The Signature of all Things
by Jacob Boehme and revised by William Law, translated by John Elliston
The cosmology of Jacob Boehme, ‘The Cobbler of Gorlitz’, one of the great mystics of the Reformation era, who influenced such diverse figures as the Cambridge Platonists and the Quaker George Fox.
‘It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrow. There is no sorrowing. For sorrowing is a thing swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.’ Jacob Boehme’s mystical pantheism and dialectical conception of God – in which good and evil are rooted in one and the same being – soon brought him into conflict with Lutheran orthodoxy. It is in ‘The Signature of all Things’ (Signatura Rerum) that the tenets of Boehme’s theosophy are related in their greatest detail. Casting the reader into the vortex of his cosmological universe, Boehme’s endeavour to express a new sense of the human, divine and natural realms attains its apotheosis in his conception of the Ungrund, the uncertainty that precedes the divine will’s arousing itself to self-awareness. Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, this is a profound text, deeply influential upon devotional writers such as William Law, visionaries such as William Blake (informing The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) and, more recently, upon cultural production as diverse as the psychology of Carl Jung and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.
- By (author) Jacob Boehme
"We had great expectations about J. Boheme's work and the discussions arisen around it: 'The first German philosopher', Hegel claimed."Dialogo Filosofico vol III, issue 14, September/December"Boehme's text was an important influence on modern accounts of the relation of God as Trinity to the cosmos, creation or 'nature', including those of Hegel, William Blake and Alfred North Whitehead. The reissue of the Elliston English translation as revised by William Law is therefore a welcome new book from Lutterworth Press."-Michael Northcott, The Expository Times, Vol. 127, No. 2, November 2015
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