Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme's Haunted Narrative

311 Pages·2002·1.85 MB·English

by  Cyril O'Regan

Chapter Title i
GNOSTIC APOCALYPSE
ii Gnostic Apocalypse
Chapter Title iii
GNOSTIC APOCALYPSE
Jacob Boehme’s
Haunted Narrative
CYRIL O’REGAN
STATEUNIVERSITYOFNEWYORKPRESS
iv Gnostic Apocalypse
Cover image:Corbis Images
Published by
State University of New York Press,Albany
© 2002 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Regan,Cyril
Gnostic apocalypse : Jacob Boehme’s haunted narrative / Cyril O’Regan.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-5201-8 (alk.paper)—ISBN 0-7914-5202-6 (pkb. : alk.paper)
1. Bèhme,Jakob,1575–1624. I. Title.
BV5095.B7 O73 2002
230'.044'092—dc21 2001049420
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to Niall Meehan O’Regan
This breathing in the dark sheds
no light.Its catch and release
opens like a bedroom door
on a swollen carpet until its arc
achieves the gaiety of swing.
This is familiar,familial,a now
of sound inflected by desire
between the stasis of hesitations,
a dream that wants to worry the stars.
September’s blue of recall flames
furiously purple.You rise from
the wound red,perfect.I run
into beauty’s trip-wire,my mind
falling into a shout.
Tugged by an invisible moon
you bring my ancestors,humors
and sweat and hope routing
their lives.But more you are
the plan I cannot read,the sketch
whose outline is not formed,
the boat to the future
the aftermath of the barque
tumbling over the edge of the world.
v

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I: Visionary Pansophism and the Narrativity ofthe Divine 27
Chapter 1. Narrative Trajectory of the Self-Manifesting Divine 31
1.1. Boehme’s Six-Stage Narrative 32
1.2. Narrative Teleology: Narrative Codes 50
1.3. Trinitarian Configuration of Ontotheological Narrative 52
Chapter 2. Discursive Contexts of Boehme’s Visionary Narrative 57
2.1. Alchemy as Discursive Context and its Sublation 58
2.2. Narrative Deconstitution of Negative Theology 69
Part II: Metalepsis Unbounding 83
Chapter 3. Nondistinctive Swerves: Boehme’s Recapitulation
of Minority Pre-Reformation and
Post-Reformation Traditions 87
Chapter 4. Distinctive Swerves: Toward Metalepsis 103
4.1. Distinctive Individual Hermeneutic and
Theological Swerves 104
4.2. Narrative Swerve: Metalepsis 115
Chapter 5. Boehme’s Visionary Discourse and the Limits
of Metalepsis 129
vii
viii Contents
Part III: Valentinianism and Valentinian Enlisting
ofNon-Valentinian Narrative Discourses 141
Chapter 6. Boehme’s Discourse and Valentinian
Narrative Grammar 147
6.1. Toward Geneology 156
Chapter 7. Apocalyptic in Boehme’s Discourse and its
Valentinian Enlisting 161
7.1. Apocalyptic Inscription and Distention 169
Chapter 8. Neoplatonism in Boehme’s Discourse and its
Valentinian Enlisting 177
8.1. Valentinian Enlisting of Neoplatonic Narrative 187
Chapter 9. Kabbalah in Boehme’s Discourse and its
Valentinian Enlisting 193
9.1. Valentinian Enlisting of the Kabbalah 205
Conclusion: Genealogical Preface 211
Notes 225
Index 277
Acknowledgments
While my interest in the seventeenth-century German speculative mystic Jacob
Boehme dates back to my undergraduate days in Dublin,and while I spent
considerable time charting the relation between Boehme and Hegel in The
Heterodox Hegel,at no time did I think that I would write a book on this fig-
ure.There was neither the time nor the need.Or so I thought.Need,however,
gave birth to time.As the Gnostic return project got under way it became ob-
vious that an examination of Boehme was inescapable,since,arguably,it is his
discourse that represents the site of introduction of Gnosis into the field of
modern discourse.In its birth I am grateful to a number of people.I owe much
to two Irish friends,to John Doyle for first introducing me to a thinker whose
opacity made Hegel and Heidegger look positively lucid,and to Brendan Pur-
cell for his unfailing support for this strange interest.I am deeply indebted to
Louis Dupré who encouraged my interest in the mystical traditions.My study
with him,both as a student and colleague of his at Yale,of Eckhart,Cusa,and
Pseudo-Dionysius,as well as the Kabbalah and Eastern forms of mysticism not
only proved illuminating and fruitful,it was also exciting,pursued as it was
under the assumption that these discourses were both philosophically and reli-
giously important.Such study created a space for reexamining even more mar-
ginal speculative mystics of the Christian tradition, as well as providing a
vocabulary and the outlines of a syntax of the discourse of the Christian mysti-
cal tradition that if it could not fit all occasions,was appropriate to many.John
Jones,editor at Crossroad,was an early cheerleader in my first attempts to write
on Boehme in the Gnosticism project,although he had been equally enthusi-
astic about my earlier unpublished work.Denying anything like an elective
affinity with speculative mysticism,colleagues at Yale such as David Kelsey,
Wayne Meeks,and Gene Outka were deeply reassuring in their openness to
entertaining a claim for importance that had little prima facie plausibility.As
was the case with Gnostic Return in Modernity,Gene Outka was supererogatory
ix