Jakob Böhme schrijft een van zijn boeken, Joseph Mulder, naar Jan Luyken, 1686
•print maker: Joseph Mulder (mentioned on object), •publisher: Johannes Krellius, •publisher: Fredrik Vorster
•engraving /etching - h 182 mm × w 142 mm [Rijksmuseum # RP-P-OB-2362]
Tot
mijn vreugde ontdekte ik bij mijn zoekactie, dat deze zomer de volgende zeer
interessante tekst verscheen, waarin uitgebreid Spinoza en Böhme met elkaar
worden vergeleken.
• Andrew Weeks, “From Radical Reformation to Mystical Pre-Enlightenment.”
In: Carl Niekerk (Ed.), The Radical
Enlightenment in Germany. A Cultural Perspective. Leiden: BRILL/RODOPI,
12 juli 2018, p. 80 -111
Over het boek cf. vorig blog. Over het betreffende
hoofdstuk: “Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment appears in a different
light when read in conjunction with George H. Williams’ Radical Reformation and
Israel’s own history of The Dutch Republic. The radical dissent of the
Reformation and its aftermath extended to Holland, influencing Spinoza’s milieu
and creating preconditions for his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670). The
radical turn attributed by Israel to Spinoza appears less unprecedented when juxtaposed
with its extended Reformation background, including the German speculative or
mystical dissenters who anticipated his themes. [cf. Brill – cf. books.google, dat 2 nov. 2018 het hele hoofdstuk
liet lezen!
Het
hoofdstuk is helder en brengt – zo verging het mij – nieuw inzicht. Weeks geeft
commentaar op Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment, waartegenover hij graag
verwijst naar Radical Reformation. Ik citeer hier de slotalinea’s van zijn
hoofdstuk: een samenvatting die zijn opzet duidelijk maakt.
My main
point in juxtaposing the German mystical dissenters with Spinoza has not been
to represent mysticism as the secret essence of the Enlightenment, or the
mystical dissenters as a decisive influence on Spinoza. In talking about
'influence', we need to check our metaphors. The German mystical dissenters
were early tributaries of the dissenting currents that inundated Spinoza's
world, as were the more proximate contemporary Socinians. German mystical
dissent articulated problems and questions which Spinoza resolved by taking
matters to a new level. Spinoza was, as they say in Gennan, 'washed by all
waters'. The waters were swelled by Collegiants and Socinians, by Dutch,
Polish, German, French, and English sectarians, by Protestant and Jewish factions,
and by the unstable relations of faith and reason at their ultimate source. The
headwaters lay in the doctrinal instability of revealed religion and in the
inherent contradictions and ambiguities of monotheism. The possible impact of
Franck, Weigel, Servetus, or Boehme on Spinoza poses intriguing questions, but
not decisive ones. Whether he knew something or nothing of them, our focus
falls appropriately on the larger current of which lie and they were part.
My point is
that Israel's argument is vindicated as much by the sixteenth century as by the
eighteenth. The speculative radicals of what I refer to as the 'mystical
pre-enlightenment' provide a clearer intimation than the French revolutionaries
of the continuities and innovations in Spinoza's thought. One has the
impression that the discussion focuses too much on who filed first in the
Patent Office of Great Ideas and not enough on how Spinoza and his associates
fought their battles and navigated the sea change toward modernity. Israel's
Radical Enlightenment series and Dutch
Republic represent the Enlightenment less as a culture or period than as a
series of pitched battles which might have gone either way, from the perilous
dissemination of Spinoza's work, to eighteenth-century clashes over tolerance,
providence, and universal emancipation in the third volume of his series.
Israel offers a compelling and solidly documented account of the militant and
resourceful Dutch radicals who supported Spinoza. Their issues were the causes
of Enlighten-ment: education, free thought and expression, political,
religious, and individual emancipation.
Some of
their issues are still contested today and continue to elicit re-sponses from
the radical to the reactionary. An example is what Israel calls the moderate
toleration of John Locke.99 It binds public life in the United
States to a culture of ostentatious piety. Our tolerance is moderate or limited
in the sense that almost any avowedly religious person or sanctimonious
hypocrite, regardless of creed, is a viable candidate for high office. An
honest atheist is not. Hardly anyone sees this as a problem. Israel's
Enlightenment was bolder and more radical. One has to wonder whether his
critics miss his point because we are still unreflectively living his point.
For scholars
of eighteenth-century German literature another set of questions is raised.
Much has been written about Spinoza's pantheism as a catalyst of enlightened or
radical German thought. It is evident, however, that German authors such as
Herder or Goethe, who were indeed emboldened by their encounters with
Spinozism, nonetheless display a tenor in their literary embrace of nature
which accords less with the urban rationalism of Spinoza than with Lutheran
tradition, including its pietistic, mystical, and dissenting diffusions. The
immediacy and particularity of vegetative life and the infinite shifting
variety of nature in Goethe or Herder are not deduced from the categorical precepts
of Spinoza's Ethics but rather owe
more to the evocation of God at work in each plant in Luther and Boehme, or to
the latter's celebration of the manifold concrete particularities of nature.
The suggestion that these two approaches to God in nature, that of Spinoza and
that of an extended Lutheran tradition, may not be utterly antithetical, but
rather distantly but meaning-fully related, is, for intellectual historians, a
promising inference from Israel's work. [p. 109-111]
99) Radical Enlightenment, pp. 265-270.
* * *
Zo'n 27 jaar eerder schreef Weeks een biografie over Böhme:
• Andrew Weeks, Boehme:
An Intellectual Biography of the 17th-Century Philosopher and Mystic. Suny Press, 1991 – books.google
Over het boek: This is a biography of one of the most
original and one of the least understood seminal writers of the Baroque world,
Jacob Boehme.
In a period tormented by mysteries and controversies, Boehme's visionary mysticism responded to the vexing quandaries confronting his contemporaries. His concerns included the apocalyptic religious disputes of his day, the havoc wrought by the Thirty Years' War in his region, the disintegration of the Old Middle European order, the rise of new cosmic models from avant-garde heliocentrism to obscure esoteric theories, and his endeavor to express by means of codes and symbols a new sense of the human, divine, and natural realms.
In a period tormented by mysteries and controversies, Boehme's visionary mysticism responded to the vexing quandaries confronting his contemporaries. His concerns included the apocalyptic religious disputes of his day, the havoc wrought by the Thirty Years' War in his region, the disintegration of the Old Middle European order, the rise of new cosmic models from avant-garde heliocentrism to obscure esoteric theories, and his endeavor to express by means of codes and symbols a new sense of the human, divine, and natural realms.
[Tussen haakjes, in het boek is bovenstaande gravure
op blz. 12 opgenomen; hij werd ook gebruikt voor de cover van het komende Jacob Böhme and His World – cf. vorig blog]
Ik noem ook het volgende boek, daar we langs die weg de auteur leren kennen:
Ik noem ook het volgende boek, daar we langs die weg de auteur leren kennen:
• James M. van der Laan and Andrew Weeks (eds.), The Faustian Century. German Literature and
Culture in the Age of Luther and Faustus. Rochester, NY: Camden House,
2013 399 pages – books,google
Het
was n.l. niet eenvoudig m.b.v. Google informatie over de auteur te vinden; LinkedIn
kent ruim meer dan 100 mensen met de naam Andrew Weeks. Welnu, in bovenstaand boek is te lezen:
 |
|
Andrew Weeks,
videostill uit “The Faustian Reformation” 500 years: The Reformation and its Resonations Conference, 15 September 2017 |
Andrew
Weeks is Professor of German and Comparative literature at Illinois State
University. Dat brengt ons vervolgens bij zijn pagina bij zijn universiteit waar je aan zijn publicatielijst ziet hoe lang en systematisch hij met het 16e en 17e eeuwse esoterisme bezig was en is.
En in Valentin Weigel: Selected Spiritual Writings. Translated and introduced by Andrew Weeks [Paulist Press, 2003 – booksgoogle] treffen we het volgende iets uitgebreidere CV aan:
En in Valentin Weigel: Selected Spiritual Writings. Translated and introduced by Andrew Weeks [Paulist Press, 2003 – booksgoogle] treffen we het volgende iets uitgebreidere CV aan:
ANDREW WEEKS is a professor of German literature at
Illinois State University (Normal). He studied in Hamburg and Berlin and
received an M.A. in German literature and the Ph.D. in comparative literature
from the University of Illinois in Urbana. As a student of German intellectual
history, Weeks turned his attention to a number of German authors who are often
neglected because of their marginal status between medieval and postmedieval
literature, among literature, philosophy, and religion, and between Catholic
and Protestant confessions: Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus, Valentin Weigel, as well
as the German dissenters, Spiritualists, and mystics before and after them. His
research attempts to interpret the writings of these authors with reference to
their historical contexts. Among the issues that arise in the relationship of
dissenting authors to their times, two are of pressing relevance today: the
problem of tolerance in the Age of Faith and the relationship between religious
authority and natural or philosophical truth. As a Fulbright scholar, Weeks
recently taught the history of German mysticism at the University of Marburg
and the German Spiritualists of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries at the
University of Szeged (Hungary).
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