"With the poet and painter William Blake, his younger contemporary, Saint-Martin saw that Voltaire’s atheism and rationalism, which had so infected Catherine’s court, were a product of what Blake called 'single vision and Newton’s sleep,' a narrowing of consciousness that left it aware of nothing but the material world, what Blake called 'the land of Ulro.' Saint-Martin believed that we have arrived at this condition because of some great primal cosmic catastrophe, when we fell from our original, integral state, at one with the divine, into the world of space and time. Our task, Saint-Martin believed, was to 'repair' the world, to 'regenerate' our fallen selves and through this regenerate the fallen universe as well—a theme that hearkens back to ideas about the role of beauty in the redemption of the world."

- Gary Lachman