(October 5, 2022 at 9:32 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: I only know about Boehme from his engravings. I was always more intereseted in Swedenborg. So I will have to check out JBs texts if you could perhaps recommend a starting point.
Anyway, for quite some time I've been having a very intense Nietzschean experience of feeling like the bottomless pit of nihilistic absurdity is staring back at me in the place where eternal light shines into neverending darkness.
If you're braver than I am, you could dive right in to Boehme's own writings. These were all translated into English even before it was legal to publish them in their original German. The little I've seen is a pretty wild ride.
I have only read one introductory text on Boehme: in the Western Esoteric Masters Series, by Robin Waterfield. A decent introduction but nothing in depth. Just now I see there are a lot more and possibly better things on LibGen. (You have to search under both Boehme and Böhme, and older English sources call him Behmen.)
Most of what I know of him comes from reading about the many important people whose work grew out of his. William Blake, for example, followed Boehme more than he did any other thinker. Many of Blake's famous lines are just restatements, in poetic form, of Boehme's.
The theology is about as far away from Scholasticism as we're likely to get. Of course it's anathema to Catholics and traditional Lutherans.
In a too-short summary: For Boehme, everything begins with the Abyss. The abyss is chaos. God, to become God, becomes aware of himself as separate from the abyss. The development of spirituality and knowledge is the ongoing process of God's developing self-knowledge. Nature and God are in no way separate, and God's self-knowledge occurs within the collective minds of human beings.
You'll see already that if we call this Geist it is pretty much a description of Hegel. German Nature Philosophy, redefining what place humans have in nature, was made possible by Boehme's example. The strong influence continues into Nietzsche, who of course saw chaos as our fundamental position, with only human thought giving the illusion of separation from the abyss. As far as I know Freud never acknowledged direct influence, but he certainly comes out of the German Romantic tradition, and the idea that there are aspects of human life which are intrinsic to us but of which we remain so far unaware of course underpins his theory of the unconscious mind.
This is not to say that Boehme started all this on his own. After his initial mystical experience he studied Neoplatonism and the Prisca theologia, so his work serves as a kind of filter or lens for a great deal which came before.
Sorry I'm not a better guide. German Idealism/Romanticism is one of those huge subjects that I never seem to get very deep into, no matter how hard I try.
(There's an excellent new book of gossip about them, though. Andrea Wulf's Magnificent Rebels is a history of the philosophers in Jena around 1800. Schiller, the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, Novalis, sometimes Goethe, the von Humboldt brothers. It was a turning point in Western thought, and the fact that they were all devoting so much time to having sex with each other's wives makes it kind of amazing that they could get anything done.)
