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CHAPTER 9  Kabbalah in Boehme’s Discourse and its Valentinian Enlisting From the very beginning I have insisted that Boehme’s discourse is complex. It is complex symbolically in that symbols from a multitude of pre-Reformation, Reformation, and post-Reformation sources animate it. More, it is complex in terms of a narrative structure that aligns symbols and gives them their meaning. Thus far, I have identified three major narrative strains. First among equals is obviously what I am calling the Valentinian strain. But as I have indicated, apocalyptic and Neoplatonic narrative strains are also present in Boehme’s discourse . As yet, however, I have not touched on the full level of the narrative complexity of Boehme’s discourse. This is not, as one might think, because I have not as yet explicitly invoked Paracelsian alchemy. For I have made clear that Boehme’s discourse is the realization of Paracelsian alchemy and its Weigelian theologization.Thus Paracelsian alchemy does not name so much an element of Boehme’s discourse as represent this discourse in its theologically underdeveloped form. There is one other narrative strand to be taken account of—that is, the narrative strand of the Kabbalah, whose presence is palpable in Boehme’s texts, as I will demonstrate shortly. Of course, the task I have set myself is far more complicated than drawing attention to this further narrative strand and thus filling out the picture of the narrative complexity of Boehme’s discourse. Given my taxomic focus, I am compelled to ask the question whether the presence of Kabbalistic elements is so extensive and intensive that it effectively challenges the Valentinian taxon for primacy. Or failing to do this, I am compelled to ask whether it accounts for elements of Boehme’s complex narrative discourse that are not, and cannot be, covered by Valentinianism. In short, I am putting the same question to the Kabbalah that I put to apocalyptic and Neoplatonism in the two previous chapters. As it operates in Boehme’s discourse, Does the Kabbalah function as a principled taxonomic supplement to the Valentinian taxon, or simply as a factual taxonomic supplement? 193 Needless to say, analysis of a narrative discourse as complex as Boehme’s is itself complex, and the pursuit of a viable taxon is itself taxing. I grant that my analysis would lose much of its point if I believed that Boehme’s discourse was idiosyncratic and did not prepare us to see in a different way ontotheological narratives in the modern field in Romanticism, German Idealism, and beyond. But it has been my conviction throughout that Boehme’s discourse is not idiosyncratic , and that he represents nothing less than the origin of a line of narrative discourses, expressed in philosophical, theological, and literary idioms, that itself represents the return of Gnosticism or Valentinianism in modernity. But if I am right about Boehme, the Valentinian verdict can only be rendered when one has taken full account of the narrative complexity, and shown why the nonValentinian strands not only do not involve giving up Valentinian ascription, but help us to understand better its new form, what I have been calling its rule-governed deformed form in the post-Reformation and post-Enlightenment fields. I now turn to an analysis of the presence of the Kabbalah in Boehme’s complex narrative discourse and to an adjudication of its taxonomic status. A number of factors prompt investigation of the possibility of a Kabbalistic taxonomy. There is solid historical evidence of Boehme’s contact with admirers like Balthasar Walther and Abraham von Frankenberg,1 who were familiar with the Kabbalah. Moreover, Boehme does not disdain to use the word (TF, 3, 34; 6, 11), although admittedly the use is tropic in the way it is in the texts of Paracelsus, where it denotes an invisible expressive form or power. In addition, there is a long interpretive tradition of asserting a strong connection . While his comments are brief in Unparteiische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie (pp. 1130–55), the Pietist Gottfried Arnold represents one of the earliest mainstream associations of Boehmian and Kabbalistic discourse. Oetinger, of course, represents the classical expression of eighteenth-century avowal, with his Die Lehrtafel der Prinzessin Antonia being just one of the many texts in which the connection between Boehme and the Kabbalah is argued and recommended.2 In the early nineteenth-century Franz von Baader assumed the connection to be more or less obvious. And the tradition of interpretation lives on in the twentieth century...

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