Gnostic Apocalypse , livre ebook

311

pages

English

Ebooks

2012

Écrit par
Cyril O'Regan

Publié par
State University of New York Press

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311

pages

English

Ebooks

2012

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

State University of New York Press

Date de parution

01 février 2012

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780791489505

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

Jacob Boehme, the seventeenth-century German speculative mystic, influenced the philosophers Hegel and Schelling and both English and German Romantics alike with his visionary thought. Gnostic Apocalypse focuses on the way Boehme's thought repeats and surpasses post-reformation Lutheran thinking, deploys and subverts the commitments of medieval mysticism, realizes the speculative thrust of Renaissance alchemy, is open to esoteric discourses such as the Kabbalah, and articulates a dynamic metaphysics. This book critically assesses the striking claim made in the nineteenth century that Boehme's visionary discourse represents within the confines of specifically Protestant thought nothing less than the return of ancient Gnosis. Although the grounds adduced on behalf of the "Gnostic return" claim in the nineteenth century are dismissed as questionable, O'Regan shows that the fundamental intuition is correct. Boehme's visionary discourse does represent a return of Gnosticism in the modern period, and in this lies its fundamental claim to our contemporary philosophical, theological, and literary attention.
Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Visionary Pansophism and the Narrativity of the Divine

1. Narrative Trajectory of the Self-Manifesting Divine

1.1. Boehme's Six-Stage Narrative
1.2. Narrative Teleology: Narrative Codes
1.3. Trinitarian Configuration of Ontotheological Narrative

2. Discursive Contexts of Boehme's Visionary Narrative

2.1. Alchemy as Discursive Context and its Sublation
2.2. Narrative Deconstitution of Negative Theology

Part II: Metalepsis Unbounding

3. Nondistinctive Swerves: Boehme's Recapitulation of Minority Pre-Reformation and Post-Reformation Traditions

4. Distinctive Swerves: Toward Metalepsis

4.1. Distinctive Individual Hermenutic and Theological Swerves
4.2. Narrative Swerve: Metalepsis

5. Boehme's Visionary Discourse and the Limits of Metalepsis

Part III: Valentinianism and Valentinian Enlisting of Non-Valentinian Narrative Discourses

6. Boehme's Discourse and Valentinian Narrative Grammar

6.1. Toward Geneology

7. Apocalyptic in Boehme's Discourse and its Valentinian Enlisting

7.1. Apocalyptic Inscription and Distention

8. Neoplatonism in Boehme's Discourse and its Valentinian Enlisting

8.1. Valentinian Enlisitng of Neoplatonic Narratives

9. Kabbalah in Boehme's Discourse and its Valentinian Enlisting

9.1. Valentinian Enlisting of the Kabbalah

Conclusion: Genealogical Preface

Notes

Index

Voir

Publié par

State University of New York Press

Date de parution

01 février 2012

EAN13

9780791489505

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

Chapter Title

GNOSTIC APOCALYPSE

Gnostic Apocalypse

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Chapter Title

GNOSTIC APOCALYPSE

Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative

CYRIL O’REGAN

S U N Y P TATE NIVERSIT Y OF EW ORK RESS

iii

Cover image: Corbis Images

Gnostic Apocalypse

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207

Production by Judith Block Marketing by Patrick Durocher

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

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2001049420

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.

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Acknowledgments Introduction

Contents

Part I: Visionary Pansophism and the Narrativity of the Divine

Chapter 1. Narrative Trajectory of the Self-Manifesting Divine 1.1. Boehme’s Six-Stage Narrative 1.2. Narrative Teleology: Narrative Codes 1.3. Trinitarian Configuration of Ontotheological Narrative

Chapter 2. Discursive Contexts of Boehme’s Visionary Narrative 2.1. Alchemy as Discursive Context and its Sublation 2.2. Narrative Deconstitution of Negative Theology

Part II: Metalepsis Unbounding

Chapter 3. Nondistinctive Swerves: Boehme’s Recapitulation of Minority Pre-Reformation and Post-Reformation Traditions

Chapter 4. Distinctive Swerves: Toward Metalepsis 4.1. Distinctive Individual Hermeneutic and Theological Swerves 4.2. Narrative Swerve: Metalepsis

Chapter 5. Boehme’s Visionary Discourse and the Limits of Metalepsis

vii

ix 1

31 32 50 52

57 58 69

103

104 115

129

viii

Contents

Part III: Valentinianism and Valentinian Enlisting of Non-Valentinian Narrative Discourses

Chapter 6. Boehme’s Discourse and Valentinian Narrative Grammar 6.1. Toward Geneology

Chapter 7. Apocalyptic in Boehme’s Discourse and its Valentinian Enlisting 7.1. Apocalyptic Inscription and Distention

Chapter 8. Neoplatonism in Boehme’s Discourse and its Valentinian Enlisting 8.1. Valentinian Enlisting of Neoplatonic Narrative

Chapter 9. Kabbalah in Boehme’s Discourse and its Valentinian Enlisting 9.1. Valentinian Enlisting of the Kabbalah

Conclusion: Genealogical Preface

Notes

Index

141

147 156

161 169

177 187

193 205

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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 inThe 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 withGnostic Return in Modernity, Gene Outka was supererogatory

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