Ozment, thankfully, gives us a good guide for analyzing the Theologia Germancia. He argues that one can split the Theologia Germanica into four sections: (1) ontology and anthropology, (2) steps to salvation, and (3) eschatology/union. In what follows, I will

(1) Ontology and Anthropology

The TD begins with the usual ontology one would expect of a Dionysian – the fusion of the Pauline and the platonic. The Frankfurter cites 1 Corinthians 13:10, and with that begins to expound upon a monistic ontology:

Pay attention: What is the partial and the perfect? The Perfect is a Being, that holds and establishes all things in himself and in his being, and outside of whom is no being, and in which all things have their being, for it is the being of all things and is in itself unchangeable and immovable and changes and moves all other things.

Nu mercke: Was ist das volkommende vnd das geteilte? Das volkommende ist eyn Wessen, das yn ym vnnd yn synem Wessen alles begriffen vnd beslossen hat, vnnd an das vnd vsswendig dem keine wares Wessen is, vnnd yn dem alle dingk yr wessen han, wanne ess is aller dinck Wessen vnnd is yn ym selber ynwandelbare vnnd vnbeweglich vnd wandelt vnd beweget alle ander dingk.

Here we have, in the vernacular, an expression of the doctrine of God as the Necessary Being, who directs all things, moves all things, has all things within him, apart from which no thing can be. This necessary being, he continues, also cannot be identified with any particular being; it is not the sum of its parts. Nor can it be comprehended (vnbekentlich), grasped (vnbegrifflich), or even described (vnsprechlich) in the manner of the creatrues (als creatur). It is nameless (Dar vmmb nennet man das volkommende nicht), impossible for creatures to know on the basis of their creaturliness (als creatur yn yr creaturlicheit vnd geschaffenheit; von yr ichtheit vnnd selbheit is ess yr vnmuglich).

And yet, in its namelessness, the Frankfurter outlines our created relationship with Necessary Being: contingent beings are like a glitz or a shine that flows out from the son or as a light and shine, this or that, and are called creaturely (eyn glantz ader eyn scheyne vss flusset auss der sonne ader vss eynem lichte vnnd schynet etwas, diss ader das, vnnd heisset creatur). It is a paradoxical anthropology, in which human beings are something while being nothing, outflows of the Divine Being and yet always remaining in the Divine Being, just as the Divine Being is both infinitely beyond them and yet closer to them than their very selves.

All beings, for the Frankfurter, flow from the Divine Being – and it is to their origin that they must return. Salvation is described by the Frankfurter as a widerbrengung, a “being brought back.”^[2] This happens in terms of being and knowledge. He declares, “As long as one holds to these things (one’s ichtheit), the Perfect remains unknown (so bleibet das volkommen vnbekant).” Indeed, to truly know (bekantniss) the Necessary Being is at the same time to participate in its Being (Wesen); the Frankfurter says that unless we come to this knowledge (which is, again, also a participation in Being itself), we remain simply eyn czufal ader eyn glantz vnd eyn scheyn, not having being, but rather simply having come from being.

Two things are worth pointing out in this account. The first, of course, is the platonic equation between being and knowing, which is operative throughout the Dionysian tradition. Second, of course, is that the Frankfurter thinks of creation as an outflow and return to the Necessary being (the exitus-reditus model). One can see here, surely, the influence of Tauler, Eckhart, and, ultimately, Dionysius himself.

This ontological scheme is extremely important for understanding the Theologia Germanica’s anthropology. It is the true nature of human beings to flow from and return to their divine source: what gets in the way, for the Frankfurter, is creaturlicheit, geschaffenheit, ichtheit, selbheit, meinheit – which gets in the way of the human being truly being himself. The metaphor the Frankfurter uses is that of the Sun and its rays, which is a Dionysian image.^[3] We might also compare the Divine Being to the sea, from which the river water of creation outflows: the flow is blocked by the debris of selfhood, and the quest of the spiritual life is to break down that debris so that the water might flow out again to the sea.^[4]

(2) Union with God – Salvation and Eschatology

If human beings are simply outflows from the Divine Being, the Frankfurter warns us that all sin is what cuts us removes us from that Divine Being. Sin is an abkeren (abkehren), a turning away, from the Perfect and a turning towards (keren) the wandelberen (the changeable).^[5] This turning towards changeable things, or the imperfect, is the result of a misunderstanding: we mistake the changeable for the unchangeable and the imperfect for the perfect. This turn towards the creature instead of the Creator hinders us from returning to God because it immerses us in the illusion of pride (annemen), the chief sin of Lucifer and Adam.^[6]

Because the central sin for the Theologia Germanica is one of misplaced activity, the central step for salvation is passivity. The Frankfurter describes salvation in this way:

Ader wie sal mein fal gepessert werden? Er muss gebessert werde also Adams vnd von dem selbigen, do von Adams fal gebessert wart vnd yn der selben weisse. Von wem ader yn Welcher weisse gescach die besserunge? Der mesch mocht nicht an got vnnd got sold nicht an menschen. Dar vmmbe nam got menschilich natura der menschheit an sich vnd wart vormenchst vnd der mensch wart vorgoetet. Alda geschach di besserunge.^[7]

But how shall my fall be rectified? It must be rectified like Adam’s fall and by the same person who rectified Adam’s fall, and in the same way. By whom and in what way did this rectification happen? Man did not do it without God and God did not do it without mankind. Therefore God took a human nature of mankind on himself and became incarnate and man became divinized. In this way the rectification happened.

Because rectification (besserung) is the result of God’s activity, it is something that must be received passively. The Frankfurter explicitly says Vnnd yn disser widerbrengunge vnd besserunge enkan ich ader enmagk ader ensal nichts nicht zu dem thun, sunder eyn bloss, luter leiden, also das got alleyne thu vnd wirke vnd ich leide yn vnd seyne werck vnd seynen willen.^[8] What gets in the way of receiving this work is our myn vnd ich vnd mir vnd mich, because this selfhood cuts me off from receiving the divine gift.^[9]

Rectification is the mutual indwelling of the divine and the human – the source and the emanation – which is possible even in this life. “If man and his soul are to be saved,” the Frankfurter tells us, “sso wil vnnd muss das eyn alleyn yn der sele seyn.”^[10] This is of course a paradoxical presence – for as the Frankfurter has a hypothetical objector ask, “Isn’t God already in the soul?” The answer the Theologia Germanica gives to this mystery – which ultimately is a question of a conflict between monistic ontology and a soteriology of participation – is Auch darff das nicht yn die sele kommen, wann es bereite dar jnne ist.^[11] It is not as though, when the soul is blocked up and unable to encounter the source, that it is somehow removed from God’s presence – for God is present to all things, nearer than their own beings. And yet, there is a state within which the soul is unaware of God’s presence within it. This state of ignorance must pass away, giving way to seeking, feeling, and tasting (man sal ess suchen, enpfinden vnd smecken).^[12]

The Theologia Germanica describes this as a process of henosis, or becoming unified with the One. It declares vnd synt ess nu eyn ist, so ist auch bessser eynikeit vnd einfeldikeit dan manigfeldikeit, wan selikeit leit nicht an vil ader vilikeit, sunder an eyn vnd eynikeit.^[13] In this sense, then, the process of salvation is actually the turning from multiplicity to oneness, from creaturely things to the cause of creaturely things, ultimately having scattered loves to having a singular love. It is, the Frankfurter says in another place, to be taken by God to Himself and “not ask for anything but the eternal Good alone.”^[14]

I have chosen to include eschatology in this section because I believe that the Theologia Germanica’s soteriology is deeply connected with its eschatology. This life, as we will see, is the process of becoming more and more humble before God, more and more in line with his will. It is, in a sense, the project of conforming ourselves to who we truly are. The Frankfurter assures us that this will never happen perfectly in this life. Rather, as he polemicizes against the Free Spirits, we never truly arrive in this state of perfect conformity, and therefore perfect revelation, until after death. In this sense, union with God, which is the base of his soteriology, is something that will only ever be attained in his eschatology.

(3) PROCESS OF SALVATION

The juxtaposition between Adam and Christ is essential for this understanding of the process of salvation. The Frankfurter in chapter 13 (14) declares: Everything that fell and died in Adam rose in Christ and became living. Everything that stood and was living in Adam fell and died in Christ” (Alles das yn Adam vnder ging vnd starb, das stunt yn Cristo wider auff vnnd wart lebendig. Alles, das yn Adam auff stunt vnd lebendig wart, das ging yn Cristo vnder vnd starp).^[15] Because of this, salvation is a “second birth” (newe geborn), in which we transition from being the children of Adam (Adams kint) or the children and siblings of the devil (teufels kint und bruder) to being children of God (gotis kint) and brothers of Christ (Cristus bruder).^[16] Children of the devil are disobedient, trapped in their selfishness and pride; children of God follow the way of war gehorsam (true obedience), which the Frankfurter defines as recognizing the nothingness –one might say givenness – of all creatures (including themselves!).^[17] Gotis Kinten follow the example of Christ in the Gospels, whose life das bitterest (the bitterest) and das aller libste (the most lovely of all) – bitterest because it was full of suffering, but loveliest because this suffering was endured with a love fully fixed on God, trusting him in both joy and tribulation. War Gehorsam is comparable for the Frankfurter to War Gelassen and War Vnderthan (self-released and in subjection).^[18] One must not only be gelasst before God, but rather, because all things come from God, one must be gelasst before all things, approaching them with a spirit of compassion and co-suffering. One must do this “in silence, resting in its ground and in a secret, hidden, suffering empathy enabling it to carry all, to suffer with all.”^[19]

This compassion is an imitation of Christ, which, for the Frankfurter, is the central meaning of being connected once again with God. When one is born again, one is passively worked on by God: one becomes a vessel for God’s compassion, God, himself, feeling and perceiving through the man joined to himself. The Frankfurter further describes this in chapter 53 (55): “God himself becomes the person in such a fashion that there is nothing that is not God or things of God and also so that there is nothing left in man of which he considers himself to be the proprietor. Thus God is at work in man, living in him, knowing, empowering, loving, willing, doing, and resting.”^[20] In this reconnection, the human being experiences profound activity – which of course, necessitates that he still “is” in a certain sense. It is not as though the human being has been replaced by an automaton – rather, this union with one’s source actually brings with it an experience of profound freedom. The Christ, the Frankfurter tells us, is therefore, while being subject to all things, also lord over all things when he is united to God. In being reconnected to his source, he becomes free.^[21]

When it comes to this strong language about God’s possession of the human person, modern readers can tend to be a little uncomfortable. Who, after all, would want to lose their selfhood to the extent that the Frankfurter describes in this paragraph? Two insights, though, I think should be kept in mind. The first is that the model for the incorporation of the human into the divine for the Frankfurter is the incarnation. And as he has already stated in chapter thirteen, Christ assumed a human nature anhypostatically, that is, without its own hypostasis, dwelling enhypostatically, in his own hypostasis. The Frankfurter sees in this Christological doctrine an analogy between the union between Christians and God.

Secondly, the Frankfurter actually goes on to describe this union in terms of his earlier described ontology. That is, he is not thinking about the human being and God as two competing entities, where one must displace the other. Rather, he says that he is thinking of this union in terms of the relationship between emanation and source, or between the “One, Eternal, Perfect, that which exists in and for itself” and the human creature. Passivity is here linked with the return to the one – man in his gelassenheit is not destroyed, but reconnected to true being, and therefore truly free to be himself.

[1] One can possibly explain this decline in direct citation on the basis of genre and necessity. On the genre side, it seems that the author of the TD was not scholastically trained, meaning that perhaps Latin manuscripts were not available to him. On the necessity side of things, it is possible that because Eckhart, and then Tauler, could be cited as alternative authorities, appeals to Dionysius’ works were increasingly irrelevant for subsequent German mystical writers.

[2] TD 74.

[3] TD 72.

[4] TD 77.

[5] TD 73.

[6] TD 73.

[7] TD 73-74.

[8] TD 74.

[9] TD 74.

[10] TD 81.

[11] TD 81.

[12] TD 81.

[13] TD 82.

[14] TD Engl. 73.

[15] TD 89.

[16] TD 91.

[17] TD 89.

[18] TD 101.

[19] TD Engl. 88.

[20] TD Engl. 147.

[21] TD 103.

A noteworthy critic of this claim is Samuel Dubbelman, who, in his dissertation, concludes that “There is no evidence that Luther read Dionysius in a humanistic fashion,” that is, in anything but excerpts.[4] Dubbelman make two arguments from Luther’s texts: (1) negatively, Luther never cites Dionysius verbatim; (2) positively, there are linguistic resonances between Luther’s summaries of Dionysian doctrine and the works of Jean Gerson (or, more specifically, Altenstaig’s summary of Gerson).[5] Dubbelman notices that there is certain technical vocabulary in Luther’s discussion of Dionysius, such as his threefold division of theology into symbolic, proper, and allegorical, his description of mystical theology as “experiential”, and his comments on “anagogical darkness,” that, though they do not come directly from the Dionysian corpus (as Rorem claimed), were nevertheless terminology coined by Gerson and disseminated by Altenstaig.[6]

This of course brings us to another knotty issue: if Luther was not reading Dionysius directly, where was he receiving him mediately? As we have seen above, there are many different sources by which Dionysian theology could have reached Luther. We do indeed have Luther’s marginal notes from his time at Erfurt, which reveal that Luther read two collections from the Erfurt Library with the major works of Bonaventure and pseudo-Bonaventure. Furthermore, we have Luther’s Tauler Marginalia, which contained all of Tauler’s sermons and a sermon by Meister Eckhart, himself. Dubbelman, for his part, has argued persuasively for the influence of Gerson’s conciliar Dionysianism as being a major source on Luther, possibly through the digest of Altenstaig. Finally, Karlfried Froehlich and Johannes Zachhuber have argued for a renaissance transmission, either through Luther’s allegedly direct reading of Marsilio Ficino’s commentaries on Dionysius (Froehlich), through the writings of Johann Reuchlin (Zachhaber and Dubbelman), or through the commentary written by Johann Eck (Froehlich, Zachhaber, and Dubbelman).[7]

The second question we must answer here at the start is a methodological one: “how should we proceed to analyze Luther’s relationship?” The traditional approach, popularized by Paul Rorem in the anglophone world, is to examine all of the explicit mentions of Dionysius in Luther’s early works and take inventory of where he is negative and where he is favorable. On this way of reading Luther, there are certain loci classici that must be dealt with: two major sections in the Lectures on the Psalms (1513-1515), one section in Luther’s commentary on the Hebrews (1517), one section in Luther’s Lectures on Romans (1515), one section in Luther’s Operationes in Psalmos (1519-1521), and then the famous passage in De Captivitate babylonica ecclesiae (1520). Rorem, McGinn, Zachhaber, Alfsvåg, and Dubbelman all utilize this text-based methodology in their analyses, though, of course, each scholar disagrees about what these texts mean for Luther’s development in relation to Dionysianism.

In contrast, there have been other voices, particularly Ilmari Karimies and Piotyr Malysz, who have argued that cataloguing certain instances where Luther cites Dionysius by name is methodologically reductive, and actually obscures our view of Luther’s real reliance on the Areopagite.[8] Both Karimies and Malysz prefer instead a thematic comparison between Luther and Dionysius, because they claim that the loci classici do not take into account Luther’s entire interaction with Dionysian mysticism. Both, interestingly, also downplay the significance of Luther’s own report about what he believes about Dionysius – Malysz claims that there is significant “continuity between Dionysius and Luther – despite the latter’s rhetorical protestations to the contrary”[9]; Karimies claims that “even when harshly criticizing Dionysius Luther at the same times makes use of some Dionysian ideas.”[10]

So we are left with two complex questions before we have even begun: (1) what was Luther reading? And (2) how should we read his reading of it? In a sense, these are the two simple points that everybody wants to know, and they are the topic of this paper.

WHAT WAS LUTHER READING?: CONTRASTING IMAGES OF DIONYSIUS

When considering the question of Luther and Dionysius, one must consider which Dionysius Luther was engaging with. And here, I am not attempting to reinvent the wheel. Good studies exist that tell the winding story of how Dionysius was received by the mendicant orders and among the conciliarist – what I want to add to this scholarship in this section is more a flushing out of particular areas of Dionysian reception, namely the Rhenish and Humanist contexts. I will briefly discuss what we already know about the reception of Dionysius in the mendicant and conciliar contexts, and then move on to discuss the reception of Dionysius among major theologians and humanists that prove consequential for Luther’s context in the German territories.

Dionysian Reception among Mendicants and Conciliarists

The Dominican and Franciscan mendicant movements were both legitimized by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.[11] Their purpose was to reform a church struggling with an increasingly secularized clergy and a growing movement of unregulated lay piety. The two orders of course answered these demands in different ways – the Franciscans advocated for a return to the gospel piety of Jesus, above all the law of evangelical piety embodied in Francis; the Dominicans focused on preaching to laity, especially to houses of lay women called Beguines. In the persons of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, both orders had elite teachers at Paris (though of course Bonaventure’s tenure was cut short by his appointment to the Minister General of his order in 1257). For this reason, both orders became intentionally intertwined with medieval dionysianism.

It is noteworthy that both Aquinas and Bonaventure represent profound and yet different appropriations of the works of Dionysius the Areopagite. Thomas, indebted to his mentor and predecessor, Albert the Great, wrote his Summa Theologia using both Dionysius’ works and the pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de Causis, a surviving Latin digest of Proclus’ Elements of Theology. Bonaventure, relying on the affective Dionysianism of Thomas Gallus, wrote his Itinerum Mentis as a Franciscan reinterpretation of the Dionysian path of the soul’s return to the One God. In this way, Dionysius became a fixture in both mendicant movements, as they attempted to provide pastoral care for both clergy and laity; the mendicant movements are an important link in the transmission of Dionysius to the Renaissance Humanists and Reformation theologians alike.

What is the basic difference between these two approaches? Caritas, love, obviously plays a significant role for both Bonaventure and Aquinas. But, to somewhat oversimply, the differences lie in what anthropological resources may facilitate the soul’s union with God. Thomist and subsequent Dominican thinkers seem to have pictured a union of the Soul with God in terms of intellectual ascent, remaining within the bounds of the dialectical unknowing set out by Dionysius in De Mystica; for Bonaventure, on the other hand, there is a point in which the intellect itself must be excluded from divine union, with love alone entering into a nuptial embrace with the unlimited One. In other words, Bonaventure overcomes Dionysian unknowing by borrowing the union of wills one finds in Thomas Gallus, Hugh of St. Victor, and Bernard of Clairvaux. Thomas, on the other hand, prioritizes the dialectical unknowing he learned from Albert.

Dionysianism was also popular among members of the late medieval conciliarist movement, as Samuel Dubbelman has recently argued.[12] These theologians, such as Jean Gerson, followed the affective reading of Dionysius, and yet attempted to stress the critical function of the intellect in order to guard against the excesses of mystical heresies allegedly inspired by Jan van Roesbruuc.[13] In doing so, Gerson especially reached back to the Franciscan interpretation of Gallus and Bonaventure – but with some new features, such as the distinction between practical and theoretical mysticism, as well as the move to situate mystical theology within the threefold division of the symbolic, proper, and mystical. Bernard McGinn, because of his emphasis on mysticism as an experience, sees Gerson as not really a mystic, but rather a systematizer of the real mysticism of others – but under our linguistic-grammatical definition of mysticism offered above, it would probably be better to think of him as one engaging in mystical discourse in his own right. Gerson’s appropriation of Dionysius was significant not only for the reception of Dionysius among Renaissance Humanists, but also, it would seem, for Luther himself.

The Rhenish Dionysius

Dominican Dionysianism seems to be one of the motivating forces behind the preaching of Meister Eckhart among the Beguines in Northern Germany. In his sermons,[14] Eckhart quotes directly from Dionysius twenty-five times, occurring in German sermons 19 (2), 20b (1), 31 (2), 57 (3), 58 (4), 65 (1), 71 (1), 73 (2), 78 (2), 82 (2) as well Von Eiser (1) and Von Abgeshiedenheit (2). In the Latin Works, Eckhart cites Dionysius in Expositio Sancti Evangelii (2), as well as in his Latin Sermon Vas Auri Solidum Ornatum Omni Lapide Pretioso Eccli. 50 (1). Most of these citations are references to Dionysius’ doctrine of unknowing, his advocacy for silence in contemplation, and his angelology; Eckhart explicitly cites from De Divinis Nominibus, De Mystica Theologia, and De Caelesti Hierarchia. In the wake of Eckhart’s condemnation, Tauler, too invokes Dionysius fifteen times in his German sermons: in 28 (1), 32 (1), 41 (2), 43 (1), 44 (1), 45 (1), 51 (1), 52 (1), 53 (2), 54 (1), 69 (1), 76 (1), and 84 (1).[15] Tauler also in one place surprisingly quotes Proclus, himself – significantly to counter the authority of Augustine in sermon 59. All of this has led Bernard McGinn to assert that Tauler “was more deeply influenced by the Neoplatonism of the German Dominican school than has been previously realized.”[16] Tauler and Eckhart, then, self-consciously place themselves within the discourse of Dionysianism, in a way that McGinn claims has been rather misunderstood.[17]

An illustration of what McGinn means here can be found by looking at the general approach still assumed by Luther scholars. The traditional approach to this question claims that Luther’s reception of Tauler was mostly positive, with the exception of his theological anthropology. Whereas Tauler believed in a sort of apex mentis associated with the grunt der seelen inherited from Eckhart, traditional scholars, using one of Luther’s marginalia, show that Luther’s critical reception of Tauler included a revision of this holdover from neoplatonism. Instead of there being a funklein in the soul that can be fanned into the fire of love, they argue that for Luther the pinnacle of the soul was actually no “thing” at all. Rather, Luther replaces the apex mentis with fides. In this sense, Luther’s theological anthropology is a relational revision of Tauler’s view; if faith, something which is given to us externally, is the place where we encounter God, there is no possibility of mystical ascent, but rather a downward motion of divine receptibility and human neediness.

One has to ask serious questions about whether or not this is the correct way to read Tauler’s anthropology, based on McGinn’s comments above. If Denys Turner is correct, the Dionysianism of Eckhart should actually not be understood as the locus of an experience, but rather primarily as a site of reception. Indeed, Turner says that Eckhart—and so by extension, Tauler— had a Dionysian apophatic anthropology, in which the base of the human being was hardly some “thing” that could facilitate ascent. Rather, the base (grunt) of the human being was the very relation to God that the traditional scholars discern in Luther’s corrective. Indeed, here, as in so many places, it seems that Luther was actually quite in line with Tauler: for in Eckhartian Dionysianism, there is no natural “stuff” outside of its procession from the Divine. Rather, the entire universe itself is an emanation from and procession back to the Deity. In this sense, salvation, just as much as creation, can only be received as a gift.

Volker Leppin has recently stressed how essential Tauler’s theology was for Martin Luther’s reformation discoveries. Most provocatively, that very element which some scholars see as being unique to Luther, the extra nos, Leppin ascribes to Rhenish mysticism. Externality and mysticism, for Leppin, are not mutually exclusive. Rather, the mystic is the one who is most concerned with a Word coming from outside oneself. To be sure, Luther dissents from Tauler in his identification of this word with images and particularly the preaching office, as Dubbelman has amply argued, but this did not persuade him to abandon the corpus or speak against it.

This is confirmed if we take a look at how Luther treats what he originally considered to be a part of the Taulerian corpus, the famous Theologia Germanica. In Martin Luther’s second edition of the Theologia Germanica, Dionysius is mentioned by name twice, both in chapter eight, where the Frankfurter explains that a vision of the nature of God can happen while still in the body. This hardly looks like significant dependence. If one compares the citations of Dionysius in Eckhart, Tauler, and the Theologia Germanica, one can see that the overall citations of Dionysius and their importance decline over the course of the fourteenth century, which may at first look like the influence of Dionysius had its day with Eckhart, was a secondary theme in Tauler, and completely evaporated in the TD. But this would be a mistaken reading, for the general apophaticism and exemplarism of Dominican Dionysianism, along with its apophatic anthropology, nevertheless remain constant.[18]

The TD begins with the usual ontology one would expect of a Dionysian – the fusion of the Pauline and the platonic. The Frankfurter cites 1 Corinthians 13:10, and with that begins to expound upon a monistic ontology:

Pay attention: What is the partial and the perfect? The Perfect is a Being, that holds and establishes all things in himself and in his being, and outside of whom is no being, and in which all things have their being, for it is the being of all things and is in itself unchangeable and immovable and changes and moves all other things.

Nu mercke: Was ist das volkommende vnd das geteilte?” he asks: Das volkommende ist eyn Wessen, das yn ym vnnd yn synem Wessen alles begriffen vnd beslossen hat, vnnd an das vnd vsswendig dem keine wares Wessen is, vnnd yn dem alle dingk yr wessen han, wanne ess is aller dinck Wessen vnnd is yn ym selber ynwandelbare vnnd vnbeweglich vnd wandelt vnd beweget alle ander dingk.

This is definitely Dionysian waters. Here we have, in the vernacular, an expression of the doctrine of God as the Necessary Being, who directs all things, moves all things, has all things within him, apart from which no thing can be. This necessary being, he continues, also cannot be indentified with any particular being; it is not the sum of its parts. Nor can it be comprehended (vnbekentlich), grasped (vnbegrifflich), or even described (vnsprechlich) in the manner of the creatrues (als creatur). It is nameless (Dar vmmb nennet man das volkommende nicht), impossible for creatures to know on the basis of their creaturliness (als creatur yn yr creaturlicheit vnd geschaffenheit; von yr ichtheit vnnd selbheit is ess yr vnmuglich).

And yet, in its namelessness, the Frankfurter outlines our created relationship with Necessary Being: contingent beings are like a glitz or a shine that flows out from the son or as a light and shine, this or that, and are called creaturely (eyn glantz ader eyn scheyne vss flusset auss der sonne ader vss eynem lichte vnnd schynet etwas, diss ader das, vnnd heisset creatur). It is a paradoxical anthropology, in which human beings are something while being nothing, outflows of the Divine Being and yet always remaining in the Divine Being, just as the Divine Being is both infinitely beyond them and yet closer to them than their very selves.

All beings, for the Frankfurter, flow from the Divine Being – and it is to their origin that they must return. “As long as one holds to these things (one’s ichtheit), the Perfect remains unknown (so bleibet das volkommen vnbekant).” Indeed, to truly know (bekantniss) the Necessary Being is at the same time to participate in its Being (Wesen); the Frankfurter says that unless we come to this knowledge (which is, again, also a participation in Being itself), we remain simply eyn czufal ader eyn glantz vnd eyn scheyn, not having being, but rather simply having come from being.

Two things are worthy of pointing out in this account. The first, of course, is the platonic equation between being and knowing, which is operative throughout the Dionysian tradition. Second, of course, is that the Frankfurter thinks of creation as an outflow and return to the Necessary being (the exitus-reditus model). One can see here, surely, the influence of Tauler, Eckhart, and, ultimately, Dionysius himself.

As we see, this Dionysianism is the basis, not a cosmetic façade plastered on top of, the anthropology of the Theologia Germanica. It is the true nature of human beings to flow from and return to their divine source: what gets in the way, for the Frankfurter, is creaturlicheit, geschaffenheit, ichtheit, selbheit, meinheit – which gets in the way of the human being truly being himself. The metaphor the Frankfurter uses is that of the Sun and its rays, which is a Dionysian image. We might also compare the Divine Being to the sea, from which the river water of creation outflows: the flow is blocked by the debris of selfhood, and the quest of the spiritual life is to break down that debris so that the water might flow out again to the sea.

Dionysius among Southern and Northern Humanists

Let us continue on to the appropriation of Dionysius among humanists. In 1987, Karlfried Froehlich argued persuasively for the importance of Dionysius for the humanist movement in general.[19] Though Lorenzo Valla in 1457 had attempted to prove that Dionysius was not in fact the disciple of the Apostle Paul, converted at the Areopagus, this did little to stem the tide of enthusiasm for Dionysius in many humanist and protestant circles at the turn of the sixteenth century. Ambrogio Traversant’s Latin translation of the Dionysian Corpus, printed at Bruges in 1480, was the most widely disseminated version among both groups. Greek manuscripts arrived from the Greek East during the beginning of the sixteenth century as well, adding fuel to the fire of humanist philological interest. Froehlich documents the interest of Trithemius in Sponheim in 1496, Wiliam Grocyn, John Colet, Tomas Linacre, and Wiilliam Lattimer in England, Philippe Junta, Ficino, and Pico in Florence, as well as Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples and his reform circle in France.[20] Many such humanists were trying to find an alternative to the rigid Scholasticism they had inherited from the Middle Ages, and that, combined with their interest in antiquity,` led them to seriously consider Dionysius as an alternative to the received tradition. In Florence, for example, Marsilio Ficino produced commentaries on Dionysius’ De Divinis Nominibus and De Mystica Theologia, in which he extolled Dionysius as the centerpiece of his Christian Neoplatonism. Ficino believed against Valla that Dionysius was indeed the disciple of the Apostle Paul, and that his writings represented the most original form of the Gospel, based on Paul and the Johannine writings. It was not Dionysius who was dependent on the writings of Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus, Ficino argued: rather, the Dionysian mysteries were too profound to be communicated to the common crowd, and thus, almost as soon as they were written, went underground, just as Plato’s original doctrines were interred to protect the divine truth from the skeptics (on this Ficino relies on Cicero and Augustine).[21] Ammonius and Numenius, however, had been able peruse the Dionysian books before they were hidden, and transmitted sparks of the true platonic theology to their disciples, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus. Once the corpus resurfaced in the fifth century, one could discern that this subsequent tradition of platonism had relied on Paul’s most learned convert; though, to the outsider who did not understand the history (Valla), it seemed as if Dionysius had inherited his ideas from pagan Neoplatonists.

The Florentine interpretation of Dionysius seems to follow fairly closely the reading of Dionysius that was adopted by Gerson, and before him, Bonaventure, Thomas Gallus, and certain of the Victorines. As speculative as his reading of Dionysius is, Ficino is sure to emphasize that

since the intellect attains what it needs to understand no so much by its own power as by divine power, consequently it cannot attain the Good itself with any of its powers at all (ut nulla penitus facultate sua bonum ipsum assequi possit). So to enjoy God is not to act with regard to God, but rather to be acted upon by God (Igitur Deo frui non est ad Deum agere, sed potius agi Deo). It is not for us to quaff down anything ourselves; but rather we are filled to the brim (impleri) from another source (aliunde prorsus). It is not for us to engage with the good by way of the intellect (per intellectum versari), but rather to be transported tither by love (sed amore transferri); and with our unity itself, which is higher than the intellect (nostra intellectu superiore), to be joined utterly (copulari) to the One and the Good.”[22]

Again, Ficino says of our union with God:

At length, in God Himself [who is] wholly superior to intellect, not only does [our] discursive argument cease, both interior and exterior, but so too does [our] understanding (sed etiam intellegentia cessat). But what is missing in [our] understanding is more than offset (compensatur) by a kind of love (amore), and by tasting (gastu) as it were and touching (tactu), and by a unity and grace (unitateque et gratia).[23]

Loving, tasting, and touching (and not intellect) are what can finally reach God. The spiritual life is more about being acted upon than acting with regards to divine union – divine union is affective. Once united to God, Ficino says, the intellect “acts at last as God does (agit Denique tanquam Deus)” in a perfect union of wills.[24]

It is hard to underestimate the influence of the Florentine Neoplatonists on the second generation of German Humanism in the early sixteenth century.[25] Conrad Mutian, Conrad Celtis, and Johann Ruechlin are perhaps the most famous second-generation humanists who gladly received Ficino’s synthesis.[26] Erasmus, however, opted for Valla’s critical approach to Dionysius, and openly questioned Dionysius’ identity in his Greek New Testament. Erasmus, Mutian, and Reuchlin are most important for our ensuing discussion of Luther: Erasmus was the prince of Northern Humanism; Mutian, the leader of the university at Erfurt where Luther received his education, began a reading group around the writings of the Florentine Platonists during his tenure;[27] Reuchlin, of course, was the premiere Hebrew scholar, around which an international controversy raged during the first two decades of the sixteenth century that was popularly reduced to a battle between Humanism and Scholasticism.[28] Reuchlin cites Dionysius in Greek seven times in De Verbo Mirifico (1494), twice in the introduction to In Septem Psalmos Poenitentiales (1512), and four times (with three allusions) in De Arte Cabalistica (1517), following the interpretation of Ficino fairly closely. Reuchlin’s citations come exclusively from De Divinis Nominibus and De Caelesti Hierarchia.

Italian Dionysianism was also received by Johann Eck, one of Luther’s main opponents during the indulgence controversy. As Johannes Zachhuber has demonstrated, Eck proved to be one of the main causes for Luther’s embrace of Erasmus and Valla’s critique of the foundations of Florentine Dionysianism, though this alone cannot explain the complexity of Luther’s position.

[1] Knut Alfsvåg, “Luther as Reader of Dionysius the Areopagite,” 101

[2] WA 8,27; LW 32:259.

[3] See Dubbelman, 241-243 and Johannes Zuchhaber, “Luther on Dionysius,” in the Oxford Handbook of Dionysius the Areopagite, eds. Mark Edwards et al., (Oxford: Oxford, 2022), 521-525

[4] Dubbelman, 233.

[5] Dubbelman, 234. On Altenstaig, see Dubbelman’s article with Erin Zoutendam, “Mystical Terms in Johannes Altenstaig’s Vocabularius theologiae (1517)” Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 47, no. 3 (2024): 53-94.

[6] Dubbelman, 240

[7] Froehlich, 42; Zachhuber, 523.

[8] See Ilmari Karimies, “Luther’s Reception of the Negative Theology in Operationes in Psalmos (1519-21)” and Piotyr Malysz, “Luther and Dionysius: Beyond Mere Negations,” Modern Theology, vol 24, no. 4, (October 2008): 679-692.

[9] Malysz, 690.

[10] Karimies, 9.

[11] McGinn, The New Mysticism,

[12] Samuel Dubbleman, thesis, “Mediated Mysticism: The Medieval Development of Mystica Theologia and Its Reception by Martin Luther,” Boston University, 2023, 163-225. See also Denys Turner, “Dionysius and Some Late Medieval Mystical Theologians of Northern Europe,” Modern Theology, vol 24, no. 3 (October 2008): 651-665, as well as the comment by Froehlich, 35.

[13] Turner, “Late Medieval Mystical Theologians,” 653.

[14] Meister Eckhart, Werke I, ed. Josef Quint, Bibliothek Des Mittelalters: Texte und Uebersetzungen Vierundzwanzig Baende Mit Illustrationen, Band 20 (Frankfurt an Main: Deutzsche Klassiker Verlag, 1991) and Meister Ekchart, Werke II, ed. Ernst Benz et al., Bibliothek Des Mittelalters: Texte und Uebersetzungen Vierundzwanzig Baende Mit Illustrationen, Band 21 (Frankfurt an Main: Deutzsche Klassiker Verlag, 1993).

[15] Johannes Tauler, Predigten: Band I, ed. Georg Hofmann, Christliche Meister, vol. 3, (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1979) and Johannes Tauler, Predigten: Band II, ed. Georg Hofmann, Christliche Meister, vol. 3, (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1979).

[16] McGinn, The Harvest of Medieval Mysticism, 247-248.

[17] Erich Vogelsang, one of the most influential writers on the topic of Luther and mysticism, proposed a threefold typology for understanding mysticism based on particular mystic’s country of origin: the Greek (Dionysian), the Roman (Bernardine) and the German (Eckhartian). Heiko Oberman famously problematized this way of viewing the mystical traditions in his essay, “Simul Gemitus et Raptus: Luther and Mysticism” (Oberman, Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 126-134), though without connecting Tauler and Eckhart with Dionysius. For a contemporary treatment of Vogelsang on this issue, see Volker Leppin, “Luther and Mysticism: The Case of the Seebergs and Vogelsang,” in Luther, Barth, and Movements of Theological Renewal (1918-1933), eds. Heinrich Assel and Bruce McCormack, (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020): 109-124 as well as James Stayer, Martin Luther, German Saviour: German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917-1933, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000).

[18] One can possibly explain this decline in direct citation on the basis of genre and necessity. On the genre side, it seems that the author of the TD was not scholastically trained, meaning that perhaps Latin manuscripts were not available to him. On the necessity side of things, it is possible that because Eckhart, and then Tauler, could be cited as alternative authorities, appeals to Dionysius’ works were increasingly irrelevant for subsequent German mystical writers.

[19] Karlfried Forehlich, “Pseudo-Dionysius and the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1987): 33-46.

[20] Froehlich, 36-37.

[21] For this discussion, see Michael J. B. Allen’s introduction to Marsilio Ficino, On Dionysius the Areopagite, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Michael J. B. Allen, The I Tatti Renaissance Library, ed. James Hankins, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), xiv-xvii.

[22] Ficino, On Dionysius, 48/49.

[23] Ficino, On Dionysius, 64/65.

[24] Ficino, On Dionysius, 48/49.

[25] See Spitz, “The Theologia Platonica in the Religious Thought of the German Humanists,” in Lewis Spitz, Luther and German Humanism, (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 1996): 118-133. For the general transmission of Florentine perrenialism to Northern Germany, see Giovanni Tortoliello, “The Prisca Theologia in the Early Reformation Debates,” Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 4, no. 2, (Spring 2024): 41-71.

[26] Spitz, “Theologia Platonica,” 127-128: “The characteristic marks of the theology proper of Mutian, Celtis, and Reuchlin indicate affiliation with Florentine thought rather than mere analogy.”

[27] Spitiz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard,1964), 130-154.

[28] Spitz, Religious Renaissance, 61-80. Luther weighed in on this controversy in his early correspondences – see Timothy P. Dost, Renaissance Humanism in Support of the Gospel in Luther’s Early Correspondence: Taking All Things Captive, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 78-86.

When I now compare myself with the men who have so far been honored as the first, the difference is palpable. I do not count these so-called “first” men among men in general: for me they are the refuse of humanity, monsters of sickness and vengeful instincts; they are inhuman, disastrous, at bottom incurable, and revenge themselves on life.

I want to be their opposite[.]

F. Nietzsche, “Ecce Homo,” chapter 2, section 30.

It is often remarked that a prophetic lyricism animates much of late nineteenth century continental philosophy. From Dostoevsky’s Underground Man to Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, reaching the depths of Marxist revolutionary rumblings and Comtean Social religious fervors, a certain apocalypticism heralded the end of an era of naivety and the dawn of something very new and very different. Yet no note of this modern dirge rang out more clearly than Friedrich Nietzsche’s heralding of the ‘death of god.’ “God,” Nietzsche proclaimed, “is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”[1] With this pronouncement, he summed up the feelings of horror and disenchantment felt by an entire generation of philosophers, writers, and academics and laid the subsequent groundwork for all of continental philosophy after him.

Though the ‘death of god’ is perhaps the most popular part of Nietzsche’s philosophy, reducing his philosophy to just this statement is misleading. Nietzsche does not, after all, consider himself a nihilist or the father of nihilism. Rather, as the Eastern Orthodox theologian and Radical Orthodoxy scholar David Bentley Hart has shown in his book, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (2009), Nietzsche’s philosophy is more concerned with the absolute affirmation of the real than an apocalyptic destruction of it.[2] Though Hart ultimately contends that Nietzschean philosophy affirms too much, he argues that Nietzsche’s project would ultimately be impossible without an implicit reliance on the revolutionarily aesthetic message of Christianity.

For Hart as well as for Nietzsche, this Christian revolution is the constitutive historical event that aesthetically colors all subsequent cultural phenomena. But their respective valuations are mutually exclusive: for Nietzsche, the advent of Christianity has tied European culture to all things decadent, decaying, and nihilistic. For Hart, the advent of Christianity means just the opposite—the Christian revolution was the very event that bestowed on all of creation the beauty of infinite value and dignity. Instead, Nietzsche, in his attempt to move European culture beyond the Christian, is the real advocate for the ‘post-human’ and nihilistic.

To further elaborate these two narratives, I would like to accomplish two things in the following paper: first, I would like to introduce Nietzsche’s philosophical project, especially focusing on the so-called ‘transvaluation of values’ (his fundamental critique of Christianity). Then, I would like to examine how David Bentley Hart engages with Nietzsche’s project. I hope that by doing so, our understanding of Nietzschean philosophy might be elevated to a more nuanced level and our apologetics against Nietzschean atheism might be strengthened and enriched.

I. Introducing Nietzsche: Aesthetics, Critique, and Genealogy

First, it is necessary for us to become familiar with Nietzsche’s project and goal. In what follows, I explain three elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy that are the most fundamental to his project: the aesthetic, the critical, and the genealogical.

Aesthetic. As David Bentley Hart has demonstrated in his monumental work, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), Nietzsche’s project is fundamentally aesthetic.[3] From his first publication to his last, Nietzsche identified his thought with the artistic and natural over and against a crude and alienating rationalism. Truth must be called into question, of course—but only to make way for an intimate affirming of real beauty. For Nietzsche, this affirmation consists of the artistic compatibility between Dionysus and Apollo, the destructive and the creative, the limitless and the limiting, which provide the motivation for his project of ‘total critique’.

Critical. Nietzsche describes his aesthetic project as “a critique of Modernity.”[4] Modern culture, he claims, is sick and in need of the physician’s hand, the steady knife of critique, to regain its health. It is worth pointing out that this description explicitly links Nietzsche with the father of German Idealism, Immanuel Kant. However, Nietzsche is not just after a recapitulation: he attempts to overcome Kant’s work by engaging in a more perfect, ‘total critique’—a critique of all nihilistic forces, including those implicit in Kant himself.

Nietzsche adamantly criticizes Kant’s critiques for being partial and inadequate. Kant’s method for critique, the transcendental method, was a “comical niaiserie allemande”: a self-defeating concept.[5] “Old Kant” had too much of theologian’s blood in his veins to bring about a ‘total critique’—he suffered from the common European ailment, Christianity. In being unable to root out this malady in himself—in being unable to overcome himself—he was unable to interpret all of reality in an affirmative way.

This is an important point to dwell on. Nietzsche is often portrayed and criticized as a nihilistic philosopher, as if his work was solely concerned with destruction and chaos. This, however, misses the point. The purpose of Nietzsche’s critical work is the total affirmation of life-for-life’s-sake—the no-saying must be followed by and affirmed in the yes-saying.[6] Christianity, as Nietzsche sees it, is unable to yes-say life—it prefers an imaginary reality (the divine) instead of real life, and so devalues real life. Nor were Kant and Hegel able to be yes-saying philosophers—just like Christianity, they uncritically preferred a counterfeit reality (the ideal) instead of the real. Schopenhauer alone stands as pedagogue of the philosophers solely because of his honesty: as a pessimist, he admitted his metaphysical resentment and hostility towards the real.

Nietzsche contends that all of the philosophers mentioned above philosophized so poorly because they asked the wrong questions—questions reminiscent of Luther’s Small Catechism. Kant, to take one example, had only thought to echo, “Was ist das?”—that is, he was a metaphysician. But Nietzsche was insistent that this is an insufficient question if one’s goal is ‘total critique’. Reality does not function like the catechism—that is mere abstraction. If one wishes to affirm reality as it is and so playfully engage with real life, philosophical inquiry must be dynamic, not settling for abstractions but rather interpreting the very phenomena of life in terms of quality and value.

Genealogical. The tool Nietzsche uses to get at this dynamic, qualitative analysis is what he terms genealogy, or, said somewhat less technically, story-telling.[7] This story is designed to show you that all ideas have a history and a person behind them. People create ideas; ideas do not create people (contra Hegel).

The story Nietzsche tells is important because it is a direct result of his dual emphasis on physicalism and psychologism. It goes like this: He begins, first, with making a cultural diagnosis. European society is sick and on the brink of cultural nihilism. As Kant and the Idealists concerned themselves with their own ‘wills to truth,’ they missed the absolute decadence infecting all of their cultural institutions, invalidating all of their presuppositions and their entire selves, down to their very instinct to philosophize. And if something is not done, becoming-reactive forces—impotent drives which corrupt all that is strong and vivacious—will ruin all of European society, completely dissipating it into a ‘will to nothingness.’[8]

But how did things get this bad? And how could his predecessors ignore the signs of such cultural decadence? Nietzsche has a theory. His predecessors had not realized that their psychological drives had been systematically trained to pursue fiction over reality. They naïvely trusted their own intuitions, their own rationality, without even questioning for what purpose they pursued truth and goodness. This oversight caused Enlightenment, Idealist, and Romantic philosophers to fall victim to what can only be called their unhealthy imaginations.

This instinct towards the unreal has a long history. It is actually symptomatic of a conflict between two different kinds of morality, which were innovated by two very different kinds of human beings: the master and the slave. The master and the slave differ in both physicality (strength) and psychology (health). Masters are naturally superior: and so, they have historically identified good and bad healthily, as first and foremost an act of self-refence (that is, without malice or jealousy).[9] The weak are base and impotent: their morals come from a damaged psychology, one which hates reality and wishes to take revenge on those stronger than them. The first move of slave morality is to reference the other, the superior, labeling his strength “evil” in order to affirm its own impotence as “good.” In doing so, it changes the nature of reality: slave morality requires a complete reorientation of all of reality away from what exists and towards fable, towards fabrication, towards the unreal. However, because slaves are naturally impotent, this morality has not played a very large role in the ancient cultural history of mankind except in times of severe decline.

II. Nietzsche and Christianity: The Transvaluation of Values

When a civilization is strong, it creates a strong morality that affirms the real as beautiful. But Nietzsche claims that he has uncovered two fundamental sources by which slave morality has eroded and undermined master morality: Western philosophy and Christian theology. In this section, I will first briefly consider Nietzsche’s critique of Socratic idealism before continuing on to an extended discussion of his critique of Pauline Christianity. Nietzsche represents Pauline Christianity, with its roots buried deep in the soil of Jewish ressentiment, as the ultimate “transvaluation” of all natural, strong, and real values into an impotent and pessimistic slave morality. For Europe to become healthy again, Nietzsche maintains that this Christian morality must be rooted out wherever it might be found.

The first monumental case of a successful erosion of higher values happened in the realm of philosophy. The Hellenic civilization was, at one time, a vivacious and strong civilization characterized by gods that reflected their natural vitality. Or they were―until Socrates’s fatal lie. Much before the transcendental musings of Kant, Socrates had delineated the boundaries of pure reason: pure reason was an imposition, a fabrication, on the natural flux of real life. This, Socrates knew, was a necessary fabrication: this noble lie was the only thing that directed culture away from ultimate nihilism. Plato, too, understood this. In the spirit of Socrates, he directed his disciples away from reality’s essential chaos and toward a theory of external ideal forms, in which all particulars experienced an abstract universality. But Nietzsche argues that this is not a healthy innovation: in an attempt to avoid nihilism, Kant’s predecessors misdirected the energy of mankind away from the primary physicality of life—that is real life—and on to an imaginary fiction. Faced with the nihilistic reality of aesthetic existence, Socrates and Plato purposely fabricated a false reality, abstract philosophy. Nietzsche claims this miscalculation was a ‘transvaluation of values’, the ultimate cause of the decline and decadence of Hellenic culture.

The second great “slave revolt” happened among the Jews and Christians. Like Socrates, the Jews were acquainted with the question of aesthetic nihilism. When they were faced with cultural annihilation at the hands of the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans, Nietzsche argued, using the best historical scholarship of his day, that the priestly caste completely revised what was once a natural and affirmative religion into something “changed” and “denatured.”[10] When “confronted with the question whether to be or not to be,” Nietzsche explains, “they chose, with a perfectly uncanny deliberateness, to be at any price,” even the price of “a radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, of the whole inner world as well as the outer.”[11] That is, the priests, like Socrates, created a false reality—but this false reality really devalued natural reality. In order to revenge themselves on their captors, they made “every natural institution (state, judicial order, marriage, care of the sick and the poor), every demand inspired by the instinct of life—in short, everything that contains its value in itself, altogether valueless, anti-valuable.” It was from out of this ground, this resentment of real life and real strength, from the “utterly false soil” of Judaism, Nietzsche claims, that Christianity grew.[12]

Christianity is “the ultimate Jewish consequence,” “one inference more in its awe-inspiring logic.”[13] Though Jesus had preached only a way of life, his heinous disciples attempted to dogmatize his theology of love into a world-contradicting theology. Through the work of the Apostle Paul, what remained of the once-strong Jewish god was subjected to an even more “anti-natural castration.”[14] Paul (whose work parallels that of the Jewish priests) created a whole system of imaginary distractions from reality:

The Redeemer type, the doctrine, the practice, the death, the meaning of the death, even what came after the death—nothing remained untouched, nothing remained even similar to the reality. Paul simply transposed the center of gravity of that whole existence after this existence—in the lie of the “resurrected” Jesus. At bottom, he had no use at all for the life of the Redeemer—he needed the death on the cross and a little more.[15]

This imaginary system places the center of gravity for the Christian tradition “not in life but in the ‘beyond’—in nothingness.”[16] The motivations at play here are clear: Christianity is a harbor for reactive forces, ultimately for a resentful “slave morality.”

Nietzsche estimates that Paul’s fabrication of the Christian mythology is probably the most important event in Western civilization precisely because it had such far-reaching effects on subsequent European cultural history. Pauline theology dominated the West and became imbedded in each and every cultural institution, shifting their focuses from the real to the unreal, to the fabricated, to the magical—in a sense, to an obsession with nothing. Even now, in the modern age, as enlightened man attempted to shed his Christian heritage, the Pauline urge to devalue lurked hidden in his subconscious drives and habits, the murky depths of his very being.

All of this represents a “Transvaluation of values”, that is, a standing of natural values on their heads. The two major champions of European culture, Platonic philosophy and Pauline theology, were nothing but the triumph of slave morality. Though philosophers claimed to seek only that which was true, good, and beautiful, a secret, resentful, and impotent instinct constituted the initial Socratic impetus towards propositional philosophy and abstract theorizing. Though Christians claimed to worship true life, goodness, and beauty in their God, Nietzsche concludes that these ideals, too, were only created out of the Jewishly impotent Paul. This Christian ‘transvaluation’ of all natural, healthy values into sickly and nihilistic ones has left European culture fixated and obsessed with the ephemeral and imaginary—that is, with nothing at all! If “old Kant” had understood that his moral universe had this dreadfully dreary history, perhaps he would have only written his Critique of Pure Reason. But Kant, not understanding this instinct towards abstraction, only upheld the status quo, leaving Nietzsche to uproot this Christian nihilism directly from its source and complete his project of critique. Nietzsche summarizes his role thusly: “Against this theologians’ instinct I wage war: I have found traces of it everywhere.”[17]

III. David Bentley Hart: A Contrary Reading

Though Nietzsche’s story may ring with tidings of doom and gloom for Western Christianity, his is not the only story worth telling. In his book, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (2009), David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian with ties to Radical Orthodoxy in England, takes up the Nietzsche’s challenge very seriously.[18] Though on the surface this book seems to deal with superficial detractors from the faith such as Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens, the careful reader will be able to see that behind almost every chapter looms the daunting shadow of Hart’s real opponent: Friedrich Nietzsche. In what follows, I will first outline Hart’s argument against Nietzsche and then evaluate both where I find his polemic successful and unsuccessful.

Hart begins his book with a sardonic wistfulness towards the days when atheists were actually committed to their critiques of religion. “My own impatience with [the New Atheists],” he remarks, “would probably be far smaller if I did not suffer from a melancholy sense that, among Christianity’s most fervent detractors, there has been a considerable decline in standards in recent years.”[19] After mentioning a long list of more formidable adversaries, from Celsus and Porphyry to Hume and Gibbon, he introduces “the greatest of them all, Friedrich Nietzsche.”[20] Nietzsche was

a man of immense culture who could appreciate the magnitude of the thing against which he had turned his spirit, who had enough sense of the past to understand the cultural crisis that the fading of Christian faith would bring about. Moreover, he had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was—above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion—rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity’s history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis.[21]

In this passage, Hart focuses on the two parts of Nietzsche’s polemic that he finds particularly insightful: Nietzsche’s understanding that, with the decline of Christianity, Europe was on the brink of cultural nihilism, and his realization of the centrality of pity to the Christian way of life.

In the first place, Hart interprets Nietzsche’s entire project through the latter’s foreboding remarks concerning the decline of the Christian worldview. This is the context of his famous parable concerning the ‘death’ of God (referenced in the introduction). Nietzsche, Hart argues, was not like those naïve New Atheists, who think they can still maintain a moral society without Christianity. Rather, Nietzsche saw that all of the structures of western society grew out of the transvaluation that happened with the ministry of the Apostle Paul. The Christian God, the god of decay, was the inherent element in all western institutions, in all western philosophy, in all western values. His death means that all of these institutions lack a permanent foundation. Nietzsche opines dramatically:

But how did we [kill god]? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its son? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?[22]

It is a war with nihilism itself, with pure becoming-reactive forces, Nietzsche predicts, that will be the next struggle of European man. Christianity had oriented Europe towards an imaginary reality: now, as Christianity passed, the “ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals” could very well be absolute nihilism.[23] Hart, for his part, agrees with Nietzsche’s assessment about the trajectory of the west. “It may very well be,” he confirms, “that when Christianity passes away from a culture, nihilism is the inevitable consequence”.[24] However, this is only a superficial agreement, as we will see later on.

The second point of agreement between these two authors concerns the essence of Christianity: Christianity, for Nietzsche as for Hart, is a religion of pity. Nietzsche complains in his Antichrist that Christianity not only directs us away from life: under the guise of pity it “makes suffering contagious” and “crosses the law of development, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction; it defends those who have been disinherited and condemned by life; and by the abundance of the failures of all kinds which it keeps alive, it gives life itself gloomy and questionable aspect.”[25] Because it transgresses the natural will to power and domination constitutive of all life, it “negates life and renders it more deserving of negation”; it is surely “the practice of nihilism” par excellence.[26]

Hart also agrees with Nietzsche that Christianity is a religion concerned primarily with pity for the poor and destitute. With approval, he summarizes that Nietzsche’s entire case against the church “required him to believe that, from the first, the gospel exercised a unique appeal upon a certain very particular social element (the weak, the resentful, and slavish) and that, as a result, the rise of Christianity had bred social and cultural consequences not only large but catastrophic.”[27] This, Hart contends, is not a misunderstanding; rather, it is simply the point.[28]

Essentially, for both Hart and Nietzsche, Christianity constitutes a “transvaluation of values,” a cultural revolution that changed the face of the west forever. The main point of contention, however, is not over the “transvaluation” as such: the contention is over the “transvaluation’s” value. At the end of the day, Nietzsche and Hart value the “transvaluation” differently, and so they read the entire narrative of the Christian church with different priorities and different eyes.[29]

Hart does not read the advent of Christianity in the same light as the nineteenth century philologist. Where Nietzsche saw the freedom and vitality of pagan culture usurped by the cold dogmatism of Christian belief, Hart emphasizes that no pagan philosophy or culture “could lift its gaze beyond the closed universe of necessity” without the Christian revolution.[30] Where Nietzsche saw paganism’s innocent affirmation of the material world thwarted by Christianity’s otherworldly nihilism, Hart reads of a paganism constituted by “cosmic disenchantment, and the spiritualities it incubated within itself were pervaded by a profound and almost desperate otherworldliness.” It was a time “when religion and philosophy alike were increasingly concerned with escape from the conditions of earthly life, and when both often encouraged a contempt for the flesh more absolute, bitterly unworldly and pessimistic than anything found even in the most exorbitant forms of Christian asceticism.”[31] “Not only is it wrong, in fact, to say that Christianity imported a prejudice against the senses into the pagan world” (as Nietzsche charged); “one should really say that, if the Christianity of the early centuries was marked by any excessive anxiety regarding the material world or life in the body, this was an attitude that had migrated from pagan culture into the church.”[32]

Much like Julian the Apostate, Hart argues implicitly, Nietzsche fails to realize that his very goals, his intense desire to value the world and the human person, arise from Christianity itself.[33] Nietzsche’s ultimate desire is to value the world and mankind. In Twilight of Idols (1888) he declares:

What alone can be our doctrine? That no one gives man his qualities—neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself. (The nonsense of the last idea was taught as “intelligible freedom” by Kant—perhaps by Plato already). No one is responsible for man’s being there at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment. The fatality of his essence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. Man is not the effect of some special purpose, of a will, and end; nor is he the object of an attempt to attain an “ideal of humanity” or an “ideal of happiness” or an “ideal of morality.” It is absurd to wish to devolve one essence on some end or other. We have invented the concept of an “end”: in reality, there is no end.

One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole; there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, or sentence our being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole. That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not form a unity either as a sensorium or as “spirit”; —that alone is the great liberation; with this alone is the innocence of becoming restored. The concept of “God”; was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility in God: only thereby do we redeem the world.[34]

However, Hart explains that this is exactly the value Christianity gave all people against the backdrop of Pagan cruelty. “This world,” he explains,

was neither mere base illusion and ‘dissimilitude,’ nor a quasi-divine dynamo of occult energies, nor a god, nor a prison. As a gratuitous work of transcendent love it was to be received with gratitude, delighted in as an act of divine pleasure, mourned as a victim of human sin, admired as a radiant manifestation of divine glory, recognized as a fellow creature; it might justly be cherished, cultivated, investigated, enjoyed, but not feared, not rejected as evil or deficient, and certainly not worshipped. In this and other ways the Christian revolution gave Western culture the world simply as world, demystified and so (only seemingly paradoxically) full of innumerable wonders to be explored. […]

In short, Christianity produced consequences so immense that it can almost be said to have begun the world anew, to have “invented” the human, to have bequeathed us our most basic concept of nature, to have determined our vision of the cosmos and our place in it, and to have shaped all of us (to one degree or another) in the deepest reaches of consciousness.[35]

Far from devaluing the world, Christianity gave the world value, ultimate significance, through the creation, redemption, and eschatological narratives. Far from alienating and enfeebling people, through the Christological and soteriological formulae Christianity created the very concept and dignity of ‘person’. Christian history is not the enfeebling of mankind—it is rather “a total humanism”, “a vision, that is, of humanity in its widest and deepest scope, one that finds the full nobility and mystery and beauty of the human countenance—the human person—in each unique instance of the common nature.”[36] “To be saved was to be joined to God himself in Christ, to be in fact ‘divinized’”, a reality that necessitated the forging of a “grammar of an entirely new understanding not only of God but of the nature of created reality,”[37] the abandonment of a static pagan metaphysics and the opening of “a grand reimagining of the possibilities of human existence.”[38] For Hart, Nietzsche’s ‘total critique’ stands on the foundation of Christianity’s ‘total humanism’. The real question one should be asking is not how we should get beyond Christianity; rather, Hart suggests, “might it not be the case that a culture that has become truly post-Christian” (as Nietzsche has predicted and so desires) “will also, ultimately, become post-human?”[39]

VI. The ‘Will to Power’ and the ‘Will to Nothingness’

Despite the fact that Nietzsche’s project stands on inherently Christian presuppositions (that is, inclinations that would be impossible without the Christian revolution [transvaluation]), Hart continues on to make the argument that Nietzsche’s project of ‘total critique’ actually accomplishes the opposite of what he intended it to: Nietzsche (and not Pauline Christianity) is in practice the true advocate for nihilistic forces, for the ‘post-human’. In what follows, I will make a couple of observations about how Hart undermines Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ and close with an evaluation of his overall project.

As stated above, Nietzsche distinguishes his philosophy from Idealism by claiming that he desires to affirm reality in toto, life as it actually is, by means of his ‘total critique’. His critical work is first of all diagnostic: Nietzsche reveals through genealogy that European culture has succumbed to a will to nothingness, a will to nihilism. We have already seen how Hart’s genealogy of the Christian religion turned this diagnostic on its head—Christianity, Hart claims, is the ultimate source of humanity and creation’s aesthetic value.

Nietzsche’s more positive work is based on an affirmation of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, the inherent unformed chaos natural to reality and civilization’s potential to bring structure, order, and value out of it. It is only by an affirmation on a grand scale, an affirmation of both chaotic and structuring forces, of real life, that culture can once again regain its aesthetic value. The power to choose, to really will this affirmation of both destruction and affirmation—ultimately to will the ‘eternal return’ of all things—is what Nietzsche called the ‘will to power’.

Hart responds to Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ with a further genealogy. Nietzsche must not have realize that it is not a pre-modern or antique theoretical concept: rather, the power of the will began as a Christian concept, as a will emancipated “from whatever constrains us from living the life of rational virtue,” the ability to “chose well” and to “continue to choose well.”[40] This ‘will to power’, too, was a product of the Christian revolution, advanced against a cruel, pagan fatalism.

However, after this point the concept of freedom began to become contorted. Hart locates the shift in late-scholastic thought: Ockhamistic voluntarism “placed an altogether unprecedented metaphysical emphasis—among the divine attributes—upon the sheer sovereignty of the divine will, and upon the inscrutable liberty of that sovereignty.”[41] “Here explicitly,” he points out, “for the first time in western thought, freedom was defined not as the unobstructed realization of a nature but as the absolute power of the will to determine even what that nature might be.” This metaphysical shift ultimately recast God in terms of “will,” migrating the concept of will to power “out of the theological realm and into modern philosophy, law, psychology, politics, and social theory.”[42]

Hart argues that the shift in metaphysics late medieval voluntarism inaugurated has had devastating effects on European culture at large. All of life, for Hart, was devaluated. “It obviously leads to a degradation of the very notion of freedom, its reduction in the cultural imagination to a fairly banal kind of liberty, no more—though no less—significant than a consumer’s freedom to choose among different kinds of bread, shoes, televisions, political parties, or religion.”[43] This “willing as such” exposed itself as violent, as a negation of the human, as it undergirding the eugenicist projects of Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, and H. G. Wells.[44]

This is important because it provides Hart with the opportunity to advance a threefold critique against Nietzsche’s philosophical project. Not only does Nietzsche wrongly value the Christian revolution. Not only is Nietzsche’s emphasis on the affirmation of life impossible without the Christian revolution. But most dramatically, Hart argues that Nietzsche, in his attempt to affirm all of reality, has accidentally affirmed this nihilistic will to absolute power. His “ethos of pure affirmation,” as Hart argues elsewhere, “at once demystified and forever consecrated violence.”[45]

IV. Conclusion: Nietzsche, Hart, and Lutheranism Today

In hindsight, it is remarkable to note how much Hart and Nietzsche agree upon. Nietzsche predicted the inevitable dissipation of European culture into nihilism; Hart likewise argues for an inevitable return to nothingness after the Christian revolution. Nietzsche had argued that this nihilism was intimately tied to the rise and fall of Christian faith, a fact that is also not lost upon Hart. But the question for both men is essentially an aesthetic question of value. That is to say, neither nihilism nor the Christian “transvaluation” are under debate here: what is under debate is how well these two particular stories color the phenomena of life.

On the one hand, Nietzsche’s genealogy has unearthed the unbecoming heritage the Christian faith has bequeathed on all of the institutions constitutive of European culture. He has demonstrated that Christianity itself was founded upon something deeper, something murkier, something resentful of life itself. Christianity, for Nietzsche, enables the slavish need to avoid and devalue reality. For him, the value of the transvaluation is a negative one. Christianity is the cause of Europe’s inevitable dark night of the soul. God may be dead, but so is the foundational justification for all European cultural institutions.

David Bentley Hart has dismissed this genealogy as “all nonsense.”[46] Nietzsche’s narrative is nothing more than the fantasies of an obsessed Hellenophile. Whereas Christianity did, indeed, appeal to the slave classes (as Nietzsche rightfully points out), this is because the Christian narrative has given an unprecedented amount of dignity and value (a transvaluation) to the human person. In fact, Nietzsche’s entire project is a result of this transvaluation—without Christianity’s revolutionary ‘total humanism’, he would never have been able to value the world and the human person so highly. Nietzsche’s solution to cultural nihilism—replacing Christianity with an act of sheer volition (his ‘will to power’)—is not an adequate check on cultural nihilism; instead, it is symptomatic of cultural nihilism.

Much can be said by way of evaluation concerning their respective projects. Though Hart does not engage heavily with different schools of Nietzschean interpretation, he charitably and sincerely engages the philosopher on his own terms. He is somewhat dismissive of Nietzsche’s genealogy, but this is perhaps well warranted—Nietzsche’s reduction of reality to only two forces, the strong and the weak, still smells faintly of the Hegelian dialectic he was so eager to avoid, and his emphasis on volition does remind one sorely of Kant’s own tendencies towards subjective idealism.[47] Likewise, Nietzsche’s historical claims can obviously no longer be thought to have any serious credibility, even among secular historians.

That being said, Hart’s picture of Nietzsche is indeed an interpretation, and so one must be cautious concerning exactly how he frames his topics. Particularly, I have in mind his genealogy of voluntarism. Linking Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ directly with late scholasticism seems to perhaps oversimplify Nietzsche’s relationship with prior traditions.[48] Ockham’s potentia absoluta did indeed constitute a different emphasis in Christian metaphysics than the Thomist or even Scotist claims concerning the divine attributes. However, one might desire a more nuanced genealogy of one of Nietzsche’s most important concepts. Furthermore, Hart’s genealogy simply neglects other important Nietzschean themes, such as the übermensch, amor fati, and the ‘eternal return’.

Probably the most interesting and enlightening insight one should glean from Hart’s apologetic is his answer to Nietzsche’s accusation of devaluation. Nietzsche accused Christianity of being an essentially nihilistic religion. But as we have seen, Hart does not reply by simply denying Nietzsche’s premise; he goes further to say that, in fact, the complete opposite is true. The most profound move Hart makes in his entire book is when he connects the question of value and personhood to the Christological controversies. He sees in the incarnation not the devaluation of humanness, but rather a revolution cumulating in the innovation of the concept of personhood itself. Soteriology for Hart implies an elevation of personhood, an unconditional valuing of creation. Christ, in taking on flesh, has taken humanity into the trinitarian life: by participation in Jesus’ flesh we, too, “have been joined together in a perfect and indissoluble unity” with God Himself.[49]

What should we as Lutherans take away from this clash of narratives? On the one hand, both Nietzsche and Hart encourage us to critically reassess our relationship with the dominant Western intellectual tradition (Plato, Kant, and Hegel). Both men argue for an aesthetic understanding of Christianity: objective, rational discourse, they tell us, cannot be fully objective or absolutely rational. Said another way, Hart and Nietzsche encourage systematic theologians to grapple with the aesthetic and personal interpretive dimensions of discursive theology: discourse, even for Christians, must never be divorced from real life.

On the other hand, Hart extends to us an apologetic defense against Nietzschean atheism, lending us an interesting point of departure for conversing with our contemporary culture. He invites us to value western culture as a Christian creation, to acknowledge our distinctive contributions to an otherwise dreary and violent civilization. He maintains that we do not need to fear our cultural heritage—rather, we need to understand just how the Christian revolution changed all parts of our culture and how it might reinvigorate our culture and all cultures once again. In this sifting of our heritage, we might carefully steer through the Scylla and Charybdis of reactionary and syncretistic engagement, faithfully and creatively dialoguing with past and present cultural traditions.

It is my hope that this paper might provoke productive conversations concerning two authors of significance for contemporary philosophical and theological discourse. Friedrich Nietzsche has profoundly affected the course of Western philosophy and theology, from men in such different theological traditions as Oswald Bayer, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and John Milbank, and continental philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. David Bentley Hart is a theologian who is in conversation with these and other, more popular thinkers, such as the New Atheists and N.T. Wright. It is my prayer that we, in considering these things, might find places to faithfully engage with those around us, as well as the occasion to reflect on what an inestimable gift, what a transvaluation God in his mercy has opened up for us in the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ.

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Toronto: Random House, 1974), 343. Throughout this paper, I am indebted primarily to Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4^th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Colombia Press, 1983), and The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, eds. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Where I cite Nietzsche himself, I will be using primarily either Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 2000) or The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Penguin, 1976).

[2] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

[3] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of the Christian Tradition, (Grand Rapids: William B. Erdman’s Publishing House, 2003), 56-72.

[4] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Beyond Good and Evil,” 2 in Basic Writings, 766-767. For an extended discussion of how Nietzsche interacts with the philosophical tradition prior to him, see Alexander Nehamas’ “Nietzsche, Modernity, Aestheticism” in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, 223-251.

[5] That is, a “German stupidity or foolishness.” Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, “On the Prejudice of Philosophers,” 11 in Basic Writings, 207-209.

[6] In this way, even destruction, the Dionysian, is consecrated by yes-saying. This is the mystery of the ‘Eternal Return’ and Zarathustra’s hardness.

[7] Nietzsche: “Supposing that this also is only an interpretation—and you will be eager enough to make this objection?—well, so much the better” (Beyond Good and Evil, “The Prejudices of Philosophers,” 22 in Basic Writings, 220-221).

[8] Gilles Deleuze, in his attempt to provide an alternative to Hegelian idealism, first posited this physicalist interpretation of Nietzsche’s aesthetic valuations in the early 1960s. Deleuze claimed that Nietzsche saw all of reality as an interplay between becoming-active and becoming-reactive forces, which are ultimately oriented towards strength or impotence. See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 61-64.

[9] Nietzsche: “It should be noted immediately that in this first type of morality the opposition of “good” and “bad” means approximately the same as “noble” and “contemptible” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 260 in Basic Writings, 394).

[10] Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 25 in Portable Nietzsche, 594.

[11] Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 24 in Portable Nietzsche, 592.

[12] Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 27 in Portable Nietzsche, 598.

[13] Portable Nietzsche, 593.

[14] Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 16 in Portable Nietzsche 582.

[15] Portable Nietzsche, 617.

[16] Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 43 in Portable Nietzsche, 618.

[17] Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 8 in Portable Nietzsche, 575.

[18] For a brief introduction to Radical Orthodoxy, see Steven Shakespeare’s Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Introduction (London: SPCK, 2000) and James K A Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004).

[19] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 5.

[20] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 6.

[21] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 6.

[22] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, III:125.

[23] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, “Preface” 4. Another place that Nietzsche talks about the instability of the transvaluation is in his discussion of “the last man” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra I:5-6 (Portable Nietzsche 128-131).

[24] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 229.

[25] Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 7 in Portable Nietzsche, 573.

[26] Portable Nietzsche, 573.

[27] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 146-147.

[28] That being said, Hart makes the crucial point that Nietzsche’s psychological analysis of Christian ‘slave morality’ is a place where “his insight failed him.” Rather than out of ressentiment, as Nietzsche assumes, the Christian transvaluation could only have occurred out of “genuine and generous happiness.” See Atheist Delusions, 174.

[29] Hart: “The Christian vision of reality was nothing less than—to use the words of Nietzsche—a ‘transvaluation of all values,’ a complete revision of the moral and conceptual categories by which human beings were to understand themselves and on another and their places within the world. It was—again to use Nietzsche’s words, but without his sneer—a ‘slave revolt in morality. But it was also, as far as the Christians were concerned, a slave revolt ‘from above,’ if such a thing could be imagined; for it had been accomplished by a savior who had, as Paul said in his Epistle to the Philippians, willingly exchanged the ‘form of God’ for the ‘form of a slave,’ and had thereby overthrown the powers that reigned on high” (Atheist Delusions, 171).

[30] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 133. Hart gives the caveat that certain strands of Platonism came close to achieving this.

[31] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 134.

[32] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 134.

[33] Though this my own reading of Hart, Atheist Delusions, 186-192, it can hardly be considered to be out of line with the overall flow of Hart’s argument. Likewise, it is congruent with his characterization of Continental philosophy’s filial relationship with the Christian religion as described elsewhere. See Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 30.

[34] Nietzsche, Twilight of Idols, “The Four Great Errors” 8, in Portable Nietzsche, 500-501.

[35] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 213.

[36] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 174.

[37] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 206.

[38] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 174.

[39] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 215.

[40] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 25. That is, Christianity freed God and the World from the cruel grip of pagan fatalism.

[41] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 225.

[42] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 225.

[43] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 226.

[44] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 227. More contemporary examples of this trend towards eugenics are Joseph Fletcher, Linus Pauling, Peter Singer, and James Rachels, as well as “Transhumanists” like Lee Silver (Atheist Delusions, 234).

[45] Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 39.

[46] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 130.

[47] Gilles Deleuze would, were he still living and interested in CTS publications, naturally disagree with this remark.

[48] This could be evidence of an uncritical reliance on the genealogical work of John Milbank. See Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 29.

[49] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 206.

Nevertheless, we started this devotional for Lent called Wardrobe and Rings: Through Lenten Lands with the Inklings, written by Julia Golding, Malcolm Guite, and Simon Horobin. And so far, for what it’s worth, it’s been a pretty good week of devotions. The first week has been all about creation. And that has amounted to basically an extended meditation on Psalm 19, “The Heavens Declare the glory of God”, paired especially with extended meditations on Lewis’ The Discarded Image. Malcolm Guite, for example, used some of the reflections to ruthlessly critique modern cosmology, and many of the meditations have brought up the famous exchange between Eustace and Ramanda in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (“Even in your world, my dear, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of”). The singing of the world into existence, from both The Silmarillion and The Magician’s Nephew, also comes up, as does Ransom’s realization in Out of the Silent Planet that space is not a vacuum. Of course, this is not a bad line-up, as far as it goes. All of these mythic retellings of medieval cosmology get to something that is true, and right, and beautiful, within the confines of the Inklings’ romantic medievalism. But at the same time, the practice that they all lead to, and the reflections on the Scriptures that are paired with them, leave me a bit… underwhelmed. Guite literally tells us one day to just go out and look at the stars, contemplating their beauty. And Horobin has us read fairly depressing selection from Job (38:4-7) -- and then asks us (as our spiritual discipline) to “celebrate!”

It makes me think of some of the work I’m doing in my doctoral program this semester. I’m currently taking a masters course on Creation and Anthropology at the doctoral level. And I really enjoy the professor – he’s the perfect combination between philosopher (his dissertation was on Bernard Lonergan) and agrarian guru (he is good friends with Wendell Berry). The class has been a long attempt on the professor’s part to convince us that creation is, in fact, good. Having bodies, eating, living in community, being connected to the land, participating in regenerative processes – all of that is good. In fact, God intended human life to work like this from the beginning. From the beginning, God intended us to marvel, wonder, and participate in creation, that is, the land and people in front of us. He’s had us read Kathryn Tanner’s Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, in which Tanner argues that her two principles, God’s radical transcendence and the non-competitivity of human and divine agency, ground an ethic that affirms creatureliness as an end in itself. Tanner shows that God’s flourishing and our flourishing are not at odds – we don’t need to be less in order for God to be all in all, but rather God is glorified when humans flourish as humans. We’ve also read Janet Soskice’s “Creatio ex Nihilo: its Jewish and Christian Foundations”, where Soskice argues that the ex nihilo can lead us to a “holy materialism,” or an embrace of matter for its own sake, as simply the good creation of God. We’ve read Rowan Williams, who takes up Tanner’s metaphysics and shows how it is the natural conclusion of church history; We’ve read Willie Jennings, who seeks to decolonize the Christian doctrine of creation so that it can embrace what he calls the realities of creaturely life. We’ve also read N.T. Wright, who warns us against all attempts to delineate a ‘supernatural’ reality beyond the natural. This last week, we were reading Terence Fretheim and Karen Kilby on suffering, and they both tried to distance the experience of suffering from any recognition that there is something wrong with creation: it is simply part and parcel of a dynamic process, the messiness of creaturely becoming.

So in devotional life, all I’m hearing about is how great the stars are and how poetic the world is (in the words of Malcolm Guite: “Nature was never disenchanted. It is we who were disenchanted.”); in my academic life, I am reading a bunch of texts about how creation is fundamentally good, that we need to flee from all platonizing spiritualities or doctrines of other-worldliness. And I keep getting stuck on my own experience of nature and created reality.

I grew up as a Boy Scout. That is, I didn’t come of age looking at nature in paintings, or reading about it in poetry. Instead, my father forced me to go out into nature. In my troop, we camped once a month, twelve months a year. That meant that we were out in nature during the heat and humidity of August as well as during the negative temperatures of January and February. It was not abstract, it was concrete – “nature”, particularly the forests around upper and central Illinois, was anything but idyllic. One did, of course, get to see beautiful scenery, curious critters, and make deep friendships. But most of the time, camping was not about the romantic beauty of the natural world: it was about surviving in mild and extreme conditions. When I did my three-week-long stint hiking up and down mountains in New Mexico one summer, I saw some amazing views. But most of the time, it felt like the mountains were dangerous, difficult, harsh, and uncaring. I often tell Elizabeth, mountains from far away look beautiful; up close, they’re quite inhospitable.

Part of what made scouting hard for me was the natural world was constantly trying to kill me. As some of you know, I have severe allergies to almost everything outside. In a poem I wrote last year, I lamented having a sinus infection on Pentecost, juxtaposing the closure of my airways with the divine breath of the Spirit on the Apostles. This is a frequent experience for me – I tend to get one or two sinus infections a year, and during allergy season I’m always presented with the dilemma: take really strong allergy medication and start having panic attacks (due to the high amount of pseudoephedrine this entailed) or go deeper and deeper into brain fog and sinus pain until I need to be put on a z-pac and steroids to heal my inevitable sinus infection. Spring blossoms around me, but I become an aspiring hermit, as I only leave the relative safety of our house for that which is necessary. I always joke with my wife Elizabeth that I’m the strangest poetic soul in the world: a poet that cannot abide spring. It is as if the entire world is coming alive at the resurrection of our Lord, and though my soul yearns to join, my body is unfit for it. My body gets in the way of joining in with the regeneration of all things.

My body and mind also have an anxiety disorder, possibly caused by some of the heavy allergy drugs I’ve been on forever. And unfortunately, this has caused other issues, among which has been the inability to lose weight due to the antidepressant my doctor proscribed me almost five years ago now. The allergies, the anxiety, the weight gain, all of this has made my body feel as if it is not the safest place to be “in” all the time. I am often worried about my body failing me, even as I engage in spiritual and contemplative communion with God and the world around me. There is a certain sense of alienation that I feel from my body. As if when Paul talks in Romans 7 about the “war with the flesh”, it isn’t just a battle with sin, but a battle for existence itself.

Not being able to trust your body to do the things you need it to do is hard. But I think even harder is when you can’t trust your mind. Of course, I experienced this with the symptoms of my anxiety disorder – not being able to trust your judgments, not being able to correctly read social situations, having racing thoughts and absurd panics, etc. But I think that one of the things that really brought this home for me was what happened during the last year of classes during my second master degree. Just before my papers were due for my fall classes, I had an accident involving a car falling off of a jack that left me with a pretty severe concussion. And if you’ve ever had a concussion, you know that it leaves you basically mentally impaired for a few months. As someone who is a perpetual student, I’ll never forget what it was like to not be able to trust my mind like that. I simply couldn’t… think. I would try to write papers, and they would come out incoherent, like gibberish. Screens would scramble in front of me, so that I couldn’t read them. I couldn’t follow the arguments in the books I was reading. I couldn’t carry on intellectual conversations. It was so disorienting, in some ways even humiliating. I went back to books I had read when I was a child to pass the time (I read through the entire Harry Potter series – something I hadn’t done in ages!). In this case, it wasn’t just my body in general, it was my brain, my brain, which wasn’t safe. I felt alienated from my own intellect, because of the way it is connected with my body. And it felt, in the moment, like I was never going to get it back.

I think that it’s for these reasons that I struggle with theologies that want to affirm the body as such, creatureliness as such, this world as such. When I read through Sergius Bulgakov for the first time, I was touched by his intuition of the sophianicity of all things. All creatures are truly images of the divine, they are icons of God in their utmost being; the cosmos is a speaking cosmos, it is divine language that manifests God’s eternal being as its archetype, as its deepest meaning. But at the same time, in his Unfading Light, Bulgakov also gave me language to describe the underside of nature, what he calls Sophia’s “Fallen Face.” That is, creation is always a coming-to-be, the play of form and matter – and so, just as it is true as Parmenides thought that nature was constituted by mind and order, so it is also true, as Heraclitus taught, that everything is in flux. What nature makes she just as readily destroys, in the meonal dance of darkness and light. This destruction, this underside, means that nature just as naturally manifests nothingness as it does Divine Splendor. And because of Adam’s fall, we most often see nature in its sheer existential absurdity, in its carnage and excessiveness, than we do its intellectual organization according to God’s goodness, wisdom, and beauty. In a sense, there is something within creation that tends towards nonbeing, that must always be upheld by God’s Will, that is on the brink of coming apart and descending into chaos. Sophia’s “Fallen Face” haunts all optimistic projects of nature affirmation – there is a sense in which the Creaturely Sophia must be redeemed, must be reconnected and deified before these romantic intuitions of wholeness and beauty can be anything more than fragments.

David Bentley Hart has been a really helpful companion in thinking through these issues. Hart’s love of Gnosticism is well-known (I even made a meme about him and Cyril O’Regan a couple weeks back). And whereas he didn’t completely change my view about gnostic theology (I have Peter Brown’s The Body and Society to thank for that), he did, especially through his lectures and his fictional work, change how I viewed the gnostic impulse that characterizes much of the modern age. The nostalgia for the heavenly realms, the feeling of alienation from our true being, the desire to “depart and be with Christ” – I adore Hart’s reading of Paul – really spoke to me on an existential level, in a certain, mythic way. When I was a Curate in Bedford PA, we did a series on the scriptures that didn’t make it into the canon of the western church. And I did the first lesson, on the Thomasine Gospel and the Myth of the Pearl. And as I studied the text again (it was not my first time), I realized that there was, indeed something there that is deeply powerful and even true. As Hart is fond of reminding us in his books, the problem with Gnosticism-so-called was not its emphasis on revelation, its preference for mythopoetics, or its assumption of a complex, hierarchical cosmology. All of those are deeply Pauline. Rather, what made the various gnostic schools problematic was their emphasis on radical transcendence, to the extent that God and creation simply had nothing to do with one another. In a sense, as I argued in my review of John Kleinig’s Wonderfully Made, Christianity needs language for what the Gnostics understood: nature herself needs to be redeemed from corruption, and this especially includes our bodies. Far from needing a “holy materialism” (Soskice), we need regeneration, a liberation of a creation which groans in travail as it awaits the birth of the true sons of God.

I’ve invoked the concept of regeneration, and I should note that this is a term that is used often among those interested in sophiology, such as Milbank, Martin, Morello, etc. And I think that these three contemporary figures have influenced me the most on these topics. Milbank, in a twitter conversation, was the one who directed me to reading Bulgakov. And Martin, through his classes at the Sophiological Center and his book, The Submerged Reality, opened up the metaphysical poets to me and first got me interested in Jacob Boehme (through his ‘holographic readings’ approach). I think one of the reasons I’m drawn to Boehme for my doctoral work is because through his reading of Paracelsus, he is able to account for the Tugend, or virtue, that is present in all things – and he realizes that this Tugend isn’t always an image of the eschatological fulfillment of all things. Rather, as only someone who is not abstracted from the land can be, Boehme intuits that when seen with fleshly eyes, the creation is a colossal mass that testifies to the brittle fire of the Zorngott, the God of Wrath. It is only with reborn eyes, that is, redeemed speculatio, that one can see in a clump of earth the entire process of the birth of God, from the darkness of the Father to the blessedly sonorous Holy Ghost. That is, it is the tincture of Christ which moves us to see the whole, and to know that the process of nature, really the process of reality, is good. The phenomena – our natural powers – will only take us so far. In order to become people who see nature as good, we have to be transformed into people who see aright. We must become people who practice gelassenheit, people who are open to God at work in all things. And then – then we can join in that work of regeneration.

Boehmist communities, such as those at New Harmony, the Wissahickon, and Ephrata, embody for me this common work (or as Fedorov calls it, the Common Task). They lived in ways that anticipated the eschatological fulfillment of the cosmos, having been tinctured by Christ they now became tinctures for the entire world around them. In this sense, then, they recognized their world as something that was alienated, but they also didn’t let it remain that way. Rather, they wrote music, they farmed, they printed books, they alchemized, they theologized, they wrote textbooks on anatomy and horticulture. They lived in creation. But this was not because they saw creation as an end to itself: rather, their vision was transformed to see what it was called to become, just as they saw what they were to become, and lived into that future.

I think that this conceptual shift, from affirmation to regeneration, is how I currently think about nature. I think that in some sense, in the books I read about nature, and in the devotional we’re doing, the missing element, the thing I can’t quite put my finger on that isn’t there, is this emphasis on reborn vision. Nature, in this sense, must follow the Lord of Nature, in death and resurrection, in destruction and recreation. Just as we all must. There is a certain cruciformity to nature that doesn’t allow us to sit and marvel at it all day, oblivious to the real pain and suffering in the natural world. Rather, nature is groaning, waiting for redemption, as are our bodies, which suffer under the corruption of concupiscential sin. For there are bodies of flesh, Paul tells us, bodies of soul, and bodies of spirit. What dies perishable must be raised imperishable, and so on, and so on.

All that is to say – I am enjoying the devotional Elizabeth picked out for us. It is thought provoking in all of the right ways. But I think that one of the problems with its discussion of the natural world is that it doesn’t take into account the “Sophia’s Fallen Face” or the yearning of the natural world for the revelation of the sons of God. It doesn’t yet reach Jesus’ saying, that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven” or his command “you must be born from above!” In this sense, it doesn’t quite reach down into the depths of creation, as one might want it to. Nature is more beautiful than the authors even say: it is destined for greater glory than we see in the night sky. Nature will someday be transparent unto the divine life of the Triune God, a fitting footstool for the divine majesty. It will become the deified flesh of Christ, through which the divine attributes shine with an eternal luster. And with my own corrupt and oppressed body, I hope and yearn for that day, too.

Karl Barth and Jacob Boehme are two men with reputations that are larger than life. Barth, on the one hand, is the major progenitor of postliberal theology, the great dissenter against Nazism, the quintessential European academic who rebelled against his training, the reformer of the Church, who said no to all other foundations except the foundation of Christ. Jacob Boehme, on the other hand, is the great post-reformation mystic and esotercist, whose writings are so obscure that John Wesley called them “sublime nonsense.” In fact, along with Paracelsus and Johann Arndt, he is normally claimed to be one link in a long chain of perennial wisdom, stretching all the way back to the Pythagoreans and Hermetics, and all the way forward to the Rosicrucians who founded our country. In this sense, some scholars attempt to bring Boehme into a larger conspiracy of mystics and esotericists who prefigured modernity, and others attempt to tie him into a timeless tradition of ancient Gnostics.

There is of course always a good mixture of truth and nonsense in reputations. In this paper, I would like to offer a little bit of nuanced reply to these caricatures, and bring Barth and Boehme together to examine the first day of creation. Ultimately, I hope that we will see the beginnings of a thesis that Boehme is able to sidestep Barth’s critique of Two-Book Natural Theology.

STORY TIME: BARTH AND BOEHME

I’ll begin at the deep end, by discussing Karl Barth. Now, my disclaimer that I have to start out with is that I have not been reading Barth or about Barth for very long. My primary interest during this time period, which I explored in my masters thesis, was Albrecht Ritchl and the Luther Renaissance. I grew up a conservative Lutheran, and so the names of Barth’s enemies, particularly Karl Holl, Werner Elert, Paul Althaus, Peter Brunner, and to some extent Rudolf Bultmann were exalted by my professors as heroes. Barth, along with these figures, might be called to some extent “post-liberal,” if by that moniker one means that they were reacting to the Kantianism and Neo-kantianism of Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, Ernst Troelsch, and others.[1] They were proponents of what they called “dialectical theology”, and were deeply suspicious of the way that liberal protestants bracketed the supernatural, opting for a faith that was built on the foundation of human psychology or sociology. Barth’s Romans Commentary was a signal, as he aggressively argued for God’s transcendence over all human concepts, all theological constructions, all the authority of church leaders. As we have spoken about in this class, God is not a God who abides any sort of “and”. “And” is idolatry. God is the sole organizing concept for doctrine and life, not the programs of personal and social reform advanced by Ritschl’s emphasis on “The Kingdom of God.”

Though they somewhat agreed on what they were getting past, in post-WWI Germany, it became increasingly clear that these postliberal theologians did not all agree about what they were moving towards.[2] The Lutherans, for the most part, especially the Hollschule, but also Elert and his student Althaus, turned towards national socialism – appealing to natural theology in order to justify its politics of Blut und Boden. This terrified Barth, because he realized that dialectical theology had not really broken with liberalism to the extent that he had thought. Rather, it had become the culmination of liberal theology: it had embraced God and the Nation (idolatry!). For this reason, Barth swiftly made his theological position clear, getting down to what he saw as the root of the problem. We do not begin with a natural theology, devoid of revelation. The Liberal Protestant theology assumes that there are two books, Revelation and Nature. But really, there is only Revelation – Nature is not a source of revelation, a foundation on which we can add anything to Christ’s Gospel.[3]

Though this is sometimes where the story ends in popular theology, we cannot let these events have the last word. As Alan Torrance has said, it would be a mistake to say that Barth does not have a doctrine of creation or that he is “apriori against natural theology”: in fact, Barth thought that natural theologians sometimes indeed come to correct insights, and he devoted the entire third section of his Church Dogmatics to the doctrine of creation where he speaks of creation in some magnificent terms.[4] No, Barth does not “do away with” creation. As he turns more and more towards Christology near the end of his career, he begins to say things like that his initial commentary on Romans did not do justice to the incarnation.[5] He begins to become concerned that in his earlier career, he stressed Jesus’ divinity almost to the exclusion of his humanity. And it is in this way that his focus seems to shift from one focused on God as bare transcendence to the God who is both God and Man, who is the foundation for both human and divine life.

This brings us into extremely controversial waters, so I don’t want to say too much more about it. But Bruce MacCormack has insisted that for Barth, the covenant in some way precedes the Trinity in his dogmatics.[6] This means that in some way, creation is included in the very life of God – without, of course, following Jenson or Pannenberg fully in their post-Barthian Hegelianism. One wonders, though, without going the Hegelian route, if one might be able to say that Barth at the end of his life has more in common with those Russian Sophiologists who contend that the central mystery of God is his Godmanhood, than he does with the initial bombastic assertion of transcendence characteristic of his earlier commentary.

Placing Barth aside, let us turn towards Jacob Boehme. Jacob Boehme is probably one of the most misunderstood figures in church history. So much work has been done over the last thirty years to disengage him from the perennial tradition of western mystics and place him back in his context as an Upper Lusatian Lutheran peasant-burgher. This has involved not only disengaging Boehme from the story of contemporary esotericists and Rosecrutians; it has also involved freeing him from the narratives of Idealists and Romantics.

I would like to posit that there are three things that we need to keep in mind as we think about Jacob Boehme, if we are to avoid caricature. One, Boehme was writing in German in the aftermath of the Lutheran Reformation. I say aftermath here because the German Reformation made an incredibly complex situation in Europe so much more complex, and ultimately ended in bloodshed.[7] The Schmalkaldic War, which took place between the Emperor and the Lutheran princes, divided loyalties in Boehme’s native Upper Lusatia. The theological controversies which followed further divided things. We could go into this at some depth, but for the sake of time, we’ll have to move on.

The second thing we need to remember is: Boehme’s second work coincided with the beginnings of the Thirty Years War.[8] We often don’t think about it today, but the Thirty Years War, the religious wars between Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, were quite a big deal. People literally thought that the world was ending. One can see it in Boehme’s apocalypticism, his polemics, his conviction of the clergy that they are “Teuffelpfaffen,” the “Buchgelernte” who teach in “steinkirchen.” This is an extremely volatile time in European history, and the writings during this period bear out that tenor of fear, anxiety, and a sense that one is living at the end of the world.

The third thing to keep in mind: the only source we really know for sure that Boehme is using is his Lutheran context.[9] So that means that instead of assuming that Boehme went to all these different esoteric masterpieces of the Renaissance,[10] it is safer to assume that Boehme was reading Luther, the Lutherbible, participating in the Gottesdienst, singing Lutheran hymns, reading digests of Lutheran dogmatic controversies, and reading Lutheran spiritual writings.

If these sort of hermeneutical rules are followed, one might be able to say that, in what follows, we are not comparing Boehme and Barth together as the quintessential mystic and the quintessential opponent of natural theology. Rather, we are comparing the early modern with the late modern, the peasant-burgher with the academic, the constructivist Lutheran with the revisionist Calvinists.

ON GENESIS – BARTH AND BOEHME

So, let us briefly compare Barth and Boehme, as they discuss what is happening in Genesis 1. We do not have much time, so we might have to settle merely for some general observations. Neither Barth nor Boehme wrote a separate commentary on Genesis. For Barth, we’re using Church Dogmatics III/1, in which he is describing creation as the external basis of the covenant.[11] This is, it should be noted, part of a series of arguments in which Barth is attempting to think about God and creation together. That is, creation is the external basis, or the place, the material, of the covenant. The proposition that goes with this is that the covenant is the internal basis of creation. This Barthian hylemorphism is designed to show that creation does not have another meaning other than the incarnation. Though it is different than grace, it is not separate from grace. Grace expresses itself through the material of creation, by taking it up into the personal union.

For Boehme, we have quite a few examinations of Genesis to choose from. Already in his first work, the Aurora (1512), we have an explication of the first few days of creation according to the way in which the German phrases are composed on the mouth. This would not be a particularly exciting account to examine, because most of us know the Genesis story primarily in English. For this presentation, I will be using Boehme’s account of creation from his capstone work, the Mysterium Magnum, or the Great Mystery, published in 1623.[12] Andrew Weeks says that “For Boehme, Mysterium Magnum is the radical of everything that is, the primal condition of all creation.”[13] “It sums up [Boehme’s] life, times, hopes, and ideas as well.”[14] His discussion of Genesis comes in the midst of this great project of recapitulation, as the first introduction of the extended exegesis he will engage in on and off for the next 800 pages. In the creation story, Boehme sees that the life of the cosmos is predicated on the life of God, and that all things are fragmented mysteries of the constant coming to birth of God in himself.

As you can see, these are two very different projects, with regards to style and terminology. Over the course of Barth’s discussion of the first day of creation, he examines what it means for creation to be contingent,[15] what sort of necessity or freedom God had as he created, and fundamentally, the nature of creation as both God’s manifestation and his concealment.[16] He explains to us that the primordial darkness is not unformed matter, and furthermore that it is not the type of darkness for which Novalis composed hymns to the night.[17] Rather, this darkness is retrospective. Darkness for Barth is the possibility that creation would remain without God. It is created only retroactively as a possibility for creation after God has acted. In this sense, it is the residue of the created act, the “past” which God always says “no” to. Human beings, because of their essential contingency, can choose this past, and commit an act of metaphysical suicide (to borrow a term from Sergius Bulgakov). But in the “let there be light” already is the promise that God will himself experience and do away with this darkness in his own self-abandonment in His Son.[18] In this sense, the creation is always already the “irruption and revelation of the divine compassion.”[19]

Boehme deals with this passage completely differently, as one might expect. He begins,

With the Word, when God said, Let there be light, the essence of the ens did powerfully move itself in the light’s property, not only in the earth, but also in the whole deep: when on the fourth day the sun was created, that is, enkindled in its place. And in this word Fiat the earth’s mass, and also the very power which is called heaven, amassed itself in the essence; all which before was only a spirit, a spiritual essence.”[20]

Boehme sees the first day of creation as ultimately the response to some spiritual pre-history: that is, the hubris of the devil. He says,

as God spake, let there be light, the holy power, which was amassed in the wrath, moved itself, and became light in the same essence in the power. And with this coming to be light, the devil’s might and strength was wholly withdrawn from him in the essence, for here the light shone in the now anew awakened power, in the darkness; which [light] the prince of wrath could not comprehend; it was also of no benefit to him, for it was the light of nature, which is useless to him.[21]

You see, like the Apostle Paul, Boehme believed in a three-heaven cosmology. There is the heaven in which God resides; the sidereal heavens of the planets, and the heavens above the earth. The creation account, in which God said “let there be light” is the penetration of light to the most remote heavens, our heavens, and Boehme says that it corresponds with the casting of Lucifer from the highest place. He will go on to say later that Lucifer’s seat is now occupied by the Sun, which rules on the chief day of the week, Sontag. For Boehme, the creation account is significant because it represents the highest heaven bringing light into our heavens, and so at once illuminating our world and casting judgment on the world of darkness, making our world a place of contest and spiritual struggle. Boehme describes this as God’s Fiat enclosing itself in the elements of our world. It is the entire basis of his theology of nature, in which the one who is reborn will be able to penetrate through the sidereal birth to the waters above the firmament, the heavenly waters of regeneration.

This all seems to be wide of the mark of Barth’s account. But focus here with me for a second on what Boehme is saying. Yes, there’s a wild cosmology that can be really distracting, and we’d need to go over Melanchthon, Paracelsus, and others to fully work it out. For a pre-scientific, early modern cobbler, this way of looking at the world was just as believable as the alternative scholastic cosmologies, maybe even moreso because it was shown to Boehme through a divine illumination and had the empirical data from Copernicus to back it up.

No, what we really need to understand here is that Boehme is letting spiritual realities, which he sees as coming from the Scriptures, and ultimately from a revelation about the infinite life of God, determine his cosmology. The cosmos, for Boehme, is a picture of the divine life, is an image of the divine’s infinite coming-to-be. And in this sense, he reads the life of the Creator and the creation as very close together, as in some sense characterized by “non-identical repetition,” to borrow a phrase from Milbank’s theology of pure gift-giving.

As we have seen, Karl Barth is adamant that any theology of nature be based in the life of God himself. That is, it needs to be christologically controlled, based in the revelation that God gives. Nature cannot give us the key to understanding divinity; rather, it must be subject to what the divinity has said about it. Boehme, taking his cues from the Bible and the revelation of what God’s life is like that he received in 1600, goes about just this task: interpreting the natural world according to revelation, not revelation according to the natural world.

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

Let us close with three suggestions. They are all suggested by our general and tentative thesis, that Boehme can adequately avoid Barth’s critique of two-book natural theology.

First, if Boehme meets Barth’s challenge, we have to rethink everything that we thought we knew about the liberal two-book theory of natural theology. That is, it is not enough to semantically locate any nature theology that relies on the “Two Books” model and dismiss it as theological liberalism. Rather, we must ask more precise questions about those who use this metaphor. Boehme clearly believes in a two-book model, in which Revelation and Nature are books that must be read – but, the key to Boehme’s project (at least one of them) is that Revelation and Nature must be read by the reborn individual. For those who are not reborn, nature and the Bible remain a dead letter, inert matter. But for those who are reborn, all things become transparent as images of the divine glory. In this sense, there is never a time when a reborn theologian will encounter nature and not see it as christologically-controlled. The two books model works in a way compatible with the Barthian strictures.

Second, if Boehme escapes the Barthian critique of two-books theology, there might be room in a Barthian context to engage more rigorously in metaphysical speculation. In this sense, the Christologically-controlled projects of the Russian Sophiologists might be instructive. Considering God as Divine Humanity, or Godmanhood, connects God and creation in a way that a mere nominalism cannot in fact account for. This should encourage us to follow the later Barth and perhaps MacCormack’s reading of him in rethinking what exactly it means for the electional will of God to precede trinitarian relations within the Godhead. The reluctant Barthians like John Behr are already making headway here, as they think through these problems with patristic theologians like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. It is worth pointing out in passing that it is those fathers which are the most strongly neoplatonic that the Barthian approach seems to have the most in common with, as well as the most to learn from.

And finally, if Boehme escapes the Barthian critique of two-books theology, perhaps that points to a way forward for contemporary theology to embrace post-reformation mysticism more fully, especially in this stream. Though Boehme has a strong understanding of the Zorngott that is completely unacceptable for Barthians, especially those following Dr. Campbell, as I have already pointed out in this class, subsequent Behmenists, such as John Pordage, Jane Leade, Johann and Johanna Peterson, FC Oetinger, Gottfried Arnold – these all held to the fundamental thesis that God is love and will, through Christ, effect a universal reconciliation between God and all things. If Boehme can be reconciled with Barth, at least in terms of the hermeneutics of creation, there may be more fruitful encounters to come between Barthians and this tradition.

[1] On this trajectory, see Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols., (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003) and Garry Dorien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology, (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2012).

[2] On this, see James M. Stayer, Martin Luther, German Saviour: German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917-1933, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000) as well as Christine Helmer, How Luther Became the Reformer, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019).

[3] On Barth’s critique of “double bookkeeping,” see Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology, 176-180.

[4] See “S3E5 Allan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance: Beyond Immanence – the Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth” Bridging Theology. April 30, 2024. Spotify.com.

[5] Keith L. Johnson, The Essential Karl Barth: A Reader and Commentary, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2019), 13-14. For a discussion of Barth’s interaction with Catholic theology and his move to thinking about Christ’s humanity, see Johnson, The Essential Karl Barth, 20-22, 93-101.

[6] See Bruce MacCormack, “Grace and being: the role of God’s gracious election in Karl Barth’s theological ontology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster, (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2000), 92-111.

[7] On this history, see Ines Haaser (Anders), “The City of Gorlitz during Jacob Boehme’s Lifetime,” in Jacob Boehme and His World, eds. Bo Andersson, Lucinda Martin, Leigh T.I. Penman, and Andrew Weeks, Brill, Boston, 2018): 70-97, Ariel Hessayon, “Boehme’s Life and Times,” in An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception, eds. Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei, New York: Routledge, 2014): 13-37, Andrew Weeks, German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and Intellectual History, (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1993), 169-192, Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic, (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1991), 13-34.

[8] On the Thirty Years War, see Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011). See also Weeks, Boehme, 127-142.

[9] See Andrew Weeks and Bo Andersson, “Jacob Boehme’s Writings in the Context of His World,” in Jacob Boehme and His World, eds. Bo Andersson, Lucinda Martin, Leigh T.I. Penman, and Andrew Weeks, Brill, Boston, 2018): 1-20; Weeks, German Mysticism, 174; Linda Martin, “Martin Moller (1547-1606) and the “Crisis of Piety” of Jacob Bohme’s Time” in Jacob Boehme and His World, eds. Bo Andersson, Lucinda Martin, Leigh T.I. Penman, and Andrew Weeks, Brill, Boston, 2018): 121-144.

[10] Boehme was absolutely influence by alchemical and kabbalistic currents in Gorlitz. But these currents were not somehow different than the “Lutheran.” See Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon, (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2009). For the transmission of mysticism during the reformation, see Protestants and Mysticism in Reformation Europe, eds. Ronald K. Rittgers and Vincent Evener, (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Paracelsianism was an open question among Philippist protestants.

[11] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.1 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition, eds. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, (Edinburgh, UK: T&T Clark, 2010), 93-227.

[12] The text I will be using is the Sparrow edition, reprinted by Hermetica. Boehme, Mysterium Magnum: An Exposition of The First Book of Moses called Genesis, Written Anno 1623 by Jacob Boehme, volume one, (San Rafael, CA: Hermetica, 2007). I will refer to it as Boehme, page number.

[13] Weeks, Boehme, 198.

[14] Weeks, Boehme, 198.

[15] Barth, 93.

[16] Barth, 93.

[17] Barth, 104.

[18] Barth, 108.

[19] Barth, 109.

[20] Boehme, 66.

[21] Boehme, 66.

The medieval scholastics worked much of the mechanics of this out in their abstract discussions of the cosmos, commenting on Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius – but ultimately, of the Church’s Scriptures, which were the infallible guide toward a right contemplation of God and the world around them. They produced an impressive edifice in conversation with all of these sources, which was fairly consistent even into the seventeenth century. But what interests me in this paper is less all the ins and outs of that complex view of reality, and moreso how it was translated to laymen and women through devotional writings and practices.

To that end, in the following paper, I will spend only the first half describing the Medieval Cosmos, even though this very well could have been my entire discussion. I will rely primarily on Thomas Aquinas, and confine myself to a discussion of the places where the heavens and earth meet, namely scholastic conceptions of light, motion, and influence (terms I have borrowed from Edward Grant). I want to give the reader a sense of the way that the cosmos was configured, so that we can have the necessary background to investigate the use to which that cosmos was put in one example of late medieval lay piety, the York Corpus Christi Plays (also called the York Mystery Plays).

The York Plays are an obvious choice, not only because they were required reading for this course, but also because they concretely utilize the themes which connect the planets to the earth: light, movement, and influence. We will see in what follows that light and influence are discursively more important to the York writers, and will take up the majority of our time. And yet, movement is always implicitly there, as one can see from the route of the plays, which takes on a certain planetary character of circular movement.

In order to center my account, though, I will limit myself to discussing the two wagon plays, Herod and The Magi, as juxtaposed images of stellar influence on particular characters in the narrative. Ultimately, my point is that through these plays, the planets are made participants in the narrative of salvation, and so become objects which must be redeemed by Christ. And furthermore, the cosmos itself becomes a picture of the Corpus Christi, that in that which is insignificant (the wafer, the lower heavens) is manifested the actual power of God.

The Medieval Scholastic Cosmos

Scholastic discussions concerning the medieval cosmos are complex, beautiful, and theologically rich. When the scholastics looked to the heavens, they saw more than just an aggregate of space rocks floating around: rather, they saw divine harmony, a material expression of God’s order, simplicity, and goodness. In this section of the paper, I want to talk about this cosmic vision by paying particular attention to the account of cosmology Thomas Aquinas gives in his Summa, as representative of the High Scholasticism of the medieval period. Thomas’ account of the cosmos arises from a contemplation of the Genesis creation story; as we focus in this account on the things that link the terrestrial and celestial worlds, we will try our best not to remove his cosmology from this exegetical context.

When Aquinas reads the Scripture, he never does so alone. Rather, he reads the text as present—along with several interlocutors from church tradition, as well as the antique philosophical tradition. We see that in this section of his Summa, Aristotle’s De Coelo is constantly in the background.[1] It should be pointed out that other source material includes Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis and Pseudo-Dionysius’ Divine Names, as well as John of Damascus. In what follows, I will only pay attention to this source material as it is relevant to my very specific purpose, which is to understand what Thomas believes about the planets and how they relate to the terrestrial region.

One of the main places to look for cosmological information in Aquinas is ST I.65-68. Here, Aquinas investigates the creation narrative in Genesis 1, with an eye towards its cosmological content. He deals with a variety of questions, but as they unfold, one sees that he is particularly concerned about maintaining the structure of the biblical narrative. God accomplished three works in the beginning: creation, distinction, and perfection (also known as ornamentation). Genesis 1:1-2 speak of creation; Genesis 1:3-8 speak of distinction; Genesis 1:11-25 describe the process of ornamentation. Aquinas also recognizes that the creation story speaks of three different areas or places in which these actions are carried out: the heavens, the waters, and the earth. It is primarily to the creation, distinction, and perfection of the heavens that this section of the paper will give attention.

Interestingly enough, because of the biblical material, Thomas actually describes the effects of the planets before he describes the planets themselves. This has the potential to be confusing for contemporary readers, who assume a very different cosmology from Aquinas; but I ask the reader to stay with Thomas as he recounts the biblical story. Thomas is convinced that the biblical writer tells the story in this particular manner for a reason: namely, to prevent us from worshipping the celestial spheres. This concern is particularly revealing, for two reasons. First, it shows to what a great extent Thomas himself believes terrestrial life is dependent on the sidereal heavens; further, that Thomas believes heavenly influences serve a part of greater narrative, a hierarchical arrangement of providence that stretches from the lowest depths of a creation to God himself. We need to know that the effects of the spheres are ultimately from God; they do not originate in the spheres, but are rather created by God’s omnipotence. And so, even though it is confusing, in what follows we will describe the effects of the spheres before we actually describe what they are.

One should note that scholastics often described the connection between our world and the heavenly spheres as constituted by three things: the role the spheres play in light, their role in motion, and their role in influencing.[2] Aquinas marks all three of these points of contact in his discussion of Genesis 1: in q. 67, he discusses light; in q. 68, he makes reference to motion; and finally, in 70, he mentions influences, or, as he calls them “occult effects.” Light, obviously, occupies the primary discussion, since it is God’s first creation. And of course, it is also the most problematic, because the light of the cosmos is created before the bodies in which it will reside.

So, the first thing that God makes is light. Light, in the Middle Ages, was an extremely important cosmological concept.[3] In the cosmos, it was generally held, there exist two kinds of light. On the one hand, Aquinas teaches that there is the light of the Empyrean Heavens, or those heavens which exist above the primum mobile, which is the abode of God. This is a spiritual, unseeable light, which does not enlighten the rest of the cosmos. Aquinas discusses the Empyrean Heavens in ST I q. 66 a. 3, connecting them to Christian eschatology. The Empyrean Heavens, he says, were created in the beginning as a picture of the glory that awaits the saints. The saints, Aquinas tells us, await a twofold glory: one of body and one of soul. The spiritual glory began at the beginning of the world with the creation of angels, who are spiritual substances. But the corporeal glory likewise has existed from the beginning, in the form of the highest, empyrean heaven, which is “some beginning of bodily glory in something corporeal, free at the very outset from the servitude of corruption and change, and wholly luminous even as the whole bodily creation after the Resurrection is expected to be.”[4] Though it does not contain heat, it is called empyrean because of its “brightness.” It is also motionless, “though it does influence bodies that are moved […] just as angels of the highest rank, who assist, influence those of lower degree who act as messengers, though they themselves are not sent, as Dionysius teaches.”[5] Specifically, this unmoved heavens move the heaven which is below it, called the primum mobile, which moves the subsequent heavens below it.[6] The empyrean heaven, therefore, is also the unmoved source of cosmic and terrestrial movement (as we will see below).

The other light, the creaturely light, is concentrated in the sun. It is the sun’s active quality.[7] From the rays of the Sun, and possibly other luminous planets (“if there is any such body” Aquinas sidebars doubtfully), “different effects according to the diverse natures of the bodies” are produced on earth.[8] Aquinas does not explain how all of this works in the Summa. But there were various theories alive among the medieval scholastics.[9] Most agreed that the Sun was the source of light, and that the light that planets give off in the night sky is in some sense a borrowed light. The Sun sat in the middle of the planetary hierarchy so that it could distribute its lumen to all of the other planets, which had the capacity to be illuminated, and so dispense the sun’s rays to the earth according to their particular quality. There were, of course, minority opinions, which claimed the planets to be of varying densities; on this way of thinking, the planets would not receive and become illuminated by the sun’s light, but, more like the moon, simply reflect that light, imparting to it, once again, their particular attributes.

Aquinas is more focused on the tension this picture creates with the narrative of Genesis. The sun was created on the fourth day, but the sun’s light was created on the first day: how can one resolve this contradiction? Aquinas explains that the discrepancy is intentional, ultimately by arguing that light is said to be created before the Sun, on the first day, because Moses wished to prevent the Israelites from worshipping the planets as the creators of light, as other antique people did. Aquinas argues that this pedagogical purpose is determinative for Moses’ account of creation, because he is speaking to a fleshy people, who quickly turn from God to a worship of the creation.

It is on day four that the planets appear in Aquinas’ account.[10] Aquinas’ account of the planets is the typical ten-sphere cosmology of the medieval scholastics, a modified version of the seven-sphere cosmology that Aristotle presents in his De Coeli. For the medievals generally, and for St. Thomas, there were considered to be ten spheres, but only seven planets. The Empyrean sphere is the top of the cosmology, which remains motionless. Below it is the Crystaline sphere, which is made up of the “waters above” mentioned on the second day of the creation narrative.[11] Then comes the primum mobile, which is the sphere of the fixed stars, including the zodiac, the first sphere that actually moves. This primum mobile moves the seven lower spheres, on which are fastened the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon, one planet per sphere. Below the heavens is what is sometimes called the sublunar sphere, which is not counted in the ten spheres that make up the cosmology, since it is the point of observation, the earth. This is the place of terrestrial change due to the appearance of contraries (which account for rectilinear motion), and it is made up of the outermost part of the sphere, where the element of fire resides, the threefold realm of air (divided into hot, cold, and cloudy, respectively), the watery realm (which God divided to raise up the dry land), and finally, earth, which is immobile and occupies the center of both the sublunar sphere and the entire cosmos. Generation and corruption on the earth is directly related to the movement of the spheres: on the first day of the creation story, God created diurnal time by his creation of light and distinction of it from darkness, that is, the day and night that determine terrestrial activities. On the fourth day of creation, he created annual time by his creation of the movement of the planets, which govern terrestrial activities according to seasons, etc.[12]

The Empyrean Heaven is also the source of cosmic motion. Though it is itself unmoved, it moves the primum mobile, and therefore, the rest of the cosmos. Particularly in the sublunar sphere, this movement of the planets generates time. Time is the measurement of movement, and movement is the actualizing of potentials, which express themselves among bodies as contraries, per Aristotle.[13] That is, if something moves away from something, the two things must be contraries: otherwise, no movement would be necessary. By bringing about the movement of terrestrial bodies from one state to another, the planets govern change on earth: that is, generation (which is the movement towards something) and decay (the movement away from something). This movement, Aristotle says and Aquinas assumes, is rectilinear—that is, up or down, right or left—because these motions are mutually exclusive from one another; planetary movement, on the other hand, is circular, because it does not admit generation or corruption, but rather is simple constancy and immutability. This is why, for Aristotle as for Aquinas, the planets are a picture of divine incorruptibility, and are therefore made of a finer, incorruptible matter, the quintessence or ether.[14]

Finally, we must discuss influences, which can be divided into known and unknown effects. Aquinas does allude to these influences in ST, but only briefly and in passing, like most of the particulars of his scholastic cosmology. Over the course of his discussion of the creation of light in ST I q. 70 a. 2, Aquinas asks the question “Whether the cause assigned for the production of the lights is reasonable?” – that is, whether it is reasonable that the planets, being superior, should give light to the earth, which is inferior. The first two objections meet the question of influences head on: the first is an attempt to dismiss planetary influences by means of Jeremiah 10:2, which says “Be not afraid of the signs of heaven, which the heathen fear”; the second attempts to differentiate between signs and causes, arguing that Moses should not have called the lights of the heavens “signs” because they do more than signify what will happen (ie, this is a strong account of causality based on the planets). In his responses to these objections, Aquinas uses classic medieval arguments. On the one hand, we should not discount the influence of the heavens upon the earth, as the first objection tries to do, but rather recognize this influence is on the changes of bodies, non autem eorum quae dependent ex libero arbitrio.[15] That is, terrestrial life is not absolutely subjected to the effects of the heaven; rather, the heavens effect only corporeal generation and decay; their sole domain is over corporeal reality. The second objection, which wishes to take the heavenly bodies as only causes and not also signs, gives Thomas the opportunity to distinguish between two sorts of corporal effects produced by the heavens: some are known, but others are unknown (effectus occulti).

Relevant to this discussion is what Aquinas writes subsequently in ST I. q. 115. In article three, Aquinas affirms very strongly what we have just said, that the heavens are the source of terrestrial movement. He tells us that “the movements of bodies here below, which are various and multiform, must be referred to the movement of the heavenly bodies, as to their cause.”[16] In fact, the planets are such significant causes of that which is corporeal that, if our intellects and wills were affixed to corporeal organs, “it would follow necessity that the heavenly bodies are the cause of human choice and action. It would also follow that man is led by natural instinct to his actions, just as other animals […] It would therefore follow that man has no free-will, and that he would have determinate actions, like other natural things.”[17] If man were not a composite being, and was only made up of a body, the basic condition of the human being would be one of cosmic fatalism.

Now, even within a composite human being, there is of course some degree in which the intellect and will are dependent on the sensible organs, and so they do not completely escape heavenly influences. This is true in two senses: one, with regards to our constitution, and two, with regard to our condition. With regards to our constitution, the intellect, in its higher faculties, still can be influenced by sensation, and so err in its imaginative, cogitative, and memorative powers. This is only natural. The will, on the other hand, is not dependent on sensation, and so has the potential to be freer than the intellect with regards to planetary influence. But what matters here is the condition of the will: whether it is turned toward sensible things or heavenly things. Those who fail to shun their passions are affected strongly by the planets: “consequently astrologers are able to foretell the truth in the majority of cases, especially in a general way” because many people live in this condition.[18] But this does not necessarily need to be the case, Aquinas says: for the planets merely present the will with an “inclination”, or, as we have described it here, “influence,” because “there is nothing to prevent the effect of heavenly bodies being hindered by the action of the will.”[19] Because of the composite nature of the human being, natural necessity is here not a strong fatalism, but more of an inclination toward natural things, which a will oriented towards heaven can overcome.

Returning to the occult effects of the planets. This word occult here does not mean esoteric, in the sense of being known by only a select few. Rather, for Aquinas, occult simply means “unknown.” Scholastics knew that the planets effect certain qualities on earth, especially the four primary qualities, whether something was warm or cold, or hot or dry. They also knew that the moon somehow effected the tides, and so had an aquarian quality, and that the Sun effected plant growth. Scholastic cosmology was actually fairly open-ended to what exactly the planets effected on earth – and it is in this openness that more popular theories arose. Medieval medical practitioners, for example, were responsible for bringing medieval cosmology to a popular audience, as they, in their prognostics associated the planets with the sickness and health of bodies and the potency of poisons and remedies.[20] Official court astrologers sought to know the occult influences that the planets have on kingdoms by means of the technique of judicial astrology; even more popular were practitioners of electional astrology, who calculated for everyday folk the auspicious times to engage in domestic activities.[21] Tradesmen, too, such as miners, had a vested interest in the stars: oftentimes, the planets were paired with particular metals and gems, being considered the active principles in their growth. In this way, the planets touched the most basic parts of medieval lives, and offered a wide variety of social groups the means to organize their activities according to the movements of things above them, and, ultimately, according to God in the highest heaven.

THE YORK CORPUS CHRISTI PLAYS

The York Corpus Christi plays make up just one piece of an overall puzzle concerning how scholastic conceptions of the cosmos were filtered out to the rest of society. These medieval English plays were a complex phenomenon. On the one hand, they were an opportunity for contemplation and reverence concerning the consecrated host. There were also dogmatic and ecclesial concerns at play: the plays serve to reinforce the doctrine of eucharistic transubstantiation and the necessity of the priestly hegemony over civic affairs.[22] Further, they were intended as a means by which magistrates enforced social solidarity, so that all classes of society might be made one in the glorious city that was (according to Aristotle) one.[23] From another perspective, they were means of economic self-promotion by the various guilds and craftsmen that vied for the attention of the general populace: the plays themselves were put on by different crafting guilds, and often showcased their mastery of their individual products.[24] And finally, they were a means of expressing lay piety, especially lay devotional pictural piety, not only through acting, but also through those very crafts that laymen and women devoted their lives to, brought together and consecrated for the glory of God and the general good and cohesion of the urbs and saeculum.[25]

There is probably no more important voice in this discussion than Sarah Beckwith, who has devoted much of her career to thinking and writing about the plays. Beckwith’s work often investigates the symbolic relations between the body of Christ in the Eucharist and the body of Christ which constitutes the social environment in which they were performed. Through her concept of “sacramental signs,”[26] she examines the way in which the plays not only reinforced the dogmatic interests of the clergy and the social concerns of the magistrates, but likewise explored the fractures of this society and the competing interests of different groups in their production. Like Christ’s body, the social body, too, was to some extent broken; in the Corpus Christi, we see not only vying interests for power, but also different narratives about what the good life looks like, what the body of Christ means for the Church, and how to negotiate difference in the face of the real, messy social experience of late medieval society.

All of this can be found in the contemporary literature around the Corpus Christi plays. What concerns us here, though, is less the conflicting narratives of bodies (an interesting topic in its own right), but rather how the plays acted as what Theodore Lerud has described as “quick images,” living scenes of devotional piety, taken up from the tradition of the Devotio Moderna.[27] “Quick images” are living representations of devotional scenes from the biblical literature, which reconfigure the audiences of the plays into participants in the narrative. I find this concept alluring when thinking about the way that the Corpus Christi Plays and scholastic cosmology fit together, because it explains one of the means by which scholastic cosmology was translated to common people and used for reflection.

In the plays, the medieval cosmos becomes something more than a set of propositions derived from Aristotle and Ptolomey. Rather, the planets enter into the consciousness of the town as actors in their own right. As we will see, the writers of the York Plays attach the planets to particular figures in order to set them within narrative structures that give them particular moral significance. Though they are not part of formal discussion of the Corpus Christi, or even the liturgy composed by Thomas Aquinas, they are put into contact with the transubstantiated host and given new meaning by the Christ event.

Where does all this occur? The natural place to look for the entrance of the planets is in the first play, which was the most magnificent and opulent, as the cosmos itself was created in the town of York. And to some extent, this is where one first sees some of the Scholastic concerns come up, as the playwrights discuss the first act of God, the creation of light. Light, as we saw above, was an important factor in the medieval scholastic conception of a unified cosmos. Thomas himself saw the creation of light as twofold, the creation of the light of the empyrean heavens, and the creation of the light which would eventually become localized in the Sun. In the earliest plays, however, neither of these possibilities are realized; one does not get a glimpse of the creation, distinction, and perfection of the cosmos—rather, light and dark take on a symbolic and dramatic hue, referring ultimately to the struggle between God and Lucifer. In later plays, however, Clifford Davidson notes that one sees a description and portrayal of the creation up to the fifth day, focusing especially on the creation of the firmament.[28] The perspective, however, was primarily constrained to the threefold popular cosmology of heaven, hell, and the earth in-between.

Light is of course omnipresent in the plays: but the morally neutral light of the scholastics gives way to a morally-charged light that represents the power of God. Different dramatic scenes make use of the juxtaposition of darkness and light, especially the crucifixion, which leads to darkness (and, it should be pointed out, here the planets once again play an active role, with the moon reigning over the lunacy of the crucifixion and the sun being itself extinguished by the death of the Godman) and the harrowing of hell (in which divine light finally and fully penetrates hell). Further, one finds some planetary involvement in the capitulation of Judas, who is accused of being controlled by mars in his plot against Jesus. Each of these features are important reminders that cosmological speculations are important to the unfolding of the story of the salvation history.

The most important episode for our purposes is the joint play, put on by the masons and the goldsmiths, which concerns the juxtaposition of Herod and the Magi.[29] Here, not only are all seven planets accounted for, but furthermore, their authority is challenged by the rectilinear movement of a humble star appearing in the sublunar field. The rest of this paper will examine this play in detail, so that we might see an example of the way in which cosmic speculations were used to enhance the piety of those participating in late medieval devotional processional theater.

The plays Herod and the Magi were put on in two separate wagons, depicting two juxtaposed scenes. On the one hand, there was the opulence of Herod’s court, which was chaotic, loud, and, frankly, maddening. In this court, Herod, like Lucifer before his fall, marvels at his own power and strength, all the while acting out the part of a barbarian.[30] He begins his jubilation over his own excellence by consulting the stars, saying “The clouds clapped in clearness that these climates enclose -- / Jupiter and Jove, Mars and Mercury amid -- / Raiking over my royalty on row me rejoices,/ blundering their blasts to blow when I bid.”[31] Jupiter (or Jove), Mars, and Mercury all had significant attributes, both in scholastic cosmology and in popular astrology.[32] For the medievals, the occult effects of Jupiter and Mars had to do with their relation to the Sun: they were hot and dry planets, responsible for choleric, or fiery personalities. It is worth mentioning that most medievals, including Thomas Aquinas, believed that the elements in the sublunar field were arranged hierarchically, with fire being closes to the edges of the sphere (a natural transition point between earth and the rest of the cosmic spheres). In judicial astrology, these planets also had significance with regards to the constitution of earthly kingdoms: Jupiter was the planet of royalty, of power, and of prowess; Mars was the planet of warfare and dominance; Mercury was the planet of eloquence.[33] Herod is at once here describing his kingdom, which is based on the power both of military might and the power of speech; he is also describing his own personality, which is, as is seen throughout this play, excessively combative and extravagant.

Herod continues by exclaiming that even those planets which are not choleric and active are subject to him: Saturn is his “subject” who, though hid, bows before him; Venus, the planet of love and desire, owes Herod his voice – that is, his duty – so that his court might live in pleasure and opulence.[34] Herod has subdued even those planets that are not ascendent, but rather descendent, in weak positions (to speak astrologically), making them serve him, as well.[35] Saturn is sometimes associated in the medieval literature with aging and dying, but it is also a planet associated with wisdom. In Greek mythology, Saturn was the ancient father of the god Zeus, who, in an attempt to maintain power, devoured his own children; in the subsequent narrative, we will see that Herod, though he thinks he is the new Zeus, throwing “thunders full throly,”[36] is actually the Saturn who desperately tries to maintain power by the murderous influence of mars, his brutality. Venus, though no help to ruling, certainly was useful for the affairs of court, where one can see opulence, cupidity, and all sorts of hedonism on display.

From the lesser planets, Herod ends by invoking the two great planets, which govern diurnal motion: the Son and the Moon. Both the Son and the Moon shine down upon Herod’s reign, the former “the prince of planets”[37] (for in medieval cosmology, it was often maintained that the Sun was the illuminator of the rest of the planets, and so was the primary source of celestial influence); the latter, the moon, is described here as “muster[ing] [Herod’s] might,”[38] as it reflects these rays of the sun to earth.[39] In total, the entire cosmic spheres, from the least important to the most important, are subject to his kingdom; He is seen here as a total tyrant, who is “fairer in face and fresher on fold” – that is on earth – than any ruler there has ever been. Appropriately, his courtier describes him as a “lodestar on height,”[40] the brightest of lights in the heavens. He has, from the beginning, been set up as another Lucifer, and those listening should perhaps expect a similar fall.

What we see in the rest of the scene is that really, it seems Mars has the basic control over Herod’s actions. He is constantly screaming, plotting violence, and fighting with anyone and everyone. He is not particularly eloquent of speech (as would befit Mercury) or majestic in his rule (as would befit Jupiter). There is a sort of barbarism about him, which is juxtaposed with the way that he describes his rule in a case of dramatic irony.

The irony may perhaps run even deeper than this. Recall what was said about the influence of the planets in ST I q. 115 a. 4: the planets not only effect the bodies of rational creatures, but also their minds and their wills to the extent that they have allowed themselves to be oriented toward material ends. In the medieval imagination, there would be a real question here as to who is actually ruling whom: Herod claims that he is the ruler of the planets, but by his sensuality and bloodlust, a scholastic theologian might propose that it is Herod himself who is being ruled. In this passage, then, we might see the outworking of a section of Thomas’ Summa, given life through the figure of Herod, for the contemplation of everyday Yorkers. Herod in this sense would be “quick image” of anyone ensnared in rage and pride, and a warning of what comes of that state of being (slavery and murder, even the attempted murder of Christ).

It was for the Goldsmiths to put on the section of the play having to do with the wisemen. Instead of the revolving planets of power and the chaos of Herod’s court, we see instead true, humble kings, who follow after the rectilinear motion of a new star. The first king begins by a clear contradiction of Herod’s claim to being a “lodestar on height”, calling on God as “Lord that lives, everlasting light.”[41] The second concurs, “All-wielding God that all has wrought,/ I worship thee as is worthy,/ That with thy brightness has me brought/ out of my realm, rich Arabic.”[42] The third goes even further, ascribing to God (and not to Herod) the power of the diurnal powers: “Lord God that all good has begun/ and all my end, both good and ill,/ that made for man both moon and sun.”[43] These appellations directly counter the astrological claims made by Herod, and pose to the listener a question about the nature of true kingship. They are juxtaposed images about the nature of a godly king: on the one hand, stands Herod, who subjugates the planets to himself, declaring himself the shining light of the heavens, on the other, the three kings, who have left the wealth of their kingdoms in an acknowledgment of God’s higher rule over both celestial and terrestrial bodies.

In the Middle Ages, one question raised by the scholastics was the nature of the star that the wisemen followed. Obviously, it could not be part of the starry firmament above Saturn, because these stars, as closest to the empyrean heavens, do not experience change. Furthermore, these stars do not experience rectilinear motion, due to the fact that they are fixed onto their own orb. In ST III, Aquinas poses the question, and answers by attributing the star to the sublunar field, to account for these difficulties.[44] He also suggests that the star might have been the figural body of what he calls elsewhere a superior separated substance (in which he includes angels or demons), one of the two kinds of celestial “influences” we described above. Perhaps, he says, it was the same Angel that appeared to the shepherds, now appearing to the Magi in the form of a star.

This fact serves to only heighten the contrast between Herod and the Magi. Whereas Herod claims the influence of the majestic planets, which rule terrestrial life, the Magi humbly follow an appearance in the sublunar sphere (“a royal star that rose ere day/ before us in the firmament”[45]), a subordinate part of the cosmos. In this sense, the Magi are following a less important celestial sign than Herod; and yet, as it turns out, this sign is more important than all the planets, being at once the manifestation of a superior separated substance and placed there by the one who moves the entire cosmos, who is the referent of its very light.

Evidence that this juxtaposition is correct can be seen when the two parties face off in lines 129-172. There, when Herod finds out that they are following such a lesser light in the sky, instead of the grand planets he invoked in the beginning, he wrongly mistakes the kings for infidels, and berates them for following “any shimmering in the sky.”[46] And yet, in an ironic twist, it is the Kings that must convince Herod from his own scriptures of the star’s significance, by interpretations of prophecies from Balaam, Isaiah, and Hosea. These prophecies are news to Herod, who is at a loss of what to do, and, on the advice of his counselors, devises a plot to subvert them from coming true. Again, we see that Herod, ruled by the planets, subject to his own sensate nature, is a picture of cruelty and ignorance, whereas the three kings speak truly and with insight and kindness.

The culmination of the scene is the adoration of the magi, a devotional picture common in medieval art. Though the star disappeared as soon as they entered Herod’s realm, it reappears as soon as they pray to God “the prince”, and the Magi follow it to the nativity scene. What transpires is a series of moving “hail” stanzas where the Magi offer true worship to the Christ Child, predicting the course of the passion plays. The Magi then receive a vision of an Angel, warning them of Herod’s intended murder of the Son of God, and faithfully leave to their own countries by a different way. Herod is thus circumvented by what is lowly, which is actually what is most powerful.

Conclusion(s)

In our discussion of the Corpus Christi Plays, we have seen that the planets were co-actors, bringing about effects and influences, as well as an ethereal, heavenly light. It remains, now, to discuss how these actions relate to the scholastic material we investigated above, and what this might tell us about the way that scholastic thought was transmitted in late medieval society more broadly.

Our examination of the Corpus Christi plays implicitly suggests that the late medieval cosmology of the plays and the cosmology of the scholastics is in a sense compatible. In these plays, one sees at least a minimal acknowledgement of the sphered cosmos, as well as an acceptance of the primary means of planetary effect, namely light, motion, and influence.

Of these, it would seem, light and influence are of more importance. On the one hand, in the plays we see a contest between the light embodied by Herod and the light followed by the Magi. The light which Herod embodies, it turns out, is indeed Luciferian, whereas the light which the Magi follow is from the Empyrean Heavens. This juxtaposition of lights will continue throughout the play, as I noted above, with the light of the moon inspiring lunacy at Jesus’ trial and the light of Mars governing the treacherous actions of Judas, contrasted with the light that surrounds Christ in the harrowing of hell. It is, of course, a continuation of the theme of light from the first play, in which God, full of light, is contrasted with Lucifer, the light-bearer.

On the other hand, we have seen influences play a major role in the course of the play. One can definitely see Herod and The Magi as a play of contrary celestial influences. The planets, especially Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury, are invoked by Herod as being the ascendent forces of his kingship, with Venus and Saturn in the descendent position. This is astrological material more than it is cosmological material, representing a popular interpretation of the scholastic cosmos; nevertheless, it is permitted, if not expounded so precisely, by what we have seen in the prima pars of Thomas’ Summa.

Further, we saw celestial movement play a minor role in one of the main moral meanings of the play. The celestial planets can almost be seen circling around Herod’s head in the opening monologue; but the humble star, which appeared to the Wise Men in the sublunar realm (Herod derisively calls it a “glimmering”), takes them from east to west, in a subordinate less perfect motion. And yet – as we find out at the end of this play – at the end of this movement is the God of the Universe. A distinct reversal is found here through celestial movement, especially as a form of leaving one’s kingdom behind and finding something even more important, the first cause, in human flesh.

Yet, as our discussion shows, all of these scholastic categories of influence are given a more dynamic and typological significance than they would otherwise have in Thomas’ Summa. In the drama of the play, they are able to be used as “quick images”, as pictural representations of Devotio Moderna piety scenes. And as they are used as images of devotional representation, they develop qualities within the context of the narrative that they would normally not have when considered abstractly. This is not to say that they are ever given meanings that contradict what Thomas has said concerning the celestial spheres (at least, not in this play; I do not want to speak absolutely); rather, through the dynamics of theater, they become actively involved in the history of the cosmos, as it moves from paradise, to fall, to redemption. The planets themselves begin to picture the divine story.

In scholastic discourse, especially in Thomas’ description of the cosmos, the dynamics of celestial influence on the terrestrial region of the cosmos are laid out by asking questions of a particular text, namely the first chapter of Genesis. But through the narrative of Herod and the Magi plays, we find celestial objects drawn into a wider unfolding drama. The writers of the play attach the seven planets, as both powers and enslavers, to King Herod the Great, inspiring his subsequent reign of terror. Thomas stated the hypothetic possibility of such a state of affairs in his discussion of the influences of planets over bodies, which we explored above; but here, we see before our eyes, in our town, the planets actually aligning themselves with a flesh-obsessed character, causing destruction, madness, and death. In this, they contribute to one of the most important themes of the Corpus Christi plays, which is the battle between God and Lucifer. This implies that the planets are not morally neutral in the Christian struggle for piety; it is an indictment of the natural order, showing that the celestial powers have complicity with human sin, and stand in need, just as much as their human actors, of Christ’s conquering over hell.

The planets also form an essential part of the play’s critique of unjust rulers. The planets delude Herod into thinking that he is invincible in his power and just in his pursuit of pleasure, and in this we see a critique of the way that judicial astrology could be used to justify illegitimate regimes. As a foil for this unjust and murderous nobility, the writers of the play tell us that true lordship consists in submitting first and foremost to God, following his will even when it leads one out of the wealth and power of one’s kingship (as was the case with the Magi).

This reversal is even more plain when one takes into account the appearance of the moving star in the sublunar sphere. Here, the structure of the medieval cosmos itself is used to manifest a central theme of the play: that it is in Christ’s lowliness, and not in his cosmic power, that he was truly God and redeemed the cosmos. This is potentially a powerful summons not only to just lordship, but to humble submission to the highest power, a call to correctly order one’s life by the inspirations of God and the testimony of the Scriptures.

Ultimately, God’s power in these plays is made perfect in the weakness of Christ’s body. That is, it is in self-lowering, instead of in pride and dominance, that God’s true dignity consists. And in this sense, the planetary theme is significant not only for the play, but for the Corpus Christi in general. Here, the heavens themselves, and especially the lowest heavens (the part over our heads!), become the site of divine manifestation, just as the lowly wafer becomes the seat of Christ’s reigning power in the Corpus Christi processional. In a sense, then, cosmology itself is a picture of the eucharist, of the body broken, of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

This is a powerful reconfiguration of the normal relations of York Society. It is a summons towards a type of social relationship which is not based on power and influence, but rather one based on charity and love, the basis of which is humility. In this sense, the cosmology of Thomas is here dynamically united with his ethics by means of the drama, in which love orders all things towards imitation of Christ. That is, a new commentary on Thomas himself emerges, through a medium quite different than a text, one which mediates between text and world. In this sense, we see that the York Mystery Plays served to at once communicate and transfigure their source material in the context of late medieval England.

[1] Aristotle did indeed write a commentary on Aristotle’s De Coelo, which would be interesting to put beside the information in the Summa. Unfortunately, such a preview is outside of the scope of this paper.

[2] See the discussion in Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: the Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687, Cambridge: Cambridge, 1996), 569-615.

[3] Grant, Planets, 390-421.

[4] ST I. q. 66. A 3. (152)

[5] ST I. q. 66. A 3, p 152-153.

[6] ST I. 1. 66. A 3, p 153.

[7] ST. I. q. 67. A 3. (158).

[8] ST. I q. 67 A 3. (158); ST I q. 70 A 1, (181).

[9] Grant, Planets, 395-419.

[10] See the supplementary discussion in Grant, Planets, 89-90.

[11] ST I q. 68, a. 2 (166-167). Aquinas allows for at least two opinions concerning these “waters above” the firmament. Really, it depends on what one means by firmament. Do we mean the firmament of the fixed stars, the primum mobile, or the firmament in the sublunar field. The answer will effect how one reads this text. That being said, the interpretations are not mutually exclusive, for there is water above the firmament in the sublunar sphere, and there is the crystalline heaven above the primum mobile. See Grant, Planets, 103-104.

[12] ST I. q. 70, a 2 (183).

[13] Consult Aristotle, Physics, V.

[14] ST I q. 66 a. 2. But what of objects in the heavens that seem to move rectilinearly, such as comets, shooting stars, etc? Aristotle in his De Coeli set the basic rule: all rectilinear phenomena in the heavens belong to the sublunar field, which is corruptible and ruled by contraries. In this way, Aristotle and the scholastic commentators were able to acknowledge the actual phenomena in front of them, while maintaining the basic tenants of their cosmology.

[15] ST q. 70, a. 2 (182).

[16] ST q. 115, a. 3 (613).

[17] ST q. 115, a. 4 (614).

[18] ST q. 115, a. 4 (615).

[19] ST. q. 115, a. 6 (618).

[20] See Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, (Chicago: Chicago, 1990), 16, 135-136.

[21] Sophie Page, Astrology in Medieval Manuscripts, (Toronto: Toronto, 2002), 61-89. Consult also Robin B. Barnes, Astrology and Reformation, (Oxford: Oxford, 2016), 16-47, which documents how reformation traditions continued medieval practices in this regard.

[22] See Clifford Davidson, From Creation to Doom, (New York: AMS Press, 1984), 12.

[23] See Sarah Beckwith, “Making the World in York and the York Cycle,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, eds. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, (Manchester and New York: Manchester, 1994): 254-276.

[24] Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays, (Chicago: Chicago, 2001), 42-58.

[25] Beckwith, Signifying God, 59-71.

[26] Beckwith, Signifying God, 3-22.

[27] Theodore K. Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 41.

[28] Davidson, From Creation to Doom, 34.

[29] York Mystery Plays, A Selection in Modern Spelling, eds. Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King, (Oxford: Oxford, 1984), 65-78. Hereafter referred to as Beadle. Richard Beadle, the primary editor of this edition, should be singled out as one of the foremost authorities on the plays today (along with the aforementioned Sarah Beckwith). As regards this paper, his secondary literature would have been used comprehensively, if it was more readily available in the Duke Library System.

[30] Compare Beadle 66 with 3-5.

[31] Beadle 66.

[32] See the discussion in Page, Astrology, 27-60.

[33] On the correlation between the planets, stars, and elements, see Page, Astrology, 34.

[34] Beadle 66.

[35] Page, Astrology, 34.

[36] Beadle 66.

[37] Beadle 66.

[38] Beadle 66.

[39] See Grant, Planets, 393-400.

[40] Beadle 66.

[41] Beadle 68.

[42] Beadle 68.

[43] Beadle 68.

[44] Aquinas, ST III q. 36 a. 7.

[45] Beadle 69.

[46] Beadle 71.

But I do want to talk a little bit about the research I’m doing in Boehme and Arndt. Perhaps we should talk about Boehme first. As I read Boehme and around Boehme, I’m more and more thinking about him as an expression of lay piety, and not the Philosopher Teutonicus that he is sometimes made out to be. The astrological material in his corpus was a popular expression of medieval scholastic cosmological insights (on this, see, among others, Edward Grant), which had been filtered down to common people through medici, astrologers, and even popular theologians (Melancthon, Chemnitz, etc.). The general regard for the inner conversion of the human being and the mysticism around this rebirth seems to be easily traceable to the traditions of prayer book originating with Musculus, Neander, Habermann, and further worked out by Moller, Kegel, and ultimately Arndt. These betenbuchen were the attempt of theologians, some gnesio-Lutherans, some philippists, to bring out Martin Luther’s mystical piety for the edification of the laity – which of course meant a transmission of late medieval spiritual writings, such as those written by Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, the Frankfurter, etc. Even the name of one of the latter books Boehme wrote, the Mysterium Magnum, was used previously by Martin Moller (Boehme’s pastor) as the title of his work of brautmystik, where he contemplates the eschatological mystery of the union between nature and supernature, man and God. If the way of categorizing Boehme’s works is correct, which sees each major book as an instantiation of one of the seven source spirits, it is telling that Boehme reserves this name for the completing of his project, the end of the alchemical rehabilitation of all things.

Part of my argument has to do with the relationship between Lutheranism and Spiritualism. I’ve been thinking about Lutheranism and Spiritualism a lot lately, especially in my reading of Caspar Schwenckfeld, Sebastian Franck, and Valentin Weigel. And what I’m starting to suspect is that spiritualist tendencies lived fairly comfortably in the Lutheran lay piety tradition, because both were nourished by late medieval mystical writings. A good example of this is the Lutheran Valentin Weigel, who capitalizes on the mystical and humanistic-spiritualistic parts of Luther’s theology, using them to protest Luther’s turn toward state-compulsion for furthering the Reformation (he turns a valid part of Luther’s corpus against another valid part of Luther’s corpus). Weigel, of course, had things in common with the spiritualists, but this is perhaps moreso because of his reading of Luther and his reading of Luther’s mystical sources than because of some covert infiltration of spiritualism into the Lutheran church. That is, it doesn’t have to be a foreign invasion into a pure, untouched ideal theology of externality. Regardless of what is made of Weigel, Boehme, being downstream, can claim Weigel and the betenbuch tradition as venerable traditions of Lutheran spiritual-mysticism, oriented toward the general spirituality of the laity, without recourse to external influences. Perhaps this is the reason he does not cite many authors: his theosophy could be rooted directly within his milieu, and so was obvious.

There is no denying that the Paracelsian strand runs deep in Boehme’s writing. And I want to investigate this more. But I don’t think that this necessarily invalidates my theory that Boehme received his formation from within the church, and not through some encroaching dissent literature, because Paracelsus was already influential among physicians at the time; of course, notoriously for Valentin Weigel (the priest), but also, for example, Michael Neander (the theologian, priest, and devotional writer). The basic problem, I think, is that typologies are obscuring the data for us: we start with large typologies, like that between the magisterial tradition and the radical reformation; but we forget that people that lived in the past did not claim to be beholden to one or the other. The boundaries were much more fluid – as one can see, for example, in Luther’s pretenses to be a “heavenly prophet” for all of Germany, or in his use of mystical anthropology, or in the controversy between him and Schwenkfelder (as Peter Erb has written to the Schwenkfeldian Society). Where is the line between radical and reformer? And how useful is a category that can include such a wide variety of thinkers as Hans Denck, Caspar Schwenckfeld, Thomas Muentzer, and Valentin Weigel? Were these all, as Steven Ozment claims, politically motivated dissenters, some with honor and honesty (Muentzer) and some without (Weigel)? My hunch is that there is something more complicated and therefore more interesting going on in the reformation and post-reformation period, and that the way we apply these strict typologies to the historical data is actually misleading as we try to get a picture of what scholastic and lay life in the period was like. Confessional Hindsight may keep us from straying from repristinatory projects that emphasize the coherence of state orthodoxy; but I’m fairly sure that this perspective will make most of the historical data unintelligible.

In Arndt scholarship, I’m currently wading into the work of Johann Anselm Steiger, Hermann Geyer, and Thomas Illig. Steiger is at the University of Hamburg, and he is working on a critical edition of Arndt’s True Christianity, which is the first of its kind, outlining major sources for Arndt’s thinking and giving the best to date historical context for his writing. Hermann Geyer’s work concerns the hermetic influences on Arndt, and the way that it relates to radical reformation theologians and laity; Thomas Illig’s work provides a good counterweight here, concerning the mystical sources in Arndt’s writings, and questioning the sharp dichotomy between Lutheranism and spiritualism. I’ve also been reading Arndt’s True Christianity (in the English) and Paradeisgartlein (in the German), and it has been a lot of fun! I haven’t made it to book four of TC yet, which is where he uses Weigel, but I’m looking forward to getting to it soon!

The two most important books in getting all of this going still remain Protestantism and Mysticism in Reformation Europe (eds. Ron Rittgers and Vincent Evener) and Steven Ozment’s Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century. Ozment, in bringing up the question of mysticism and the dissent literature, puts to us one of the key questions of this whole debate: what do we do with the Radical Reformation? And in Rittgers and Evener’s Protestant and Mysticism in Reformation Europe, one finds one of the best collections of scholarship on the topic of Reformation and mysticism. I’ve been really benefiting from the articles in this volume on Arndt, Boehme, Weigel, Musculus and Neander, and Moller.

One more note, before we conclude. I have been keeping an eye out over the last semester for any way that Pseudo-Macarius might have influenced the post-reformation mystics, especially Johann Arndt. For in Quasten’s Patrology, the entry on Macarius claims that Johann Arndt had Pseudo-Macarius’s spiritual homilies memorized, and would often repeat it over to himself. But – alas – Quasten does not cite any sources for this anecdote.

Lo and behold, while I was doing research in the library on Pseudo-Macarius, I came across a volume that I posted about the other day. Martin Illert’s Makarios – Ein oestlicher Kirchenvater im Spiegel des deutschen Protestantismus is a lovely little book, with a section specifically on Arndt’s debt to Macarius. Following the lead of Hans Schneider (Der Fremde Arndt, 2006), Illert tracks down the association of Arndt with Pseudo-Macarius, finding it in Gottfried Arnold’s Unparteyische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie. Arnold found evidence of Arndt’s reliance on Ps.-M in a letter that Arndt wrote to Johann Gerhard, urging him to read the spiritual little book. But – when one, like Schneider and Illert, put the text of the Homilies and Arndt’s True Christianity together, one does not see massive borrowing. There is some evidence of “transformation” (Illert), so that one can call Arndt’s reception of Pseudo-Macarius something like a Lutheranization of the patristic material. But the themes that Arndt supposedly took from Macarius could just as easily have been taken from elsewhere – especially the medieval mystics. And further, there are other themes deeply important to Macarius that are simply absent in Arndt’s work. For these reasons, then, it seems that there is really not much behind the claim that Arndt’s work is closely related to Pseudo-Macarius’. It is actually Arnold, not Arndt, that sees deep significance in Pseudo-Macarius’ work – but that is a discussion for a different day.

There is always more to do and more to read. I hope that all of your projects are going well, and that seeing a snippet of mine might be edifying, or if not edifying, at least entertaining. I’ll try to get some actual articles up sometime over the holidays, once I have my term papers written (God willing, on both accounts).

Read more

Over the last month, Elizabeth and I have been trying to implement a sort of bedtime routine for our daughter, Talya. Talya is our first child, so we’ve never done something like this before. But once she turned six months, the pediatrician told us that it was time. And so, we cobbled together a sort of everyday liturgy. We sing songs together. We read poetry. I play some hymns on the ukulele. And then we conclude with the end of Compline, that is, with the Song of Simeon and the lay blessing. And then we walk Talya into her room, and, more often than not, she is asleep within five minutes or so.

Talya has always slept better when we play music for her. When she was a newborn, she used to fall asleep to the swaying of our bodies as we would softly sing any song we knew all the lyrics to. And then, as she got older, Elizabeth put together a playlist of lullabies, which we would play on the living room TV as Talya swung back and forth in her baby swing. Music was deeply soothing for her. And it continues to be, even as she has outgrown the baby swing.

We still use that playlist in the car, especially when we take her on long car rides (for example, the seven hour car ride down to North Carolina). So we listen to these songs quite a bit. One of the things that makes me grateful to my spouse is that she picked songs that would not annoy us to death. That is, her taste in music is very good—the playlist is full of The Hound + Fox, JJ Heller, Josh Garrels, and Joel Clarkson, all of which provide a soothing, calming, and frankly just pleasant atmosphere for baby (and, let’s face it, nine times out of ten for me) to fall asleep. The playlist has become a part of our family; these songs will forever remind us of this season with our baby girl.

Every so often, one of the songs will burrow into my head, so that I churn the lyrics over and over again in my brain. Just the other week, it was The Hound + Fox’s “The Fox.” Which, I have to admit, is kind of a brutal and weird song—but in that way that makes for great lullabies in every age. The most amazing line in the song is when the fox enters into the forest pen, he takes a look at the geese and ducks and declares “a couple of you are gonna grease my chin”—and that becomes the line that’s repeated in serene repetition at the end of the verse. It’s just marvelous, in a way that only lullabies can be.

2

Anyway, this week, the song that’s been stuck in my ear and therefore my head is JJ Heller’s rendition of “It’s you I like.” You probably know this song—perhaps not from JJ Heller, but from its more famous performer and its original writer, Mr. Fred Rogers. Fred Rogers is a really big deal out here in Pittsburgh: he was a wonderful human being, presbyterian minister, and television host, author, and producer of the kids’ show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. The song, “It’s you I like,” is a simple, lovely melody, in which Rogers assures his listeners that there is something special about them, regardless of what they’ve done, how they’ve dressed, even their physical characteristics. There is something that is simply good about them being here, being alive, being themselves. It is a touching song, and Elizabeth and I find ourselves singing it to our daughter a lot of the time—and even to one another.

I mean, just take a look at how lovely these lyrics are:

It’s you I like
It’s not the things you wear,
It’s not the way you do your hair
But it’s you I like
The way you are right now,
The way down deep inside you,
Not the things that hide you,
Not your toys—they’re just beside you.
But it’s you I like
Every part of you
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new
I hope that you’ll remember
Even when you’re feeling blue
That it’s you I like
It’s you, yourself
It’s you. It’s you I like.

A song like that warms the heart. There is something so precious about the way Mr. Rogers is able to cut through everything with his lyrics, worded so simply and melodied so honestly, to assure us that he actually likes us, not the things that are periphery to us. It is us that he likes, that which is way down deep inside us, but also every part of us that is authentically us.

The song relies on a difference between what is genuinely us and what is counterfeit. In describing what he likes, Rogers is careful to also say what he does not mean when he says “I like you.” He does not mean “the things you wear” “the way you do your hair” or “your toys”—that is, his liking you doesn’t depend on contingent aspects of your person. The way you do your hair, the things you wear, these are things that can change from day to day. But Mr. Rogers wants you to know that his liking you is not dependent on something arbitrary, which will be different each day; instead, there is something more fundamental about you that is likable. Something that is more fundamentally you, something which is constant.

Mr. Rogers also says he doesn’t like you for “your toys.” He wants you to know that your likability doesn’t come from what you do with your hair, or what you change about your body—and it also doesn’t come from the amount of things you’ve accumulated. Some people, in an expression of insecurity, feel the need to paper over who they are, showing status in their wardrobe, their self-styling, and in shiny toys. But these things, Mr. Rogers claims, are “beside you” and even “hide you”—they are not only periphery, but also, in some sense, obfuscating. They dress up the self, in such a way that they distract from what you really are. Mr. Rogers says no to these things, to that which is inauthentic, to that which covers the self, and makes it look better than it is, more socially acceptable, more prestigious. These things aren’t the reason he likes you. Because they aren’t really you.

So what is the you behind all these things? Mr. Rogers has a list: “the way you are right now” “the way down deep inside you” “every part of you” “your skin, your eyes, your feelings, whether old or new.” That is, the something that is more fundamental about you, which Mr. Rogers likes, is that thing that is hidden by these external matters—the way you do your hair, the things you wear, and your toys. Underneath these things are that which he sees as fundamental: “the way down deep inside you”: metaphorically, “your eyes”, which are [possibly] obscured by your hair, “your skin”, which is covered by the things you wear, and “your feelings”, which are covered by the shiny things you accumulate. Mr. Rogers divides between the authentic and the inauthentic, the you and the not-you, ultimately arriving at his point: he likes what is hidden about you. He likes your fundamental self. He likes that fundamental metaphysical entity within you which is beyond circumstance and adornment, obfuscation or covering. He likes the stable entity discerned solely through metaphysical reasoning which is you. Only then can his “liking” of you be constant, because its directed toward a constant object.

3

I don’t want to be mean to Fred Rogers. But, if this is right, then we encounter some issues with the way that the song negotiates its anthropology. In a sense, it causes me to gape with Ritschlean horror at the metaphysical view of reality behind the song, which attempts to reduce relations to the realm of pure abstraction. For Albrecht Ritschl, as I recently explored in my Master Thesis, critiqued metaphysics exactly along these lines: metaphysics leads to the division of the abstract from the concrete, the universal from the particular. If the “you” that Mr. Rogers likes is devoid of anything particular, anything external, anything obvious and subject to change—how can he be said to like anything but his own mental construction—which is hardly a living, breathing human being? Ritschl was concerned that the entire tradition of western metaphysics followed this logic, especially in the realm of theology, where it substituted Aristotle’s Prime Mover, the Form of Forms, or the attribute-less God of Negative Theology, for the living, Personal, willing God of the Old and New Testaments. Ritschl saw himself as fundamentally a defender of the integrity of the particular against the machinations of a metaphysical abstraction which sought to reduce God to the universal aggregate of things, their abstract, general being. Ritschl saw the doctrine of theosis especially along these lines—a dynamic pantheism, or the generalizing of all things, until the Creator/Creation distinction was simply a drop in the all-consuming alchemico-dialectical process of the divine abstract.

Ritschl’s critique of metaphysics in general should probably be only thought about as a critique of one particular kind of metaphysics. But it pops up again and again in the late modern critique of ontology, especially in Nietzsche and those influenced by him.1 The universal is claimed to eliminate and absorb the particular—Ritschl and Nietzsche both critique metaphysical Christianity as a “Buddhism”, a nihilism which ultimately cannot positively serve as the foundation of everyday life. Ritschl adds that metaphysical Christianity is a kind of advaitic philosophy, which deifies nature, really just a form of idolatry at which the Protestant Reformation was aimed at. This, of course, is deeply unfair to both Buddhism and Advaitic philosophy—both of which, if one wants to compare them with 19^th century protestant theology, had far more metaphysically sophisticated tools at their disposal than did Ritschl or Nietzsche. Though this comparison between eastern philosophy and metaphysical theology was meant to be derogatory, we could perhaps twist it into a positive in this way:

Like metaphysical Christianity, Advaitic philosophy is hardly the Spinozian pantheism that the Western tradition often assumed it be. In fact, “not two” is different than “one”—the multiplicity of the refractions of being in Advaita are more akin to the metaphysical vision that actually constituted the Christian speculation that Ritschl so quickly dismissed as “abstract.” Like Schelling arguing against Jacobi for the pantheistic grounding of freedom, perhaps one could argue for a pantheistic grounding of particularity in the advaitic scheme, as well as in the Christian western metaphysical tradition. This is, in fact, one way to read Jacob Boehme, for example: the one root of being, which is God, is the source of a positive multiplicity of beings. Having a single root of being—that is, believing in metaphysical monism—is actually the precondition for the coherence of the refraction of being. In this sense, monism itself is the precondition for a grounding of the relation between the One and the many.

4

I was recently reading Andrew Week’s book on Valentin Weigel, which was very thought-provoking. Weigel was a second generation Lutheran pastor, who was deeply influenced by Luther, Paracelsus, and Sebastian Frank. That is, he represents a tradition of Lutheran Spiritualism, which attempted to navigate the relationship between the Letter and the Spirit as the basis for the Christian life. What caught my eye was the way in which Weeks described Weigel’s ontology, which was based on the distinction between the image and proto-image, a common feature of the Augustinian tradition. Weigel, of course, uses this distinction in order to polemicize against the absolutizing of confessional and state hegemony. Like Augustine’s Civitas Dei, Weigel’s corpus seeks to demonstrate that temporal and earthly power, including its being, is given from heaven. This means that ultimately, when it comes to matters of Geist, earthly powers (the church and state) must be subordinate to it, they cannot claim for themselves absolute authority. They are subject to the reign of Christ—whose reign is within us.

Weeks calls attention to the way in which Weigel’s fundamental ontology is similar and different than Boeheme’s. On the one hand, the two are similar—Weeks sees in both authors an attempt to synthesize the German mysticism of Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, and the Theologia Deutsche with the nature mysticism of Paracelsus. As he shows in his book on German Mysticism, these thinkers are within this Augustinian tradition which differentiates sign from thing signified, or image and proto-image; but whereas the Rhineland Mystics tend to downplay the significance of creation, Paracelsian mysticism tends to emphasize the integrity and goodness of creation. Weeks argues that the difference between the synthetic projects of Weigel and Boehme is that Weigel is not able to account for particulars positively, as manifestations of the proto-image, but Boehme, on the other hand, through the Paracelsian concept of signatures, is able to synthesize the two traditions into a mysticism of inwardness which likewise affirms external reality as a real multiplicity.

When reading this, I could not help but think of the well-known divergences within Neo-platonism, between Plotinian pure contemplation and the theurgy of Proclus and Iamblichus. In some ways, they have the same fundamental ontology, which differentiates between the proto-image and the image—but this ontology is interpreted with different ends in mind: in Plotinus, the goal is to release the soul from the body into which it has never fully descended, so that it might once again be “alone with the alone”—but in the theurgists, creaturely existence is given a different purpose, as it aids the soul in the process of mimesis, or imitation, of the heavenly circumambulations, freeing it to follow the levels of materiality back to union with its origin. This pedagogical purpose of matter, which sees it as the place in which the soul is deified, points to a view of the image as expressing or manifesting the proto-image, instead of just obscuring it. In a way, the difference between Weigel and Boehme, though of course it does not depend on these primary texts, seems to rehash the contemplative and theurgic divergences within this tradition. Obviously, this is quite the assertion, and it needs to be developed more seriously on its own. But I think it might be more likely than it looks on the surface.2

This kind of tension is present at the center of Christian ontology and cosmology. When Christians say that God is the source of all that is—the ex nihilo—they are really saying that creation has no other origin than in the will of the Creator. This means that there is not some design out there by which creation was made—rather, it is the expression of divine intentionality and will, it is predicated on movements of the divine’s inner life. In this sense, as Hans Boersma has rightly remarked in a recent substack post, ex deo and ex nihilo are the same doctrine.3 For Boehme, one might say that one is created not simply ex deo, but ex verbum domini, which is certainly an orthodox way of construing the doctrine.4 This makes the ex Deo even clearer, especially in its biblical precedent and its implications for theological cosmology.

But in the Christian faith, this ex nihilo/ex deo cuts both ways. On the one hand, it relativizes all earthly claims to absolute authority (Weigel). But on the other hand, it puts forward creation as a divine manifestation, as a positive plurality which mirrors God’s being (Boehme). On the one hand, it is a critique of idolatry. On the other hand, it seems to indicate, to quote Traherne rather freely, that “man has never desired too much; he has only desired wrongly.” It implies there is a holy idolatry, if one might use that offensive way of saying it, or, in the words of Robert Herrick, a “cleanly wantonness”—symbolized of course by the icon in the East, where purified matter is revered as the site of divine encounter on the basis of the pedagogy of the Incarnation. This tension is seen in the controversies over images in both the East and the West, and the arguments over aesthetics in general. In a sense, Weigel and Boehme simply take different approaches to the fundamentally Christian as well as Neoplatonic ontology, which has within itself enough ambiguity to support both programs. Perhaps one could do a reading of Christian history which highlights the vacillation between these two approaches over the course of the last two thousand years.

5

“It’s you I like”. Mr. Roger’s song burrows into my ear. It makes sense when dealing with someone who is insecure and trying to hide and divert from themselves to make a sharp distinction between who they are and what they wear. In a similar vein, it makes sense to make a sharp distinction between the natural and the supernatural, the image and the proto-image, when the image seeks to be identified with the proto-image to justify its unjust treatment of divergent expressions of the Christian truth (Weigel). But what if one isn’t doing one’s hair out of a sense of anxiety, what if one isn’t trying to hide one’s body by the clothes one wears? What if one’s toys are the legitimate expression of who one is, not a way to distract or buy the attention and affection of the thinker? Perhaps here we have a case of Boehme’s concrete multiplicity, in which the variety of images actually express the proto-image, the “you I like” could be maximally inferred to include all the things that are simply “beside you.” Perhaps in a Boehmist twist, we could reconfigure the words of Mr. Rogers’ song to be:

It’s you I like
And the things you wear,
And the way you do your hair
It’s you I like
The way you are right now,
The way down deep inside you,
And the things that hide you,
And your toys—the things beside you.
It’s you I like
Every part of you
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new
I hope that you’ll remember
Even when you’re feeling blue
That it’s you I like
It’s you, yourself
It’s you. It’s you I like.

In such a way, we follow Boehme in a maximalist affirmation of what is, in which metaphysics avoids the Ritschlian critique by affirming both the spiritual nature of reality and the manifestation of the spiritual in the material, as signatures. This sort of metaphysic would be able to ground a phenomenological approach to reality which takes objects as objects, taking them seriously in all their particularity exactly because of their one root and source, because of their oneness in being. In this sense, science itself could be less of a catalogue and more of an opportunity to wonder at the constant variation of being, the many-faceted revelation of the divine, which animates and inspires the entire cosmos to participate in a single act of worship, which is the filiation of the Son from the Father. Seeing the cosmos as revelation is ultimately a metaphysics more on the model of poetry than prose, a science based in art instead of mechanism, in which all things are in one another and all things are in God, displaying different divine attributes when turned in each direction, like light through a jewel. The affirmation of everything—in a sense, the apotheosis of Nietzsche within the Christian vision, the aesthetic justification of the Christian truth.

Confirmation, of course, is not really an entrance into the Anglican Church. Anglicans tend to believe that one is confirmed into the Universal Church when one is confirmed. It is not that you are baptized into a denomination—and so, you are not confirmed into a congregation, either; you commit yourself to the entire Church within this local congregation. That is part of the reason why confirmation is done by a bishop: a bishop, an episcopos, is a representation of the entire church, of the church’s catholicity. It is in a lot of ways an ecumenical office: when one is confirmed by the bishop, one is welcomed, blessed, and prayed for by Christians everywhere.

A lot has happened in this year of being an Anglican. My grandmother died; we moved in with Elizabeth’s parents; Talya was born; my dad almost died; my theological mentor had a stroke; I wrote a thesis and graduated with my second masters degree; Elizabeth’s aunt died; I was accepted into ThD to work on Post-Reformation mysticism; Elizabeth and I began the process of buying a house—and probably more that I’m forgetting. Our Anglican parish has been a great source of comfort for us while we have gone through all that. Not only by giving us a place for worship and adoration on Sunday mornings, with liturgical structure, moments of awe and wonder, the blessed gifts of God’s Word and Sacrament, and challenging and thought-provoking preaching; but also, when Talya was born, our parish brought us meals for a few weeks; when we needed work, they employed us, and helped us keep that employment while we had our baby; they prayed for my dad when I was pretty sure he was going to die; they helped me publicly process the grief of exiting the LCMS; our rector met with us to discern God’s call on our lives; they met us in community, through small groups and through staff meetings; and they were a place of healing, through the church’s counseling services. This church which married us has been there for us in deep and abiding ways that have made it feel like home. As I come up on the anniversary of my confirmation, these kindnesses and acts of love bubble up in my mind as I think about being an Anglican. Anglicans help and care for others.

Another thing about being an Anglican that I’ve enjoyed is the intellectual companionship. I work in a rather niche realm of theology, and I’m used to being under the gaze of suspicion. But in my Anglican parish, I’ve really been able to be myself. I’ve found other people that are working on things that I love, like patristics, liturgics, theological aesthetics, and even post-reformation mysticism. Our parish let me deliver a talk about medieval mysticism and its impact on the reformation. This week, I’m seeing two dear friends from my parish, one whose interested in patristics, and the other who is majoring in religious studies. When I told my rector about what I got kicked out of the Lutheran seminary for, he thought it was a really cool project—and that’s not an atypical reaction in Anglican circles! A member of our parish even gave me a few books for ThD work in post-reformation mysticism, with writings from Arndt, Boehme, Angelus Silesius, Czepko, etc. in it, which I’ve been translating here and there. There seems to be room for me in this tradition, and encouragement of my scholarship and love of learning. In this sense, I’ve been deeply grateful for the parish life among Anglicans; there have just been so many people that have simply been a joy to get to know, from theologians, to artists, to poets, to computer programmers and scientists. All seeking the unity of truth and love, all walking on the way of Jesus.

And that brings me to a third thing I have loved about being an Anglican. Anglicanism, as of right now, is different from other Reformation traditions, in that it is not a “confessional” church body. There is no singular Anglican tradition that one can point to and say “you have violated the Helvetic Confessions of 1536 and must therefore be disposed of.” Rather, Anglicans lead with worship. That is, many Anglicans believe that the unity of the church is deeper than confessional beliefs. Beliefs, of course, matter, and the Anglican church has been shaped by identifiable theological movements that are important and beautiful: but intellectual theology is not the only thing that matters, nor is it even the predominant thing that matters. Anglicans tend to be united less around specific hot-button issues from the Reformation (or today!), and more around a common life lived in prayer, love, and service, gathered around God’s gifts in intentional hospitality. This embodied worship, which unites head and heart, devotion and intellectual rigor, is immensely appealing to me, because it allows me to put certain Reformation controversies aside when I enter the sanctuary, and simply follow in the way of Jesus. Anglicans tend not to be aggressively rationalistic or dogmatic; and for this reason, the environment has been deeply healing for me.

These are some of the things I’ve loved about being an Anglican for the last year. But I don’t say them as a contrast to where I was when I was a Lutheran. In fact, I don’t see being an Anglican as a leaving-behind of my Lutheran upbringing at all. I have been deeply shaped by Lutheran theology, especially the writings of Martin Luther and the Augustana. I am a graduate of a Lutheran undergraduate institution, as well as of a Lutheran seminary. And I have been deeply shaped by the liturgical tradition of 20th century Lutheranism, as well as the ecumenical projects of that century. In fact, a lot of my academic work is still Lutheran, though it explores neglected parts of the Lutheran tradition which are sometimes ignored or vilified in contemporary Lutheran discourse. What’s cool about Anglicanism is that I have actually found encouragement to keep pursuing these studies in my new denominational context. My Anglican brothers and sisters don’t feel threatened by a layperson specializing in what has traditionally belonged to the province of a different denomination. Instead, they’re usually curious about it.

I often think about the irony of my situation: when I was a Lutheran, I used to read Anglican poets and theologians regularly in my devotional life—especially Donne, Traherne, Crashaw, and Herbert, as well as less well-known Anglicans like Leade, Pordage, Rust, FD Maurice, etc. Now, as an Anglican, I read Lutheran poets and theologians, such as Angelus Silesius, Czepko, Arndt and Boehme. The two traditions are deeply intertwined in my mind, and I hope to explore these connections more fully in my own research as I settle on the Anglican side of the fence.

I guess, all this is to say that I am immensely grateful to my Anglican parish for inviting me into a new season and new form of life. It is a lot like the old season and form, but with different emphases, highlighting different things. God has been good to me, and to my family. To all those he’s used along the way, I simply say, “Thank you.”

Along the way, one of the things that has shocked me the most about Boehme is the ways in which his thought is so Lutheran. I know I have a special interest in that sort of claim, because I am starting my research from a sympathetic vantage point (or at least one of phenomenological openness). But Andrew Weeks makes a really big deal of this in his introduction to Aurora. There, he claims that Boehme is influenced not only by specific doctrinal developments in Lutheran Orthodoxy (such as the debates over ubiqiutism and the sacramental presence): he’s influenced by the lay life of the Lutheran Christian, the living out of the Christian life in the liturgical setting, full as it is of liturgical expression, hymnody, catechesis, and sacramental participation. In his biography, Weeks even comments that the foundations of Boehme’s thought are actually sacramental: rebirth is a deep reflection on baptism; signatures (the participation of the finite in the infinite) a reflection on the Sacrament of the Altar.

Boehme was also deeply concerned with language, and adopted a spiritual reading of the Scriptures which paid them as religious objects deep reverence. The written Word of God—specifically, Luther’s vernacular translation—is the conduit for the philosopher to catch a glimpse of the nature of reality, not only though the doctrine that it communicates, but through the pedagogy it enacts, the words it chooses and puts in our mouth. For example, in the Aurora, Boehme advocates for a sort of syllabic exegesis, where the very natural movements of the mouth are construed in such a way that the german language itself conveys the truth of the seven source spirits. All languages, in this sense, have a sort of connection with the paradisal Adamic language, which identified things named fully with their qualities. The Scriptures conform our ethnic languages to the realities which this adamic language would have indicated; Scripture becomes a signature of celestial realities. Even Boehme’s magia seems to follow the logic of the sacramental acts. But I’ll admit, I don’t understand enough about that to talk about it at length here.

For Boehme, the three principles are an elaboration of the Trinity, and explain how all of life is simply a trinitarian analogy. The life which he describes in progressive stages or in dynamic terms is actually the eternal life of God: Boehme does not, at least as far as I’ve read, conflate time and eternity; in both the Aurora and the Mysterium Magnum, he goes out of his way to say that he is describing eternity in a creaturely away, according to the poverty of his discourse. In this sense, Boehme’s description of the Seven Source Spirits can only ever hope to exist within a qualified valentinain discourse: qualified of course by the neoplatonic appeal to epistemic partiality. This is sometimes overlooked in the scholarship, and a point that I want to elaborate more fully sometime, after I’ve read more.

Boehme also brings a host of Reformation polemical tropes to bear on his contemporary situation. Here we find Luther’s disdain for the clerical class, identifications of ruling churches as antichrist, scoffings at those who think they are “learned” simply because of their privileged position, as well as urgent and heartfelt appeals for all parties involved to undergo a spiritual rebirth, a repentance. Like Luther, Boehme styled himself as a spokesman for the middle class; furthermore, he lived deeply enmeshed in hopes and fears of the coming apocalypse. Boehme’s apocalypticism is sometimes seen as a continuation of the medieval tradition (especially Joachim): but it remains a fact that, in the Luther Bibel of 1534, the book of Revelation is the part of Scripture that has the most woodcuts, making it the most pertinent and interesting to the lower and middle classes. Luther himself, especially during the early 1530s, believed himself to be living at the end of the world: and this intuition continued in evangelical churches. Boehme, of course, did not think of himself as a prophet, and especially used the language of “illumination” to describe his spiritual experience (a reference to Augustine, etc.), though after his death (and certainly, in some places during his lifetime) he was referred to as such. Boehme’s illumination should be seen in the context of the debate that raged in Augustinianism even into the post-reformation period over the epistemologically valid sources of truth in the Chrisitan life. Luther, of course, would speak about his own Reformation as the product of such an Augustinian illumination, particularly around the phrase “iustitia Dei” in Romans 3. If one were to believe in the “two books” model that characterized Reformation approaches to God and nature, it is not completely unbelievable that such an experience could happen by means of the sun reflecting from an ordinary pewter dish.

There are other element of his project that Boehme inherited from Luther. Luther’s Zorngott was of course a problem that Boehme needed to find a solution to: Luther vacillated between the God of Wrath and the true God of Love in his writings, to the extent that someone like Albrecht Ritschl could not help but simply everything to Luther’s Love-God. Boehme, on the other hand, chose to think about the God of Wrath as connected with the spiritual disposition of the person considering God—which is, of course, a deeply patristic way of handling the problem. Boehme also was deeply dependent on Luther’s understanding of Christology, and held to Chalcedonian and creedal frameworks in his discussions of Christological orthodoxy. Though one won’t find in Luther an explicit endorsement of the ex Deo, one will find him speak at length about what creation “from the Word” means. I don’t think that it would be fair to say that Luther believed in ex nihilo and Boehme believed in ex Deo: as Hans Boersma has recently pointed out, the two beliefs are artificially posited against one another, when really, they are trying to say the same thing.

Boehme obviously had some problems with his Philippist pastor, Gregory Richter. But at the same time, he was welcomed quite warmly by Lutheran noblemen, even in Saxony of all places. He of course abhorred religious warfare, and supported toleration for the other confessions of Christians and even non-Christians. In this sense, he does depart from Luther: Luther famously wrote against toleration for muslims and jews, as well as his Christian opponents. He was deeply critical of Lutheran clergy for their embracing of warlike and polemical stances against God’s children (though of course, Boehme’s tongue could be just as sharp).

So far, one of the things that has surprised me is Boehme’s use of voluntarist categories almost to the exclusion of intellectualist ones. Luther, of course, in his thought, equates Faith with the intellect and hope with the will (Galatians 5). But in Boehme, the intellect does not really come up in the same way. Instead, everything seems to be blind will, which itself comes to some sort of self-recognition and sentience. There is still mind involved; but it is no longer prior (though it is archetechtonic, without being sequentially first). This is a place I want to dig in deeper, too, because of all of the discussions around voluntarism and Boehme’s effect on later idealism and pessimism.

That being said, one of the things I’m doing is approaching Boehme within his premodern context, because I don’t want to think of him as simply a spring-board for something else. For example: I recently read Ernst Benz’s The Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy. And it was good! Like, I really didn’t know that much about Oetinger starting out; it was really helpful! But, at the same time, Benz, by locating these sources as just sources of German Romantic philosophy, and not integral and interesting projects in their own right, tended to obscure the information that he was presenting, slanting it toward romanticism as if that was the only place this lineage of scholarship could have gone. His eye towards Romanticism also meant he didn’t discuss their projects in their fullness, it was a limiting perspective; around the same time, I found that to be the case with M.H. Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature.

For that reason, I’m reading a little bit more widely in the history of early modernity, starting with Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History (ed. Euan Cameron). The book is in three sections, focusing sequentially on the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries. Thankfully, the book looks at these centuries through a more populist lens, always beginning with the conditions of how normal people lived during the time period, and only then moving more in the direction of social superiors. Andrew Weeks had really good information about Upper Lusatia; I’m hoping that, especially as I try to understand what’s going on in his writings, I’ll be able to ground my readings in enough early modern history that I really understand what he’s doing and why.

Part of the way that I want to do this is by reading Paracelsus and Weigel. This is the traditional genealogy that Boehme is placed in. He is also sometimes placed within the genealogy of late medieval mystics, such as Eckhart, Tauler, and Suso. The connection that Weeks draws is from these late medieval thinkers, through Muentzer and Schwenckfeld, to Weigel, Paracelsus and ultimately Boehme; on the contrary, though, I think one of the things I’ve found while writing my thesis on Luther and Gregory is that one could just as easily draw a line of continuity from the late medieval mystics through Luther to Paracelsus, Weigel, and co.; and further, even if Schwenckfeld must be included in the genealogy, his theology has much indebted to Luther, especially in terms of his Christology (as Peter Erb has argued), so one really can’t get around the reformer.

Anyway, that’s where I’m currently at with researching and getting in to Jacob Boehme. So far, it’s been a lot of obscure and fun material to try to get a handle on, and it’s been really stimulating to try to unravel it all. In the next few weeks, I’m hoping a few more resources will arrive from Brill, and I’ll have even more to dig through before my ThD starts.

But until then, I’d like to encourage you to share their own projects and what’s been on your mind in the comments. This substack space is richer when we all talk about what we’re doing!

Read more

I remember being a high school student when Rob Bell’s Love Wins came out. I read maybe the first two chapters, using a pencil in the margins to argue with Bell all along the way. Part of me wishes I still had that copy of his book, so I could see how I was thinking about eschatology in 2011. But I have a feeling I, like most of the evangelical world, didn’t quite understand what Bell was doing in that book. I was impassioned by the way conservative evangelicals described the book to go “heresy hunting” in it, swiftly forgetting that Bell had been a source of inspiration and excitement for me and others in our youth group because of his NOOMA videos. I chose to believe the worst about him, and then I read his book in order to confirm the opinion of him I already entertained. I was very young back then; but I regret being a part of that, nonetheless.

Contemporary discussions about eschatology, especially universalism, are complicated, and often involve more than simply theology. Bell questioned Evangelical certainty about eschatology—without committing himself to universalism—and he was unceremoniously ejected from the Evangelical world with a ruined reputation. Even bringing up alternative models of eschatological fulfillment for general discussion was enough to brand Bell a heretic. Bell encountered institutional resistance for more than simply teaching bad theology; rather, the anger, the rage, the vitriol against Bell was so intense because he had transgressed an institutional boundary, he had questioned the reigning ideology in Conservative Evangelical circles: fundamentally, the substructure of beliefs particularly designed to differentiate conservative institutions from liberal ones, correct theology from its liberal counterpart. Fundamentally, the argument over Bell’s book was not simply about Bell, or even universalism. Rather, it was about the trauma of the schisms during the Great Awakenings, the solidification of these fissures over slavery and reconstruction, and, most recently, the fundamentalist/modernist controversy (as it has played out in the 20^th century (over higher criticism and ecumensim) and now more recently in the 21^st century (Bell was writing around the same time as the Lutherans and Anglicans split over LGBT+). His book became symbolic of the threat of creeping liberalism remaining among conservative Evangelicals, it triggered an Institutional Trauma-Response. And whereas Bell, in his book, was most likely identifying a real problem with the ideological solidification of conservative American Christianity (that it reduces the fundamental diversity of historic Christian thought for the sake of institutional hegemony), this identification was easily enfolded back into the dominant narrative of his community, ultimately condemning him to theological firing squad for the gross sin of ideological treason.

No matter what one thinks of Bell’s conclusions about hell (if one can call them “conclusions” at all), one has to respect his attempt to give better nuance to the history of Christian theology than those that use the tradition as a cudgel of conformity for their particular theological beliefs. I would rather be open to what the tradition has to say than to assume that it agrees with me. Bell’s anti-dogmatic, honest, and intellectually curious posture will always remain one of his most congenial characteristics—it is why it was such a joy to read his Everything is Spiritual while I was on vicarage in the LCMS. Rather than taking the vantage point of the cool intellectualist or the moral finger-wagger, Bell showed himself as simply open to doing theology, even theology which was not immediately useful for the institutional framework he inhabited. He did not attempt to do violence to the Scriptures, nor did he pridefully set himself up as the moral adjudicator of Christian dogma, or as the infallible guide to the tradition. He was just some guy, telling stories, reflecting on the Christian life. He was hardly the creeping liberal that he was painted out to be, the college or seminary professor waiting to tell your children that God is dead or that the Scriptures are really a product of cultural and political power struggles, and that we should all embrace sexual libertinism and stop attending church. In fact, he did not really critique the institution he was a part of at all: what he seemed to be more concerned about was conforming his thoughts to the words of Scripture.

2

I’ve spent the last three years or so reading and thinking about Gregory of Nyssa. And one of the main points of contention about his corpus is whether—and to what degree—Gregory is a universalist. Ignatius Green, in his introduction to Gregory’s Catechetical Discourses, argues that if one sticks primarily to Gregory’s texts, one cannot with certainty say that Gregory agrees that all will be saved. In fact, when mentioning the all-important doctrine of the salvation of demons, Green observes that Gregory says “some believe that…”—not, of course, taking the doctrine for his own (he would most likely be referring to Origen). The Catechetical Orations particularly do not speak to this reality of a final salvation for all beings—even Gregory’s remarks about the salvation of the devil are more hypothetical than real points of doctrinal affirmation and teaching.

At the other end of the spectrum are authors like Marmodoro, Ramelli, and McClymond. These authors all read a fairly strong universalism in Gregory, though they do so by means of different tools. McClymond, for example, writes a genealogy which connects Gregory and the entire Alexandrian system to Gnosticism. Ramelli outlines a series of textual traits that unite patristic universalists, and shows how Gregory’s writings bear a family resemblance to this corpus. Marmodoro stresses the logic of Gregory’s system, and the way that apocatastasis is integrated into his wider theology. All three authors deal with a multitude of Gregory’s texts, instead of the more focused work Ignatius Green undertakes on simply the Catechetical Discourses.

Further complicating the problem is what exactly we mean when we use the term “universalism” when we refer to patristic authors. I think this point isn’t talked about enough in our discussion of the past. The word is simply anachronistic if it is applied without reservation. Universalism has a complicated origin in modern theology—and there are a variety of theologies today that we simply lump together using the term. For example, there is a universalism which is based in antinomianism, which says that a loving God would not judge or punish anyone, so all must go to heaven. There is a mechanical or organic universalism, which finds its origins in F.C. Bauer’s interpretation of patristic theology along Hegelian lines, which basically teaches that the cosmos will automatically be deified, objectively, without perhaps even its consent, as a fulfillment of God’s purposes for himself. There is a universalism based in the sociology of religion, which minimizes religious differences, saying that all roads lead to heaven (the infamous Elephant analogy). There is Philadelphian universalism, based as it is in pietist eschatological expectations, the eternal gospel of Jane Lead and Johan and Johanna Elenora Petersen’s Behmenism. And we could go on! If any of these are what we mean by “universalism”, the conversation of early church universalism becomes much more difficult. Gregory simply did not have access to any of these sources, and his issues are not the same as contemporary universalists’. Gregory is not a modernist or a fundamentalist, a pietist or a romantic, a German Idealist or a cosmopolitan religious studies professor. He does not have the language at hand to deal with any of these issues.

Substituting the word apocatastasis doesn’t really help here. For this bumps us up against the issue of what Gregory means by apocatastasis. How close should one read his usage to previous Stoic usages (the question of Gregory’s reliance on pagan philosophy)? How closely should one read his usage to earlier Christian usages (Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St. Peter in Acts 2, etc.)? And there are systematic questions about the image—how is it being used metaphorically? In what way is it a rectification, a righting? In the sense of time—that the end is like the beginning? In the sense of nature, that nature is healed? In the sense of spiritual repentance? And will it simply be a return to the beginning, like a circle, as it seems Marmodoro argues—or is there a difference, so that one can say that Gregory’s apocatastasis is actually in some way linear (Alexander Pierce; J. Warren Smith)?

Sometimes, one refers to this doctrine as “Universal Salvation.” But what would Gregory mean by these words? “Universal” for Gregory certainly has a wide scope—Gregory did indeed believe that the world was a cosmos, or an oikos, or a uni-verse, because it was created by the One God. But when we say universal, is this ontological/cosmological arrangement of all things what we normally mean? And surely, he does not fit the contemporary discourse about “salvation” that Evangelicals normally assume. For Gregory, salvation is not a punctiliar moment of self-surrender; so universal salvation cannot mean that everyone has this particular experience. Gregory’s religious imagination is punctuated by sacramental theology and its effect on the life of virtue: his discourse of soteriology, that which is “universal” is more complicated than the simple “getting saved” of most of American Christianity. In this sense, it’s easy to misunderstand Gregory, if we say that he teaches universal salvation.

Instead of labeling Nyssa’s eschatology as “universalism” or “universal salvation”—or even apocatastasis—I think we need to simply acknowledge it as the anomaly that it is. It is not like the modern forms of universalism among progressive and Liberal theologians today. It is not based in libertinism or antinomianism, or a rejection of the authority of Scripture. It is also not the Hegelian absorption of the particular into the universal. It is exclusivist: Gregory thinks that all “salvation” is found in Christ and only in Christ. It is not overly emotional or sentimental: Gregory believes in the enlightenment of the intellect and the hard struggle of ascetic activity. It does not diminish the value of effort: for it is synergistic, in the sense of something achieved by the help of grace in the school of the church. There is no salvation outside the Church, in fact, whose spiritual path is the responsible and faithful exegesis of the Scriptures. Gregory even believes that judgment and punishment are essential parts of God’s interaction with human beings. All the things that are important to conservative Christianity in this conversation over the status of hell are present in Gregory: love for the Church, submission to Scripture, emphasis on the essential value of both judgment and mercy, the particularity of Christ; and the reality of hell.

One place that Gregory reads the Scriptures differently than most evangelical Christians today is concerning the purpose of judgment. Through his studying of the Old Testament, Gregory came to the conclusion that judgment tends to mean God’s pedagogical action on us, God’s disciplining us for the better. There is always a goal in mind, for everything that God does. There is a certain teleology which is important for Gregory’s thought, where all things must be directed toward their perfect end. Judgment functions according to this teleology: when God judges, it is not simply to get his pound of flesh, but rather so that he can make the object of his judgment better. This is not philosophical speculation, though: rather, Gregory is observing how judgment works in the Old Testament, and identifying what he sees as a basic biblical truth about the character of God. God is a God who brings his creation to health.

Gregory sees this as consistent with who God has revealed himself to be in Christ: that Christ is the one in whom all things find their proper relation to the Father, their perfection. Judgment in this sense is God’s action on us to bring about repentance, a turning toward Christ; Christ’s entrance into human nature, his entrance into our world, has provided the possibility of a new direction for humanity, which is the schematic for all human lives: union with himself. If this is God’s purpose for humanity, it is an infinite purpose, which ultimately cannot be thwarted by finite wills. Rather, optimistically, Gregory believes that the Gospel will, in the end, be found persuasive by all people, and, along with humanity, all rational beings and created things, in what might be called cosmic evangelism, repentance, and discipleship.

Labeling Gregory a “universalist” proves to deemphasize essential parts of his theology: such as the role of Scripture, the Church, Jesus, and the seriousness by which he regards God’s judgment. It also gives us some false impressions about Gregory, viewing him as a modernist liberal theologian, who seeks to undermine the Church and her saving vision of evangelism, discipleship, etc. I don’t think that adequately takes into account the fullness of Gregory’s vision. But, on the other hand, there are marked differences between Gregory and Conservative and fundamentalist theologians today. He doesn’t really fit in either camp: and when he is militated against one side or the other, he is inevitably reduced to the vision of that particular camp. Instead, if we read him outside of our current controversies, there’s a chance that he might be able to force us to question the debates in which we’re embroiled.

3

Rob Bell and Gregory of Nyssa are in some sense similar to one another in my mind. Both have been labeled “universalists” without identifying themselves as so. This slippery title has been coopted by the fundamentalist/modernist schism in order to present the boundaries between the two camps: Bell was dismissed as a traitor to the evangelical cause, because he attempted to nuance theological discussion of eschatology; Gregory has been appropriated by theological liberals and shunned by theological conservatives for teaching universalism, much like his mentor Origen. And, I would argue, that when they are disengaged from this narrative about them, that they are both hard universalists, what emerges is a much more complex picture, one that will make us ask fundamental questions about institutional identity, group think, but also about the nature of theology and what exactly we mean by this label “universalist” today. Fundamentally, the past will cause us to question ourselves, why we ask the questions we ask, and why we ask them in the way that we ask them.

I know, I know it’s not always helpful to be the “well actually” guy. But really, the only point I’m trying to make in this article is that these are complicated, important issues. And that it is important for us to approach conversations like these understanding our institutional prejudices, our theological assumptions, the complexity of the thinkers under consideration, and with charity toward their presentations and texts. If we slow down and think, there is a chance that we can engage out of more than simply church trauma, but with theological precision and acumen aligned with the disposition of love.

Part of the problem here has to do with our conception of Plato and the tradition he engendered. Just like Luther, and the Scriptures themselves, Plato was one of the first authors subjected to modern critical methods, and, just like Jesus, there was much debate over whether one could reach the “historical Plato” and his authentic doctrines.[1] Methodologically, this meant bypassing the subsequent platonic tradition, and prioritizing the dialogues and some biographical material from Plato’s students. As one reached back for the authentic Plato, the differences between Plato and Aristotle were exaggerated to the point of historians labeling certain periods “Platonic” and others “Aristotelian” (for example, the contrast between the early and high middle ages). And further, the tradition after Plato was divided into the two blocs of “Neoplatonism” and “Middle Platonism,” with the latter denoting all the philosophy that took place within the platonic tradition in between Plato and Plotinus. What this means for Luther scholarship is that when one asks about Luther’s opinion on Plato, often one is comparing Luther with a Plato and Platonism he would never have encountered, a Plato reinterpreted in the modern era according to historical critical methodology.

Recently, historians of antiquity have questioned the methodology behind this “historical” Plato, as well as the sharp distinction between Plato, Middle Platonism, and Neoplatonism. Instead of dividing Plato from the tradition of Platonism, the Tübingen approach to Plato has been to read Plato in the continuity of his tradition, from antiquity through the middle ages. This, I think, gets us better toward what Luther thinks of when he thinks of “Platonism”: a long tradition of philosophy, including both pagan and Christian commentators. This tradition of philosophy was not something distinct from Aristotelianism or Stoicism, for the most part. Though modern philosophers would like to parse these philosophers out into ideal types, and then evaluate Luther’s relation to them, in the late middle ages it was simply assumed that these theistic forms of philosophy were basically compatible with one another. When Luther targets Aristotle, he is not passing judgment on “Aristotelianism” or—God forbid—“Thomism”; he is only finding fault in one particular area of Aristotle’s teaching, as one philosopher among many in the platonic tradition, as part of his polemic against the Ockhamist scholastics. Luther is not passing judgment on an entire type of philosophy divided into categories which were not created until long after his death.

The dichotomy between Luther and Plato is, indeed, a false dilemma. And most of the reason for this is that Luther’s thought includes within it platonic discourse. Luther was a man of the late medieval period: he simply could not avoid the Platonic tradition. Denys Turner has shown that the speculative Neoplatonism of the Greek Fathers gave form and direction to Western Monasticism, for one.[2] Bernard McGinn has demonstrated the influence of Proclean Neoplatonism on Dominican scholasticism and mysticism for another.[3] Volker Leppin has recently demonstrated the importance of Johannes Tauler and the Theologia Germanica for the generation of Luther’s thought.[4] In his scholastic education, Luther would have read Lombard’s Sentences, which mostly draws on Augustine and John of Damascus. In his early commentary on the Psalms, we see Luther interacting with the Christian Proclean Pseud-Dionysus (or, for him, just Dionysus). And Saak and Anderas have both demonstrated fairly pointedly Luther’s reliance on the late Augustine (of course, once again, for Luther this would have just been “Augustine”).[5]

Some of these influences, it is true, Luther ended up rejecting. For example, he repeats a common medieval complaint about Pseudo-Dionysus, that his grand Proclean vision somehow loses a necessary emphasis on Christ. But this is not a condemnation of Dionysus’ platonism, and it is also not a complaint that originates with Luther. He likewise makes some disparaging comments about Augustine—but these have to be taken for the anecdotes they are, not sweeping generalizations about Augustine’s entire theological project (and certainly not a condemnation of Augustine’s metaphysics). John of Damascus retains his importance in Luther’s Christology, which is distinctly realist (and not only relational, whatever that term means). Luther never sours on Tauler or the Theologia Germanica, which are both deeply influenced by Dominican Neoplatonism.[6] When one reads Luther’s texts, one is forced to see that he really didn’t have a problem with late antique philosophy, as long as it was theistic (everybody since Origen had a problem with Lucretius and Epicurus). Luther’s reformation was not a reformation directed against Plato; in fact, in some significant ways, platonism helped Luther articulate his theology, in both its scholastic and mystical dimensions.

Such a reassessment is also motivated by reexamining Luther’s debt to humanism. There are sometimes misconceptions about humanism among Lutherans, colored mostly by a particular reading of the controversy between Luther and Erasmus over the freedom of the will.[7] And so, in the reformation biographies, sometimes historians make a sharp division between the reformation and renaissance, arguing that the former was theological while the latter was anthropological. Some theologians even say that the humanists believed in works righteousness, while the reformers believed in justification by grace through faith. It is usually acknowledged that the reformers took certain tools from the humanists, such as humanist philology, but by and large left the rest of their anthropocentric doctrines to be taken up by the later Enlightenment.[8]

But humanism was more than simply a philological approach. It was inherently theological.[9] Particularly, the humanists were interested in the tradition of Christian Platonism and the possibility of that tradition’s resurrection. The southern humanists were enamored with Neoplatonism: Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola were members of the Florentine Platonic academy, which spread neoplatonic and hermetic philosophy throughout the continent. In the North, Nicholas of Cusa, John Colet, Desiderius Erasmus, and Johannes Reuchlin all championed similar doctrines, influencing both magisterial and separatist reformers. These humanists were united in a love for this tradition; and because of their love for this tradition, they embraced the classical rhetoric of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian.

Once again, some scholars here tear apart what in antiquity went together. Rhetoric and philosophy were not two separate things. Rhetoric has always assumed a philosophy, whether it was the relativism of the sophists, the advanced psychology of Aristotle, or the mystical platonism and stoicism of Cicero and Quintilian.[10] These last authors were especially used by St. Augustine, and their writings thus became congenial to the humanist project worked out along medieval spiritual lines.

Sometimes, in Luther Studies, scholars neglect the fact that Luther’s thought is saturated by the humanist retrieval of classical rhetoric. And by this, I do not simply mean rhetorical devices, though these are absolutely present. Rather, I mean that Luther’s thought was deeply impacted by a rhetorical view of the world, in which rhetoric is a divine act, and the nature of reality is language. These features of Luther’s theology are sometimes advanced according to modern linguistic theory, such that Luther becomes the originator of Austen’s speech-act theory, or the founder of a relational ontology.[11] But in reality, they are much older, and are in line with his general acceptance of a classical, platonic view of reality.

[1] For a summary of scholarship on Plato, see the discussion in Naomi Fisher, Schelling’s Mystical Platonism (1792-1802), (Oxford: Oxford, 2024), 3-8. The most important book for the reading of Platonism advocated in this thesis is Lloyd P. Gerson, From Plato to Platonism, (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). See also Dmitiri Nikulin, “Plato: Testimonia et Fragmenta” in The Other Plato: The Tübingen Interpretation of Plato’s Inner-Academic Teachings, ed. Dmitri Nikulin, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012), 1-38 (esp. 9); Giovanni Reale, Toward a New Interpretation of Plato, trans. John R. Catan and Richard Davies, (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 23-49; Raymbond Klibansky, The continuity of the Platonic Tradition During the Middle Ages, with a new preface and four supplementary chapters, together with Plato’s Parmenides in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, (Muenchen, DE: Kraus International Publications, 1981), 21-31; James Hanks, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, volume 1, (Leiden: Brill, 1990); and of course, Lloyd P. Gerson, “Plotinus and Platonism,” in Brill’s Companion to the Classical Reception of Plato in Antiquity, ed. Harold Tarrant, Danielle A. Layne, Dirk Baltzly, and François Renaud, (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 316-335.

[2] Denys Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs, (Cistercian Publications, 1995), 20-21.

[3] Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, vol. 4 (New York, NY: Herder and Herder, 2005), 39-47.

[4] Volker Leppin, Die Fremde Reformation: Luthers mystische Wurzeln, (München, DE: C.H. Beck, 2016) and Volker Leppin, United with Christ: Martin Luther and Christian Mysticism, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2025). For a general introduction to the literature about the question of Luther’s mysticism, see Ronald Rittgers, “Martin Luther,” in Protestants and Mysticism in Reformation Europe, eds. Ronald K. Rittgers and Vincent Evener, (Leiden: Brill, 2019): 34-55. The seminal article for this discussion is Heiko Obermann, “Simul Gemitus et Raptus: Luther and Mysticism” in The Dawn of the Reformation: 126-154.

[5]Erik Saak, Luther and the Reformation of the Later Middle Ages, (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2017); Phil Anderas, Rennovatio: Martin Luther’s Augustinian Theology of Sin, Grace, and Holiness, (Göttingen: V&R, 2019), 257-304. See also Ilmari Karimies, Martin Luther’s Understanding of Faith and Reality (1513-1521): The Influence of Augustinian Platonism and Illumination in Luther’s Thought, (Tuebingen, DE: Mohr Siebeck, 2022).

[6] McGinn, Harvest, 240-296, 392-404.

[7] James M. Kittelson, Luther the Reformer: The Story of the Man and His Career, (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2003), 77 and James A Nestingen’s “Introduction: Luther and Erasmus on the Bondage of the Will” in Gerhard Forde, The Captivation of the Will: Luther and Erasmus on Freedom and Bondage, ed. Steven Paulson, Lutheran Quarterly Books, (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm.B. Eerdmans, 2005), 1-21.

[8] One cannot help but think of the “three streams” approach recently utilized by Thomas Korcok, Lutheran Education: From Wittenberg to the Future, St. Louis: Concordia, 2011), which reduces humanism to simply a textual approach.

[9] For humanist spiritualism, see André Séguenny’s article “Schwenckfeld and Christian Humanism,” in Schwenckfeld and Early Schwenkfeldianism: Papers Presented at the Colloquium on Schwenckfeld and the Schwenckfelders, September 17-22, 1984, ed. Peter C. Erb, (Pennsburg, PA: Schwenkfelder Library, 1986): 285-304 (esp. 293-298). See also Stolt, Martin Luthers Rhetorik des Hertzen, (Stuttgart: UBT, 2000) and Carl P.E. Springer’s Cicero in Heaven: The Roman Rhetor and Luther’s Reformation, (Leiden: Brill, 2018), esp. 46, 77-78.

[10] Martin Camargo, “Non solum sibi sed aliis etiam”: Neoplatonism and Rhetoric in Saint Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana,” Rhetorica vol 16, no. 4 (1998): 393-408; Carol Poster, “Silence as a Rhetorical Strategy in Neoplatonic Mysticism,” Mystics Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 2 (June 1998): 48-72.

[11] Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas H. Trapp, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008); Robert Kolb, Face to Face: Martin Luther’s View of Reality, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2024), esp. 3-9 and 257-259; Charles Arand and Robert Kolb, The Genius of Luther’s Theology: A Wittenberg Way of Thinking for the Contemporary Church, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008).

It is just so bizarre. On the one hand, it is this very material process. I type these words out on a keyboard, this enters the computer according to a code, and what appears on the screen is the equivalent to written script. If I am writing on a paper, I simply use a technique I have practiced every day since elementary school, imprinting ink from the pen onto a substance that is capable of retaining its imprint. The paper receives the ink, just as the ink gives itself to the paper; the keys input the encoded message, and the screen displays it with some permanency. That’s materially what we do when we write. We imprint—we rely on a matrix of relative cause and effect, that when I press down on keys or when I make strokes on a page, there will be some sort of effect, some sort of relative permanence.

And not only “some sort” of relative permanence. But “some sort” of intelligible permanence. When we write, we arrange the technology of written language according to a grammar, an intelligible arrangement. This is governed first of all by linguistic rules—writing is orderly, it follows commonly practiced conventions. But it does so for the end of intelligibility (or sometimes, obscurity—but then, it does so for an understood affect). It follows the standard rules of grammar and spelling so that it might be comprehensible—by other intellects. And here is the bizarre part. Through the medium of writing—and its corresponding technology, reading—we encounter the intention, the thoughts, the intellect of other human beings. Writing in this sense is a medium, by which what is internal becomes external, what is unempirical becomes empirical. In that sense, writing is revelation, a revelation of the intellect, of the one who writes.

Writing is an artifact of the one who writes. This means that it shares, to some degree, in the intellect’s attributes—especially in terms of intelligibility and purposefulness. But interestingly enough, these attributes are transferred—that is, they belong more properly to the intellect who writes, than they do to the writing itself. There is an analogy between the writer and what is written; the written document possesses the characteristics of the writer, but in a manner or mode appropriate to it. This is extremely interesting—for the human intellect is not closed off to this material, this ink and paper, but rather shares itself with them. It bestows something of its intellect on them.

In this sense, writing is revelatory. Writing reveals the intellect both to itself and to other intellects. Something of the intellect is shown in writing; by no means the whole intellect—but rather, the modal characteristics of the intellect are contained in the writing and inferred by the reader. Things that are present to the intellect all at once are laid out in an orderly sequence. Impressions are given the form of sentences, requiring judgments about subjects, verbs, and objects. As much as writing is expressive, bringing something new out of the intellect, it is also limiting, making the intellect conform its thinking to the limits of the particular language one is writing in. Writing, in this sense, reveals—but every revelation is also a limitation.

It amazes me when I pick up a book that I can encounter a brief moment in the intellectual journey of a human being. That I can catch a snapshot of a human being thinking, feeling, of their intellectual life—stretched out over the temporal sequence of language and conformed to its categories. In a sense, in writing, we encounter both the material and the intellectual working together as one, as closely as the soul moves the body. Writing and reading thus become opportunities for communion with others, the site in which we can practice being human, what the ancients called “virtue.” If we encounter another intellect as we read, we can practice loving that intellect as a reflection or image of God, revealed to us through the precious medium of language.

I try to do this when I read theologians. The vehicle of my own ecumenical theology is this sort of phenomenologically-serious writing and reading. I do not read in order to exploit, condemn, or judge. Rather, I read with the expectation that I will encounter another human being seeking God in the text before me. This means bracketing some of the narratives we often assume in theology today. For example, in my thesis on Gregory of Nyssa and Martin Luther, I have had to suspend the modern judgment that the two are incompatible thinkers, and instead look at what the thinkers have to say for themselves. I do the same thing when I read Boehme or writers from his tradition: I bracket the assumption that these are modern gnostics (which is really a bad faith argument anyway) and instead approach the text with the intention to listen to what Boehme has to say for himself. In this way, I remain open to the way these texts might question me; I allow a conversation to begin in which I am an active participant, but not a monologuist. I am open to being wrong about my convictions, because this is the prerequisite of any truly ecumenical theological conversation—to begin it from a place of humility, not pride.

So far, this has been really fruitful for me. It has led me to encounter writings with a wonder and an excitement that I notice many of my peers do not share. And it has also led to a really interesting push and pull when it comes to how I think about my faith. Seriously engaging with thinkers that are different from me has led me to question some of my most cherished beliefs, as well as discover that some of the things I held dear actually are pretty important. It has given me a larger view of what Christianity is about, and what the possibilities contained within it could be. And reading texts from the history of the church has given me the opportunity to love those whom I disagree with—for example, Albrecht Ritschl, lately—with respect and love, instead of simple party spirit. It is stretching, but in a good way. Reading and writing in this sense have encouraged me to pursue and cultivate virtue.

Reading and writing are simply amazing! And there are many facets of these disciplines to probe and to contemplate. But as I come to a conclusion on my STM thesis, I’ve been internalizing more and more what they mean to me, and how they influence my theological work. I hope that you have found this reflection edifying, and are open to the invitation I set forward here on Substack, the conversation opened up by our mutual writing and reading.

Only, they weren’t exactly romantic butterflies. They were nervous butterflies. Butterflies that said “I don’t know what kind of eschatology my girlfriend holds to, but this isn’t a good one.” And further, “I think she just sent me a song about transitioning out of the faith.” And even further: “I think that she just sent me a song that romanticizes death.”

I mean, recall the lyrics:

“Love of mine
Someday you will die
But I’ll be close behind
I’ll follow you into the dark
No blinding light
Or tunnels to gates of white
Just our hands clasped so tight
Waiting for the hint of a spark.”

Of course, super weird (and not romantic) opening. I mean, I’m all for momento mori, but I have never understood how morbidity could be romantic—you know, the whole Hozier aesthetic—unless it was embedded in something deeper. It’s one of the excesses of English Romanticism—particularly but not exclusively Shelly—to retain the Christian estimation of death within the immanent frame of enlightenment. And with Lewis, I tend to not enjoy this particular kind of Romanticism.

But even looking past that, this song has such weird theological vibes. Like, what a weird entrance into personal eschatology. I was, at this point in my life, only comfortable with a very clearly delineated understanding of end things. Part of this was because of where I was at on my spiritual journey. Part of this was where the church was at. This was around the time that Rob Bell was making waves in American Evangelicalism for allegedly denying the existence of hell (spoiler: he didn’t). And so it was a mark of Lutheran orthodoxy to hold to a strong doctrine of eternal conscious torment (infernalism). For the song to suggest anything but the eschatological dualism that has become commonplace in the western church was concerning, even distressing for high school Ben. And even moreso, to replace this eschatology with romantic sentiment—“just our hands clasped so tight / waiting for the hint of a spark”—what was that? I didn’t even have a box for it.

The chorus equally perturbed me. It went

“If heaven and hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate their “no”s
On their vacancy signs
If there’s no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I’ll follow you into the dark”

It was just bizarre. And weird. Weirder still was that in verse two, Benjamin Gibbard tells us a bit about his catholic upbringing, and how that influences this personal eschatology. He describes the nuns, whose severe disciplinary actions were based on an understanding of divine love at the heart of which was fear. He “never went back”—not only physically (he ended up graduating from a public school university), but ideologically, he “never went back” to his catholic faith, and remains to this day agnostic. Instead, he chose a love that was not based in fear; a love that was simply, love.

The third verse chronicles his adventures with his lover. He emphasizes that his lover and he have seen many things over the course of their life, and that now they are ready to die. “But it’s nothing to cry about” he soothes, “because we’ll hold each other soon / in the blackest of rooms.” That is, he lived a full life with someone he loved, and he is convinced that, even without the traditional formulae of heaven and hell to rely upon, that he and the one he loves are intimately bound, even beyond death. That somehow, even though the specifics are murky, this love will live on.

I very much did not like the implications of this song when I was a teenager. I didn’t like that it romanticized death, that it was critical of organized religion, or that it was hazily and agnostically sentimental about the afterlife. I didn’t think that Ben Gibbard knew what he was talking about; I thought it would be better for him to return to the Church and once again embrace the traditional view.

It's been years since my high school girlfriend sent me the song. But every so often, I think about it, because it was just so hard for me to get my head around why someone would like it. How someone could be sucked in by the surface level “deepness” without actually thinking about what the lyrics were saying, how they were depicting our personal destinies. When I listened to it, all I heard was corporate nihilism. It didn’t say enough. Because really, it didn’t say anything. Gibbard was unable to write a deep and meaningful piece of art—and honestly, this was probably because he simply didn’t have deep enough beliefs from which to pull from, out of which to express himself. But as I was thinking about it today, I was wondering. What would it look like for this song to have a theoretical substructure that provided it the means by which to be insightful, the means for it to actually say something? To this end, in this post I want to interpret this song allegorically, so as to save it from the abyss on which it teeters.

Allegorical Reading of “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie

The first question one must ask is: who is speaking? The song begins “Love of mine” That is, it begins as address. And this address is in the style of nuptial language, as the address from a Beloved to a Lover. We see it in the Gospels, but more importantly, we see it in the Song of Songs, where the Beloved often calls to his lover “my love” or “love of mine.” This appellation, “love of mine” is spoken by the Bride’s Beloved, who is, of course, Christ, the Bridegroom. And if it is Christ the Bridegroom who is speaking, then it must, indeed, be the bride, the lover, who hears; fundamentally, then, this song should be seen as a discourse between Christ and the Church.

Christ continues: “Love of mine / someday you will die.” Profound words, the height of all human wisdom. For is this not the sum of the Jewish wisdom writings, that “all flesh is grass” that “all is vapor” to “not put trust in princes”? Wisdom counsels us in these words, surely, with a divine wisdom, that we are not to look to any other created thing, nothing but God himself for salvation. Someday, we will all die; the world turns; the grass withers and fades, but the Word of the Lord remains in eternity.

And further, this sounds like what Jesus is getting at in his famous “Parable of the Rich Fool.” For in that paprable, Jesus invites us to consider our own mortality; he says: (Lk 20:13-21), “You fool! This night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” This is certainly the call to consider death that has animated Christianity for most of its history, what we call the Momento Mori, to live as if each day was one’s last. Christians constantly keep death in their sight, because they know that they have limited time to preach, teach, administer, love. And so, it needs to count. As Luther says in his sermon On Preparing to Die (1519): “We should familiarize ourselves with death during our lifetime, inviting death into our presence when it is still at a distance and not on the move.” Only in this way will Christians die well: if they practice every single day.

Gibbard continues: “But I’ll be close behind.” That is, he has reversed the fundamental Pauline distinction between head and body! Whereas in 1 Corinthians, Paul argues for the resurrection of the dead on the basis of the real participation in Christ that one has as his body (for where the head goes, the body must go also), Gibbard reverses the claim, viewing death from our own experience. Death feels like we go first and Christ follows after us, because, once again, in the words of the Reformer, “we must do our own dying.” We die like the Son died: alone, in a dark night, feeling forsaken. And it feels like Christ must follow us, instead of we him; as if we have departed him by departing this life, instead of entering into him with a finality.

This is very astute. “I’ll be close behind” in one fell swoop both acknowledges the feeling of God-forsakenness that accompanies death, while still assuring us that in some way God is present in our death; that even though it feels like we are entering into our dissolution, Christ can follow us even there, even to the depths of the sea, because of his great mercy and love for us.

This is made clear by what comes next: “I’ll follow you into the dark.” As we will see, this is the line which is repeated over and over again in this song. So it is important to not underestimate its importance. Our phenomenological perception of death is that it is something dark, as opposed to light. That is, we always value what is in front of ourselves as what is clear, and what is far from us and unknown as what is obscure. We think of death as the night of the soul, because we do not understand it. But in his De Mortis, St. Gregory of Nyssa tells us that this must not necessarily be so. Consider, he tells us, the creation in front of us. Can we dare to understand exactly how it works? Or why it works? Is not our earthly life more obscure to us than we often realize, yet we do not fear it. It is hardly rational to fear death because it is unknown, Gregory tells us; rather, its unknowness makes it more like than unlike our current state of affairs.

St. Gregory of Nyssa again tells us that death is not the darkness that is important. Rather, it is the darkness of the cloud that we should seek to understand. Gibbard, of course, knows this, and so in his song, he connects the dark with union—the nuptial imagery I pointed out before. Christ “follows us into the dark”—but this is not simply the dark of death, but rather the darkness of the cloud, which guards the ascetic ascent to the Heavenly Tabernacle, which is the union of God and Man. They are, in a sense, mutually constitutive or co-exegeting images: for it is only at death that we take off the old man fully, so as to travel to the heavenly Jerusalem that much easier. In this sense, death functions, according to Gibbard, like the cloud in De Vita Moyses: it is the clouding of the intellect, the complete mortification of the human nature so that it might receive union by grace.

Gibbard goes on to deconstruct traditional portraits of heaven and hell. According to the mystics, hell and heaven are not local places. That is, one is not above and one is not below. Rather, heaven is the presence of God and hell is to be apart from God. This is why Gibbard says “no blinding light or tunnels to gates of white” await Christ and the Beloved. Christ gives this divine knowledge to the soul which is his lover, that at each personal eschatology, one is not sent to a local place, but rather, what is constitutive of the personal end-state is “hands clasped so tight / waiting for the hint of a spark.” That is, the human individual is constituted by his or her relationships: between the Beloved and the Lover, but also the lover in her interhyposticity, in her openness to other human beings. This is exactly the argument that David Bentley Hart made in his That All Shall Be Saved, and which Bulgakov makes in his The Bride of the Lamb. There are no isolates human beings: rather, we are all made up of “our hands clasped so tight”, the interhyposticity of the human spirit.

The stanza closes on boehmist imagery. “Waiting for a hint of a spark” is of course a reference to the “spark” or “shine” which Boehme saw, the shine which he experienced, which revealed to him the seven source spirits in seven wheels, always turning in different directions. The crack, or the shine, or the spark of light comes when the spirits overpower one another in the love-play, which of course Gibbard hints at with his use of Bride/Bridegroom language in this stanza. The crack, or the spark, or the shine that awaits the human being is likewise his divine illumination now that his soul is not obscured by the presence of his body, so he is able to see spiritual truths in a spiritual way, and not, as the Apostle Paul says, “through a glass, dimly.”

We come then, to the chorus. The chorus takes up the theme which we explored above, with the twofold meaning of “darkness” in Gibbard’s lyrics. He returns to critiquing the traditional, static concepts of hell, reducing them to absurdity, as if they are simply concrete places to live, instead of spiritual realities. It is so interesting how he does this throughout: with a deft metaphysical hand, he subtly digs at the reader by subverting our assumptions that hell and heaven are somehow more than what we experience here on earth. Rather, he claims that they have “vacancy signs” that are put up by their caretakers, they experience satiation, as if they allowed a finite number to enter their doors, and then they were filled up. Gibbard obviously does not believe this. But he writes the two entities in such a way to poke fun at the way Christians have sometimes discussed the afterlife, as if it was simply a continuation of life here and now. He satirizes the way Christians want households, even mansions, in heaven, along with baseball and all their favorite foods. Gibbard lampoons this view because he is a strict spiritualist: it is as if he were saying that a true personal eschatology should “illuminate the No’s in [its] vacancy sign” to gross materialism and unsophisticated thinking.

In some sense, what Gibbard is doing here is like Rabi’ah. Rabi’ah famously rejected a scheme of rewards in Islamic theology, arguing that the only good of heaven is actually participating, that is, loving, God. In a similar way, Gobbard here is arguing that, if one could simply imagine heaven and hell, that is, rewards and punishments, being full, or even irrelevant, what would be left is simply this: the soul ascending into the dark, accompanied by that which it loves. “If there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks / then I’ll follow you into the dark” he has Christ proclaim. That is, in the dark of the cloud, at the dark of death, our soul is forced to depart the things of this world, first through contemplation, and then literally, through the putting off of the body. This can be seen as a departing, but Gibbard purposely uses the word “embarking”, which is a reference to Gregory of Nyssa’s notorious doctrine of epectasy, in which he teaches that after death, creatures perfectly and endlessly embark within God, going from perfection to perfection. He draws attention to the theme of the song, which is the union of the soul with God, in the last part of the chorus: for as we saw above, Christ follows the soul into the dark, at the hour of the death of the ego and the death of the flesh, Christ’s promises are sure, that he follows after the soul, in its own dark night.

In the next verse, Gobbard has the Bridegroom embark on what seems to be a viciously protestant critique of Romanism. I don’t know if I exactly would follow him there, seeing as I have quite a bit of respect for other Christian traditions, and the whole things feels rather out of place. But a few explanatory remarks might be called for.

In Greek, “catholikos” means “universal”—so I do not see why, following certain other interpreters, we must necessarily take him to mean specifically a school of one particular denomination.

“Roman rule” looks to be a reference to protestant grievances with papal authority—but I am convinced that this is a misreading. I base this on the fact that this “Roman Rule” is called “vicious,” a word which has the Latin root “vitium” meaning “blemish” or even a medical “malformation.” This universal schooling that he is talking about is not vicious in the sense of diabolical—rather it is blemished, imperfect, in some way it is malformed and does not attain to its goal.

We have to remember who is doing the speaking here. It is still the Bridegroom. The Bridegroom, Christ, who entered the “universal school” of the world through his incarnation, had his “knuckles bruised” at the crucifixion, and like a lamb led to the slaughter “held [his] tongue” before what was ultimately malformed, blemished, and irreverent desires that seized human beings, crowding him out of their hearts. Is this not the same thing that happens daily, when we prefer the desires of our hearts to the goodness of his will? Does not Christ constantly enter into our Catholic Schools and there encounter the viciousness of our Roman rule, getting his knuckles bruised by our hearts, those fickle ladies in black?

It is important to dwell here a little while on this “lady in black.” The literal sense of this word is of course referring to nuns. But to hold to such a literal meaning here is irrational, because it doesn’t follow the sequence of the passage. We have already seen that the Bridegroom, Christ, is here recounting his earthly sojourn. How irrational it would be to think that there were nuns on earth during the incarnation! And so, we must understand this enigma spiritually, as a figure more appropriate to the voice of our Bridegroom.

The discerning intellect will notice that in this song, the Spirit skillfully has given us two different words for that which is not white. On the one hand, we have what we already saw, “dark”: this is not the opposite of white, but rather a veiled form of it, an obscuration, not an obliteration. On the other hand, here there is “black,” which is the true opposite of white. This “lady in black” is not a veiled form of the good, but rather, she is the opposite of the good, namely, the lack of good. She is a woman because Gobbard has read the book of Revelation: he knows of the Biblical contrast between two women, the one who is dressed in the Sun (a mirror image of Christ at his Transfiguration) and the one who is drunk on the blood of those slaughtered by Babylon the great. This “Great Harlot” is here invoked to describe all those who bruised Christ’s knuckles, because it was surely the world’s tendency towards nonbeing, its unraveling, its participation in death that caused his sufferings and death. Christ held his tongue despite the abuses of the great enemy of all mankind, as she taught him a false gospel, namely, “that fear is the heart of love.” And having conquered her, he “never went back”: as the Apostle says, “dying he died to sin once for all […] death no longer has dominion over him.”

What follows is the chorus, said again, as if to confirm these things to be true.

There is, of course, one more verse to the song. But if I were to interpret it for you, what would be left for your own eager intellects? It is not for me to interpret all scriptures for the reader, but rather to incite into you a desire to eagerly drink the spiritual nectar, which has been hidden in the brine of Death Cab for Cutie’s lyrics, trapped away as a spiritual man carried in this body of death. But beneath this flesh is the heart of the mysteries of the faith, apparent for one who has drawn back Moses’ veil, that we, too, might gaze upon the image of the Father, who is Christ our Lord. For to him and to the Father and to the Holy Spirit is that unending splendor and glory, now and forever. Amen.

Thanks for reading my allegorical exegesis. I just wanted to put at the end that this was satire, I don’t own the rights to anything, and it was purely to make you laugh. I hope you enjoyed! -BWAM

All of that is, of course, nonsense. There is no healthy social media consumption. The fact that substack gives us the option to write our thoughts out long-form, instead of in pithy one-liners is indeed good—but if you’ve spent any times in Substack notes, you’ll see that the differences between this platform and others of a more notorious variety have been overexaggerated. Substack is social media. From the invisible hand of the algorithm that controls what posts we see and don’t see, to the system of social rewards sent communicated through engagement statistics for each post and the normal social media language of “likes” and “comments.” It may be that you prefer this platform to others (I certainly do); but we are not avoiding social media in any meaningful way by being on substack.

This means that we need to be aware of the ways in which substack incentivizes certain values, when it comes to our writing. The one I want to talk about in this post is the incentivization of novelty. That is, that one’s output needs to be constantly new, original, that everything needs to be captivatingly creative, a masterpiece. And if one’s piece is not “original”, then it is not worth posting.

This is of course not something that only concerns social media. Entertainment mediums in general rely on the new, the foreign, the exotic. This is one of the ways that they stimulate our interest. And they are only mirroring the basic impulse of our society. In academics, “new” research is highly praised, especially if it breaks more ground which other scholars can build on. Capitalist business models are of course all based around novelty and innovation—if one can find a new product market, a new, more efficient way of making an old product, or perhaps a new, more effective philosophy of business, you are an essential person to your company’s vision. We speak of “advances” in medicine and technology, “new discoveries” in the physical sciences, “breakthroughs” in mathematics, etc., etc.

In theology, this love of the “new” is shown particularly in our genealogies: how we think about those that have come before us. We praise thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther and John Calvin, etc., for their ingenuity, for their novelty of thinking, for the way they originally developed the tradition they received. There is an “Augustinian” way of doing theology, or a “Thomist School” or a “Reformation Discovery”: in our historiography, we prioritize what became explicitly new with their thought, we assume development, we take these figures more as charismatic leaders and capitalist innovators, instead of how they usually described themselves, as priests, bishops, teachers of Christ’s Church. And then we who do theology try to be like them, either explicitly or implicitly in our writing, our theologizing. All of a sudden, Substack becomes full of theologians obsessed with novelty, with how they can put wild things together, how they can think through the most obscure metaphysics, how they can mix and match the most opposite dishes on the long buffet of history.

Please don’t hear me wrong. I don’t have any problem with authentic innovations in theology. But they have to be intentional. They have to be clever and helpful. Novel answers must be in dialogue with theology of the past and the problems we’ve inherited from it. It must be “true” to the experience of the community, in her writings, in her life lived together, etc. New definitely has a place—and it must be discerned in a life of prayer and listening to the saints. Hard conversations must be had; God must be present—this is how genuine newness occurs.

But that hardly seems to be the type of novelty platforms like substack encourage. Once I publish an article, it becomes an artifact, trapped like a bug in amber. It goes out into the algorithm, and it is brought to people’s screens, people with related interests (whether or not they follow me). People like it—or ignore it—and maybe share it with their thoughts. Substack shows me the metrics of how my post is “doing”—its performance, assuming that each post is meant to influence, to be talked about, to be rewarded with engagement. What is encouraged are “fresh takes”; a culture of “cultural commentators” who always have something insightful to say, always perform, always drive up engagement with their particular product.

This is the part of substack that needs to die. Substack is great for writing and sending what you write to people’s inboxes. Substack is great for collaboration and networking between creatives. But Substack is terrible for the pressure it puts on writers to perform, to quantify their contribution in likes or other forms of engagement, to seek more and more novelty for the sake of relevance to the contemporary discussion. I once joking made a status that said “down with the ‘stats button.’” I repeat that refrain here, even more adamantly, adding to it “down with ‘home,’ as well.”

These trends on this website are worrying, because there is great potential here for substack to be a fun and encouraging place to write. Where we all talk about our interests, not caring who finds us, who reads us, how our pieces “do” or “engage” with our “audiences.” A place where we are motivated by love for our topic, for our crafts, instead of the need for “likes.” But the social media components of this website and app make it hard to realize this ideal. Instead, they create a space where anxiety, anxiety for relevance, anxiety for connection, anxiety for approval, anxiety for novelty sits and waits for us, a shadow over our art.

May we not give in; may we instead laugh at the metrics that substack offers to measure the worth and “effect” of our art.

May we resist the urge towards constant novelty.

I have been really bad at reading pieces on substack. Even the pieces that my friends write. For some reason, it just feels far too exhausting to hear a new perspective, far to tiresome to be asked to evaluate something I assume is correct. Think pieces, I think they’re called. “Why everything you think you know about x is wrong…” “Something surprising about x that you need to learn…” I just can’t bring myself to read them anymore. My attention feels spread far too thin, and in the end, though these articles get views, they seem to hardly deliver on their promised insights.

I’ve written a little bit about this before. In “Fernando Pessoa on Not Thinking” I first made the point that there is a spiritual side to not thinking, turning off one’s brain, and not engaging in think pieces. In the follow up post, “Talking Heads and Social Media” I encouraged my readers to practice humility and gentleness, and to avoid what I called “social media thinking”. In a piece that I accidentally sent before it was ready, called “Resisting the urge towards novelty on substack (and in life)”, I publicly complained about the way that substack incentivizes lazy and in some sense dishonest engagement, by asking us to prioritize that which is new, shocking, exciting, or strange. It continues to reduce us to peddlers of our ideas, self-exploiters, trying to discern by strange intuitions the daemonic influences of the algorithm, as it prioritizes voices based, not on content, but on obscure levels of engagement.

All of this brings me to this current post. A post in which I admit that I am exhausted by substack. That is, I don’t really write here, and I don’t really read here. It feels like the Aeolian Harp is simply sitting in still water. I have ideas, I have plans—but with the state of my school and personal life, it is hardly realizable. And I think that frustrates me a little bit. And this frustration has led me to think about: why am I frustrated? What about the substack app is putting pressure on me to perform, in this season where I really can’t engage all that much?

I think that what’s pressuring me to perform are the social media dimensions of the app. The app is basically designed to make you want to join a conversation. It exposes you to conversations you are not already a part of, accounts that you never heard of, think pieces on things you never thought about. By the algorithm, it prioritizes the articles that it thinks you will find more engaging, and it puts them in your face and coerces you to notice them. And it actually prioritizes writers you do not know, over the ones you follow, even under the “following” tab. The app implicitly asks you to ever grow, to learn more and more, and promote your own work more and more, in an endless expanse of bad infinity.

But this is not like meeting new people or reading new books in real life. Rather, everything is flattened out, made the same. The only thing to differentiate writings from one another is for them to have flashy titles or explosive descriptions—because these are different, they get noticed, engaged with, and then prioritized by the algorithm. In real life, on the other hand, you can hear a person’s voice, see their gate, notice their eyes light up when they tell you something they’re passionate about. You can look at a book, see its binding, feel the age in its pages, smell the generations who have flipped through it. On substack, all of work is ones and zeros, and our relationships with one another can at times border on the transactional.

Ultimately, I think that what saddens me the most about substack is that it is not really conversational. That is, instead of being naturally disposed towards conversations, it creates spaces in which we create digital fortresses for our thoughts, where we control who comes in and who comes out, where we dictate the message to followers, who cease to be real but are instead reduced to pixels on the screen, numbers to be graphed, revenue to be regulated. Ultimately, the social media function still is a fundamental reduction of the human to fit the medium on which we try to express ourselves. It is a pedagogy in the market of values, the reduction of all products to the same along with their consumers, as Marx talks about in in his first volume of Capital.

In this sense, Substack is actually pretty bad for us writers. It would be much better for it to only have the email function, not paired with social media. In fact, it would be better for us to write out papers on our computers and mail them to our friends directly, so that we might start living, breathing conversations. It would be much better for us to submit our writing to academic journals, so that professionals can critique them and make them better. It would be much better if we gifted our art and poetry to others, so that they could cherish them and the occasion on which they were presented. Instead of placing more and more of ourselves out into the void, it might be good to spend that energy doing real things: with loved ones, professionally, and for our own spiritual edification.

I do like writing. But writing for me is always more than writing. It is dialogue. It is orality. It is being open to one another. I really think social media is problematic. For now, I’m going to keep on writing on substack, but I think I’m going to delete the app off my phone, so that I don’t engage here like I used to on Facebook or X (née Twitter). Once I finish my thesis, I’ll come back and try to get some more essays done for you lovely people, without engaging in the social media components of the app.

Recently, I’ve had multiple people come up to me and say that they don’t understand what I’m writing about. The names are obscure, the references too specific, the passion more confusing than inspiring. This isn’t the reputation that I want. I don’t want to be known for writing obscurely; I want to be known for writing meaningfully, and beautifully. Like the Romantics of old, I want to match my form to my content: to write splendidly of things that are splendid. Because writing itself can be a vehicle of contemplation, the completion of reading, the response evoked by reading. I take in the words of someone like Bulgakov or Boehme, of Luther or Nyssa, and they evoke in me an urge to engage in the conversation begun by their texts. Their texts stir my mind with concepts and my imagination with images, and in so doing change me into someone who writes differently. I experience their writings as gifts, gifts to be given again in my own writings, as I attempt to communicate to others what these theologians wrote, and why they wrote it. And I hope, then, that by coming into contact with their thoughts, those who read what I write might become inspired to read and write for themselves, forming an ecology of gift-giving.

Reading, of course, is no easy feat, just as writing isn’t one. Reading takes virtue: charity, patience, fortitude, temperance, and the like. If these virtues are lacking, one runs the risk of misunderstanding what the author wrote, of molding him according to one’s own deficiencies. Authors of the past are mirrors for our present: though it’s not all that we see in them, we certainly cannot but see in them a reflected image of ourselves. Reading involves recognizing our own moral shortcomings, and striving to overcome them by this act of encountering and really loving another. In a book, some other person’s mind is opened up to us through the medium of their language and written skill; not their whole mind, of course, but rather their mind thinking about a particular topic, at a particular moment, frozen in time like a bug preserved in amber (the image is from Friedrich Nietzsche). This is at once a miracle and something very delicate, something fragile. Minds on page can be bent in such a way that minds by themselves cannot be. C.S. Lewis can be used as an apologist for white American evangelical power; Luther can become the spokesman of the third reich. But this fragility is the condition of communion: like Adam in the beginning, free to choose both good or evil, but open to evil by the passibility of his nature; Nyssa says that the passibility of man is the very foundation of his deification, and that without it, he would have remained apart from God, immature, a man of earth. Perhaps it is the same with our writings—they are fragile, apt to be misunderstood, untethered once they leave our hand; but in this openness to others, they actually can create the context for real communion, for growing together, the possibility of love.

I was recently asked during an interview for a ThD program that I want to enter, “Why does this project you want to embark on matter?” And the question took me by surprise, though it probably shouldn’t. I want to write my dissertation on the possibility of a Lutheran mysticism, by way of a historical investigation into Boehme and Arndt. And the interviewer was right: that’s not really something that most Christians, let alone Lutherans themselves, would really care about. I can hear the litany of questions: how does this help us in this dire political hour? How does that help the church reach the world? How does that further the Kingdom of God? Why should we allocate funds for you to pursue pet interests, while the world burns around us all?

In the moment, I didn’t know how to answer the question. But I think I do now. My project, what I’m working on, like my writing on Substack, doesn’t matter. I mean this in a specific way. If you’ve been following my work, my poetry, my sermons, they are not aimed towards some pragmatic end. They do not attempt to solve the problems of today, they don’t clarify our situation—instead, they usually conclude by racking up more questions than they answer. Speculative theology does not have the answers to solving the rise of ethnic nationalism, the fissures in late stage capitalism, the mass decline of churches, or the radical isolation and fear that people are feeling across our country today. That’s simply not what it’s for.

I do speculative theology because it is useless. That is, it questions our desperate need to perform, to solve, to act, and instead grounds us in the deep wells of existence, the transcendentals that inhere within the Godhead. It relativizes our actions, attempts to shake us out of our self-certainty, leads us into a more detached existence from ourselves. Speculative mysticism forces us to listen to people who are different than us, engage in problems that are strange to us, and in this way, actually transforms us into different people, who have heard, seen, and felt things that other people simply haven’t. The transformative value of studying the mystics alone is reason enough to do it: but imagine—if enough people studied mystics, the lovers of the faith, instead of the polemicists and fighters. Imagine what the Church and Country might look like.

Their writings call us to imagine a different future—to imagine a different self, with different relations to our neighbors, our communities, and our God. Speculative theology may be useless for the present moment—but that might be because speculative mysticism challenges the contemporary moment, confronts its absolute claim on our thought and our life. Perhaps it is the present moment that is wrong, not speculative theology. Perhaps it is the present moment, what we are currently doing, that is real insanity, expecting things to change as we do the same thing over and over again. The quest of mystical theology, the object of which is the holy grail of the eucharist, remains open to us— if only we will leave home and embark on the only adventure ever taken. It remains open in sunrise and sunset, in the greening of the world, in our participation in liturgy, in the face of those we love and those we hate. It beckons us to something that is new, some other way of living than we have attempted to maintain up to now. And that way is the path followed by the mystic, the speculative theologian, as well.

This is really all I’m writing about here on Substack. On the one hand, nothing very useful. And on the other hand, something that I feel is very important, nonetheless. Substack has become part of my own contemplation of various authors, and I want to use it as an invitation to enjoy these authors, and to invite these authors to change how we think and feel, how we participate in the world around us, to participate in an economy of gift-giving, of love for one another. I know some of the material I talk about is obscure, or unusual, or a little heady. But I’m only bringing it up because it’s edified me in my own life, and I think it could edify you, as well. Take whatever is edifying; leave whatever is not. But at the end of the day, I hope that you’ll continue to join me in seeking for things that are true, good, and beautiful, things that propel us into God.