The Quiet Lake and the Hidden Spring: Locating the Ground in Kierkegaard's Works of Love

At the end of the prayer with which he begins Works of Love (1847), Søren Kierkegaard notes that while ‘works of love’ might normally be viewed as a subset of worthwhile human endeavours or ‘works’, from heaven's perspective no work can be pleasing unless it is a work of love. From this arises the question—which Kierkegaard himself moves swiftly to address—of what distinguishes a work of ‘love’ from other, non-loving works? In this article, and with particular reference to Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), I highlight how Kierkegaard's answer to this question draws upon the theological tradition that Bernard McGinn has called ‘the mysticism of the ground’.

Epilogue

The epilogue summarises the book’s narrative and outlines avenues for future research. Spiritual alchemy is chiefly important as a hybrid that defies a straightforward distinction between science and religion. In a way, its story is one of religious dissenters productively appropriating natural philosophy to articulate their faith. After laboratory alchemy was effectively eclipsed and the link to Jacob Boehme weakened, spiritual alchemy lost its internal cohesion and gave way to many divergent interpretations of alchemy that distanced it from the manipulation of material substances through chemical processes. Future studies will be able to shed more light on various alternative interpretations of alchemy that can now be perceived more clearly in contrast to the long tradition of spiritual alchemy described in this book.

Jacob Boehme’s Spiritual Alchemy of Rebirth

This chapter presents the first fully developed spiritual alchemy as encountered in the later works of Jacob Boehme, including his Signatura rerum of 1622. In his earliest work of 1612, Aurora, alchemy did not yet play a role, and rebirth had not yet acquired its distinct shape. That changed as Boehme gained access to networks of correspondents and supporters who introduced him to alchemical terminology and the notion of rebirth as developed by Valentin Weigel and others. In works composed between 1619 and 1622, Boehme frequently used alchemical language to describe rebirth, thus formulating the spiritual alchemy of rebirth. For him the ubiquitous body of Christ was the philosophers’ stone and the subtle body of the new birth at once.

Friedrich Breckling, the 1682 Boehme Edition, and Spiritual Alchemy

Since Georg Lorenz Seidenbecher died young, this chapter explores how one of his associates, Friedrich Breckling, shared his millenarianism and eventually described spiritual alchemy in his writings. After initially associating closely with the controversial prophet Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil, Breckling discovered the writings of Jacob Boehme around 1680. His contacts included many who were directly involved with the first complete edition of Boehme’s works in 1682, including his estranged neighbour Johann Georg Gichtel. Breckling, too, may have contributed to this project. In two small treatises published in the same year, Breckling described the spiritual alchemy of rebirth and contrasted it against the fraudulent alchemy of priestcraft. Breckling’s spiritual alchemy prominently reflected his double calling as ‘God’s librarian’ and advocate of persecuted believers, to whom he extended hospitality throughout his life.

A Nuremberg Chymist and a Torgau Astrologer Read Pseudo-Weigel

This chapter introduces two early readers of pseudo-Weigelian texts on the alchemical rebirth as representative of two different avenues by which this conception could have reached Jacob Boehme. Johann Siebmacher, a chymist in Nuremberg, penned a treatise that discussed the subject in 1607. It was printed a decade later under the title Wasserstein der Weysen (Water-stone of the wise). Boehme praised this work in a letter mistakenly dated 1622. Once the date is corrected to 1624, it becomes clear that Boehme only read the Wasserstein shortly before his death. This renders Paul Nagel, a millenarian and astrologer who corresponded with Boehme, the more likely source for Boehme’s spiritual alchemy of rebirth. Nagel not only copied relevant pseudo-Weigelian texts but also integrated their ideas on alchemical rebirth into his own manuscript treatises.

Dionysius Andreas Freher, Boehme’s Apostle to the English

This chapter details how Dionysius Andreas Freher brought the spiritual alchemy of rebirth from the Low Countries to England and thus served as the most important link for transmitting it to the nineteenth century. Freher arrived in Amsterdam in late 1685 and soon joined a religious commune near Leiden, led by Johann Georg Gichtel’s disciple Johann Wilhelm Überfeld. In this context, Freher immersed himself into the writings of Jacob Boehme for almost ten years. Eventually, his conflicts with Überfeld and news of Jane Leade’s Philadelphian Society in London prompted him to go to England. Not much is known about Freher’s life there, yet he seems to have acted as a Boehme expert who explained the theosopher’s opaque writings to an English audience. Freher’s main work on Boehme, Fundamenta mystica, also described the spiritual alchemy of rebirth. In shortened form, one of Freher’s treatises found inclusion in an influential nineteenth-century volume on alchemy.

Dialectics, Irony, and The Well of the Saints

Beginning with a reading of a short manuscript fragment, A Rabelaisian Rhapsody (1898–1900), this chapter shows that this short dramatic dialogue affords us a unique and overlooked insight into the structures and key concerns of Synge’s entire dramatic oeuvre. In doing so, the chapter excavates many new influences on Synge’s work through a close reading of new source materials by Jacob Boehme, Spinoza, Blavatsky, Nietzsche, Hegel, Rabelais, Paracelsus, and a number of esoteric figures, reinforcing the continued importance of mysticism to his dramatic development. In The Well of the Saints (1905), we find the final synthesis of the dialectical structure of ‘A Rabelaisian Rhapsody’, and the preparation for Synge’s overt sociological statements regarding modernization in Ireland in his articles ‘From the Congested Districts’, published later the same year. Synge established a spiritual basis for his aesthetic, countering asceticism with pantheism, restriction with Rabelaisian excess. The various iterations of this conflict can be traced over numerous dialogues, scenarios, and plays in his oeuvre, and this dialectical structure became subsumed into a larger literary vision of nonconformity and multidirectional irony. In turn, Synge’s spiritual and aesthetic opposition to ascetic or conforming figures began to influence his understanding of political and social change in contemporary Ireland. Finally, this chapter demonstrates that by reading The Well of the Saints as a play based in Ossianic dialogues, nineteenth-century Celticist readings of racial difference, and conflicting modes of production, we can begin to understand Synge’s drama as one urging consciously towards protest and designed political impact.

Schelling, esotericism and the meaning of life

F.W.J. Schelling argues in his middle period work Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom that will should be understood as the most fundamental constitutive element of reality. Though it is often downplayed in recent scholarship, Schelling derived his most central ideas for this work more or less directly from the theosophy of Jacob Boehme. I will argue that far from peripheral and antiquated curiosity, Schelling´s esoteric influences constitute the very foundation of his middle period thought. Schelling´s affinity to esotericism enabled him to develop a form of pantheism, which is not tied to the familiar problematic aspects of traditional Christian and post-Christian narratives. In mainstream Christianity, the meaning of life is dependent on the almighty God´s will, for which nature is inherently meaningless material. For Schelling, by contrast, nature itself is constitutively willing and meaningful. Consequently, owing to his esoteric influences, Schelling provides an account of the meaning of life which diverges from the dominant idea of Western philosophical and theological tradition that the meaning of life consists in a ”true world” or ”destination” beyond immanent reality.