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CHAPTER 6  Boehme’s Discourse and Valentinian Narrative Grammar Although the inspiration behind the present project is genealogical, and genealogists such as Baur have shown the way with respect to the possibility of a Gnostic reading of Boehme’s narrative discourse, in the order of demonstration, a Gnostic genealogical account of narrative ontotheological discourses, which has Boehme as the proximate point of origin, depends on establishing the prima facie credentials of a Gnostic taxonomy of Boehme’s discourse. Baur’s own reading of Boehme in Die christliche Gnosis shows that interpretive shortcomings with respect to the details of Boehme’s narrative system, and lack of clarity with respect to its relation to both mainline and marginal post-Reformation discourse , undermine the taxonomic case. I have tried to obviate these deficiencies in the two previous parts. Yet it would be idle to read Boehme more multidimensionally and yet to fail (1) to bring forward the clarification of Gnostic, carried out in chapter 1, in which Gnostic was given hard edges by being identified with Valentinianism and (2) above all, to fail to take account of the grammatical reformulation of Valentinianism carried out in Gnostic Return in Modernity. In due course I will have much more to say about Valentinian narrative grammar, and the way it allows for significant discontinuities between classical Valentinian narratives and the modern candidates for Valentinian ascription. It is important, however, not to consider the grammatical reformulation of Valentinianism as involving an end run around actually engaging Boehme’s narrative ontotheology in conversation with the distinct and distinctive classical Valentinian genres. Without the Valentinian narratives of the Hellenistic period, we would not be able to extrapolate a Valentinian narrative grammar. And a Valentinian narrative grammar that demanded no actual correspondences between putative modern representatives and classical Valentinian texts would be a purely fictive entity. On the antecedent presumption that there is more than an insignificant amount of overlap between Boehme’s narrative and the narratives of classical Valentinian genres, here I begin to test the measure of overlap both with respect 147 to individual narrative episodes and narrative figuration as a whole. Of the three Valentinian genres that came in for sustained attention in Gnostic Return in Modernity, PSY (as presented by Irenaeus in Against Heresies [bk 1 1–8]), and the Tractate, the longest text in the Nag Hammadi cache, will bear the burden of comparison with Boehme’s ontotheological narrative. Evidence of positive overlap between Boehme’s narrative and these two Valentinian narrative genres must necessarily be purely internal to the texts themselves, given that Boehme neither cites Gnostic nor Valentinian sources in his texts, nor mentions them in his letters. Nor again do we possess third-person accounts that Boehme had actually read heresiological accounts of Gnosticism. Needless to say, the only representative of the three classical genres with which he could have been in contact is PSY. Although this text becomes generally available through Gottfried Arnold at the end of the seventeenth century,1 its accessibility at the beginning of the century is unclear. Nevertheless, it would make sense to start with this text for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is logically possible that Boehme had some knowledge of the text, if not directly, then indirectly as the heresiological account of Irenaeus was filtered through the Paracelsian or Weigelian traditions. Second, it is with this particular text that there exists the most obvious overlaps of a lexical kind between Boehmian and Valentinian discourse. Commencing with PSY as the comparandum, however, does not imply that it enjoys principled advantages over the other two Valentinian genres. Either the Tractate or the Gospel could prove more illuminating with respect to the erotic, kenotic, and agonistic constitution of Boehme’s ontotheological narrative. Of these two Valentinian genres the focus will be on the Tractate. For in the Tractate, it is possible to see an erotic figuration of narrative (of the fall from divine perfection and its recovery) stirring beneath and struggling against the narrative surface that seems to support the pure repetition of the perfection of origin perforated and degraded by fall. The repristination of PSY by Boehme’s discourse can be divided into recall of more general and more specific features of this particular Valentinian narrative genre. On the more general front, Boehme’s discourse recalls an encompassing metaleptic narrative, whose end points are the immanifest divine—abyss (Bythos) and silence (Sige) in PSY, the Unground beyond name and definition in Boehme2 —and the...

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