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CHAPTER 7  Apocalyptic in Boehme’s Discourse and its Valentinian Enlisting In a noncontesting taxonomic and genealogical environment, the argument in chapter 6 to the effect that Boehme’s discourse represents an instance of Valentinian narrative grammar, while also representing a rule-governed deformation of classical Valentinian genres, might well explanatorily suffice. But the taxonomic status of Boehme’s discourse is contested, and this obviously has consequences with respect to any genealogical account of narrative discourses that harks back in some fundamental way to Boehme’s visionary narrative. If apocalyptic ascription has had a certain primacy, Neoplatonic, and even Kabbalistic ascriptions , have not been lacking. Thus, the Valentinian reading of Boehme’s narrative discourse, both in itself , and regarded as the point of departure for later narrative discourses, must be demonstrated against rival possible or actual accounts.The demonstration of the explanatory power of Valentinianism vis-à-vis apocalyptic, Neoplatonism, and Kabbalah has two analytically separable elements. (1) It involves showing that neither apocalyptic, Neoplatonism, nor Kabbalah account for the basic structures of Boehme’s narrative. (2) More positively, it involves showing that those elements of apocalyptic, Neoplatonism, or Kabbalah that can be discerned in Boehme’s pansophism are explicable in terms of a Valentinian taxon, provided the grammatical understanding of Valentinianism is kept to the fore. I begin this crucial task of demonstrating the explanatory power of the Valentinian taxon with a discussion of the taxonomic challenge presented by apocalyptic. Later chapters will deal with the taxonomic challenges posed by Neoplatonism and Kabbalah, and thus indirectly with their genealogical challenge. Boehme’s texts provide plenty of encouragement to construe his narrative as articulating apocalyptic. Evidence of the importance in Boehme’s texts not only of visionary tropes, for example, Ezekiel’s chariot, but also of apocalyptic texts in general, and above all Revelation, has already been adduced (chapter 2). 161 Boehme’s texts continue a sixteenth-century tradition of Reformation, specifically Lutheran, Revelation interpretation, especially along its Melanchthon axis. If for the most part in this tradition interpretation involved an application of the biblical text to the contemporary situation of perceived crisis and promise, such that Revelation enacted perfectly an “absorption of the world,”1 in a few cases, and above all in Weigel, there is a speculative interest that transcends the vision of the eschaton and the enervating conditions that are its signs. Boehme taps into the upper registers of post-Reformation apocalyptic interpretation, and especially its speculative forms, that leave behind the chronicles of salvation history, the diatribes against the contemporary situation of fallenness and apostasy, and the obsession with signs and prognostications of the end. What this speculative interest is, how it betrays itself in discourse, and in what way it modifies classical apocalyptic will be dealt with in due course. What needs to be explicated first, however, is the array of apocalyptic features in Boehme’s texts. For practical purposes it is helpful to sort out this array into those features that more nearly concern apocalyptic as literary genre,2 and those features that more nearly can be thought to belong to the level of the content of apocalyptic. On the level of Boehme’s recapitulation of apocalyptic as literary genre, one can include the emphasis in his texts on vision, and specifically on its suddenness and its overwhelmingly luminous quality, its pneumatic horizon, the numinousness of constitutive symbols such as the apocalyptic Christ and Jerusalem, and the authority of the immediacy of vision that, on the one hand, suspends interpretation, and, on the other, provokes it. Each of these genre elements is important and helps to reinforce, and in turn be reinforced by, Boehme’s appropriations of apocalyptic on the level of content. Especially interesting is Boehme’s reprise of the doubleness of the iconic matrix of Revelation . Symbols at once certify truth, and point beyond themselves.This endemic doubleness of Revelation also regulates its subsequent interpretation. This is especially the case in sixteenth-century Lutheran interpretation. Interpretation responds to Revelation’s iconic matrix as both luminous and obscure, as disclosing and withholding. Both the text itself and its sixteenth-century interpretation forbid regarding the symbols as perspicuous in a straightforward way. Perspicuity is a possibility only in and through interpretation whose task is to fathom the symbols and remove their obscurity. Boehme understands the necessity of interpretation with respect to Scripture in general as much as any of the Spiritual Reformers, and understands that Revelation is the text that excites this recognition and encourages...

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