An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception by Ariel Hessayon & Sarah Apetrei

Author:Ariel Hessayon & Sarah Apetrei [Hessayon, Ariel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Religion, Philosophy, Mariology, Christian Theology, Mysticism
ISBN: 9781135014285
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-08-28T23:00:00+00:00

Joseph Trapp’s dismissal of Boehme as an “illiterate enthusiast,” from whom one could only expect “falsehood and frenzy,” stung Law to especially fulsome praise of the “Teutonic Philosopher.” Jacob Boehme “may be placed among those who had received the highest Measures of Light, Wisdom, and Knowledge from Above. He was no more a human writer, spoke no more from Opinion, Conjecture, or Reason, in what he published to the world, than St. John did, when he put his Revelation into writing.” Unsurprisingly, Law is quick to qualify the comparison with the New Testament, and he does so with a hermeneutic claim that places Boehme in relation to orthodox Christianity. The shoemaker’s distinctive mission was to “open” up the “deepest Ground,” and reveal the innermost necessity of Christianity, as witnessed to in Scripture and taught by the Church. In no sense had Boehme anything “to alter, or add, either in the Form, or Doctrine of Religion.” He neither innovated nor completed because he “had no new Truths of Religion to Propose to the World.”55

If the distinction between “adding” and “opening” is one prong of Law’s defense of Boehme’s orthodox credentials, the other is his stress on the performative character of Boehme’s writing against any appearance of encouraging theological or philosophical speculation. Academicus, the intellectual fall-guy in Law’s dialogues, exemplifies this distinction. His excitement at understanding something of Theophilus’s expositions is routinely slapped down as a desire for intellectual satisfaction and control. Boehme, Law argues, never sought to satisfy any speculative urge, nor to inform or build up knowledge. All his writings intend is to provoke the reader to open herself to “the Birth of . . . Light and Love.” Intellectual wrangling, or even the simple desire for explanation, misses the entire purpose and character of these books: “to help anyone to work with his Brain for clear Notions, and rational Conceptions, of what he has written, is helping him to do and be that, which all his Works, from the beginning to the End, absolutely declare against, as contrary to the whole Nature and End of them.”56

At one level, Law wants to head off in advance an assessment of Boehme from the perspective of theological controversy. He is also, though, returning to his critique of dualism—in this case, that of reason and desire or, in characteristically eighteenth-century terms, rationality and enthusiasm. There is a more subtle point than his critics would allow behind Law’s sometimes vigorous and deliberately provocative dismissal of the productions of reason. Theology seen as a body of truths that may be entertained, considered, and argued about, theology as the product of “reason,” is only possible because the desire to know has fallen apart from the desire for the good. Thus, in the internal war between desire and desire, of the divided will, knowing can insulate against loving, and intellectual stimulation can be mistaken for spiritual renewal. The truth of Boehme’s writings, according to Law, lies in that transformation that is the new birth of the will,

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