Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme's Haunted Narrative (review)

Cyril O'Regan's most recent book should make a significant contribution to the current modest renaissance in Boehme studies (a revival with its center in Boehme's well-preserved home city of Görlitz, Germany, and with an aspiration to a critical edition and renewal of international multidisciplinary studies on the seventeenth-century dissenter, philosopher, and theosophist). For centuries, the curious and difficult but beautifully written treatises of the shoemaker of Görlitz (1575-1624) have stimulated perennial waves of interest or influence. O'Regan's contribution to the latest wave consists of a fresh take on one of the oldest approaches to Jacob Boehme: the interpretation of the Philosophus Teutonicus as a rejuvenator of Gnostic speculative discourse in post-Reformation Germany.

Gnostic Apocalypse pursues its aim aided by several points of orientation. The book charts its course by going back to the history of Christianity and Gnosticism of the nineteenth-century founder of the Tübingen School of historical-critical religious studies, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860). Following Baur (though by no means uncritically), O'Regan looks from Gnosticism forward toward Hegel's philosophy, viewing it in the light of an ancient syncretism. This forward focus accords with O'Regan's previous books on The Heterodox Hegel and the Gnostic Return in Modernity. Finally, being equally well grounded in current interdisciplinary scholarship, O'Regan employs concepts and theories drawn from the critical and literary theory of recent decades. A comprehensive index catalogs extensive and grounded references to Louis Althusser, Harold Bloom, Hans Blumenberg, Michel Foucault, Jean Francois Lyotard, et al. (alongside Saints Thomas, Irenaeus, and Augustine). O'Regan aims above all at a transhistorically coordinated approach, utilizing the construct of metalepsis, understood both as employed by Irenaeus in writing against Valentinian heresy and as adapted by Harold Bloom in his literary theory that took its point of departure from The Anxiety of Influence in poetry.

For O'Regan, the concept of metalepsis is central: "It denotes the phenomenon of a complex disfiguration-refiguration of biblical narrative, or any first-order interpretation of it" (17). About the concept, O'Regan acknowledges that "it judges as well as describes." In the interest of intellectual honesty, the author freely admits: "This means that as I side with Irenaeus's salvation history narrative over classical Valentinianism's narrative bravura. [sic] I side also with the narrative renditions of the mainline Christian traditions, and especially the mainline Protestant narrative traditions, over the pansophic narrative of Boehme . . ." (17). The simultaneous normative and descriptive functions of the term metalepsis have ambiguous implications to which I will return. However, first the range and order of topics treated in O'Regan's Gnostic Apocalypse merit enumeration.

Beginning on the descriptive end of its arguments, Gnostic Apocalypse characterizes the "Narrative Trajectory of the Self-Manifesting Divine" in terms of "Boehme's Six-Stage Narrative," in terms of "Narrative Codes, and in terms of the "Trinitarian Configuration of Ontotheological Narrative." These are three subchapters that attempt to capture the recurrent, if varying, motif-like aspects that structure Boehme's writings, which are free commentaries on biblical narratives, most frequently on the first chapters of Genesis regarding the creation of the world and human creature and regarding the fall of the latter. The "Six-Stage Narrative" is nothing less than a summary of what Boehme regarded as the all-encompassing and inherently coherent account of the creation, fall, resurrection, and restoration of all things. These stages are successive moments that are grounded in the structures of being and its divine matrix. O'Regan is no doubt correct in asserting that the three principles of divine being—liberally adapted by Boehme from Paracelsus—cannot be strictly equivalent to the Trinity (52). However, since Boehme's speculations on divine being are generally motivated by the paradoxical gap between divine nature—perfect and omnipotent&#8212...