Jacob Boehme and the Spiritual Roots of Psychotherapy 9004678557, 9789004678552

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Jacob Boehme and the Spiritual Roots of Psychotherapy

Studies in Theology and Religion Edited on Behalf of the Netherlands School for Advanced Studies in Theology and Religion (Noster)

Editors in Chief Jan Willem van Henten (University of Amsterdam) Mandy Robbins (Wrexham University) Associate Editors Herman Beck (Tilburg University) Anders Klostergaard Petersen (Aarhus University) Daniella Müller (Radboud University Nijmegen) Advisory Board David Ford (Cambridge) – Ruard Ganzevoort (Amsterdam) Maaike de Haardt (Tilburg) – Ab de Jong (Leiden) Anne-Marie Korte (Utrecht) Peter Nissen (Nijmegen) – Jeremy Punt (Stellenbosch)

VOLUME 35

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/star

Jacob Boehme and the Spiritual Roots of Psychotherapy Dreams, Ecstasy, and Wisdom By

Glenn J. McCullough

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025000989

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. isSN 1566-208X isbn 978-90-04-67855-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-68029-6 (e-book) DOI 10.1163/9789004680296 Copyright 2025 by Glenn J. McCullough. Published by Koninklijke Brill BV, Plantijnstraat 2, 2321 JC Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill BV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill BV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill BV via brill.com or copyright.com. For more information: [email protected]. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To Cole, Ashlyn, and Caleb

∵

The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. Jesus Christ (Mt. 13.45–46)

…

One pearl was suspended inside the belly of the fish and it gave illumination to Jonah, like this sun which shines with all its might at noon; and it showed to Jonah all that was in the sea and in the depths. Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer (ca. 750)

…

O earthly human! If only you still had it! … If only you knew what lay here, how you would seek after it! … O precious pearl! How sweet you are in the new birth! How fair and surpassing excellent is your lustre! Jacob Boehme, Mysterium Magnum (1624)

…

Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1955)

∵

Contents Preface xi Acknowledgments xv List of Figures and Tables xvi Abbreviations xvii Hymn to Wisdom 1 1 Introduction: Modernity and the Borderland of Dreams 3 1.1 The Larger Context: Dreams and Modern Hubris 3 1.2 Theorists, Themes, and Thesis 13 1.3 Review of Literature 20 1.4 Methodology and Primary Texts 27 1.5 Chapter Summary 29 2 Augustine and the Framework of Theological Psychology 31 2.1 Augustine as Psychotherapist 33 2.2 Map of the Soul: Trinitarian Psychology 35 2.2.1 Will/Love: the Force of Desire 39 2.2.2 Memory: the Infinite Inner World 43 2.2.3 Understanding: the Range of Perception 44 2.3 Dream Theory: Jacob’s Ladder to Heaven 46 2.3.1 Everyday Ecstasy 47 2.3.2 Threefold Vision and the Imaginal Realm 50 2.3.3 Discernment and Demonic Deception 52 2.3.4 Dreams and Paradise 56 2.4 Dream Interpretation: Wisdom and Archetypes 60 2.4.1 Wisdom Created and Uncreated 62 2.4.2 Wisdom and the Soul 64 2.4.3 Wisdom and Creation 67 2.5 Conclusion: Therapeutic Implications 69 3 Jacob Boehme and the Imaginal Rebirth of Theological Psychology 72 3.1 Imaginal Rebirth 75 3.2 Boehme’s Imaginal Realm in Historical Context 77 3.3 Boehme as Magus 79 3.4 Boehme as Mystic 86 3.5 Boehme as Lutheran Integrationist 97

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Contents

4 Boehme as Psychotherapist 103 4.1 Method: Psychology and Theology 103 4.2 Ontology: Three Levels 106 4.3 Approach: Psycho-Mythical Theology 116 5 Boehme’s Map of the Soul: the Birth of the Unconscious Mind 123 5.1 The Soul-Body Nexus in the Micro- and Macrocosm 126 5.2 Abyss: the Eternal Dark Fire of Inner Desire 129 5.3 Wisdom: the Eternal Holy Light of Inner Understanding (“Verstand”) 135 5.4 Knowledge: the Temporal Realm of Outer Reason (“Vernunft”) 140 5.5 Interactions and Transformations: the Twofold and Threefold Soul 142 6 Boehme’s Theory of Dreams: Building the Body of Light 149 6.1 Ecstasy, Magia, and Dream Deception 151 6.2 Becoming Joseph: Dreaming the New Human 158 6.3 Dreaming from Darkness to Light 168 6.4 The Great Code of Dream Interpretation 171 7 Boehme’s Theory of Dream Interpretation: Seven Steps to Heaven 174 7.1 Day One: Darkness, Light, and Primordial Life-Energy 181 7.2 Day Two: Time, Eternity, and the Oceanic Feeling 185 7.3 Day Three: Dry Land, Vegetation, and the Terra Firma of “I-ness” 191 7.4 Day Four: Heavenly Bodies, Astral Reason, the Hidden Dark Mind, and the Transforming Centre 196 7.5 Day Five: Elemental Creatures, Expanding Awareness, and the Harmonious Soul 204 7.6 Day Six: the Microcosm, or Humanity in Full 208 7.7 Day Seven: Sabbath, Shalom, and Silence 210 8 Freud, Jung, and the Psychodynamic Rebirth of Dreams 212 8.1 Freud’s Map of the Soul: Raising Hell 213 8.2 Jung’s Map of the Soul: Collision of Opposites 217 8.3 Freud’s Theory of Dreams: Word and Image 224 8.4 Jung’s Theory of Dreams: Opening the Inner World 230 8.5 Freud’s Dream Hermeneutic and the Psychosexual Stages of Development 234 8.6 Jung’s Dream Hermeneutic and Individuation 241

Contents

9 Conclusion 245 9.1 The Question of Direct or Indirect Influence 245 9.2 Implications for Scholars and Therapists 249 9.2.1 Spiritual and Pastoral Counselling 250 9.2.2 Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy 255 9.2.3 Scholarship on the Religious Roots of Modernity 259 9.3 Conclusion 267 Bibliography 271 Index of Subjects and Names 302

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Preface I am grateful to an early editor of this book who noted that it is really three books in one, with three interweaving theses that can easily get lost in the details of the argument. It might help to spell out these theses at the outset, and to show how they might matter to you, the reader, and to our current historical moment. The first and central thesis is that Jacob Boehme (1575–1624 CE), the mystical shoemaker from Gorlitz, Germany, is basically the originator of the psychodynamic therapies of Freud and Jung, including their respective maps of the soul, their concepts of the unconscious mind, their contention that dreams and imagination are primary modes of unconscious expression, and their resultant stages of (Freudian) psychosexual and (Jungian) psychospiritual development. For scholars, I hope this thesis will be exciting because, up to this point, we have traced the influences on Freud and Jung back to nineteenth century German and English Romanticism—to philosophers like Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to poets like Goethe, Schiller, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and to a group of romantic medical doctors that most people have never heard of. The scholarly consensus is that psychodynamic therapy emerged as a bricolage of piecemeal contributions from these various influences. My claim is that the roots of psychodynamic therapy go much further back, not to nineteenth century art, philosophy, and medicine, but to seventeenth century theology, and specifically to the Lutheran mystical theology, or “theosophy,” of Jacob Boehme. Boehme’s theology is a remarkable mixture of the Lutheran biblical mythos, kabbalah, alchemy, astrology, and direct experience of God’s presence in the natural world and the soul, all mediated through the ubiquitous figure of divine Sophia. With Boehme psychodynamic therapy emerges from a theological and mystical matrix, not as a piecemeal bricolage, but basically whole. For therapists, I hope this thesis will be exciting because spiritually integrated therapy is no longer just a novel approach or modality, but a necessary perspective that is informing all modalities. As a therapist myself, I notice that clients increasingly bring their spiritual perspectives and experiences into the consulting room, and I believe we need to meet them where they are. We now have abundant evidence that mental health issues can arise from spiritual distress, and likewise that spirituality can offer remarkable resources for healing. As a teacher in a psychospiritual therapy training program at the University of Toronto, I am heartened by the number of gifted students who are eager

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to seriously engage both religious traditions and psychotherapeutic theories, and to explore where they are mutually informing. These students are bringing substance to Jung’s early idea that religions are the great psychotherapeutic systems of humanity. Hopefully this book will show that Western psychotherapy, since its inception, was itself deeply religious, although Freud and Jung, either knowingly or unknowingly, concealed its spiritual and mystical pedigree to make it more palatable to the scientific ethos of their time. Today the time is ripe to reveal the hidden spiritual roots of Western psychotherapy, as we bring it into conversation with the diverse global religious traditions of our clients. And Boehme is just the person to help us in this task. Even in the seventeenth century he was attempting to bring peace to the religious violence of his time: not only between Catholics and Protestants, but between Christians, Jews, Muslims, and so-called Pagans. This work is still vital. Some therapists today claim that Freud and Jung are outmoded. I occasionally hear, often from graduates of psychology departments, that psychodynamic therapy is no longer an “evidence based” approach, and that today’s “gold standard” is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). But these claims are aging badly. Studies continue to show that the benefits of psychodynamic therapy are at least as large as those of the manualized therapies branded as “evidence based.” Further, the common factors literature suggests that therapeutic techniques only account for about fifteen percent of a therapy’s healing effects. Other factors, like empathy and the client-therapist relationship, are much more important. Freud and Jung knew this long ago, which is why they wrote so much about the therapeutic relationship and tended to eschew formulaic techniques. Psychodynamic approaches are not as good at creating the large data sets that have helped CBT dominate the scientific literature, but I think they still have a lot to teach us, not least about the presence of sacred realities within the human psyche. My second thesis, which is mostly outlined in the footnotes, is that Jacob Boehme has been unjustly marginalized by historians, and this is partly because of the early and sensational charges of heresy against him, and particularly against his first devotional text, the Aurora, which was circulated in hand-copied manuscripts among a small group of followers, and came to the attention of a contentious local clergyman. It is not that I see heterodoxy as a particularly negative thing, since outliers often have an insightful view of the mainstream, but this label overlooks some important facts. For example, in the final year of his life, Boehme was warmly welcomed by the Lutheran theological intelligentsia in Dresden, which was then the “Rome” of Lutheranism. According to Boehme, the members of the Dresden consistory loved his

Preface

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writings and assured him of their support. Even if Boehme is exaggerating here, we can be sure that he was not admonished or imprisoned by these defenders of Lutheran doctrine, who were not exactly known for broad-minded tolerance. But the label of heterodoxy still clings to Boehme’s work, and the result is that his work has been segregated by historians, and associated with many other segregating labels, like Gnosticism, pantheism, theosophy, occultism, and especially “esotericism.” Again, there is a kernel of truth in many of these terms, including “esotericism,” since Boehme’s work eventually became influential among various secretive groups, like Freemasonry. But there is also a deep falsehood, in that Boehme never intended his work to be segregated in this way, and he certainly did not intend it to become the preserve of a secretive elite, a misinterpretation that has become deeply problematic. On the contrary, Boehme saw himself as the “philosopher of the simple folk (Philosophus der Einfältigen)” (Aurora 18.80), someone who was continuing the Reformation impulse toward a “priesthood of all believers” and a radically democratized access to the sacred. This explains the influential role of Boehme’s writings in the English Revolution (1640–1660 CE), among dissenting groups who were trying to give “the commons”—including common agricultural lands—back to the common people, through the establishment of a true Commonwealth. As someone who was trained in theology, I see Boehme’s work as quite orthodox, and I have included a chapter on Augustine, the father of Western orthodoxy, to help flesh this out. Augustine of Hippo may be the West’s most prolific psychotherapist, and he was certainly the most influential Christian theologian of the medieval and early modern periods, for both Catholics and Protestants. But certain aspects of Augustine’s vast corpus, like his doctrine of Sophia, and his theory of dreams and their interpretation, are not well known today, and will be highlighted in what follows. What makes Boehme unique then is not so much his deviation from accepted doctrine, or from the Augustinian tradition, but something much more radical. Boehme transposes theology into an entirely new key by incorporating the symbolic world of dreams and the imagination, and thus marrying logos with Sophia. Boehme attempts to understand the cognitive doctrinal clashes of his day, which were causing untold brutality and violence, by getting beneath them, so to speak, to their mythical core. He incorporates what Freud later called “primary process thinking” into theology, and the result is what I call a “psycho-mythical” theology, which sees the image-based thinking of the imagination as more primary than language-based thought. All of this is part of Boehme’s attempt to give theology, and God, back to the people, and it is relevant for spiritually integrated therapy today. Having explored countless

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dreams of clients, students, and friends, I can certainly say that dreams are a radically democratic phenomenon. They send the most extraordinary wisdom to each of us, and reveal a profoundly sacred core in the soul that is personalized to each unique human struggle and life path, if we have ears to hear them. This leads me to the third thesis, which is that the world of dreams forms a connecting link between Boehme, Freud, and Jung. Along with certain strands of historical influence, the dreamworld itself may explain some of the deep continuities between these thinkers and their respective understandings of the soul. My own life experience enters the picture here, in that, after a series of profound tragedies as a young adult, my dreams became extremely active and vivid. And my attempts to understand these dreams with several therapists led to a remarkable awakening and expansion of awareness, wherein I realized that the dreamworld is every bit as real and detailed as the waking world. Westerners tend to see dreams as a somewhat strange and random commentary on waking life, but it may be that the waking world takes its place within the larger boundary of the dream. This latter view seems to be espoused by countless global cultures and spiritual traditions that pay special attention to the dreamworld as a place of spirits and ancestors, and a particular locus of the sacred. I am hoping that this book will help therapists put Freud, Jung, and psychodynamic therapy into conversation with these global cultures and spiritual traditions, and help therapists understand clients who were shaped by these cultures and traditions. As a therapist, I have yet to meet a client who was not profoundly moved by sacred impulses, often operating just below the threshold of consciousness. And I suspect it is time for Western therapists to begin attending to these impulses with integrity, precision, and care. If this book is helpful in that endeavor, I will certainly be grateful.

Acknowledgments Thank you to the scholars and therapists whose teaching, writing, and personal support has shaped this project: Joseph Schner, Pam McCarroll, Sean McGrath, Arthur Boers, Peter Erb, Dorothy and Robert Gardner, Harold Bloom, Jeffrey Kripal, Cyril O’Regan, John Dourley, Ann Ulanov, and Margaret Barker. Your graceful offerings of time and your kind responses to my questions have meant more than you know. And to those who first mentored my interest in this area many years ago: Barbara Forrest, Travis Kroeker, Ellen Charry, James Loder, and Deborah Hunsinger, your influence has shaped me in ways that I am still realizing, with gratitude. A special thanks goes to Michael Stoeber, who helped guide this project from its inception, and surrounded it with his calm affirming presence. His unique gifts of patience, support, and insight were remarkably sensitive in allowing my own vision to emerge. To my children, Cole, Ashlyn, and Caleb, who were born in the midst of these pages, and who often visited my desk with their own forms of inspiration: thank you for your urgent needs, your bright eyes, and your playful hearts, which all came trailing clouds of glory. And of course to Rachel, for her support on this stretch of the journey. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Knox College Bursary Committee, The Toronto School of Theology Scholarship Committee, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship fund, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Thank you for supporting a dreamer. And to Perry Hall and the staff at Robarts library: thank you for your invaluable assistance.

Figures and Tables Figures 1 Icon of Divine Sophia by Eileen McGuckin 2 2 Boehme’s Three-Level Ontology 109 3 Boehme’s Map of Everything by Andreas Freher 121 4 Boehme’s Map of the Fallen Soul 130 5 Marriage of Sun and Moon from Splendor Solis 156

Tables 1 The Seven Days of Creation: Development and Transformation 180

Abbreviations Augustine Exp. of Ps. GRM Hom. on 1 John TLMG

Expositions of the Psalms On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees Homilies on the First Epistle of John The Literal Meaning of Genesis

Boehme Most English translations follow the chapter and section numbering of the German facsimile edition (FE). But when they differ, I have cited the year of publication, and chapter-section numbering of the English edition after the facsimile edition (e.g. Forty Questions 13.5/1764, 13.9). FE Jacob Böhme Sämtliche Schriften. 11 vols. Facsimile of the 1730 edition, Theosophia Revelata. Das Ist: Alle Göttliche Schriften des Gottseligen und Hocherleuchteten Deutschen Theosophi Jacob Böhmens. Edited by Johann Gichtel and Johann Ueberfeld. Aurora Morgen Röthe im Aufgang (1612, FE vol. 1). English: Aurora (2013). Election of Grace Von der Gnaden-Wahl (1623, FE vol. 6). English: Of the Election of Grace (1781). Forty Questions Viertzig Fragen von der Seelen (1620, FE vol. 3). English: The Answers to Forty Questions Concerning the Soul (1764b). Incarnation Von der Menschwerdung Jesu Christi (1620, FE vol. 4). English: The Treatise on the Incarnation, in Three Parts (1764b). Letters Theosophische Send-Briefe (1618–1624, FE vol. 9). English: The Epistles of Jacob Boehme ([1649] 1886). Mysterium Mysterium Magnum (1623, FE vols. 7 & 8). English: Mysterium Magnum (1965). Signature De Signatura Rerum (1622, FE vol. 6). English: The Signature of All Things (1781). Six Mystical Pts Kurtze Erklärung Sechs Mystischer Puncte (1620, FE vol. 4) English: Six Mystical Points (1958). Six Theosophic Pts Von Sechs Theosophischen Puncten (1620, FE vol. 4). English: Six Theosophic Points (1958).

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Abbreviations

Vom Dreyfachen Leben des Menschen (1620, FE vol. 3). Threefold Life English: The Threefold Life of Man (1764b). Three Principles Beschreibung der Drey Principien Göttliches Wesens (1619, FE vol. 2). English: The Three Principles of the Divine Essence (1764a). Way to Christ Der Weg zu Christo (1624, FE vol. 4) English: The Way to Christ (1978).

Freud SE

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Edited by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

Jung CW

The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. 20 vols. Bollingen Series 20. Edited by Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953–1979.

Other AT DWB

NRSV OED

Oeuvres de Descartes. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. 12 vols. Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964–76. Deutsches Wörterbuch. 14 vols. Von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. Fortgesetzt und bearbeitet von Moriz Heyne, Rudolf Hildebrand, Karl Weigand et al. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854–1960. The Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha, New Revised Standard Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 20 vols. Ed. John Simpson and Edmund Weiner. Oxford: Oxford University and Clarendon Press, 1989.

Hymn to Wisdom I learned both what is secret and what is manifest, for Wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me … For Wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness. Although she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets; for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with Wisdom. She is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars. Compared with the light she is found to be superior, for it is succeeded by the night, but against Wisdom evil does not prevail. She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well. I loved her and sought her from my youth; I desired to take her for my bride, and became enamoured of her beauty. She glorifies her noble birth by living with God, and the Lord of all loves her. For she is an initiate in the knowledge of God, and an associate in his works. Wisdom 7.21–22, 24–30; 8.1–4 (NRSV)

© Glenn J. McCullough, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004680296_002

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Figure 1

Hymn to Wisdom

Icon of Divine Sophia by Eileen McGuckin. Used with permission.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Modernity and the Borderland of Dreams They said to one another, “Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.” Joseph’s brothers (Gen. 37.19–20)

…

Even though you intended to do evil to me, God intended it for good. Joseph (Gen. 50.20)1

∵ 1.1

The Larger Context: Dreams and Modern Hubris

This book is about the Lutheran mystic and theologian Jacob Boehme (1575– 1624 CE) and his remarkable anticipations of modern2 psychology and psychotherapy, particularly the depth psychology and psychodynamic therapy of

1 Bible passages are from the NRSV, unless otherwise noted. This translation of Gen. 50.20 is mine. 2 Periodization of history is, of course, simplistic, but I will use the generally accepted terms. This book generally supports the view that what we variously call “modern,” “Enlightenment,” or “secular” thought is neither as novel or as self-sustaining as it has believed. One thing that the so-called “postmodern” turn has demonstrated is that the rational foundations of modernity are not as stable as they first appeared. We seem to be left with a choice, then, either to abandon those foundations and with them modernity (something that nobody seems quite willing or quite able to do in practice) or to look further back, and more broadly, at the Western theological and spiritual discourses that gave rise to modernity, which is what my project proposes to do in relation to modern psychology. It is not yet clear whether “postmodern” discourse merely reveals the cul-de-sac of modernity or offers a way out. I suspect the former, but hopefully this project will be helpful to adherents of both positions.

© Glenn J. McCullough, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004680296_003

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Chapter 1

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939 CE) and C.G. Jung (1875–1961 CE).3 But my research for the book began by exploring the history of dreams and their interpretation in the West,4 and it was in dreams that I found the initial connecting link between Boehme’s theological psychology and Freud and Jung’s largely scientific psychology. In the context of this broader research, the book also reflects on the death and resurrection of dreams as a valid form of experience and knowledge in the Western world. As a general trend, the death of oneiric knowledge accompanied the construction of modernity and its intellectual borders, and Boehme and many of his heirs can be seen as voices of protest against this initial trend. Likewise, the resurrection of dream knowledge by Freud, Jung, and their heirs profoundly destabilized modernity’s borders. In this larger sense, my original research also arose from questions about the Promethean hubris of modernity, and the relationship between this hubris and the world of the dream. Since it is easy to lose sight of the big picture in the minutia of an argument, let me begin by sketching this larger context. By “modern hubris” I mean at least two things: first, the general assumption of many Enlightenment thinkers that their work emerged de novo, fully fledged, from the mists of religious superstition that preceded it. The resulting veneration of scientific ways of knowing at the expense of religio-ethical ways of knowing has been part of our modern predicament for some time now. One could argue, for example, that this imbalance has allowed dangerous scientific 3 The terms “psychodynamic therapy,” “depth psychology,” and “psychoanalysis” are often used interchangeably to describe any theorist who acknowledges an unconscious mind. “Psychoanalysis” is sometimes used to distinguish Freud’s approach from Jung’s “analytical psychology.” On Jung’s preferred name for his work, “complex psychology,” and on the mistaken “Freudocentric” reading of Jung, see Shamdasani (2003). I use “psychodynamic” to include Freud and Jung, while not overlooking their differences. I also use “psychodynamic” to denote the process of therapy, and “depth psychology” to denote the theoretical basis of this process. Reports of the demise of psychodynamic therapy are overstated. A recent study showed that 18 percent of clinical psychologists identify as psychodynamic in orientation, and the 22 percent who identify as “eclectic or integrative” make significant use of psychodynamic approaches (Comer and Comer 2018, 64). In his recent review of outcome research, Shedler notes that “the benefits of psychodynamic therapy are at least as large as those of therapies promoted as ‘evidence based’—and, moreover, the benefits of psychodynamic therapy last” (2020, 53). Further, many of the common factors that promote healing in all current therapies derive from psychodynamic theory. See chapter 9.2.2. 4 The distinction between East and West, as an historiographical concept, is full of projections and misconceptions (e.g. Said 1978). This distinction, particularly in theology, is based mainly on linguistic grounds (Greek vs. Latin). Augustine, for example, read very little Greek. Inasmuch as this book engages the important discussions of Said and his post/decolonial followers, it will point to continuities between East and West that might foster more helpful dialogue and understanding.

Introduction

5

creations to proliferate without the normal reserve and restraint offered by religio-ethical thought. We still seem unable to come to terms, morally and spiritually, with the fact that certain technological achievements—like nuclear weapons or the internal combustion engine—are now threatening the existence of organized human life, not to mention the rest of life on the planet. The privileged status of scientific thinking over against religio-ethical thinking makes such technological achievements simply appear as objective, value-neutral, and inevitable. As Robert Oppenheimer famously said, “when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it” (Polenberg 2002, 46–47).5 The next “inevitability” on our horizon seems to be some form of technological “transhumanism” or “biodigital convergence,”6 a development that our current spiritual and ethical resources seem, again, unable to understand, let alone critique, at least on any significant scale. A second and related aspect of modern hubris is the assumption that some kind of “pure reason” can exist that is totally detached from the body and embodied existence, in all its socio-historical contingency and depth. To most scholars in the humanities and social sciences, this Enlightenment assumption now seems like a kind of psychological inflation on a mass scale, which has been used by dominant Western cultures both to justify and to conceal all manner of oppression. A host of recent thinkers have attempted to reverse this trend, some looking for a so-called “postmodern” era and some looking for a critical retrieval of the pre-modern. A much smaller subset of thinkers is concerned with the twin spectres of moral relativism and cultural tribalism that appear when pure reason is dethroned. In my research, I was fascinated by the fact that dreams have been connected both to religio-ethical ways of knowing and to the body for large swaths of Western history, not to mention the histories of other cultures.7 I wondered if an exploration of dreams might offer 5 The hubris of the Manhattan Project was revealed to Oppenheimer at the “Trinity explosion,” which successfully tested the bomb. Vishnu’s words from the Bhagavad-Gita suddenly flashed in his mind: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” 6 The Government of Canada, for example, recently funded a “policy horizons” group that is exploring “biodigital convergence”: “Biological and digital systems are converging, and could change the way we work, live, and even evolve as a species. More than a technological change, this biodigital convergence may transform the way we understand ourselves and cause us to redefine what we consider human or natural” (Van der Elst 2019, 5). 7 The revelatory and divinatory approach to dreams is as old as recorded history in the West. And although it is a generalization, it is fair to say that indigenous cultures globally tend to

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some critical insight on both scientific “objectivity” and disembodied reason. Much to my surprise, I soon discovered that oneiric experiences were heavily implicated in the emergence of science and pure reason in the first place. The violence implicit in modern hubris was probably seen most presciently by Nietzsche. In his famous parable, a madman enters the public square in a dream-like delirium, telling all who would listen that God is dead: “We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers.” The madman wonders why the mocking atheistic crowd does not notice the crisis. “Who will wipe this blood off us? … Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” ([1882] 1974, 182). Nietzsche understood the full import of the fact that modern science had killed the parent who nurtured it, religion, and that the reasons for this murder were neither objective nor pure. But my research for this book leads me to juxtapose Nietzsche’s parable with one that is more sacred, and ultimately more hopeful. In the biblical story of Joseph (Gen. 37.1–50.26), dreams represent the primary locus of divine revelation in the temporal realm, and as such they both structure and drive the entire narrative. Near the beginning of the story, Joesph’s dreams spark a violent reaction in his brothers: “Here comes this dreamer … let us kill him” (Gen. 37.19). But by the end, Joseph’s dreams have been vindicated, as the plot bends toward comedy, and Joseph forgives his brothers’ murderous intent: “Even though you intended to do evil to me, God intended it for good” (Gen. 50.20). My sense is that dreams, and their revelatory and bodily insights, have not only survived the trials of modernity, but they may yet be vindicated as a locus from which to understand modernity’s malaise. In my research I was quite surprised to discover the crucial (and largely hidden) role of dreams in giving birth to modern thought. Two potent examples will suffice to illustrate this. First, René Descartes (1596–1650 CE), a contemporary of Boehme, claimed that his “new method” was inspired by three momentous dreams that occurred on the night of November 10, 1619, in which he “was filled with enthusiasm and discovered the foundations of the marvellous science.” He wrote these dreams down in a “little notebook bound in parchment,” which he kept with him for the rest of his life.8 Descartes believed see dreams as reflective of a higher spiritual/ancestral world. In the West, connecting dreams to the body goes back at least to Hippocratic physicians, like Rufus and Galen, who published treatises on the diagnostic use of dreams. In their view, the soul “surveyed one’s bodily functions during sleep and brought about dreams that indicated, by a scrutiny of their content, bodily health” (Holowchak 2002, 127). 8 This notebook has since been lost, but we have an incomplete translation published by Adrien Baillet in 1691. For more on this see Cole’s wonderful The Olympian Dreams and Youthful Rebellion of René Descartes (1992). See also von Franz (1968), who shows in detail how Descartes’ dreams foreshadowed his life’s work.

Introduction

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that the “Spirit of God” had inspired these dreams, and that they prophetically anticipated and informed the entire course of his life and thought (Baillet [1691] 1972, 51, 81). When he finally published his Discourse on Method in 1639, he began by referencing this momentous night of incubation, “shut up alone in a heated chamber.” But here he makes no mention of his prophetic dreams (AT, 6: 11). And in fact, when we enter the metaphysical section of the Discourse, one of the main axioms of Descartes’ argument is a deep scepticism of dream experience, a scepticism that he presumes needs no justification, and which he then extends to waking experience: “I resolved to pretend that everything that had ever entered my mind was no more true than the illusions of my dreams” (AT, 6: 32).9 Not only are dreams illusory but, in Descartes’ logic, they cast doubt on the whole sensorium of waking experience.10 Descartes’ presupposition here would not have been self-evident if he had lived in one of countless global cultures, both past and present, which see dreams as potentially more revelatory than waking experience—their objects potentially more real (ontologically) and their messages potentially more truthful (epistemologically). Dreams, as many of us have experienced, can be lit by a purer light than the waking world. Indeed, even in the West, at the same time as Descartes was formulating his famous cogito ergo sum—the motto that would be inscribed over the doorway to modernity and that would emphatically distance modernity from the dream—Jacob Boehme, the main protagonist of this book, was formulating a theory that would revive the revelatory and bodily potentials of the dream, at least in some small measure. But Descartes was certainly the more influential figure. And it seems that, for Descartes, the enthusiastic dreams that gave birth to his seminal modern method had to be killed (or at least concealed) in order to protect that method. The second example involves another eminent modern thinker: Immanuel Kant (1724–1804 CE). In 1766, some fifteen years before his first Critique, Kant published anonymously a little book called Dreams of a Spirit Seer. The book explores the Swedish mystic and scientist Emanuel Swedenborg, whose remarkable and florid visions of heaven, hell, and the spirit world were published in the voluminous Arcana Coelestia (1749–56), which Kant acquired a copy of at no small expense. We know from extant letters that Kant was initially 9 Descartes reiterates his view that dreams are the chief reason for sensory suspicion at the end of this metaphysical section (AT, 6: 38–40), and also at the beginning and end of the metaphysical section of his more formal 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy (AT, 8: 19–20, 70–71). 10 Whether Descartes was merely skeptical of the literal sense of dreams, but still believed that their symbolism could be revelatory, is not altogether clear. What is clear is that later interpreters have used his arguments to support a materialistic dismissal of all dream experiences.

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quite taken with Swedenborg and his visions. Kant believed in Swedenborg’s “extraordinary” gifts of clairvoyance. But in Dreams Kant takes a very different tone, denouncing Swedenborg as the “arch-dreamer among all dreamers” and the “worst of all enthusiasts (Schwärmer)” ([1766] 2002, 42, 55, 69–71).11 In the midst of this blustery denunciation, Kant also notes that Swedenborg’s “testimony  … bears such an uncommon likeness to my own philosophical brainchild … that one must either suppose that there is more cleverness and truth in Schwedenberg’s [sic.] writings than first appearances allow or that it is only by accident that his system coincides with mine” ([1766] 2002, 48–49). As for the “accidental” agreement between their systems, it is not hard to see that the historical line of influence is very much from Swedenborg to Kant. On this point C.D. Broad remarks wryly: “It might strike an impartial observer that the agreement may not be wholly disconnected from the fact that Kant had carefully read and epitomized Swedenborg’s doctrine at the time when he was pursuing his metaphysical speculations” (1969, 143). In short, Kant was much more indebted to Swedenborg’s dreams and visions than he wanted to admit.12 Swedenborg was recognized as a prominent Enlightenment scientist when his visionary experiences erupted, and he subscribed to a modified Cartesian view of nature. His resulting speculations about his visions divide reality into two realms: a mechanistic material world explored by science, reason, and the physical senses, and a spiritual world explored by the imagination, including dreams and visions, which operates according to a very different, moral-spiritual sense. Kant later put forward a similar dualistic metaphysics: In the epistemology of the first Critique ([1787] 2003), he limited reason to the phenomenal world of the physical senses—a world of uniform time, space, and causality, explored by modern science. This limiting of reason was intended both to secure a place for modern science, and to make room for the noumenal realm of “God, freedom, and immortality” in the ethics of the second Critique ([1788] 2003) and the aesthetics of the third ([1790] 2000). In the latter Critique of Judgment, we find Kant describing the poet’s ability to incarnate the noumenal realm in a passage that likely would have pleased Swedenborg. Through

11 For a history of this important word see La Vopa (1997) “The Philosopher and the ‘Schwärmer:’ On the Career of a German Epithet from Luther to Kant.” 12 On this see especially Magee (2003) and Hanegraaf (2007). Moses Mendelsohn’s review of Dreams exemplifies the critique that Kant was afraid of: “the joking pensiveness with which this little work is written leaves the reader sometimes in doubt as to whether Herr Kant intends to make metaphysics laughable or spirit-seeing credible.” In his personal reply to Mendelssohn, Kant admits that it was “difficult for me to devise the right way to clothe my thoughts so as not to expose myself to mockery” (Kant [1766] 2002, 123, 84).

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the imagination, writes Kant, the poet has access to ineffable “aesthetic ideas” or “archetypes”:13 The poet ventures to make sensible rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation, etc., as well as to make that of which there are examples in experience, e.g., death, envy, and all sorts of vices, as well as love, fame, etc., sensible beyond the limits of experience, with a completeness that goes beyond anything of which there is an example in nature, by means of an imagination that emulates the precedent of reason in attaining to a maximum; and it is really the art of poetry in which the faculty of aesthetic ideas can reveal itself in its full measure. ([1790] 2000, 192–3) In short, for both Kant and Swedenborg, not only is the phenomenal realm of the physical senses and scientific reason distinct from the noumenal realm of morality and religion, but further, the noumenal realm can penetrate into the phenomenal realm of the senses via the imagination and its archetypal “aesthetic ideas.” The limiting of “pure reason” thus allows for an expansion of the role of imagination and its religio-ethical possibilities. But Kant concludes his work on Swedenborg by reiterating the limits of reason, anticipating his first and best-known Critique. And most Kant scholars continue to read this as an emphatic denunciation of the florid dreams of a seer like Swedenborg, and indeed of dream experiences in general: Metaphysics is a science of the limits of human reason, and since a small country always has many borders, and since it is more important to know well and guard one’s properties than to go out blindly on conquests, therefore this use of the aforementioned science [of metaphysics] is at once the least known and the most important. ([1766] 2002, 57) For Kant, the small country with many borders is human reason, which he tried to limit to the physical, phenomenal realm of the senses, following the example of modern science. But the “small country with many borders” is also good metaphor for modernity itself, in that the power that modern epistemology granted to modern science had to be protected with heavy walls. It would seem that, at least for Descartes and Kant, one of the main areas of experience 13 As we will see, Freud and Jung were both avowed Kantians, and Jung’s concept of the “archetype” owes much to Kant, although he also notes its continuity with traditions going back to Augustine and Plato.

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that this small country was defending itself against was the borderland of dreams, even though oneiric inspirations had secretly helped them theorize modernity’s borders in the first place. It is from this vantage point that we can begin to understand why Freud’s attempt to annex this borderland in his monumental Interpretation of Dreams (1900) was both so momentous and so destabilizing. Freud succeeded, at least for a time, in bringing dreams within the precincts of modern science, and even within the limits of the positivistic science of his day. Much of the unrest in the early Freudian movement, and the expulsion of some of its key members (Adler, Stekel, and Jung) can be read as attempts to protect modernity’s borders against those who would transgress them, and thus to protect psychoanalysis as a fledgling movement within modernity. But because psychoanalysis took dreams as a primary datum of human psychology—because it found meaning in the dream—it was only a matter of time. Once inside modernity’s walls, dreams and their interpretation soon played a crucial role in breaking down those walls, in the “hermeneutical turn,” and the emergence of the so-called “postmodern.” To what degree Freud foresaw this eventuality is a matter of some debate. Jung, in describing his fiery 1913 split with Freud, noted that Freud’s “outmoded” positivism clashed with his own “phenomenological”14 approach to dreams ([1911–12] 1967, CW 5, xxiii). And many years later Michel Foucault, who did not like the moniker “postmodern” but who is likely the most enduring of the French poststructuralists corralled under this term, traced his own method to the dream theories of Ludwig Binswanger, the Swiss psychiatrist and colleague of both Freud and Jung, who applied Heidegger’s existential phenomenology to the interpretation of dreams (Foucault [1954] 1984).15 Foucault’s attempt to radically historicize knowledge and to question modern “objectivity” is thus likewise rooted in the world of the dream. There are many ways 14

15

Jung uses this term not in the more specific sense of Husserl and his heirs, but in a sense that has its origin in Kant’s first Critique, and was then modified in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and which also has close affinities to the pragmatism and radical empiricism of William James, who Jung greatly respected (see e.g. Jung 1940, CW11: 6). Foucault explicitly traces his method to his first published work, an “Introduction” (1954) to a republication of Ludwig Binswanger’s essay “Dream and Existence” (1930). Here Foucault takes a new approach to dreams that was latent in Binswanger’s thought, and in doing so he intends to found an entirely new approach to academic inquiry based on a new “anthropology.” For Foucault, “the dream is not a modality of the imagination, the dream is the first condition of its possibility” ([1954] 1984, 67). And this implies that part of what it means to be human is that we imaginatively create the worlds in which we live, both when we are asleep and when we awake.

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to trace this history of course, and many more characters within it. My point in this sweeping sketch is simply to suggest that dreams entered modernity like a Trojan horse in Freud’s Traumdeutung, and we are still trying to make sense of the resulting upheaval in the intellectual landscape. To return to the parable of Joseph and his brothers, we might say that thinkers like Descartes and Kant attempted to kill the world of dreams in order to secure a place for modern science, a science that seemed so obviously successful and beneficial in their day. They secured a daylight world of uniform space, time, and causality over against a nocturnal world of dreams, which violated all of these conditions, and yet offered remarkable (and secret) inspiration. But as with Joseph, what first seemed like a killing was merely a temporary concealment. Descartes and Kant threw their own influential dreams and dreamers into the pit, so to speak, like Joseph, which is precisely where Freud later found them, and resurrected them, as the “royal road” to the unconscious mind. For Freud this dark pit represented the lower regions of the body and the nebulous border between psyche and soma—the hidden darkness below, often represented by a wild animal in dream symbolism, just as in the Joseph story (“… then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams”). What Joseph’s brothers intended for evil, God used for good. And at the end of the story we see that Joseph’s ordeal allowed for the preservation of two nations, Egypt and Israel. In my allegorical reading of the story, these preserved “nations” would be religion and modern science. Is it possible that the early modern attempts to kill (or conceal) the world of dreams were necessary to secure an intellectual space for modern science? And is it possible that Freud’s resurrection of the dream world, within the heart of the scientific milieu, might yet help us understand the fraught relationship between scientific and religio-ethical ways of knowing? In other words, is it possible that science needed to detach itself from religion in order to flourish in the modern world? And that part of both this detachment and this flourishing involved securing waking empirical reality over against the strange world of dreams? Is it possible that, contra Nietzsche, modernity is not responsible for killing God, but merely for throwing the revelatory dream world into the pit, like Joseph? If so, then the resurrection of dreams might yet provide some remarkable insights into a possible rapprochement between science and religion—a reconciliation, as we will see in the following pages, between what Augustine called scientia (knowledge) and sapientia (Wisdom), and what Boehme called Vernunft (reason) and Verstand (understanding). A reconciliation of this kind might also offer insights into the relationship between modernity and the vast majority of traditional cultures and religions,

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past and present, which see the dream world as superordinate to waking reality. It might help to explain why modernity has been so obliviously destructive both to the religious vision that birthed it, and to the many visions of the cultures it has encountered and colonized. In short, a recovery of oneiric experience might help us understand what Tertullian (ca. 155–225 CE), the founder of Christian theology in the Latin West, meant when he said that “the greater part of humanity get their knowledge of God from dreams” (De Anima 47). In a time when technological imperatives seem almost as apocalyptic as anything the Bible can offer, dreams might also help us understand why modernity’s disembodied reason has managed, like Icarus, both to climb so high, and to place itself in such great danger. This larger context of dreams and modern hubris is what makes Jacob Boehme such an interesting figure. As a contemporary of Descartes, Boehme offered the definitive minority report on modernity. While Descartes was attempting to secure modern science over against the “illusions of dreams,” Boehme was attempting to make space for dreams and visions within the Lutheran theology of his day, and even to use this dream world as a locus of reconciliation both for the bloody factions of Christendom embroiled in the “wars of religion,” and for the other religions of the known world—paganism, Judaism, and Islam.16 Descartes and his heirs certainly became dominant in the West, but Boehme’s legacy remained as a strangely powerful undercurrent, with a vast intellectual legacy. The nineteenth century Romantics, for example, made heavy use of Boehme to counter the materialism and mechanism of Enlightenment thinking. Boehme’s dream world of Imaginatio, and its connection to a body that was both physical and spiritual, became key inspirations for Romantic poetry and philosophy, both in Britain and Continental Europe.17 Boehme, though he never saw himself as a revolutionary, was also trying to move theology out of the elite power centres of seventeenth century European Christendom, including the elite rationalism of the university. He wanted to give theology back to the common people, and their common nightly revelatory experiences. In this sense he believed he was simply extending the work of Reformation started by Luther. This might be why Boehme’s thought also played such a significant role in the English Revolution (1640–60 CE), with its 16 Or, as Boehme calls them, “Jew, Turk, and heathen.” E.g. “And as for you: you claim to be a Christian and know the light. Why then do you not walk in it? Do you imagine the name sanctifies you? Wait, fool, until the time comes. You will then see how it is. Before you, many a Jew, Turk, or heathen will enter the kingdom of heaven who has properly adorned his lamp” (Aurora 11.29). 17 See Hessayon and Apetrei (2014, 162–195).

Introduction

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host of radical Dissenters (Ranters, Diggers, Muggletonians, Levellers, etc.). Many of these dissenting groups were trying to give “the commons”—including common agricultural lands—back to the common people, through the establishment of a true Commonwealth. Christopher Hill, who traces these radical streams in his brilliant The World Turned Upside Down, notes that Boehme “influenced many of the characters who appear in this book” (Hill 1976, 176).18 Boehme’s championing of dreams allowed common access to a world of revelation that was not ruled by bishop, priest, or king—a true Lutheran priesthood of all believers. Scholars have only begun to chart Boehme’s vast cultural influence in these and other movements. In this book we will look specifically at his influence on modern psychology and psychotherapy, and in doing so we will explore the migration of the dream world from Boehme’s theological register to Freud and Jung’s scientific register. It is hard to say if the remarkable similarities between Boehme, Freud, and Jung owe more to direct historical transmission, or to the fact that the data of dreams produce similar conclusions in various times and places. But in my view, these similarities justify crediting Boehme as the originator of what today we call psychodynamic therapy. 1.2

Theorists, Themes, and Thesis

What follows is a survey of psychological and oneiric themes in four theorists: Augustine of Hippo, Jacob Boehme, Sigmund Freud, and C.G. Jung. For each theorist I look at three themes: (1) a general overview of psychological theory or “map of the soul,” beginning with Augustine under the rubric of “trinitarian psychology”; (2) a general discussion of “dream theory,” which looks at the place and role of dreams in their psychological theory; and (3) a discussion of “dream interpretation,” specifically as this interpretation structures a theory of human psychospiritual development, beginning with Augustine under the rubric of “Wisdom and archetypes.” Boehme is the primary focus of the book, and my discussion of Freud and Jung is interspersed throughout, with a comprehensive summary provided at the end. First a note on my choice of theorists. As mentioned, my research began with a general overview of the Western history of dreams and their interpretation, and it soon became obvious that the two most prolific modern dream 18 Likewise, Hessayon notes that that during and after the English Revolution “engagement with Boehme’s teachings was … more extensive at this crucial moment in English history than has usually been recognized” (2014, 77).

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theorists were Freud and Jung, who each founded their entire body of work on a theory of dreams. As Freud said in his later years, his dream theory was the “shibboleth” and “sheet anchor” that kept psychoanalysis from going astray (1933, SE 22: 7). And it stands at the root of all the psychoanalytic concepts that have now become ubiquitous in psychotherapy, not to mention popular culture (repression, projection, transference, trauma, the unconscious, etc.) Similarly, Jung’s theory of individuation and its succession of encounters with intra-psychic archetypes (e.g. shadow, anima/animus, Self), developed mainly from his observations of his own and his patients’ dreams. He realized that dreams emerged in a coherent series, unique to each individual, but with common motifs. And each unique series pointed the way, teleologically, toward psychic healing and wholeness by describing certain stages of development and rites of passage, and giving the conscious ego an opportunity to become aware of them. For both Freud and Jung, dreams offered a more objective therapeutic account of the situation in which the patient’s troubled ego found itself. Given that Freud and Jung basically invented the idea of psychotherapy as “talk therapy”—Freud in relation to neurotic disturbances, and Jung in relation to psychotic disturbances—and given that dreams stand at the root of their respective theories, it seems safe to assume that dreams have played a constitutive role in modern psychotherapy, and that these seminal dream theories represent a basic matrix from which the contemporary spectrum of therapeutic schools has emerged. As I moved back through Western history, I soon discovered that the two most prolific pre-modern dream theorists were Augustine of Hippo and Jacob Boehme. Both were prolific not mainly because of the amount of writing they devoted to dreams, but because of the vast influence their work had on later theorists, and, in Boehme’s case, the vast impetus he gave later readers to search for meaning in their own dreams. Augustine offered the most sustained and comprehensive patristic theory of dreams, which became the great touchstone for medieval discussions of the topic.19 And importantly, Augustine’s dream theory was systematically integrated with his entire theological edifice, which basically defined orthodoxy for the Christian West—like a loom on which the many tapestries of medieval and early-modern thought were woven. Boehme, I soon realized, was the catalyst for a great florescence 19 In the ancient world, great figures like Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Lucretius all offered theories of dreams and their interpretation. In the late-antique world, besides Augustine, the other influential dream theorists were mainly Neoplatonic in orientation, including Synesius of Cyrene, and especially Macrobius and Calcidius. See Dulaey (1973), Kruger (1992), Erny (2006), and Koet (2012).

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of communal dream interpretation that began in the seventeenth century, and his thought later appeared in a more secular and individualistic mode in nineteenth century European Romanticism.20 Taken together, Boehme’s influence in these two movements represents arguably the greatest resurgence of interest in dream experience in Western history. Thus dreams were the initial obvious link between our four theorists, and here I was surprised to find some deep points of continuity that suggested a kind of “tradition” of dream theory, although one that was reformulated significantly as it passed through the crucible of modern science. The migration of dream theory from theology to science began to fascinate me, because it seemed so obviously to be a movement from a “more” to a “less” theoretically. The broad vistas of Augustine’s and Boehme’s theological dream theories were basically truncated and shorn of their religious and “superstitious” elements as they passed into modern scientific psychology. The horizons of meaning narrowed, and this narrowing had intriguing psychological and theological implications. But more importantly, I also began to realize that many of the original theological foundations of dream theory survived the migration, and simply became more hidden. They passed into modernity like the buried foundations of an ancient building on which a new modern structure is built. Of course, this modern structure often proclaimed its purely empirical basis, its scientific credentials, and its self-supporting status. Modern psychotherapy claimed to have made a decisive break with pre-modern “mysticism” and “superstition.” But at times, to my ears anyway, it seemed to protest too much. I began to wonder if the occasionally shrill tone of Freud’s atheism, for example,21 or of Jung’s repeated claims to a “purely empirical method,”22 might point to secret insecurities about the hidden sources of their fledgling science. 20

For Boehme’s influence in the seventeenth century see Jones (1959), Hessayon and Apetrei (2014), and Gerona (2004). For his influence on Romantic dreamers and related currents see Binswanger (1928), Lersch (1923), Beguin (1939), Ripa (1988), James (1995), Dieterle and Engel (2003), and Martin (2018). 21 Freud’s basically Feuerbachian understanding of religion is multifaceted, nuanced, and frequently misunderstood (see Hewitt 2014). But in his less charitable moments he was simply dismissive of the religion of the “common man,” with typical Enlightenment disdain: “The whole thing [i.e. religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living to-day, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions” (1930, SE 21: 74). 22 E.g. “I am an empiricist, not a philosopher” (1954b, CW 9i: 75). Many Jungians today would dispute this claim.

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For example, the basic ancient idea of the therapeutic value of dreams seemed to pass into modernity unscathed.23 This was the heuristic hypothesis that Freud and Jung eventually demonstrated empirically in various ways. But the basic faith in this hypothesis was there from the beginning as a hidden foundation; the empirical validations came later. I also noticed that the widespread pre-modern theological motif of “demonic dream deception” seemed to lie hidden behind Freud’s idea of “dream distortion,” in which the mysterious agency of a “dream censor” conceals the sexual underbelly of the dream. Because of this censor, the sexual demon appeared to Freud just as he did to medieval monks, “transformed into an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11.14). Freud was actually aware that his landmark Traumdeutung, though clothed in the language of positivistic science, had a theological prehistory. In one case he described the book to his friend Wilhelm Fliess as a kind of Dantean katabasis: “It is an intellectual hell, layer upon layer of it, with everything fitfully gleaming and pulsating; and the outline of Lucifer-Amor coming into sight at the darkest centre” (July 10, 1900; in 1954, 323). The perceptive reader might also have noted this theme in the book’s famous epigraph, taken from Virgil: “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo,” which loosely translates as “if I cannot bend heaven, I will raise hell.” In moving hell and its demons within the bounds of modern science, Freud was also locating them within the bounds of the human psyche or soul, a move that was started three centuries earlier by Boehme. Likewise, dreams were a key locus for the “anomalous” phenomena of modern parapsychology, and both Freud and Jung cautiously admitted that they had observed such phenomena in their clinical work too often to ignore it. Jung eventually theorized the concept of “synchronicity” in conversation with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, to explain the strange coincidences that seemed to connect his patients’ inner subjective dreams to the outer objective world (1951b; 1952). And Freud eventually admitted his belief in telepathy, or “thought transference,” which seemed to be a product of the deep emotional rapport of the clinical transference relationship.24 Today the theory of quantum entan23

24

This view goes back to Greco-Roman Antiquity. At more than two hundred sites throughout the ancient world, pilgrims with various maladies would make offerings to the healing god Asclepius and then retire to incubation chambers awaiting dreams that would either cure directly or provide a curative prescription. Similarly, the magicians of antiquity would assist their clients in supplicating various gods to grant dream revelations, while physicians in the Hippocratic tradition like Rufus and Galen published treatises on the diagnostic use of dreams. See Hewitt (2014) for a discussion of Freud’s interest in telepathy, and how this relates to his explicit positivism. Freud claimed to have observed telepathy several times, and he

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glement, which Einstein initially referred to pejoratively as “spooky action at a distance,” has become an accepted theory in physics, and thus many of these anomalous phenomena are beginning to look less spooky, to physicists anyway. In this respect, the “superstitious” aspects of the dream that science initially dismissed and defined itself against are now finding explanations within accepted scientific theories.25 Freud and Jung were among the first to bring these phenomena under the scientific purview. Arguably the most important aspect of the migration of dreams into modernity was that it greatly expanded the precincts of the individual psyche, even as the medieval realms of heaven and hell were evacuated. The objective simply became subjective through a kind of scientific slight-of-hand, as heaven and hell passed virtually wholesale into psychotherapy, and particularly into the asylum, where visions of such realms were increasingly warehoused (e.g. Foucault 1965). But owing to the inherent strangeness of the dream world—its peculiar mix of subjectivity and objectivity—it never quite fit within either framework. Medieval spirits were never purely objective, because the demons were always credited with a prescient knowledge of the soul’s weak spots, and the angels always knew exactly where to apply the healing salve. These objective entities always appeared with a deeply subjective awareness of the soul they touched—via ontological participation—and thus pre-modern theorists always struggled to distinguish between dreams that emerged from outside agents, and those that reflected the soul itself. Likewise, in modernity, when the realm of dreams was assigned its purely subjective status, psychologists continued to marvel at the fact that certain “autonomous” dream called it the “rational core” of occultism. Early on Freud advised his friend Ferenczi not to publish the results of a successful telepathy experiment, for it would be “throwing a bomb into the psychoanalytical house which would be certain to explode” (Jones 1957, 3: 380). Yet Freud later published an account of the evidence for his own belief in telepathy, just before reaffirming a positivist scientific worldview, in the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933, SE 22: 31–56). Jung was explicit about his belief in this phenomenon in his published work (e.g. 1948a, CW 8:261–2) and even more explicit in his lectures and letters (e.g. [1936–40] 2008, 1–31; 1973, 1: 117). He assumed that it had a scientific explanation that would eventually be discovered. See Main (1997) for a good summary. Dream telepathy is still a live area of scientific research. For a survey of the literature see Ullman and Krippner (1989), and Krippner and Fracasso (2011). 25 For meta-analyses of extant experiments in parapsychological or psi phenomena, including telepathy, see Dean Radin, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (2006). These meta-analyses lend strong statistical validity to the existence of such phenomena and raise questions about their marginalization by mainstream science. For a rich analysis of such phenomena in relation to theories of religion, see Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2010).

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characters showed more intelligence and awareness than the dreamer to whom they appeared. And the dream anomalies that continued to flummox the scientific worldview, like Jung’s “synchronicity” and Freud’s “thought transference,” suggested that dreams transgressed the bounds of the subjective psyche. If one of modernity’s borders was the strict subject-object divide necessary for scientific inquiry, dreams introduced a phenomenological and hermeneutical interpenetration of subject and object. Much of what I have mentioned above is beyond the scope of this book, and it will not be the focus of the discussion below, but I hope it gives some idea of where my research began and where it could possibly lead. This “tradition” of dream theory is the broad context for the resonances between Augustine, Boehme, Freud, and Jung that we will see below. The unique qualities of the dream world—its therapeutic value, its strange prescience, its revelatory wisdom and bodily knowledge, its hidden deceptions, its subject-object ambiguity, etc.—seem to have produced certain continuities in dream theory from ancient through to modern times. Given that Boehme’s influence on psychodynamic psychotherapy is the main theme of the book, why did I include the much earlier work of Augustine? For two reasons: First, as a theological thinker Boehme is working within a framework that was largely established by Augustine. Without this framework it would be too easy to selectively appropriate certain aspects of Boehme that find continuity in Freud or Jung, and thus to read modern psychology back into Boehme. By providing an initial chapter on Augustine I can establish a robust theological matrix—one that defined the medieval and early-modern West—and then situate Boehme in relation to it, before bringing this framework and Boehme’s modifications of it into dialogue with modernity. In short, Augustine provides enough ballast to allow theological concepts to speak on their own terms, while also providing a counterweight to Freud and Jung, whose concepts are more congenial to contemporary minds. Second, Boehme is notoriously difficult both to read and to categorize, and Augustine allows us to situate him in relation to mainstream Western theology. Boehme was labelled a heretic almost immediately after his first work appeared, and most theologians today continue to see him as a marginal, though strangely influential figure.26 But judgments of heterodoxy can be made as much for socio-political as for doctrinal reasons. And because serious 26

Paul Tillich might be the best-known Boehme supporter in modern theology, even if his appropriation of Boehmian concepts tends to be somewhat superficial. Something of a Boehmian renaissance has emerged now that English-speaking theologians are reading the work of the Russian Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov. Behind Bulgakov stand

Introduction

19

scholarship on Boehme is still in its early stages in the English-speaking world, the nature of his heterodoxy is still contested. While I will not take a definitive stand on this issue, I will suggest that Boehme’s heterodoxy has been exaggerated, both in the past and present, and particularly in regard to his later works. My sense is that Boehme’s marginal theological status has more to do with his florid and bewildering style than with the actual doctrinal content of his thought. Because Augustine was basically the architect of Western orthodoxy, he offers a kind of touchstone to help situate Boehme in relation to accepted readings of creed and canon. We can thus get a better sense of just how marginal or mainstream Boehme’s ideas actually were, and by extension we can get some sense of how marginal or mainstream the ideas of Freud and Jung were in relation to the Western theological tradition, though neither had a desire to conform to this standard.27 In short, I am not merely arguing that Freud and Jung are indebted to a somewhat obscure Lutheran mystic, but that they are indebted to a mainstream theological tradition—an Augustinian framework—within which Boehme himself operated, although somewhat uniquely. As a practicing psychotherapist, my intention in this research has always been to provide a more fulsome historical and religious context to help contemporary therapists understand the traditions they inhabit—especially for the growing number who identify as spiritually integrated therapists. My hope is that the discussion below will bear fruit in therapeutic practice, and particularly in the therapeutic use of dreams. But unfortunately, given space Vladimir Soloviev, Pavel Florensky, and Schelling, who are all deeply indebted to Boehme. See John Milbank (2009) and Michael Martin (2015). 27 Jung intentionally positioned his work in relation to the Christian tradition (e.g. 1951a), but Freud generally distanced himself from religion. Let me say at the outset that I am not attempting to coopt Freud for Christianity. The Boehmian psychological trinity that later influenced both Freud and Jung was indebted to both Jewish Kabbalah and to Christian theology. Among other Kabbalistic motifs, the “trinity” of the supernal sephirot—Keter, Chokmah, and Binah—is somewhat visible in Boehme’s work (see Wolfson 2018). This helps explain why David Bakan could write a book like Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition ([1958] 1975) even though Freud, the famously “godless Jew,” maintained a resolute atheism. It is unlikely that Freud studied Kabbalah in any depth, although Bakan relates an intriguing story in this regard. Apparently Freud was “beside himself with excitement” when, late in his career, he read a translation of the work of the seventeenth century Kabbalist Chaim Vital. “‘This is gold,’ Freud said, and asked why Chaim Vital’s work had never been brought to his attention before.” According to Bakan, Freud was thinking of writing an introduction to the translation. But the translator, upon reading Freud’s manuscript of Moses and Monotheism, “would have nothing further to do with him.” This story was offered to Bakan second-hand may well be apocryphal (Bakan 1975, xvii). See also Berke and Schneider (2008).

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constraints, I have not been able to say much about these practical implications. Hopefully I can expand on them in future work. I will say that, throughout my research, I was continually surprised by the fact that the therapeutic instincts of the pre-modern dream theologians, including Augustine and Boehme, were very good. And in this respect Freud and Jung were not so much innovators as inheritors of a lineage of dream therapy. Before moving on, let me summarize my thesis more specifically: key aspects of the seminal psychotherapeutic theories of Freud and Jung can be contextualized historically and theologically within the thought of Jacob Boehme, including (1) the concept of an unconscious mind, (2) a therapeutic and revelatory approach to dreams and their interpretation, and (3) a journey of (Freudian) psychosexual and ( Jungian) psychospiritual development that is structured by key dream symbols. Boehme’s thought forms the wider boundary, so to speak, in which the respective theories of both Freud and Jung can be situated. And Boehme himself is indebted to a framework of theological psychology that stretches back to Augustine. I believe that the confluence of these three aspects justifies identifying Boehme, more than any other single historical figure, as the originator of depth psychology and psychodynamic psychotherapy. 1.3

Review of Literature

Scholarship on the use of dreams in spiritual direction, spiritual and pastoral counselling, and spiritually-oriented psychotherapy28 is fairly limited. In the fields of spiritual direction, and spiritual and pastoral counselling, the pioneering writers on this topic were John Sanford (1968, 1978) and Morton Kelsey (1974, 1978)29 who were Anglican priests, Jungian therapists, and good friends. Both realized that Jungian theory had significant resonance with 28

These three fields are not mutually exclusive and their boundaries are highly contested. Historically, spiritual direction was largely a Roman Catholic practice while pastoral counselling was largely Protestant. Today Protestants are practicing spiritual direction, while pastoral counselling has expanded to include inter-religious spiritual counselling, and many such counsellors are becoming credentialed psychotherapists. Likewise, in the general field of psychotherapy, spiritual and religious concepts are increasingly being integrated into various therapeutic approaches. 29 Kelsey rightly pointed to his and Sanford’s pioneering role: “Except for a work by the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Meseguer, The Secret of Dreams, published in 1960, and a book published in 1966 by a friend, the Reverend John A. Sanford, I have found no serious religious study of the subject since David Simpson’s Discourse on Dreams and Night-Visions in 1791” (1974, 25).

Introduction

21

traditional Christian theology, but given the state of scholarship at the time they offered little critical discussion of why this might be the case. As a result, their work tends to subsume theological concepts within psychological categories. Subsequent spiritual directors, and pastoral counsellors working within the Judeo-Christian tradition, have followed their trajectory.30 Spiritual and pastoral counsellors who take an inter-faith approach to dream-work are more prolific,31 and their work has been aided by historians and anthropologists of various religious and spiritual traditions.32 In the general field of psychotherapy, it is mainly Jungians who continue to use dreams in clinical work,33 and they occasionally bring dream material into conversation with traditional religion and spirituality, although these discussions likewise tend to subsume theology within psychological categories, often as an a priori methodological assumption.34 In general, from the perspective of this book, all of 30 Proceeding chronologically, Ronald Barnes, S.J. (1984) offers a short paper on whether dreams are a “help” or a “distraction” in spiritual direction. Savary, Berne, and Williams (1984) use Sanford and Kelsey to elaborate thirty-five “dreamwork techniques.” Russ Parker (1985, 1988), an evangelical Anglican, takes Sanford and Kelsey in a more charismatic direction and provides helpful case studies. 31 Proceeding chronologically, Jeremy Taylor (1983, 1992, 1998), a Jungian and Unitarian Universalist Minister, offers a very accessible approach emphasizing pan-spiritual themes. Kelly Bulkeley, who is not himself a spiritual counsellor but whose work seems most applicable to this field, takes a more sophisticated interdisciplinary approach centred in the history of religions school and uses Gadamer’s hermeneutics to interpret religious meaning in dreams based on “root metaphors” (1994, 1995, 1999, 2000b). He also offers some practical guidelines for pastoral counsellors working with dreams (2000a), traces a brief but helpful comparative history of dreaming in the world’s religions (2008), and offers a theory of dreaming and the origins of religion, in conversation with contemporary cognitive science, and using data from the impressive sleep and dreams database (2016). Bulkeley (2001), and Bulkeley, Adams, and Davis (2009) have edited interesting collections of multi-faith essays on dreaming. Adams, Koet, and Koning also take an inter-faith approach in Dreams and Spirituality: A Handbook for Ministry, Spiritual Direction, and Counselling (2015). 32 For example, in Indigenous spirituality (Eggan 1966; Hallowell 1966; Brown and Brightman 1988; Irwin 2001), in Judaism (Flannery-Dailey 2004; Harris 1994; Wolfson 2011), in Islam (Amanullah 2009; Corbin 1966; Fahd 1966; Hermansen 2001; Mittermaier 2011, 2015; Yamani 2009), in Hinduism (O’Flaherty 1984), and in Buddhism (Young 2001). 33 Those Freudians who still use dreams therapeutically tend not to engage religious themes in any depth. See Lansky (1992) for a good summary. 34 Jung’s protégé, Marie-Louise von Franz, made his approach to dream interpretation accessible in several excellent books, many of which engage religion and theology explicitly (e.g. 1966, 1968, 1979, 1983, 1998). James Hillman relates dream symbolism to religious views of the underworld (1979). Jungian psychiatrist James Hall summarizes Jungian dreamwork methods (1983) and notes in The Unconscious Christian (1993) that many of his ostensibly “secular” patients have deeply Christian motifs in their dreams. Robin

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these discussions could benefit from a critical awareness of how dreams and their interpretation migrated from a theological to a scientific register, and an awareness of the extent to which contemporary dream-work is indebted to a theological matrix. In terms of scholarship on the historical roots of psychodynamic therapy, the standard-setting work is Ellenberger’s magisterial The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970), which locates both Freud and Jung firmly in nineteenth century German Romanticism, and particularly in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. Ellenberger claims that “there is hardly a single concept of Freud or Jung that had not been anticipated by the philosophy of nature and Romantic medicine” (1970, 205).35 He also notes a fundamental change in the conception of the unconscious in Romanticism: it “no longer meant St. Augustine’s forgotten memories or Leibniz’s ‘unclear perceptions,’ but was the very fundament of the human being as rooted in the invisible life of the universe and therefore the true bond linking man with nature.” He further notes that “there is hardly a Romantic philosopher or poet who did not express his ideas on dreams” (1970, 204). But strangely, Ellenberger makes almost no mention of Boehme, except to note that “German romantic philosophy in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century culminated in 1869 in Eduard von Hartmann’s famous Philosophy of the Unconscious,” in which “the will of Boehme, Schelling, and Schopenhauer finally took the much more appropriate name of unconscious” (1970, 209–210).

van Löben Sels (2003), a Jungian therapist, offers a fascinating comparison between the striking dreams of one of her clients and the visions of the thirteenth century Beguine Hadewijch of Brabant. Bonelle Lewis Strickling, a Jungian therapist and spiritual director, combines Jungian theory with the existentialist philosophy of Karl Jaspers, and offers helpful case studies in Dreaming about the Divine (2007). 35 Ellenberger also credits this idea to Leibbrand, who noted that “Jung’s teachings in the field of psychology are not intelligible if they are not connected with Schelling” (1954). Jung himself seemed somewhat aware of this lineage: “There had been talk of the unconscious long before Freud. It was Leibniz who first introduced the idea into philosophy; Kant and Schelling expressed opinions about it, and Carus elaborated it into a system, on whose foundations Eduard von Hartmann built his portentous Philosophy of the Unconscious” (1934b, 102; See also 1940a, 152). Similarly, in his lectures on the history of psychology at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich, Jung credits Schelling with the insight that the unconscious is the absolute foundation of consciousness, and that this “primeval foundation is not differentiated, but universal” (1934a, 1, 15). Curiously, Freud seems unaware of this lineage in “The Ego and the Id:” “To most people who have been educated in philosophy the idea of anything psychical which is not also conscious is so inconceivable that it seems to them absurd and refutable simply by logic” (1923b, SE 19: 13).

Introduction

23

Boehme’s anticipations of psychodynamic psychotherapy extend far beyond his concept of the will, as we will see below.36 More recently several scholars have expanded Ellenberger’s account by looking at anticipations of psychodynamic theory in the broader European Romantic milieu: Günter Gödde (1999) in relation to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Jon Mills (2002) in relation to Hegel, Stephan Atzert (2005) in relation to Schopenhauer, and Paul Bishop (2008; 2009) in relation to Goethe and Schiller. Joel Faflak’s Romantic Psychoanalysis makes the less cautious claim that “Romanticism, particularly British Romantic poetry, invents psychoanalysis” (2008a, 1). Jung in Contexts, edited by Paul Bishop (1999), has essays on Jung’s relationship to Thomas Mann, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson among others. Romantic Psyche and Psychoanalysis, edited by Faflak (2008b), has essays on anticipations of psychodynamic theory in Schelling, G.H. von Schubert, Mary Shelley, Wordsworth, and Blanchot. And Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought, edited by Angus Nicholls and Martin Liebscher (2010), begins with Goethe and the Sturm und Drang, and moves through Schelling, Schopenhauer, C.G. Carus, Eduard von Hartmann, Gustav Fechner, and Nietzsche. Finally, and specifically on Romantic theories of the dream, we have Albert Béguin’s wonderful L’Ame romantique et le rêve (1939), and Yannick Ripa’s very helpful Histoire du rêve (1988). Taken together, these works suggest that psychodynamic theory emerged as a bricolage of piecemeal contributions from various Romantic writers. And yet the question arises as to how so many of them arrived independently at certain virtually identical concepts, raising the possibility of a common historical source. Boehme’s name is rarely mentioned.37 In general, while the above scholars tend to see psychodynamic psychotherapy as a product of twentieth century science and the broad nineteenth century Romantic milieu, I argue that it is also (and probably most fundamentally) a product of seventeenth century theology. Matt Ffytche (2012) and S.J. McGrath (2012) follow Ellenberger in identifying Schelling as the central figure in the genealogy of the unconscious. Ffytche’s The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of 36

At times Ellenberger shows a poor understanding of Boehme’s work, and a tendency to read him through later philosophers like Schelling and Schopenhauer. This is especially evident in his essay “The Unconscious before Freud” (1957, 4, 6, 8, 14). Other more cursory histories of the unconscious include L.L. Whyte’s The Unconscious Before Freud (1978), which briefly mentions Boehme, and Frank Tallis’ Hidden Minds (2002), which makes no mention of him. 37 Béguin’s L’Ame romantique et le rêve (1939), which briefly references Boehme eleven times, is the exception.

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the Modern Psyche traces a crisis in late eighteenth century ideas of the self, typified by the philosophy of Fichte, and argues that Schelling’s response to this crisis gave birth to the psychodynamic unconscious.38 McGrath, in his very helpful The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious, traces a lineage of thought from Schelling to Freud and Jung via the “Schelling school of Romantic psychiatry”—a group of mid-nineteenth century physicians who combined Schelling’s Naturphilosophie with medical psychiatry: G.H. von Schubert, K.F. Burdach, Ignaz Troxler, and C.G. Carus, who in particular was a decisive influence on Jung.39 McGrath also notes Schelling’s influence on Gustav Fechner, who was revered by Freud, and on Victor Cousin, who influenced Pierre Janet (2012, 17, 23, 120; 2014, 37).40 While the works of Ffytche and McGrath make important contributions to the genealogy of the unconscious, my own view is that Boehme’s anticipations of psychodynamic theory are actually more striking than the anticipations they identify in Schelling. Both McGrath and Ffytche make mention of Boehme, Ffytche only in a passing reference that lumps him together with Eckhart and Tauler under the rubric of “German religious mysticism,” in which Ffytche says Schelling found a “corroboration of his own theory of unconsciousness” (2012, 150). But McGrath looks in some depth at Boehme’s singular influence, asserting that “Boehme’s alchemico-theosophical psychology, modified and given metaphysical grounding by Schelling, is the origin of the psychodynamic notion of the unconscious” (2012, 1–2). More specifically, McGrath notes a strong structural similarity: “The middle Schelling’s model of divine personality, which the human personality mirrors, repeats in all essentials Boehme’s triadic pattern of the self revelation of God” (2012, 15). He further notes that in Schelling’s early work the unconscious is basically impersonal and inert. But after immersing himself in Boehme in 1806, Schelling adopts Boehme’s “volitional unconscious, the unconscious of drives (as distinct from the epistemological unconscious, the Kantian unconscious of ‘dark representations’)  … the biggest lesson he learns from Boehme concerns the dynamic structure of

38 Importantly, Ffytche is not trying to describe a “tradition” or lineage of thought. He is attempting to show how the concept of the unconscious gained prominence in an effort to theorize individual independence (2012, 9). 39 In one interview Jung notes that his view of the unconscious was influenced more by Carus than by Freud (Shamdasani 2003, 164). 40 Interestingly, Boulouque (2020) also notes the influence of Kabbalah-inflected tropes, mediated through Boehme, Schelling, and Victor Cousin, on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “American religion,” and especially on Emerson’s concepts of the unconscious, the abyss, and the Oversoul.

Introduction

25

the personality” (2012, 12).41 McGrath then provides a helpful summary of Boehme’s thought, which concludes with a paragraph that aims to “abstract the psychodynamics from Boehme’s theogony” (2012, 48–71). Here the reading of Boehme is heavily tilted toward his influence on Schelling and Franz von Baader (McGrath 2012, 54, 55, 71–74, 78n24, 78n26). McGrath continues this latter discussion in an important essay on “The Psychoanalytical Relevance of Jacob Böhme’s Concept of Evil” (2016), which contains the most exacting exposition to date of the topic I am exploring here. In this essay, while McGrath notes that a historical genealogy exists between Boehme, Freud, and Jung, he focusses instead on structural resonances in their respective theories, just as I will below. And while McGrath’s reading of Boehme, Freud, and Jung differs from mine in certain respects, these differences are generally complementary, in that they support a thesis very similar to my own: Böhme’s greatest influence on the contemporary age manifests itself through the dissemination of psychoanalytical notions of the self, which one way or another, and via a labyrinth of transformations, lead back to his speculative theology. And yet Böhme’s influence on depth psychology and psychoanalysis has scarcely been explored. The Böhmian thread shows that psychoanalysis is only on the surface a secular and agnostic practice; its roots are buried deep in Christian self-experience. Böhme is not the only theological root of psychoanalysis: we must also include the early Christian experience of interiority, medieval mysticism, the rite of exorcism, the medieval practices of confession and Seelsorge. Nevertheless Böhme is the most important root, for only in Böhme’s theogony does psychoanalysis find the metaphysical terms necessary to accurately formulate the psychological structures which show themselves in psychoanalytical practice. Böhme’s notion of unconscious drive (Trieb) as the root of consciousness, his principle of polarity, and his understanding of the necessity of a sublimation of otherwise self-destructive narcissism are concretized and enacted in psychoanalytical experience. (2016, 50) 41 McGrath also provides insight into why Boehme has been neglected in genealogies of the unconscious, despite the fact that his influence on Schelling is well established (Benz 1983; Brown 1977; Mayer 1999). In philosophy departments, the “claim for a theosophical influence on Schelling has become unpopular in the last four decades,” because “it has become a reason to dismiss him as an irrationalist, a mystic, and his philosophy, Schwärmerei.” Further, Boehme is often considered “too obscure to explain Schelling” (2012, 47–48). Indeed McGrath’s work is very helpful in reclaiming a reading of Boehme that is neither irrational nor obscure.

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My own view is that the non-Boehmian theological influences on psychoanalysis mentioned above (“interiority,” “mysticism,” “exorcism,” and “confession”) actually coalesce in Boehme’s thought in remarkable ways, which we will trace below. With gratitude for McGrath’s pioneering essay, I will look in more detail at Boehme’s map of the soul, and highlight Boehme’s theory of dreams and their symbolic interpretation in terms of the seven archetypal qualities of Wisdom/Sophia, which structure a stage theory of psychospiritual development.42 I will also situate Boehme in relation to the Augustinian theology and mysticism of Western Christianity, while noting the influence of Jewish Kabbalah on Boehme, particularly as this was mediated through Paracelsus, which explains why a book like David Bakan’s (1975) Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition makes so much sense, even though Freud was a famously “godless Jew.” In general McGrath succeeds, more than any other writer, in recognizing and reclaiming Boehme’s importance for the history of psychology and psychotherapy.43 I have only discovered four other writers who treat Boehme in relation to psychodynamic theory in any depth. The first is Kielholz, whose Jakob Böhme; Ein pathographischer Beitrag zur Psychologie der Mystik appeared in a series edited by Freud himself. He argues that Boehme’s work represents a pathological “sexualization of the whole cosmos” (1919, 45; in Weeks 1991, 211).44 Gordon Pruett’s (1976) essay “Will and Freedom: Psychoanalytic themes in the work of Jacob Boehme,” seems to be the first work in English on the topic. And while it does connect Freud’s Id to Boehme’s Ungrund in insightful ways, it presents a limited reading of Boehme’s psychology and a selective reading of his corpus. Suzanne Kirschner has a chapter on Boehme in The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis (1996, 130–148), a social historical genealogy that traces post-Freudian object relational views of human development back to the ancient amalgam of both “Judeo-Christian biblical theology” and the “Neoplatonic mysticism” of Plotinus. Interestingly, she makes little mention of 42 McGrath mentions Schelling’s “sketch of a psychology of dreams” in The Ages of the World ([1813] 1997, 159), which was influenced by G.H. von Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften (1808) (McGrath 2012, 112, 119n44). Schubert himself also published an influential book on Die Symbolik des Traumes (1814) which bears the influence of Boehme. 43 McGrath’s essays on “Schelling and the Unconscious” (2010) and “Schellingian Psychotherapy” (2014) are also very helpful. The former essay offers a compelling critique of Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian reading of Schelling, in favour of a Boehmian theological reading. The latter essay argues that Schelling’s metaphysics could structure a metapsychology of non-pathological productive dissociation. 44 Unfortunately I was not able to get a copy of this work.

Introduction

27

Augustine. Her chapter on Boehme identifies him as a key turning point in this lineage, and while in general her thesis supports the view that Boehme is a very important precursor to psychoanalysis, her reading of Boehme is very general, and depends heavily on secondary sources.45 In terms of the psychodynamic view of development, which is her central topic, she does not mention any of the continuities between Boehme, Freud, and Jung that we will see below. And finally John Dourley’s (2008) Paul Tillich, Carl Jung, and the Recovery of Religion contains a chapter on Boehme with some excellent insights about the therapeutic use of Boehme’s work, but it also tends to distort Boehme by assimilating him to the categories of Jung and Tillich.46 1.4

Methodology and Primary Texts

My methods are mainly textual and historical, but I will not be tracing the direct genealogical transmission of ideas. Such a lineage has already been traced quite well, mainly from Schelling to Freud, with some exploration of Boehme’s influence on Schelling. Instead, I explore Boehme on his own terms, looking at structural and conceptual patterns of continuity and discontinuity with Augustine, Freud, and Jung. In so doing I give due consideration to the meaning of these structures and concepts within their own historical contexts and theoretical frameworks. The primary texts I focus on are as follows: Augustine’s Confessions, The Trinity, and The Literal Meaning of Genesis; Boehme’s Mysterium Magnum, and Clavis; Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams; and Jung’s The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Additional primary texts are listed in the bibliography. Instead of adopting a specific theoretical framework to structure my research, as mentioned above, my intent is to explore continuities between two very different theoretical frameworks: Augustine’s and Boehme’s frameworks are broadly theological, in that they are mainly indebted to the Bible and theological tradition in conversation with human experience. Here Biblical revelation and personal revelatory experiences are granted priority over other sources of knowledge and experience. Freud’s and Jung’s respective 45

Kirshner depends heavily on Walsh (1983). I agree with Gentzke that Walsh presents an “idiosyncratic reading of Boehme through the lens of Erich Voegelin and Hegel,” and that Walsh’s “distortions of Boehme’s thought” are “due to a seemingly selective reading of his works” (Gentzke 2016, 18–19). 46 McGrath (2012, 56, 60, 77n23) provides a good critique of Dourley’s reading of Boehme.

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frameworks are broadly scientific in that they are indebted to the psychological theories of the day in conversation with their own empirical observations. Their frameworks are also broadly philosophical in that psychology had only recently transitioned from the purview of philosophy to that of natural science. The extent to which the scientific method can ever be purely empirical is one of the questions posed by my research, inasmuch as science tends to find its starting points and heuristic hypotheses in existing narratives and personal experiences. Chapter 2 outlines an Augustinian “framework” of theological psychology, which attempts to show how Augustine set the terms for the discussion of psychology in the West. In this sense, I could have used the now popular Foucauldian term “discourse” to describe this framework and its influence. But I hesitated because this framework, as Augustine saw it, was not only or even primarily composed of words and language. The referents of the language used to describe this framework include pictorial images, physical and non-physical regions (including spiritual worlds), and autonomous entities (including God), which become discernible in theoretical and linguistic structures. Each of the three themes I explore in Augustine also exhibits a kind of skeletal structure of its own: (1) the soul has a trinitarian structure, in harmony with the Father, Son, and Spirit of Bible, creed, and Christian tradition;47 (2) human epistemic experience or “vision” has a tripartite structure, encompassing (i) objects of the material world, (ii) images of the imagination, including the dream world, and (iii) imageless ideas of the intellect, ideas that have referents in the mind of God; and (3) human development is structured by a figural reading of the seven eternal days of creation, representing seven archetypes of Wisdom. As we will see, much of this Augustinian framework survived the migration from theology to science in a truncated form. But whether identifying these “structures” commits me to some form of methodological “structuralism” is another question.48 47 I am using Augustine’s gendered terms for the Trinity, but one could argue that gender is not an essential category for Augustine, especially in the mind of God, following Mt. 22.23–30. 48 Foucault is likely the most enduring of the French post-structuralists, and his current (almost hegemonic) popularity in the Humanities and Social Sciences begs some comment. The post-structuralists were partly responding to the so-called “structuralism” of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “mythemes.” My own view is that the wide global and historical dispersion of certain myth and folklore motifs goes well beyond any common linguistic origin. We must look beyond language to account for this wide dispersion. The reaction against Levi-Strauss in anthropology, and against figures like Mircea Eliade in religious studies, does not obviate the existence of these widespread myth and folklore motifs.

Introduction

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In retrospect, I realized that a key aspect of my research method was noting the extent to which a particular author’s corpus was capacious and synthetically fertile both within and beyond its historical context. For example, the fact that the Augustinian “framework” we will explore was capacious enough to include such a vast swath of ancient, medieval, and pre-modern thought is quite breathtaking. There were also, of course, enforced boundaries and constraints (religious, political, institutional, bodily, etc.) that encouraged the endurance and dispersion of Augustine’s work. But my sense is that the synthetic possibilities of a corpus—its ability to incorporate other voices from the past, present, and future, without undue constraint—tends to be the salient factor in its influence and dispersion. Boehme’s work is also synthetically fertile in this sense, which likely accounts for his vast intellectual influence, in spite of his early marginalization by the authorities of his day. 1.5

Chapter Summary

I have already outlined the Augustinian framework we will explore in chapter 2. Chapters 3–7 discuss how Boehme inhabits, modifies, and in many ways reanimates this Augustinian framework. Chapter 3 looks at the imaginal realm—the realm of dreams and imagination that for Augustine was a middle world or “mesocosm” of visio spiritualis. We will explore how Boehme’s reanimation of this realm allowed various historical streams of magic and mysticism to converge synthetically in his work. Chapter 4 offers a general introduction to Boehme’s work as a whole, including an overview of his method, ontology, and general approach, all of which help to situate him as a theological “psychotherapist.” Chapters 5–7 look more specifically at Boehme’s anticipations of psychodynamic therapy. Chapter 5 explores Boehme’s “map of the soul,” noting how his modifications of Augustine’s soul-trinity bring him into closer alignment with And to affirm the wide dispersion of these motifs does not necessitate adopting some form of “structuralism.” For example, Northrop Frye’s approach (1982; 1990) to these common motifs in literature is not a “structuralism” in the French post-structuralist sense. The structures I mention in this paragraph, especially as they are appropriated by Boehme, include a fundamental dialectic of presence and absence, which could be situated in relation to the presences and absences that are so central to Foucault’s modified historicism. But on this point Foucault himself is heavily indebted to Boehme, via Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and thus it would seem anachronistic to impose a Foucauldian frame on Boehme’s work. In order to see ideas in the fullness of their original context, it does not help to frame them in terms of later, more narrow and derivative perspectives.

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the eventual theories of Freud and Jung. Here we see Boehme’s concept of the unconscious mind, which he describes in terms of inner eternal dark and light worlds that participate in the realms of hell and heaven respectively. We will also see his concept of an “I-ness” (Ichheit) or ego that mediates between these inner eternal worlds and the outer temporal world. In Boehme’s understanding of the soul’s development, this “I-ness” is initially fixated on the outer temporal world, but it can discover the inner eternal dark world through a process of confession, and ultimately then discover the inner eternal light world through a process of sublation and transformation. This rebirth (Wiedergeburt) allows the whole of temporal reality to be lit by the light of eternity, as the soul clothes itself in the lineaments of a spiritual body. Chapter 6 looks specifically at Boehme’s theory of dreams, discussed in the Mysterium Magnum in terms of a brilliant exegesis of the biblical story of Joseph. Similar to Augustine’s view of dreams as a form of everyday ecstasy (ekstasis), Boehme sees them as a form of magic (magia), where the soul is active while the body sleeps. And this magia, which has access to the macrocosmic World Soul, also has access to the eternal imaginal realm where the dark world is transformed into light and the soul is reborn. Likewise, Boehme’s view of demonic dream deception in many ways rediscovers and reanimates Augustine’s original view. In his general discussion of dream theory, Boehme encourages the reader to “become Joseph,” who is the “clearest figure” of the “New Human regenerated out of the earthly Old Adam.” This developmental journey involves the seven archetypes of Wisdom, which structure both the soul and its stages of transformation from darkness to light. Chapter 7 engages the details of this developmental and transformational process by looking at Boehme’s exegesis of the seven biblical days of creation, which form the original exegetical context for Wisdom’s seven qualities. Here I show how Boehme’s psychospiritual stages of development form the wider boundary in which to situate both Freud’s psychosexual stages and Jung’s stages of individuation. Finally, chapter 8 summarizes the theories of Freud and Jung in light of the Boehmian resonances noted throughout the book, and closes with a brief discussion of the implications of this research.

Chapter 2

Augustine and the Framework of Theological Psychology This chapter explores Augustine’s thought in relation to our three themes: (1) his map of the soul, (2) his theory of dreams, and (3) his hermeneutic of dream interpretation. Because these themes are all central to Augustine’s mature thought, our journey simply walks through key passages of his later works: Confessions, The Trinity, and The Literal Meaning of Genesis (hereafter TLMG).1 As a whole the chapter offers an overview of Augustine’s theological psychology—his account of the soul’s journey into God—particularly in relation to dreams.2 I am calling the chapter a “framework” of theological psychology because Augustine’s thought became paradigmatic for the West, throughout the middle ages and into the early modern period.3 Boehme’s thought, as we will see shortly, is heavily indebted to this Augustinian framework, in (1) its trinitarian view of the soul; (2) its positioning of dreams in a middle realm between God and material creation, and between mind and body; and (3) its biblical archetypes of dream interpretation, found especially in the creation account of Genesis 1 (the Hexameron). Unfortunately I do not have the space to say much about the socio-historical context of Augustine’s “framework,” although I am indebted to scholars who have done this work very well.4 Nor am I offering a psycho-history of Augustine himself, which has also been covered quite thoroughly.5 Nor will I offer much critique according to the 1 City of God is the fourth large work of Augustine’s later years. The writing of these four works overlaps in time: Confessions (397–401 CE), The Trinity (399–426 CE), TLMG (401–415 CE), City of God (413–427 CE). Together they cover theology in relation to the soul (Confessions, The Trinity), creation (TLMG), and human society (City of God). 2 What I am calling Augustine’s “theological psychology” covers much the same ground as his “theological epistemology” (Gioia 2008; Nash 2003; Schumacher 2011) and his “mystical theology” (Butler 1923; Cayré 1954; McGinn 1991; Bonner 1994; Kenney 2005). The definition of “mysticism” is a thorny issue, but I am happy with McGinn’s attempt to keep “mysticism” and “mystical theology” together, and to keep mysticism embedded in religion as a “way of life,” rather than merely an episodic “experience” (1991, xi–xx). 3 See Steven Kruger’s excellent Dreaming in the Middle Ages (1992) for an account of Augustine’s extensive medieval influence. 4 Peter Brown is the great authority here (1967, 1982, 1988). 5 For example, Augustine’s relationship with his mother Monica has animated many Freudian reflections about the “oceanic feeling” of “primary narcissism”—the original psychic bond

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categories of contemporary social theory.6 All of this has been done, and done well, by others. What I am doing amounts to a general sketch of Augustine’s thought on our three themes, which will provide a framework in which to situate later chapters. Because I am stressing the breadth and broad contours of Augustine’s thought, I will also not be engaging much of the minutia, and the many intractable debates of Augustine scholarship. While Augustine is a systematic thinker, his terminology is not always consistent and his thought developed throughout his lifetime, leaving much fodder for scholarly threshing. Also, like many great thinkers, he often considers many sides of an issue and lends credence to more than one position. A good debate among Augustine scholars often enough indicates a fissure where two or more streams of thought emerged in the West, and in my understanding of the Augustinian “framework,” all such streams are important. The point is not to iron out the contradictions in Augustine, but to notice how one oevre can branch into very different historical fields of discourse, and why, for example, both Protestants and Catholics claimed Augustine as the authority in the Reformation debates. The expansiveness and charity of Augustine’s thought—his ability to accommodate many views, even those of his opponents, often within a higher synthesis—is likely what made him so compelling for future generations. The Augustinian “framework” we will explore is a kind of loom on which many different medieval and early modern tapestries were eventually woven. But, again, we do not have space to actually trace this vast intellectual legacy, only the matrix from which it emerged. My reading of Augustine here is slightly tilted toward the stream that Boehme will inhabit, and I will point out where that is the case.7

with the mother. See the lit review in Parsons (2013, 9). These psycho-histories, while very interesting, often involve anachronism: the reason we can so easily psychoanalyse Augustine is likely because his work formed the matrix of psychotherapy, as we will see in what follows. Interestingly, Erikson’s Young Man Luther (1958) inaugurated the psycho-history genre by subsuming theology within psychology. We might even see this as an (unconscious) attempt on the part of psychotherapy to deny and move beyond its theological roots. 6 E.g. Brown (1988, 2012, 2015), Pagels (1988), Miles (1979, 1989, 2008, 2012), Gilligan and Richards (2009, 102–118), and Stark (2007). 7 My approach to Augustine is also somewhat Protestant compared to, for example, the great Etienne Gilson, who I suspect tilts Augustine toward Thomas, particularly by imposing discrete realms of nature and (supernatural) grace (e.g. 1960, 77–96). Cayré (1954) also makes this mistake, which muddles his otherwise brilliant exposition, as McGinn notes (1991, 231). My sense is that, for Augustine, nature and grace interpenetrate, and this aligns me with Henri de Lubac, and certain strands of the patristic “ressourcement” or (so-called) “nouvelle théologie” (see e.g. Milbank 2005), including Hans Urs von Balthasar, as I will note later. It also aligns me somewhat with Karl Barth.

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Augustine as Psychotherapist

I hope this framework will also reveal Augustine as a “psychotherapist” in the general sense of the Greek roots of the word. Several scholars have noted that Augustine’s primary interest is “soul-healing,” and that his central questions are therapeutically oriented.8 His first question—how do we find happiness?—is existential and universal in that he believes human beings are “asking” it at every moment.9 We could even speak here of a “happiness principle,” something like Freud’s “pleasure principle,” as a human constant. Augustine’s answer, that God is the source and goal of true happiness, sounds much too easy to modern ears. But the nuances of the soul’s relationship with God are infinitely complex, because they lead us into the stormy waters of desire,10 where Augustine’s questions proliferate: What is desire? Where does it come from and where does it end? Why do so many of our desires prove counterfeit, and remain unfulfilled? How does desire deceive, and how do we deceive ourselves in desire? Why do we desire what destroys us? How do we work with our desire, and how do we surrender it? What is divine desire, and how does God desire us? How does God’s Spirit “break, blow, and burn”11 our desire? Desire fascinated Augustine,12 and it will appropriately launch our discussion below. In later chapters we will find that desire, in the guise of “libido,” also stands at the root of modern psychotherapeutic theory. But as a psychotherapist Augustine does not really offer a technique,13 and this separates him from the majority of therapeutic schools proliferating at the moment. For Augustine, therapeia is in many ways simply theōria:14 a vision 8 E.g. McGinn (1991, 244–245), Charry (1997, 2006), Miles (2008, 2012), Parsons (2013). 9 E.g. The Trinity 13.2.7, 13.6.25; Confessions 10.21.31. See Gilson on the influence of Cicero’s Hortensius, which taught Augustine to identify happiness with the love of Wisdom (1960, 3). Similarly, O’Connell: “If there is one constant running through all of Augustine’s thinking, it is his preoccupation with the question of happiness … But the answer is equally uniform: what makes man happy is the possession of God, a possession achieved by way of vision” (1968, 205, quoted in McGinn 1991, 232). Scholars debate whether Augustine’s “eudaimonism” is continuous or discontinuous with its Greek and Latin precursors (e.g. Wolterstorff 2012). 10 I am using “desire” here as shorthand for Augustinian “will/love,” defined below. 11 These words are from John Donne’s Holy Sonnets: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” 12 McGinn: “few mystics spoke more often about desire” (1991, 259). 13 However, many have tried to find a therapeutic process in Augustine’s thought, and a fair bit of the mystical literature of the West simply represents this attempt. Probably the best known is that of purgation, illumination, and union. See Bonner (1994, 121–123) and Parsons (2013, 105). 14 Greek theōria, which is central to Eastern Orthodox spirituality, translates as contemplatio in Latin, a word that is crucial for Augustine especially in its connection to visio. Reading Augustine as a psychotherapist in many ways reveals his proximity to Eastern Orthodoxy.

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of a (somewhat hidden) reality, its structure, the human place within it, and human thought and behaviour in relation to it. This contemplative theory and vision of reality is itself healing for the soul. In this sense Augustine is indebted to Greek philosophical therapeia,15 and even Freud and Jung are likely more in line with this ancient approach than the more technique-oriented psychotherapeutic schools of today.16 But reading Augustine as a “psychotherapist” is still by no means natural today; he is usually positioned mainly as a systematic theologian. The intractable debates that continue to define Augustine scholarship represent attempts to find logically consistent systems in his thought, often when they were never intended in the first place.17 And the result is usually that both sides in the debate lose the psychological nuance of Augustine’s original formulations. Scholastics of both the Protestant and Catholic variety have tended to iron out Augustine’s irrationality in their search for logical coherence.18 In general, my view is that Augustine’s formulations are not always logically coherent because they emerged mainly from his own psychological experiences.19 Augustine was attuned to the strange logic of the soul, which rarely fits within the formal logic See Tataryn, who notes that Augustine’s influence on the Eastern church helped pave the way for Boehme’s influence on Florensky and Bulgakov (2000, 45–154). 15 E.g. Miles: “the Confessions is primarily therapy in the Platonic sense of a methodical conversion from ‘misidentification of reality,’ to recognition of the reality, the patterns of behaviour, that has been implicit but unidentified within one’s most intimate and pressing experience … (2008, 110). See also Kolbet (2010, 2013). On Platonic therapeia see Cushman (1958). 16 Unfortunately, in the contemporary era of psychotherapeutic “schools” (Ellenberger 1970, 418), every new technique quickly gets a new “brand name.” Freud and Jung both had a broad enough vision and theoretical base to give birth to a plethora of different techniques and schools among their followers. The fact that “technique,” in the modern sense, often constricts vision and therefore truth, is something that was stressed by Heidegger, Gadamer, and their heirs in hermeneutics. I have argued that Heidegger’s insight here—his attempt to recover truth as a poiēsis or unveiling—is very Augustinian (McCullough 2002). 17 Helpfully, McGinn calls many of these debates “dialogues of the deaf,” interested more in polemics than higher synthesis (1991, 230). 18 For a good historical description of this tendency, in relation to moral thought, see Rist’s Augustine Deformed: Love, Sin, and Freedom in the Western Moral Tradition. Rist particularly notes the distorting effect of the separation of will from love, contrary to Augustine’s original formulation (2014, 228–248). 19 See Conybeare, who notes in The Irrational Augustine that the “idiosyncrasy of Augustine’s arguments” has everything to do with their basis in human experience (2006, 139–192).

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of a syllogism. And for Augustine, the strange logic of the soul has everything to do with the strange logic of God. 2.2

Map of the Soul: Trinitarian Psychology

This section explores Augustine’s theory of the soul, which is described most extensively in the second half of The Trinity (books 8–15), where he outlines the key soul-trinity of (1) will/love, (2) memory, and (3) understanding, corresponding to the (1) Holy Spirit, (2) Father, and (3) Son, respectively.20 Augustine’s personal experience of this soul-trinity also informs the whole project of the Confessions.21 In later chapters we will see how Boehme, Freud, and Jung move within the parameters established by Augustine. To anticipate the basic argument, Augustine’s concept of “will/love” is the nascent “libido” of modern psychotherapy, “memory” is the nascent “unconscious mind,” and “understanding” is the nascent field of “consciousness.” Augustine’s psychology is paradigmatic not only in his definition of these discrete terms, but in their trinitarian function and interaction. These three are both distinct and inseparable; they appear together in any movement of the soul, and yet they can always be isolated conceptually. The complex dynamics of will/love are the driving force, so to speak, that searches the hidden caverns of memory and brings certain elements to light in the conscious field of understanding. Trinitarian psychology basically began with Augustine. Before him, the “image of God” in which humans were created was usually ascribed solely to the Son, Jesus Christ.22 As the primordial human, Christ was both the model for the first Adam, and was himself the “second” or “last” Adam.23 With Augustine a new and potent idea enters Western discourse: we are made in the image not just of the Son, but of the whole Trinity. We are trinitarian beings, and most

20 I am using Augustine’s gendered terms for the Trinity, but one could argue that gender is not an essential category for Augustine, especially in the mind of God, following Mt. 22.23–30. This will be important below in discussing Jung’s archetypes. 21 Augustine first outlines his soul-trinity concept in the Confessions 13.11.12. 22 Sullivan notes the few exceptions to this rule (1963, 194). He also notes that the “third member of the Augustinian trinity, love or will, finds no counterpart in any of the trinities proposed by preceding Fathers” (1963, 195). See also Hill (1991, 55–56). 23 1 Cor. 14.45–48. Christ is described as the image of God in Col. 1.15, and Augustine also follows this tradition (e.g. The Trinity 7.5).

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especially in our psychological functioning.24 It would be hard to overstate the influence of this imago Trinitatis concept on later Western thinkers.25 In The Trinity Augustine offers his most coherent account of the human soul, not so much in terms of its nature, which was much discussed by ancient writers, but in terms of its functioning.26 For Augustine, the soul is always in motion, and it is through the soul’s phenomenological experiences that we can understand it. The careful structuring of The Trinity also reveals Augustine’s theological method. In the first half (books 1–7) he explores the biblical revelation of the Trinity, which is approached through faith, while the second half (books 8–15) moves from faith to experiential understanding within the individual soul. It describes how we can experience the Trinity through our own soul-functioning, if only in ephemeral flashes on this side of eternity.

24 For Augustine, Trinitarian analogies are present in all created being, but the imago is something more: it reveals the deep paradox and mystery that each element is within the whole, and the whole is also within each element. More technically, Hill describes the marks of Augustine’s Trinity, derived from Scripture in books 1–7 of The Trinity, as “co-extensive,” “co-equal,” and “consubstantial” (1991, 53). Augustine also emphasized the inherent relationality of the Trinity, in order to move beyond the Greek-Latin linguistic impasse of one “substance” (Gr. ousia; L. substantia) in three “persons” (Gr. hypostasis; L. personae). For Augustine, the names Father and Son, imply a mutual relation, and that relation is the Spirit. 25 McGinn calls it “second to none” (1991, 243) and Sullivan traces its influence through the middle ages and beyond. While Eastern theologians almost never follow Augustine’s trinitarian psychology, Western theologians almost always do (Sullivan 1963, 190–195, 204–307). Remarkably, Sullivan could also say in 1963, that “few theologians have other than a passing acquaintance with the doctrine of St. Augustine as found in the De Trinitate” (1963, 204). Sullivan and others (e.g. Hill 1991, 25) note that in the West a notable distortion crept into Lombard’s Sentences, which describes the three elements of the soul as “faculties” (Sentences I, dist. iii, c. 2), thus distorting Augustine’s emphasis on the phenomenological experience of the soul and the unbounded and interpenetrating (perichoretic) nature of its three elements. Thomas, depending on Lombard, partly corrected and partly perpetuated his mistake (Sullivan 1963, 216–272). Reacting against Thomist scholasticism, a more Augustinian view was recovered by the Rhineland or “speculative” mystics: Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroeck. For example, Tauler notes: “St. Thomas said that the perfection of the image consists in its being active, in the use of the faculties. However, other theologians give it as their opinion—and here we have something incomparably more sublime—that the image of the Trinity lies in the most intimate regions of the soul, in its most secret and intimate depths, where God is present essentially, actually, and substantially” (Spiritual Conferences, 141; see Sullivan 1963, 288–295). This stream of Rhineland mysticism was an important influence on Boehme. 26 “In this respect,” says Hill, “his approach has more in common with that of moderns like Freud and Jung than with the theories and speculations of ancient philosophers” (1991, 258–259).

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The second half of The Trinity reveals that Augustine’s psychology is also his mysticism. In book 8, the transition between the two halves, he announces that he will now explore the Trinity “in a more inward manner” (modo interiore), i.e. within the soul. This inward movement quickly turns upward, as he elaborates several soul-trinities that reconfigure themselves, kaleidoscopically, as the soul is drawn heavenward in the love of God. This dual movement, inward and upward—what McGinn calls moments of “enstasy” leading to moments of “ecstasy”27—is connected to Augustine’s own mystical experiences at Milan and Ostia:28 “The God within is the God above” (Exp. of Ps. 130.12). We will return to the theme of ecstasy when we discuss dreams below. Augustine brings the reader with him on his quest, inviting our souls to mirror God’s beauty and wholeness. The soul ascends in the context of grace descending, and as it ascends the soul-trinity increasingly functions in the image of its Source. On such a journey, all our perceptions change; as Proust said, “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes” (2019, 55). Augustine uses three main words to describe the soul or psyche: (1) “anima” denotes an animating life principle and a sensual awareness, which humans have in common with animals—a more creaturely and earthly “soul,” as the English translators have it; (2) “animus” denotes a more specifically human awareness or “consciousness”; and (3) “mens” (“mind”) denotes the higher aspects of both former terms.29 It is in the mens that the imago Trinitatis appears most fully, but contrary to many misreadings (e.g. Meyer 1954), for Augustine the mind is not merely rational. All of its movements involve both an affective and a cognitive quality. We must love in order to know, and know in order to love—an aporia that Augustine never tires of repeating (e.g. The Trinity 8.6, 9.3, 10.1–5, 13.7). These three terms for the soul also alert us to the fact that the soul (as anima) extends below, or beyond human awareness (animus), which is itself a broader category than the affective cognition of the mind (mens). Augustine’s soul thus appears like a field of concentric circles, expanding outward from affective cognition to broader awareness, and beyond into the realm of the sensual life force, a model that will find resonance in Freud and Jung.

27 This pattern also appears among the neo-Platonists, especially Plotinus, although Augustine makes certain modifications of it. See McGinn for a good summary of scholarship on this question (1991, 232–235). 28 The vision at Milan in 386 is described in Confessions 7.10.16–7.11.17, 7.17.23, and 7.20.26. The vision at Ostia is described in Confessions 9.10.23–26. 29 This discussion is indebted to Edmund Hill (1991, 259–260).

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There is also a vertical dimension: just as the soul extends downward and outward, from mens into the animal realm, so the soul extends upward and outward, from mens into the eternal realm of God. This “shape” of the soul is mirrored in the narrative shape of Augustine’s figurative reading of the Fall, where in Adam and Eve the soul is drawn down into the realm of the serpent, who represents material and sensual bodily perception.30 But in Christ the soul is also drawn upward, from material objects into the realm of eternal Wisdom, in which all materiality continually participates. Wisdom is the realm of the eternal archetypes through which the universe was created, and in which history and the soul move and develop, as we will see in part three of this chapter. To trace the argument of the second half of The Trinity briefly, book 8 begins by noting that God is both Truth and Goodness, which means that God is the axiomatic context in which all of the soul’s knowing and loving takes place.31 This ontological, cognitive, and affective link between the soul and God is the foundation on which Augustine will build his various soul-trinities. But for Augustine the affective has a certain priority over the cognitive, as we see in his first trinitarian analogy at the end of book 8. Here Augustine outlines a trinity of (1) lover, (2) beloved, and (3) the love that joins them as “a kind of life coupling or trying to couple together two things,” corresponding to (1) Father, (2) Son, and (3) Spirit respectively (8.5.14). Love is in some sense higher than knowledge as we embark on this inward journey; as Augustine says in one of his homilies, God “rode far above the fullness of knowledge to show that no one could approach him save by love” (Exp. of Ps. 17.11). In short, this initial trinity of love is not just a precursor to the others; it is the foundational context for them. Love is the medium of all the soul’s movements (The Trinity 8.13).32 Augustine then proceeds in books 9 and 10 to outline his key soul-trinity of will/love, memory, and understanding, which he traces through various configurations for the remainder of the text, noting how it functions with outward material objects and with inward images (book 11), with ideas (book 12), with knowledge or scientia (book 13), and with Wisdom or sapientia (book 14). In this section we will concentrate on defining the three elements of this 30 For Augustine, the serpent represents “the fivefold power of sensation in the body” as opposed to the senses of the mind. The ancients noticed that the spinal cord, or peripheral nervous system, resembles a serpent as it winds its way down from brain to body, as Hippolytus mentions in relation to certain gnostic groups (Jung 1951a, CW 9ii: 233). 31 As Hill says, “truth is that in terms of which we know and understand whatever we do know and understand, and goodness is that in terms of which we desire, approve, and love whatever we do desire, approve, and love” (1991, 24). 32 Elsewhere Augustine says that love is the soul’s “foot” (Exp. of Ps. 9.15), and the “path” by which the soul ascends or descends (Exp. of Ps. 85.6).

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soul-trinity, and later in the chapter we will explore the distinction between scientia and sapientia. 2.2.1 Will/Love: the Force of Desire The centrality of love in Augustine’s psychology is probably best expressed in one of his homilies: Each person is such as his love is. Do you love the earth? You will be earth. Do you love God? What shall I say? Will you be a god? I dare not say this on my own. Let us hear Scripture: “I have said, ‘You are gods and sons of the Most High, all of you [Ps. 82.6].’” (Hom. on 1 John 2.14.5)33 In The Trinity Augustine uses the terms “will” (voluntas) and “love” (amor) to describe a single element of the soul-trinity, corresponding to the Holy Spirit. There is thus an intentional ambiguity as to whether this element implies voluntary (conscious) or involuntary (unconscious) action.34 The English “desire” could be used to cover both terms, but I have kept “will/love” to remain consistent with Augustine scholarship.35 For Augustine, while the will (voluntas) maintains a capacity for free choice, love (amor) acts like a “weight” on the will (e.g. Confessions 13.9.10), and the “weight” of our love can thus make it difficult, if not impossible, for the will to follow through on its free choices.36 Love becomes a weight on the will simply because our souls become fastened to the objects of our love. For Augustine, as the quote above suggests, we literally become what we love, analogous to the way that the Father and Son interpenetrate and partake of each other’s being in the bond of the Holy Spirit. 33 Theōsis or deification is an important, and neglected theme in Augustine’s thought (see Bonner 1986; Meconi 2013), and it raises serious questions for Lossky’s (1963) attempt to separate Eastern theōsis from Western rationalistic justification theories. Augustine follows the basic affirmation of Irenaeus and Athanasius that “God became human in order that humanity might become divine.” 34 This ambiguity, of course, became a flashpoint of the Reformation: Protestants championed the “bondage of the will,” Tridentine Catholics maintained the freedom of the will, and both claimed Augustine as their authority. One could argue, with Rist (2014, 136–171), that both sides of this debate separated will from love, and thus deformed Augustine’s original formulation and its psychological, experiential basis. 35 “Desire” has two advantages: it can be both voluntary and involuntary, and it has a more active connotation than “love.” Augustinian “love” is always a desire for something; like Freud’s “libido” it involves an “object cathexis.” The slash dividing “will/love” could be likened to that of a fraction with a numerator and denominator: for Augustine, will is like a split-off fraction of love. 36 Thus the apostle Paul can say, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it” (Rom. 7.18).

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Love binds us to our loves. Augustine’s distinction between will and love thus captures the distinction between what we choose and what we actually do in the world we are bound to, but the two ideas are continuous. Love (amor) is the broader or supraordinate term, since (unconscious) love often moves the (conscious) will, and can even overrule its choices. And yet, for Augustine, will/love as a singular force drives all the soul’s actions: all its cognition and affect, and all its bodily activities, whether we choose them or not (e.g. Exp. on Ps. 31.2.5; see also Gilson 1960, 135). While will/love is a singular element, for Augustine it energizes two very different dispositions, which are determined by two very different objects: “love-of-self” and “love-of-God.”37 Love-of-God, however, always includes both love-of-neighbour, and a love-of-self that is more authentic than the former concept.38 To keep this in view I will sometimes use the formulation “love-of-God/other/self” for the latter term. “Love-of-self” involves a shrinking awareness and diminishing engagement with the world, like a centrifugal spiral tending toward solipsism and death. “Love of God/other/self” involves expanding perception and increasing engagement, like a centripetal spiral toward greater life. In short, will/love as a singular force always finds itself centred around one of two poles: The first pole is a result of the fact that our perceptions are located in a particular body, and thus we easily get the impression that the universe quite literally revolves around us, and exists to serve us. The second pole appears when we realize that there is a Creator who called this universe into being, and who holds it in existence at each moment through a continual outpouring of love. When we realize this, not just conceptually but existentially, like the universe we become centred in love-of-God. The transition from the first pole to the second is not easy, and it feels quite literally like a death—the death of our self as centre of the universe. But what feels like death turns out in fact to be rebirth, characterized primarily by the expansion of our capacity to receive and give love. We realize that our finite love is a drop in a vast ocean—a universe pulsating with Creator love—and we naturally add our small voice to the throng. This expansion of love is also an expansion of

37 E.g. City of God 14.28; TLMG 11.15.20; and in a more psychological mode, The Trinity 9.13. By “love-of-God” I intend both the subjective and objective genitive, since for Augustine God’s love toward us (grace) always elicits a loving response (works). 38 Thus for Augustine, paradoxically, love-of-self actually becomes self-hatred, while loveof-God contains a genuine love-of-self (The Trinity 14.18). See also O’Donovan (1980, 83–111). Love-of-God includes both aspects of Jesus’ distillation of the law in the two “great commandments” (The Trinity 14.18).

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vision, which reveals eternal being shining through all finite beings in poetic superabundance.39 Importantly, each of these two dispositions, by itself, makes use of the full range of affect and cognition. In regard to (1) affect, all human emotions are present in each respective disposition. Thus no emotion is intrinsically bad.40 Augustine is often misread as differentiating between good forms of love, like charity (caritas) and delight (dilectio), and bad forms of love, like concupiscence (concupiscentia) and cupidity (cupiditas). According to this misreading, it seems we must supress our bad loves and express our good ones.41 But on a closer reading we find that even caritas and dilectio can become disfigured in love-of-self, and even cupiditas and concupiscentia can find fulfilment in love-of-God.42 Concupiscentia is a good example, since it is so dominant in the Confessions as a seemingly negative form of love, and it is likely responsible for Augustine’s reputation as the father of sexual repression.43 Outside the Confessions, Augustine speaks of the fulfilment of concupiscentia within the disposition of love-of-God/other/self: “there is a concupiscence of the

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The motif of poiēsis—of divine creation as revelatory—appears in Augustine’s repeated references to Rom. 1.20, which are often connected to Wisdom. E.g. God’s “invisible things are descried by being understood through the things that have been made from the creation of the world … This is why the book of Wisdom rebukes those ‘who from the good things that are seen were unable to know him who is, and did not recognize the craftsman by looking at his works’ [Wisdom 13.1]” (The Trinity 15.3). Rom. 1.20 is the keynote in all three accounts of the vision at Milan (Confessions 7.10.16, 7.17.23, 7.20.26). See also The Trinity 2.25, 4.21, 6.12, 13.24, 15.1, 15.3; and Confessions 10.6.8, 10.6.10, 13.21.31. 40 See, for example, Augustine’s stance against Stoic apathy (City of God 14.8–9). 41 This mistake is easily made because Augustine sometimes uses concupiscentia and cupiditas as a kind of shorthand for love-of-self, and caritas and dilectio as shorthand for love-of-God/other/self. 42 Augustine’s view is based on the usage of these words in his Latin Bible. On caritas see Sermons 349.1–3. On dilectio see City of God 14.7 and Hom. on 1 John 8.4.5. On cupiditas see City of God 14.7. See also Gilson (1960, 311–312), Bonner (1962), and Nisula (2012). 43 In one sense the caricature is correct, in that the misreading of Augustine on this point has had a large historical influence. First we should note that concupiscentia is not strictly sexual. It is a broader term like “desire,” and in its negative form it refers to a compulsive anxiety, usually in regard to money, sex, and power: a “habitual grasping at every object … in the fear that something would be missed” (Miles 2008, 97–97). Comparisons can be made here with Freudian libido, since Augustine first notes concupiscentia in the infant at the breast (Confessions 1.7.11), and he also notes the revelation of God in the infant-breast complex (Confessions 1.7.7), in a way that resonates with Freud’s “oceanic feeling” of primordial unity.

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spirit against the flesh, and a concupiscence of Wisdom” (On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.23).44 In regard to (2) cognition, the soul functioning in love-of-self grasps objects, including concepts, only inasmuch as they serve the self and return the self’s love.45 But finite objects never fully satisfy the soul’s infinite desire for infinite love, and in this cycle of unrequited love and disappointment the soul fractures. Things fall apart. Cognition becomes a constant desire for more objects, while reality appears increasingly lifeless, fragmented, and meaningless.46 Manipulation of knowledge replaces contemplation of Wisdom. By contrast, the soul only begins to reflect its trinitarian image when it is “pulled together” by an influx of divine love. It then finds an eternal source and goal capable of satisfying its eternal desire. As Blake said, “More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul; less than All cannot satisfy Man” (There is No Natural Religion; 1988, 2). Within each disposition, the soul can consider both finite and infinite objects. But in love-of-self even infinite objects, like beauty, become limited, and grasped in terms of service to the self. In love-of-God/other/self, even finite objects speak poetically as more than mere objects, in praise and revelation of their Creator. We will meet these two dispositions again, in various mutations, in Boehme, Freud, and Jung. 44 Augustine is alluding here to two Bible verses, both of which use concupiscentia in the Latin: Gal. 3.17 says that “what the spirit desires (concupiscit) is opposed to the flesh,” and Wisdom 6.21 says that “the desire (concupiscentia) for Wisdom brings one to the everlasting kingdom.” Later in the same work, Augustine responds to a Pelagian critic: “I never said ‘there would be no concupiscence [if man had not first sinned],’ because there is a concupiscence of the spirit, which craves Wisdom. My words were, ‘there would be no shameful concupiscence’” (On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.52). McGinn notes that, in Augustine’s later works (after 396 CE) he avoids using “the erotic language of the love between man and woman to describe the encounters between God and the soul” (1991, 260; see also Brown 1988, 419). This might be an overgeneralization. It is true that Augustine avoids reading the Song of Songs in terms of eroticism for Christ, which was a frequent motif in his forebears (e.g. “Holy Virginity” [ca. 401 CE]). But he does not avoid eroticism for Wisdom, even in his later works (On Marriage and Concupiscence [ca. 419–421 CE]; Exp. of Ps. 32.2.7, 33.2.6, 35.5 [ca. 396–410 CE]; Sermons 32 [ca. 403 CE], 33 [ca. 405–411 CE], 35 [before 411 CE]. These dates represent a scholarly consensus, compiled by Fitzgerald (1999, il). It is also worth noting that Brown’s influential “two Augustines” theory, which posits that Augustine lost a good deal of his Platonism after 396 CE, was repudiated somewhat by Brown himself in the 2000 edition of his great biography, although it had already deeply influenced scholars (Harrison 2006, 4–18). 45 This intellectual disposition resonates with what the Frankfurt school later called “instrumental reason.” 46 William Cavanaugh, among others, has noted Augustine’s prophetic foresight in regard to contemporary consumer capitalism (2008, 7–14, 48–58).

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2.2.2 Memory: the Infinite Inner World For Augustine, memoria means much more than the English “memory.” It is a hidden inner world that connects us to the eternal.47 Book 10 of the Confessions is devoted to memoria, and it quickly draws us into the depths: “Lord, to your eyes, the abyss of human consciousness is naked. What could be hidden within me, even if I were unwilling to confess it to you? I would be hiding you from myself, not myself from you” (10.2.2). Memoria is the soul’s great mystery, the “abyss” corresponding to the Father of the Trinity. Just as the Father remains invisible as the Son, through the Spirit, “makes him known” (Jn. 1.18, 6.46), so memory remains invisible, even as parts of it emerge into conscious “understanding” through “will/love.” We see what arises from memory, but we do not see memory itself. Another mystery of memory, as the quote above notes, is that parts of it remain inaccessible. We hide ourselves from ourselves, until such time as we are able to face our hidden memories and confess them (e.g. Confessions 10.5.7, 10.8.15). Even more mysterious is that, in hiding memories from ourselves, we are actually hiding ourselves from God. For Augustine, our concealed memories are like children hiding to avoid the rebuke of a stern parent. But when the face of God appears in grace rather than judgment, our memories emerge. Only then do we realize that God was somehow most present in these hidden and revealed memories. In short, it is no exaggeration to say that for Augustine we find God in the deep caverns of memoria (e.g. Confessions 10.25.36). And the Confessions can be seen as Western literature’s most exalted game of psycho-theological hide and seek. Augustine searches his hidden memories, only to find that God was hiding there and seeking him all along (e.g. Confessions 10.40.65). The whole work is based on an unqualified trust in the therapeutic value of being found—being seen in full—by both God and the reader. In recollecting his life, Augustine also finds that his memories are not static. As they emerge they are reframed and transformed—lit by a purer light—in communion with the realm of Wisdom and archetypes.48 Thus book 10 of the Confessions is

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Cary argues, somewhat controversially, that this “inner space” or “inner world” of memory basically originated with Augustine (2000, 125–145). See Bourke (1992, 142–165) and Hochschild (2012, 137–224), for more balanced readings. For an excellent discussion of Augustine’s memoria in relation to Freud’s unconscious see Parsons (2013). For example, why does Augustine dwell so long on his memory of stealing pears from a neighbour’s tree with a “gang of naughty adolescents”? This “wickedness” seems paltry to modern ears. The point is that there was no pleasure in the pears, only in the theft itself: “I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself.” And thus the memory is illumined by the archetypal story of Genesis 2 (Confessions 2.4.9).

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devoted to memoria, as a meta-reflection on the whole project of the previous nine books.49 Augustine speaks of the “the vast hall of memory” (10.8.14), and the “fields and vast palaces of memory” (10.8.12). Memory is “as it were, the stomach of the mind” (10.14.21). These finite metaphors give way to the infinite: “It is a vast and infinite profundity” (10.8.15), “a power of profound and infinite multiplicity” (10.17.26). Because will/love, which brings memories to the surface, involves both conscious (voluntas) and unconscious (amor) aspects, memories can appear with or without our choosing (e.g. 10.8.12). Stylistically, the Confessions seems especially open to involuntary memories. They seem to appear as Augustine is writing, and he allows them into the work trusting that they arise from the will/love of the Spirit. Memory is also deeply connected to the ontology of human being. It is who we are: memory “is mind, this is I myself. What then am I, my God? What is my nature?” (10.17.26).50 And because memory is an infinite aspect of the soul, our exploration of ourselves in relation to God is potentially endless: “I never reach the end. So great is the power of memory” (10.17.26). This is because memoria includes not only past experiences, but also the eternal archetypes of creation. And while Augustine is not always clear on how these archetypes get into our memory, he is clear that they are there before we recognized them, “as if in most secret caverns” (10.10.17; also The Trinity 12.24–25). We will explore these archetypes in section 2.4 of this chapter. 2.2.3 Understanding: the Range of Perception In The Trinity Augustine uses the terms “knowledge” (notitia) and “understanding” (intelligentia) to describe the third element of the soul, corresponding to the Son. But both words run the risk of an overly rational connotation. What they should convey is anything that presents itself to our awareness: the whole vast range of emotional and cognitive perception. While the English “perception” is likely more accurate, I have used “understanding” to remain consistent with Augustine scholarship. Like the Son, this element is the most visible of the three, and its presence always involves the other two elements: whatever appears in our understanding reveals its connection to memory, and it appears in and with the affective force of will/love. Augustine sometimes describes understanding as a “thought” or “inner word” (e.g. The Trinity 14.9) which can be further incarnated in actual speech. This word is born from memory in 49 50

Parsons puts it nicely when he calls the Confessions a “search for God in the fields of memory” (2013, 7). The equation memory = mind (mens) = human being is also mentioned in Confessions 13.11.12 and The Trinity 9.1.

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will/love, analogous to how the Word is begotten by the Father in the Spirit (e.g. The Trinity 11.12). As noted above, this appearance can be either voluntary (conscious) or involuntary (unconscious), which corresponds to the fact that the will/love of the Spirit can proceed either from the Father or the Son, i.e. either from (unconscious) memory, or from (conscious) understanding.51 In The Trinity Augustine notes four types of objects that enter our understanding, and these four types of objects take us, again, on an inward and upward journey through the soul to God. As we move through each type our soul-trinity functions in greater harmony with and resemblance to the divine. (1) The first type is outer material objects that we see directly. Here it might seem that there is no participation from memory, and yet memory must be involved for us to know any object as an object, and to choose it from the array of our perceptual field. (2) The second type is inner spiritual/imaginative52 objects: either images of outer objects, or imaginative creations that exist only in the soul. Importantly, this soul-trinity of inner objects is “consubstantial” in trinitarian terms, whereas the first soul-trinity of outer objects is not.53 Together these first two types of objects form what Augustine calls the trinity of the “outer human,” discussed in book 11. He then moves to the “inner human” in books 12–14, which is also a move from the “soul” (animus) to the higher regions of “mind” (mens). In the inner human we meet the final two types of objects that enter our understanding: knowledge (scientia) and Wisdom (sapientia). Both participate in “non-bodily and everlasting reasons (rationes) … above the human mind” (12.2), but knowledge (scientia) uses these archetypes

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This is a kind of “double procession” of will/love. When will/love proceeds from understanding, our conscious mind produces the will/love that searches for the desired memory; when will/love proceeds from memory itself, a thought emerges spontaneously (unconsciously) with its own affective force. See The Trinity 11.12. 52 Augustine uses the term “spiritus” to indicate the image-making capacity of the soul, often translated as “imagination,” and it is important to note its connection to figural or “spiritual” readings of the Bible. Augustine’s concept of spiritus is influenced by the Greek concept of pneuma. See Verbeke (1945, 501–508), Taylor (1948–1949, 211–218), and Couliano (1987, 1–11). 53 An outer object is not the same substance as its (spiritual) image produced in the mind. This makes the soul-trinity of an outer object especially vulnerable to corruption in the disposition of love-of-self: “in the love of temporal and material things … it is not enough for greed to know and love money unless it also has it, or to know and love eating or copulating unless it also does them, or to know and love honours and political power unless they are also forthcoming” (The Trinity 9.14).

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to actively order and administer outward objects, whereas Wisdom (sapientia) contemplates the archetypes in a passive and receptive mode of cognition.54 It is important to note that within this hierarchical structure of object types, each new level includes the ones below it, and ultimately Wisdom includes them all. It is thus not a divided hierarchy, but an inclusive one, and I will be referring to it in subsequent chapters as Augustine’s “integral vision.” Wisdom allows knowledge to function harmoniously, by allowing it to participate in archetypes like goodness, truth, and beauty. Harmonious knowledge in turn orders all images in the imagination, which in turn include all objects perceived in the material realm.55 When the soul functions in harmony with its divine source, perception involves all levels of this integral vision, and the material world presents itself as wedded to and infused with the eternal—lit by the light of Wisdom. The archetypes shine through the corporeal creation, and God’s “invisible things are understood through the things that have been made” (Rom. 1.20).56 In the next section we will meet Augustine’s integral vision again, this time in relation to dreams. 2.3

Dream Theory: Jacob’s Ladder to Heaven

This section explores Augustine’s theory of dreams, which is described primarily in book 12 of The Literal Meaning of Genesis.57 Augustine offered the most sustained and coherent patristic account of dreams, and this account had a vast influence on Western thought throughout the medieval period and, as we will see, into the early modern period of Boehme.58 Following his 54

I have capitalized “Wisdom,” even in regard to human cognition, to emphasize its participation in divine Wisdom (Sophia). 55 For Augustine, corporeal objects are perceived by being instantaneously “translated” into (spiritual) images (TLMG 12.16.33). 56 As noted above, this verse is one of Augustine’s favourites. The integral vision it implies is made clear in the vision at Milan, where Augustine says that the incorporeal light of Wisdom “transcended my mind, not in the way that oil floats on water, nor as heaven is above earth” (Confessions 7.10.16). The integral poiēsis of Rom. 1.20 is also very much the perspective of the Gospel of John, the voice of the eagle, in that, while the other Gospels offer an account of the transfiguration, John is a transfiguration from beginning to end. Augustine distinguishes scientia and sapientia through an exegesis of John’s prologue (The Trinity 13.1–5). On the centrality of John in Augustine’s theology see Carleton (1960) and Houghton (2008). 57 To situate Augustine amongst other ancient and patristic dream theories see Dulaey (1973, 15–68) and Erny (2006, 131–180). According to Dulaey, Augustine also mentions dreams in twenty-seven other works (1973, 9). 58 For an overview of the vast influence of Augustine’s dream theory, see Kruger (1992, 57–82), and Keskiaho (2015, 137–214). McGinn notes that Augustine’s influence in the

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theological predecessor Tertullian, Augustine classifies dreams as a form of ecstasy, where the soul “stands out” (ek-stasis) from the body. And importantly, this differs from many recent scholarly definitions of both ecstasy and mysticism, which tend to exclude dreams.59 In comparison to waking life, Augustine sees dreams as both a higher form of thought (epistemologically) and a higher form of reality (ontologically). Again, following Tertullian, dreams can reflect the cares and dispositions of the soul itself, but they can also be bestowed and influenced by spiritual entities, like angels, demons, and even God. Augustine tries to mitigate fears of demonic deception by stressing the need for correct interpretation of dreams, which is only possible when they are viewed in light of the archetypes of Wisdom. 2.3.1 Everyday Ecstasy Tertullian (ca. 160–225 CE), the founder of Latin theology, is also the first extant Christian thinker to offer a sustained theory of dreams (in De Anima chapters 42–49), and some of his ideas influenced Augustine significantly.60 Tertullian goes so far as to claim that “the greater part of humanity get their knowledge of God from dreams” (De Anima 47). In terms of the process of dream formation, Tertullian describes dreams as a natural form of “ecstasy,” produced by the conjunction between a mortal body and an immortal soul. The body needs sleep, but the soul is “always occupied and active owing to its perpetual movement, which again is a proof and evidence of its divine quality and immortality” (De Anima 45). The active soul finds greater freedom as the body sleeps, and dreams are the natural result. Tertullian claims biblical warrant for dream ecstasy from Genesis 2: Thus in the very beginning sleep was inaugurated by ecstasy: “And God sent an ecstasy61 upon Adam, and he slept (Gen. 2.21).” … From that very circumstance it still happens ordinarily … that sleep is combined with

West flows especially from key passages of his vast oevre, including TLMG book 12 (1991, 254). On the vast diffusion of medieval manuscripts of TLMG, see Kruger (1991, 60–61). 59 E.g. Underhill (1955, 358–379). We will discuss Bernard McGinn’s definitions below. 60 On Tertullian’s dream theory see Dulaey (1973, 55–56), Erny (2006, 134–137), and De Brabander (2012, 57–76). Tertullian likely wrote De anima between 210–213 CE, and in it he references the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas. Some believe that Tertullian actually edited the remarkable dream accounts of Perpetua, who was martyred in his own city, Carthage, around 203 CE. See Cobb (2021, 8, 97–98). 61 The LXX reads “ekstasis” here. The Old Latin (Vetus Latina) Bible manuscripts used by Augustine, which were translated from the LXX, likely preserved this sense of ecstasy. The Vulgate, which was translated from the Hebrew, reads “soporem” here.

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ecstasy. Indeed, with what real feeling, and anxiety, and suffering do we experience joy, and sorrow, and alarm in our dreams! (De Anima 45) Notice here that, for Tertullian, dream ecstasy involves both a “standing-out” of the soul from the body, and a heightened state of affect. In book 12 of TLMG Augustine also situates dreams within a discussion of ecstasy, and specifically St. Paul’s experience of being “caught up to the third heaven  … into Paradise” (2 Cor. 12.2–4).62 Because the first eleven books of TLMG “continued to the point where the first human was driven from Paradise,” book 12 completes the narrative arc by exploring one of the clearest biblical accounts of re-entry into Paradise. Augustine begins by noting Paul’s repeated assertion that he was unsure whether his ecstasy took place “in the body” or “out of the body.” And for Augustine this same ambivalence is present in dreams, where our liminal dream bodies seem both real and yet different from our corporeal bodies.63 Thus begins a strategy of using dreams to understand all forms of ecstasy, which guides Augustine’s exposition throughout book 12. Without naming him, Augustine alludes to Tertullian’s definition of dream ecstasy: “my soul … in some mysterious way was awake while I slept” (12.2.3).64 Later Augustine provides a broader definition of ecstasy, which extends beyond dreams: “when the attention of the mind is completely carried off and turned away from the senses of the body” (12.12.25).65 He notes that there are many 62

For an excellent discussion of the neglect of this passage in modern discussions of Paul’s mysticism, see Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy (2009, 20–66). 63 Specifically, Augustine recalls one of his own dream experiences, where he became aware that he was dreaming (a “lucid dream,” to use the term coined by LaBerge 1985) and then began “testing” a friend in the dream to see if he was real. This attempt was itself paradoxical: “whenever I made an effort to persuade him that he was not real, I was partly inclined to believe that he was” (12.2.3). This experience of “testing” the environment of a lucid dream, and finding nothing counterfeit, is quite common (e.g. Hervey de Saint-Denys [1867] 1982, 56–59; Bosnak 1997, 6–10). 64 See also 12.20.42. Like Tertullian, Augustine grounds his concept of dream ecstasy in Gen. 2.21: “the ecstasy in which Adam was caught up when God cast him into a sleep was given to him so that his mind in that state might participate with the host of angels and, entering into the sanctuary of God, understand what was finally to come” (TLMG 9.19.36). The “sanctuary” his mind enters in this passage is an allusion to Wisdom (e.g. Prov. 9.1; Sirach 24.10). For Augustine, this first dream ecstasy took place during the separation of the sexes, and prophetically revealed the “great mystery” of the eventual reunion of the sexes, as figured by Christ and the church. We will see this motif again in Boehme. 65 Augustine’s later definition of ecstasy also includes Tertullian’s sleep-death analogy: “the soul is quite removed from the body … but less than in death” (12.26.53). McGinn notes that the influence of TLMG book 12 on the West “has been primarily due to its careful description of the state of ecstasy” (1991, 254). On Augustine’s understanding of ecstasy

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different kinds of ecstasy: It can happen when one is asleep or awake. It can be caused naturally or by a special divine revelation. It can result from the infusion of images by angels and demons. It can occur either in a healthy state, as when a healthy body sleeps, or as a result of sickness, as in the case of fever or “madness.” And it can be caused either by the body or the soul (12.12.25–12.23.49). But while there are many exotic forms of ecstasy, Augustine notes that “all these phenomena” are “similar to dreams” (12.18.39). He thus chooses dreams as the usual case through which to understand the more unusual.66 And, like Tertullian, he situates dreams as an everyday form of ecstasy. Having established this foothold in dreams, Augustine then offers a basic survey of the topic: Dreams are sometimes false and sometimes true, sometimes troubled and sometimes calm; and true dreams are sometimes quite similar to future events or even clear forecasts, while at other times they are predictions given with dark meanings and, as it were, in figurative expressions. And the same is to be said of all these visions. (12.18.39) To summarize, while all ecstasies can be understood through the “less remarkable … daily occurrences” of dreams (12.18.40), not all dreams, and thus not all ecstasies, are purveyors of divine truth. In widening the category of ecstasy to include everyday dreams, Augustine brings the issue of discernment and interpretation to the forefront, which we will explore in a moment. But some dreams, and thus some ecstasies, do reveal truth. And in this case they cover much the same ground as our last chapter on trinitarian psychology, drawing us inward and upward into communion with the archetypes of divine Wisdom, which grant prophetic insight into God, the soul, and the cosmos.67 see Butler (1923, 60–61), and Maréchal (1930, 89–109, 191–214). Strangely these latter discussions do not recognize the importance of dreams for Augustine’s understanding of ecstasy. 66 Augustine notes the merits of this method, disagreeing with those who “like to gaze in wonder at what is strange and seek the causes of the unusual, while they generally do not care to know about daily occurrences of this sort [i.e. dreams]” (12.18.39). He later grounds this method in Acts 2.17: “For Scripture clearly says, I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh, and the young men shall see visions, and the old men shall dream dreams, thus attributing both to the work of God” (12.21.44). Here and elsewhere he implies that both dreams and visions are a result of divine (“supernatural”) grace, although other passages seem to contradict this, likely because the realms of nature and grace are not always separate or discrete in Augustine. 67 Augustine’s own experiences of God at Milan and Ostia were both “ecstatic” according to his own definition of the word. For a discussion of ecstasy in relation to these experiences

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2.3.2 Threefold Vision and the Imaginal Realm In attempting to understand the character of Paul’s ecstasy, Augustine elaborates his very influential theory of threefold vision: (1) corporeal, (2) spiritual, and (3) intellectual vision (12.6.15ff.). Corporeal vision (visio corporealis) involves both bodily eyes and bodily objects. It is the vision we use every day to see the material world all around us. Spiritual vision (visio spiritualis), which is most obvious in dreaming, involves both the spirit/imagination of the soul and spiritual objects. It is the vision that allows us to remember material objects when they are absent, and to create new fantasy objects through the creative imagination.68 Finally, intellectual vision (visio intellectualis) involves both the intellect and intellectual objects or eternal ideas. Augustine illustrates all three with a simple example: “when we read, You shall love your neighbour as yourself, the letters are seen corporeally, the neighbour is thought of spiritually, and love is beheld intellectually” (12.11.22). The three together are what I am calling Augustine’s “integral vision.” It is important to note the correspondence here between the capacity for vision and the objects of vision. Each distinct way of perceiving is tuned to a distinct realm of perception, and thus Augustine’s epistemology is tuned to his ontology.69 Just as there is a material world that our eyes perceive, so there is a spiritual world that our spirit/imagination perceives, populated by spiritual entities, like angels and demons, and other spiritual objects that are incorporeal but nonetheless real.70 This means that every night in our dreams we literally inhabit a different world. Further, and importantly, for Augustine the dream world is always higher than the waking world.71 Dream objects are ontologically “more real” than waking objects, and the vision we use to perceive them is likewise superior epistemologically, although it is still subject to deception. In what follows I will be designating this dream world, following Henri

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see Henry ([1938] 1981, 14–40, 82), Courcelle (1950, 157–167; 1963, 17–88), O’Donnell (1992, 124), Bonner (1994, 129–135), and Kenney (2005, 1–14). While excellent, these discussions do not recognize the importance of dreams for Augustine’s understanding of ecstasy. Augustine explicitly notes this creative function of the spirit/imagination in dreams (Letters 7.6, 9.5), which is a departure from Aristotle and Cicero, who believed dreams were composed only of past memories (Dulaey 1975, 102–103). This creative capacity of imagination will become very important for Boehme. Boehme will follow this pattern, in his correspondence between the “microcosm” and “macrocosm.” E.g. “these objects do exist, and the joy and vexation produced by a spiritual substance are real. For even in sleep there is a vast difference between being in joyful and in sad circumstances in our dreams” (12.32.61). E.g. “every spirit is unquestionably superior to every body” (12.16.32).

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Corbin, as the “imaginal” realm,72 the loss of which could easily be counted as one of the chief marks of modernity. Although, as we will see, Freud and Jung both managed to reanimate this realm by giving dreams pride of place in their respective psychologies, and by treating dream objects as once again real, albeit in a qualified psychological sense. Augustine is quite clear about the graded ascent of these three worlds: “there is, of course, a hierarchy in these visions … For spiritual vision is more excellent than corporeal, and intellectual vision more excellent than spiritual” (12.24.51). The hierarchy is based on the fact that corporeal vision depends on spiritual vision, but not the reverse. That is, corporeal vision through the eyes can only be perceived by the incorporeal soul if it is first “translated” by the spirit/imagination into images (12.16.32–33),73 but spiritual vision can function without corporeal vision. Likewise spiritual vision depends on intellectual vision “if a judgement is to be made upon its contents” (12.24.51). Intellectual vision allows us to understand and interpret the images of the spirit/imagination. Thus while the objects of the dream world fall under spiritual vision, the meaning of those objects, and thus the meaning and interpretation of dreams, falls under intellectual vision. Augustine illustrates this point by citing one of the great biblical dream interpreters: Joseph, who understood the meaning of the seven ears of corn and the seven cows, was more a prophet than Pharaoh, who saw them in a dream; for Pharaoh saw only a form impressed upon his spirit, whereas Joseph understood through a light given to his mind … In the one there was the production of the images of things; in the other, the interpretation of the images produced. (12.9.20) This implies three levels of prophecy, which Augustine illustrates by citing the other great biblical dream interpreter: Less a prophet, therefore, is [1] he who, by means of the images of corporeal objects, sees in spirit only the signs of the things signified, and a greater prophet is [2] he who is granted only an understanding of the images. But the greatest prophet is [3] he who is endowed with both gifts, namely, that of seeing in the spirit the symbolic likenesses of corporeal 72 73

See Corbin (1969, 179–195, 216–220; 1972). For a wonderful history of the term “imaginal,” see Kripal (2016, 120–123). For the influence of this view of the soul, which extends well into the Renaissance, see Couliano (1987, 1–11, 38–48).

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objects and that of understanding them with the vital power of the mind. Such a one was Daniel. (12.9.20) Notice here that, contrary to what we would expect from the graded “hierarchy in these visions,” the greatest prophet is not the one who sees only with the visio intellectualis. The greatest prophet sees, so to speak, with both eyes—both spiritually and intellectually.74 For Augustine, the integration of these two forms of vision produces something greater than either form on its own. And while he is only integrating the two higher forms of vision, nonetheless the principle involved is what I am calling Augustine’s “integral vision.” We will return to it in relation to all three forms of vision when we look at dreams and Paradise in a moment. 2.3.3 Discernment and Demonic Deception Augustine’s discussion of dream discernment is mainly intended to mitigate the fear of demonic deception—a fear that was prevalent among Christians of the time, and which increased steadily throughout the middle ages as it was emphasized by various authorities. As mentioned, Tertullian is the first extant theologian to offer a sustained theory of dreams, and his ambivalent discussion of discernment was sustained by later writers. Tertullian is both very positive about the revelatory potential of dreams, and very negative about their possible deceptions. Dreams “can be compared to the actual grace of God, as being honest, holy, prophetic, inspired, instructive, inviting to virtue, the bountiful nature of which causes them to overflow even to the profane ….” And yet, for Tertullian, many dreams are also demonically inspired with the intent to deceive: “We declare, then, that dreams are inflicted on us mainly by demons, although they sometimes turn out true and favourable to us” (De Anima 47). Likewise, Augustine begins his discussion of discernment by stressing the possibility of deception. He admits that even those possessed by a devil occasionally speak the truth … The discernment of these experiences is certainly a most difficult task when the evil spirit acts in a seemingly peaceful manner … sometimes even speaking the truth and disclosing useful knowledge of the future. In this case he transforms himself, according to Scripture, as if into an angel of light [2 Cor. 11.14]. (12.13.28) 74 This metaphor is drawn from William Blake, who calls it “double vision” in a letter to Thomas Butts, November 22, 1802 (1988, 721). See Northrop Frye’s book of the same name (1991, 22–39).

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For Augustine, such deceptive spirits are difficult to detect, and can only be recognized by someone with the divine gift of “discernment of spirits” (discretio spirituum) [1 Cor. 12.10] (12.13.28). But as his discussion continues, Augustine quickly changes course with a crucial caveat, derived from his theory of threefold vision. In spiritual vision, “good spirits instruct people and evil spirits deceive them. But there is no deception in intellectual vision” (12.14.29). Here we need to remember that when Augustine speaks of intellectual vision, he is also speaking of intellectual objects. Counterfeit objects exist in the material world, and even in the spiritual world, like demons who appear as angels of light, but there are no counterfeit objects in the intellectual world. Here you either find the object you seek, or you fail to find it, but you will not find a false look-alike: “the intellect is employed to seek out the meaning that these things have or the useful lessons that they teach; and either it finds its object and enjoys the fruit of its search, or it fails to find it and continues to reflect” (12.14.29). Intellectual vision is not subject to the same deceptions as the lower two forms of vision. For Augustine, dream interpretation cannot be deceptive because the truth or falsity of an interpretation is, or soon becomes, self-evident. For example, if a dream is interpreted as a prediction of the future, it will become self-evident whether the prediction comes true. If a dream is interpreted to describe the state of the dreamers’ soul, it will become self-evident by finding immediate recognition (either in the dreamer or in someone who knows them) or by failing to do so. Augustine’s point is that it causes no harm to ponder and test these interpretations, and in fact there is great potential benefit from such reflections: the intellect might just discern the “useful lessons” taught by the dream and enjoy “the fruit of its search.” If it fails, the intellect can simply continue its reflection without fear of deception. For Augustine, dreams that have “no special meaning” are “the imagining of the soul itself,” and if they have “some special meaning … it follows of necessity that the revelation must come only from some spirit” (12.12.26). That is, dreams that have a message must be sent by some spiritual messenger. In regard to discerning the “special meaning,” Augustine distinguishes three cases: [1] to allow a person to see only images that have a meaning, while he is unaware of the fact that they do mean something; and at other times [2] to allow him to perceive that such images have some meaning, while he is left in ignorance of what they mean; and at still other times [3] to allow the human soul through some sort of fuller revelation to see these images with the spirit and understand their meaning with the mind. (12.22.48)

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Notice that the third case corresponds to Daniel, the “greatest prophet,” mentioned above. In terms of discernment, while we can be aware or unaware of a dream’s “special meaning,” we cannot be deceived by it, because the truth or falsity of any meaning we may posit will become self-evident. In short, for Augustine, we should have no fear of demonic deception when it comes to meaning and interpretation, “in which even erroneous thinking may take place without harm to the soul” (12.14.30). Here he gives the example of a person “who is secretly evil,” like a demon who masquerades as an angel of light. It does no harm to believe that the person is good, “provided no error is made in the true realities, that is to say, in Goodness itself” (12.14.30). We may be deceived by the person, but we cannot be deceived by Goodness. Thus, “when the Devil deceives us with corporeal visions, no harm is done by the fact that he has played tricks with our eyes, so long as we do not deviate from the true faith or lose the integrity of intelligence, by which God instructs those who are obedient to Him” (12.14.30). The same is true of spiritual vision. The idea that the truth of visio intellectualis is self-evident and self-attesting sounds strange to modern ears. But Augustine’s basically Platonic understanding of this realm of “transparent truth,” where “vision is darkened by no cloud of false opinion,” is based on the idea that the experience of divine love is self-evident and self-attesting.75 In the realm of intellectual vision, the virtues of the soul are not tedious and burdensome. For then there is no restraining of lust by the effort of temperance, no bearing of adversity by fortitude, no punishing of wicked deeds by justice, no avoiding of evil by prudence. The one virtue and the whole of virtue there is to love what you see, and the supreme happiness is to possess what you love. For there beatitude is imbibed at its source, whence some few drops are sprinkled upon this life of ours … In such a vision God speaks face to face … and here we are speaking not of the face of the body but of that of the mind. (12.26.54) Dreams, as visio spiritualis, bring us closer to this source of love and beatitude, and dream interpretation, when guided by this source, need not fear deception. Augustine further mitigates the fear of demonic deception by affirming that we are not culpable for “carnal intercourse” in dreams. Presumably, 75 This resembles one of William James’ four marks of mystical experiences: the “Noetic quality” of mystical states offers “insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect … and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime” (1902, 329).

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demonic temptation often took the form of sexual dreams among the ascetics of Augustine’s day. The attempt to keep young monks from temptation likely explains why, for example, the Cappadocian fathers were so negative toward dreams, while the Alexandrian theologians before them, including Athanasius, had been much more positive (Kelsey 1991, 105–108, 122–127). Augustine tries to recover this positive tradition by affirming that sexual dreams are not sinful.76 He also refrains from attributing nightmares to demons, which was a common view among his theological predecessors.77 Importantly, while Augustine’s approach to discernment does much to mitigate the fear of demonic deception, this aspect of his thought did not find widespread acceptance. It is likely the only significant point of his dream theory that did not become paradigmatic. Instead, down through the ages, the fear of demonic deception had an increasingly chilling effect on Christian dream interpretation. And as Kelsey notes, this effect was compounded by Augustine’s contemporary Jerome (347–420 CE), who introduced a “direct mistranslation” of Lev. 19.26 and Deut. 18.10 into the Latin Vulgate: “Jerome turned the law: ‘You shall not practice augury or witchcraft [i.e. soothsaying]’ into the prohibition: ‘You shall not practice augury nor observe dreams’” (1991, 139). This direct prohibition was used to support two other ambivalent allusions to dreams in the Vulgate: “With many dreams come vanities” (Eccl. 5.7), and “dreams have deceived many” (Sirach/Ecclesiasticus 34.7). Kelsey notes further that with Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604 CE), “for the first time in the writings of the church fathers, the warning passages of Leviticus 19 (in Jerome’s Vulgate translation), Ecclesiastes 5, and Ecclesiasticus 34 were emphasized again and again” (1991, 141). Notwithstanding the many positive, revelatory, and prophetic dreams described in the Bible, Gregory concludes his key discussion of dreams by noting that “one ought to be very reluctant to put one’s faith in them, since it is hard to tell from what source they come … the master of deceit … is clever enough to foretell many things that are true in order finally to capture the soul by but one falsehood” (Dialogues 4.50). While Augustine and Gregory were the great medieval authorities,78 Gregory’s fear of demonic deception seems to have prevailed, especially in monastic communities.

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He reasons by analogy: sex “is spoken of without sin by a man wide awake, who doubtless thinks about it in order to speak of it” (12.15.31). Augustine is also reluctant to attribute nightmares to God (as in Job 7.14). While taking no firm stand on the issue, he generally sees nightmares as indicative of the soul’s own experience of suffering (City of God 22.22.23; see Dulaey 1973, 132–135). See Kruger for a wonderful summary of manuscript evidence of Augustine’s and Gregory’s medieval diffusion (1992, 59–62).

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If demonic dreams can assume a guise of truth, and if truth itself is not self-evident or self-attesting, it follows logically that all dreams should be suspect. The risk of deception outweighs the promise of revelation. As a result, as fears of demonic deception increased throughout the middle ages, they often poisoned the well against any attempts at dream interpretation. And interestingly, historians note several cases where prophetic dreams that were critical of ecclesiastical and political authorities, the truth of which was (or became) self-evident, were easily dismissed as demonic trickery by the powers of the day.79 From the time of Gregory, right through the middle ages and into the modern period, the fear of demonic deception effectively marginalized dream interpretation in the Christian West, and Augustine’s positive view begins to look like something of an anomaly, at least until the great florescence of the seventeenth century, toward which our story is winding. 2.3.4 Dreams and Paradise Augustine’s theory of threefold vision seems to imply that the ecstasy of imageless intellectual vision is the highest form of perception possible in this life. Indeed, most of his medieval interpreters have read him this way, which explains why, for example, the popular Carmelite mysticism of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross says nothing positive about dreams, urging us to move beyond images as quickly as possible into the pure experience of God in interior prayer.80 Here I will argue that dreams have a more important place in Augustine’ thought than many of his interpreters, including Teresa and John, have realized. This more positive view relates to what I have been calling Augustine’s “integral vision.” Augustine’s topic in book 12, the final book of his great Genesis commentary, is Paradise and how we might recover it. And at the beginning of the book he 79 E.g. Dutton describes the case of a wandering monk whose dreams were critical of, and disturbing to, both Charlemagne and Pope Hadrian. At about this time Charlemagne outlawed popular dream interpretation in his most influential capitulary (1994, 36–40). Richard Kagan describes the remarkably prophetic dreams of Lucretia de León in sixteenth century Spain, some four hundred of which were preserved via her trial by the Inquisition. These dreams predict, almost a year before it occurred, the very unexpected defeat of the Spanish Armada by England in 1588. They also condemn Philip II as the source of “a corrupt church, oppressive taxes, lack of justice for the poor, and a weak national defense … Lucrecia even predicted the deaths of the king and his heir apparent, the infant Philip, the extinction of the Spanish branch of the House of Habsburg, and the accession of a new monarchy that would reconquer the lands lost to the Muslims and ultimately recapture Jerusalem.” She was twenty-one when Philip had her arrested by the Inquisition in 1590 (Kagan 1990, 2–9). 80 I will justify this claim shortly.

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seems to locate Paul’s experience of Paradise in the realm of spiritual vision, along with a host of other imagistic biblical revelations, not least of which is the final Revelation to John (12.2.5). But later he seems to change his mind, suggesting that Paul’s experience of both the third heaven and Paradise are experiences of imageless intellectual vision (12.27.55–12.28.56).81 To complicate things further, he then suggests that there might be up to ten heavens, and that Paradise and/or intellectual vision might exist beyond the third heaven (12.34.65). The discussion then shifts again when Augustine considers Paradise in terms of the region we enter at death,82 and here he reverts to his original opinion that Paradise is a realm of spiritual vision (12.32.60).83 Thus throughout the discussion Paradise maintains an ambivalent position between spiritual and intellectual vision, and here we get a hint of Augustine’s penchant for “integral” rather than “either/or” thinking, similar to the way that Daniel was identified as the “greatest prophet” because he saw both spiritually and intellectually (12.9.20). Earlier in TLMG, when Augustine began his discussion of Paradise in relation to the Garden of Eden, he differentiated three approaches. Some view the biblical Eden literally or “corporeally,” and some view it figuratively or “spiritually.”84 The third approach reads the account in both senses, and Augustine admits that “the third interpretation appeals to me” (8.1.1). This would mean that the original Eden was a literal garden, but also that this same garden still exists on a spiritual plane, in the imaginal realm of visio spiritualis. This also means that, for example, the Tree of Life at the centre of Eden was a literal tree infused with figurative “spiritual” meanings—meanings that are still powerful because this Tree still exists in the imaginal realm, and its meanings can still be discerned through visio intellectualis: “Thus Wisdom, namely, Christ Himself, is the Tree of Life in the spiritual Paradise to which He sent the thief from the cross.85 But a Tree of Life which would signify Wisdom was also created in the earthly Paradise” (8.5.9). This example again highlights Augustine’s preference 81 82 83 84 85

Here he also suggests that intellectual vision is the “face to face” vision of God, granted only to Moses (Exod. 33.7–34.4) and possibly to Paul (2 Cor. 12.2–4), and justified by Num. 12.6–8 (12.27.55). As “when Christ said to the robber, This day you shall be with me in Paradise (Lk. 23.43)” (12.34.66). Interestingly, Augustine’s evidence for this is what today we call “near death experiences,” which he assumes his readers at the time were naturally aware of, given their frequency (12.32.60). Origen, for example, viewed it as only spiritual. Christ on the cross was a common type of the Tree of Life, following Deut. 21.23 and Gal. 3.13.

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for “integral” rather than “either/or” thinking about vision and Paradise. It also highlights the deep connection between figurative or “spiritual” hermeneutics, and imaginative or “spiritual” vision: the objects of spiritual vision are naturally pregnant with multiple figural or “spiritual” meanings, which can only be discerned through intellectual vision. This brings us to the end of book 12, where Augustine completes his discussion of Paradise, this time with reference to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, in a way that combines both of the above discussions. The question here is, “why must the spirits of the departed be reunited with their bodies in the resurrection, if they can be admitted to the supreme beatitude without their bodies?” (12.35.68). Augustine’s answer is that the soul “has a natural appetite for … the body,” and for this reason, even in a state of ecstasy, “it is somehow hindered from going on with all its force to the highest heaven, so long as it is not joined with the body” (12.35.68). In other words, the fact that we must “stand out” of our body to experience spiritual and intellectual vision is not ultimately a sign of health or order for Augustine. And the ultimate vision of Paradise involves the integration of all three kinds of vision: “all things occupying their proper place, the corporeal, the spiritual, and the intellectual, in untainted nature and perfect beatitude” (12.36.69).86 This integral vision raises some serious questions for those who see intellectual vision, isolated from corporeal and spiritual vision, as the only Augustinian goal. Augustine suggests that Paul’s ecstatic Paradise involved a “double vision,” both spiritual and intellectual, just as Daniel’s prophetic gift of dream interpretation involved a “double vision,” both spiritual and intellectual. He further suggests that the original Paradise of Eden was a “double vision,” both corporeal and spiritual. And the final eschatological vision of the resurrection—the final Paradise—is a fully integral vision: corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual. This also suggests that the interpretation of dreams is an important practice precisely because of its integral potential: it necessarily combines spiritual and intellectual vision, and it also frequently incorporates corporeal vision when dreams replay everyday scenes and memories. The very attempt to situate dream interpretations in relation to everyday waking life and corporeal history joins the intellectual and spiritual to the corporeal. 86

Augustine says that Paul’s ecstasy “was wanting in one point the full and perfect knowledge of things … he did not know whether he was in the body or out of the body. But this knowledge will not be wanting to us when we shall be reunited to our bodies at the resurrection of the dead” (12.36.69). Here again Augustine is alluding to the liminal dream body, and Paul’s liminal body in ecstasy, with which he began the discussion in book 12: “it was impossible to discern clearly whether it was corporeal or spiritual” (12.1.2). We will soon see a similar liminality in Boehme’s concept of the spiritual body.

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Let me conclude with a look at the structure of TLMG, to highlight the importance of dreams and spiritual vision within Augustine’s whole theoretical architecture. Augustine is known for the architectonic symmetry of his great works, and TLMG is no exception.87 Books 1–10 are divided into two equal parts. Books 1–5 deal with the first creation account (Genesis 1) and particularly with the duality of creation: incorporeal creation in eternity and corporeal creation in time. Books 6–10 deal with the second creation account (Genesis 2) and particularly with the duality of the human being: the incorporeal eternal soul and the corporeal temporal body. Book 11 then deals with the Fall and expulsion from Paradise, and book 12 deals with redemption and the recovery of Paradise. The symmetry of the work becomes apparent in these final two books, where fall and redemption involve both creation and the human soul-body: the fall of the soul means that its perception is truncated such that it can no longer see the eternal archetypes of creation. Outside Eden, the spiritual and intellectual no longer shine through the corporeal, and creation no longer speaks poetically of its connection to the eternal. The soul loses its integral vision and becomes trapped in a world of dead matter-in-motion, where objects exist only to serve individual wants and wills. In book 12 the recovery of Paradise is about recovering integral vision, which is why dreams figure so prominently in the book—representing the imaginal “mesocosm”88 that ultimately connects the eternal to the temporal in both creation (the macrocosm) and the human soul-body (the microcosm). Our natural, nightly form of ecstasy and spiritual vision offers us a world like the original Eden, where every object is pregnant with symbolic “spiritual” meanings. Dreams can then be interpreted though intellectual vision using the eternal archetypes, and especially the archetypes of creation in Genesis 1, which we will explore in a moment. Dreams and their interpretation thus teach us to see the eternal archetypal realm shining through spiritual objects, and this symbolic and figurative way of seeing can then be applied to the waking corporeal world. In short, dreams and their interpretation teach us how to see with integral vision, revealing the true purpose of creation in its eternal significance. Like Jacob’s famous dream ladder (Gen. 28.10–19), with its ascending and descending angels, the imaginal realm is an intermediary between time and eternity—a place of downward “condensation” and upward “sublimation”—where eternal archetypes illumine the space-time materiality of everyday life, and where everyday bodies become sublime. 87 See, for example, Edmund Hill’s diagrams of the complex chiastic symmetry of The Trinity (1991, 27, 258–265). 88 This is Antoine Faivre’s helpful term (2000, xxiii).

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In short, when Augustine is read in the way I am advocating here, the purpose of his project is not to escape bodily life and retreat to the reverie of imageless intellectual vision. The ultimate spiritual goal is harmonious integration of threefold vision, so that the dream world we experience every night, rightly interpreted, can be extended into waking life, and so that the Creator can shine through all of creation. Augustine’s integral vision, in my reading, is much closer to that of a William Blake, who speaks not of escaping bodies but of glorifying them, and for whom the opening of the imagination is a corollary of the doctrines of incarnation and atonement: “O Human Imagination! O Divine Body I have crucified!” ( Jerusalem 24.23).89 Again, I am not saying that this is the only reading of Augustine, but that two different readings are both possible and justifiable. One reading gives us the imageless ecstasies of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross; the other reading gives us Boehme and Blake.90 We will explore this point in more depth in chapter 3, when we look at Boehme’s place in Bernard McGinn’s history of mysticism. 2.4

Dream Interpretation: Wisdom and Archetypes

This final section explores Augustine’s theory of Wisdom, which is the realm of the eternal archetypes that structure both the created world and the human soul. The order of the soul mirrors the order of creation because they are both grounded in Wisdom, and Boehme will later use the Renaissance terms “microcosm” and “macrocosm” to express the same idea. Augustine bequeathed his theory of Wisdom to the medieval and early modern world,91 and as such it forms the third aspect of my Augustinian “framework,” although it is deeply connected to the other two aspects: We have already seen that Wisdom is the summit of Augustine’s trinitarian psychology, and that the archetypes of Wisdom are present in the secret caverns of memoria. Similarly, Augustine

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See also Blake’s Vision of the Last Judgment 69–70: “All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the Divine body of the Saviour the True Vine of Eternity.” 90 Scholars continue to debate whether Augustine’s vision at Ostia was one of pure intellectual vision, or whether it also involved spiritual vision. McGinn sides with the latter view: “There can be no question that Augustine is describing an experience that is open to symbolization in visual form, as is shown by the mention of luce corporea at the beginning of the first version” (1991, 235). 91 See Rice (1958, 1–29) for a discussion of how Augustine reshaped the classical view of Wisdom, how his view framed the entire medieval discussion, and how it was reborn in a new form in Renaissance Platonism.

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locates Paul’s vision of Paradise entirely within the realm of Wisdom.92 Visio intellectualis participates in the archetypes of Wisdom, and these archetypes structure the lower two forms of vision for the illumined mind. Because the meaning and interpretation of dreams falls within visio intellectualis, these archetypes also offer a blueprint for interpreting dream symbols, and this latter Augustinian concept influenced Western thought right up to the time of Freud and Jung, as we will see. The centrality of Wisdom in Augustine’s thought93 is a corollary of his high view of the biblical Wisdom literature,94 and it was also shaped by his own experience at Ostia with his mother Monica: our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection towards eternal being itself … There life is the Wisdom by which all creatures came into being, both things which were and which will be … And while we talked and panted after her [i.e. Wisdom], we touched her slightly with the whole beat of the heart. (Confessions 9.10.23–24)95 The erotic nature of the quest for Wisdom was evident even in Augustine’s early work, as we see in this passage from the Soliloquies: Let us ask about what kind of lover of Wisdom you are: you long to see her and to hold her naked in a perfectly pure gaze and to embrace her with nothing in between, in a way that she allows to only a select few lovers. But if you burned with love for a beautiful woman, would she not be right to withhold herself from you if she found that you loved another? So how can Wisdom, the purest of beauties, reveal herself to you, until you are ablaze for her alone? (Soliloquies 1.13.22) In his later writings, as noted above, Augustine continued to speak positively of “a concupiscence of the spirit, which craves Wisdom” (On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.23). 92

For example, Augustine says of Paul’s vision that “it is impossible to suppose that anything was accustomed in these revelations to be made known to him but what appertained to Wisdom” (On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin 1.12). 93 On this see especially Cayré (1943; 1954, 104–219), and Jerphagnon (2006). 94 Certain key verses, particularly from Proverbs, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), are a constant refrain in Augustine’s writing, and he insisted on the inclusion of the latter two books in the canon of Scripture (On the Predestination of the Saints 27; City of God 17.20). 95 This translation is a modification of Chadwick (1991, 171).

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I have been using the term “archetypes” for what Augustine variously calls reasons (rationes), ideas (ideae), forms ( formae), species (species), or rules (regulae).96 These archetypes seem to be either innate in the soul from birth, or continually infused into its eternal nature,97 and Augustine specifically notes their mysterious presence in memory.98 Like Plato, Augustine includes among the archetypes the numbers and geometrical forms of mathematics (e.g. Confessions 10.12.19; The Trinity 12.23), and ideas like justice, love, goodness, truth, and beauty (e.g. Answer to Faustus 20.7; TLMG 12.24.50). But unlike Plato, Augustine’s archetypes also include the eternal “days” of creation, described in Genesis 1, which were created simultaneously in eternal Wisdom. 2.4.1 Wisdom Created and Uncreated Augustine uses the term “Wisdom” to describe what are, strictly speaking, two different entities: (1) the eternal uncreated Wisdom of God, Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 1.24), and (2) the eternal created Wisdom of God, the “first of God’s works” (Prov. 8.22), “created before all things” (Sirach 1.4) who is a kind of “mirror” of uncreated Wisdom (Wisdom 7.26). This created Wisdom is a feminine being, the Sophia of the biblical Wisdom literature, who is eternal in the sense that she was created before time, although she is not co-eternal with the uncreated 96 For Augustine’s discussion of these Latin terms in relation to their Greek precursors, see Eighty-three Different Questions 46.1–2. This is an earlier work (ca. 388–396 CE), but Augustine’s definition of rationes here seems to hold for his entire corpus: “if these reasons of all things to be created or [already] created are contained in the Divine Mind, and if there can be in the Divine Mind nothing except what is eternal and unchangeable, and if these original and principal reasons are what Plato terms ideas, then not only are they ideas but they are themselves true because they are eternal and because they remain ever the same and unchangeable. It is by participation in these that whatever is exists in whatever manner it does exist” (46.2). 97 Scholars debate this and Augustine gives evidence of holding both views. See Gilson (1960, 77–96) and Schumacher (2011, 7–18). 98 E.g. Confessions 10.10.17; The Trinity 12.24–25. In the latter passage, while Augustine believes he is dissenting from Platonic anamnesis, his view remains very Platonic, in that the archetypes are already in the soul before we recognize them. That is, Augustine dissents from Plato’s idea of transmigration or reincarnation, but he also mistakenly sees it as the basis for Plato’s theory of anamnesis. For Plato, what we are remembering is the eternal archetypal world, not previous earthly existences (Phaedo 72e; Phaedrus 249c–250), and thus Platonic anamnesis is based on the soul’s pre-existence in eternity, not necessarily its pre-existence in other earthly bodies. Augustine agrees that human souls exist in eternity before entering the body, and he considers a variety of options as to how this might happen (TLMG 7.22.32–7.28.43, 10.1.1–10.24–40), remaining undecided to the end (Revisions 1.1.3).

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Son. This distinction is clear in the Confessions book 12, where Augustine differentiates between a Wisdom “which is altogether coeternal and equal with you, its Father” (12.15.20), and also a Wisdom “which is created, an intellectual nature which is light from contemplation of the light.” The word contemplatio is significant here, as we will see. Let me quote Augustine’s description of this eternal created feminine Wisdom at length for the sake of clarity: So there is a Wisdom created before all things, which is a created thing, the rational and intellectual mind of your pure city, our “mother which is above and is free” (Gal. 5.6) and is “eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor. 5.1). In this text “heavens” can only be “the heavens of heavens” which praise you (Ps. 148.4); this is also the Lord’s “heaven of heaven” (Ps. 113. 16). We do not find there was time before her, because she precedes the creation of time; yet she is created first of all things [Sirach 1.4]. However, prior to her is the eternity of the Creator himself. On being created by him, she took her beginning—not a beginning in time, since time did not yet exist, but on belonging to her own special condition … We do not find time either before her or even in her, because she is capable of continually seeing your face and of never being deflected from it. This has the consequence that she never undergoes variation or change. Nevertheless in principle mutability is inherent in her. That is why she would grow dark and cold if she were not lit and warmed by you as a perpetual noonday sun (Isa. 58.10) because she cleaves to you with a great love. O House full of light and beauty! [Prov. 9.1] “I have loved your beauty and the place of the habitation of the glory of my Lord” (Ps. 25.7–9), who built you and owns you. During my wandering may my longing be for you! I ask him who made you that he will also make me his property in you, since he also made me … Is not the House of God [Prov. 9.1], though not coeternal with God, nevertheless in her own way “eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor. 5.1) where you look in vain for the successiveness of time because it is not to be found there? (12.15.20–22) Notably here, Augustine not only personifies created Wisdom as female, but addresses her and venerates her directly. He goes on in this passage to identify her with Jerusalem my home land, Jerusalem my mother (Gal. 4.26), and above it yourself, ruler, illuminator, father, tutor, husband … the one supreme and true Good. I shall not turn away until in that peace of this dearest mother,

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where are the firstfruits of my spirit (Rom. 8.23) and the source of my certainties, you gather all that I am from my dispersed and distorted state to reshape and strengthen me forever. (12.15.23)99 This created feminine aspect of Wisdom has often been neglected by Augustine scholarship,100 and I have quoted at length here both to substantiate this neglected aspect, and to illustrate the great throng of biblical symbols that surround feminine Wisdom, many of which will reappear in Boehme. Most strikingly she is the “mother” whose “husband” is God, and the “mind” in which the eternal archetypal creation of Genesis 1 takes place.101 2.4.2 Wisdom and the Soul In our earlier discussion of trinitarian psychology we briefly mentioned Augustine’s key distinction between knowledge (scientia) and Wisdom (sapientia), which he defines in The Trinity book 12 as two different functions of the human mind (mens) as it participates in “non-bodily and everlasting reasons (rationes) … above the human mind” (12.2). This distinction has been seen as the linchpin of Augustine’s theological system (e.g. Madec 1975, 78), and it profoundly influenced the medieval and early modern world.102 Basically, Wisdom and knowledge are two different ways of thinking. Wisdom is a higher, inward, receptive, and contemplative form of cognition, whereas knowledge is a lower, outward, active, and administrative form of cognition. Both participate in the archetypes, but Wisdom does so in passive contemplation, whereas knowledge puts the archetypes to work, so to speak, in administering temporal affairs (12.17). For example, eternal ideas like “measure, number, and weight”103 are used by scientia to order and administer temporal objects. But these same mathematical ideas can be contemplated by Wisdom, for example, when the soul is ravished by the “sheer arithmetic of a beautiful piece of music,” where 99 This and the previous translation are adapted from Chadwick (1991, 255–257). 100 For an example of this tendency, in an article that set the scholarly standard for discussing Augustinian Wisdom, see Cayré (1943). For a recent retrieval of the role of eternal created feminine Wisdom in Augustine, including her role in the vision at Ostia, see Kenny (2005, 110–128). 101 Chadwick notes that for Augustine this “heaven of heaven is, like the world-soul in Porphyry (Sententiae 30), created but eternally contemplating the divine” (1991, 250n9). See also Bourke (1984, 78–90). The world-soul reappears in Boehme, via the influence of Renaissance Platonism. 102 E.g., it formed the basis for the scholastic distinction between ratio superior and ratio inferior in Thomas (e.g. Summa Theologica Vol. 4, Q. 79, Art. 9). 103 Augustine frequently mentions this triad, taken from Wisdom 11.20 (e.g. On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees 1.16.21; The Trinity 3.16, 11.18; TLMG 4.3–6).

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they appear as a revelation of beauty (12.23).104 Augustine further defines Wisdom as “worship of God,” and knowledge as the practice of virtue: “anything we do sagaciously, courageously, moderately, and justly … avoiding evil and seeking good” (12.22).105 Most notably, the two are united in Jesus Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of Wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2.1; The Trinity 13.6.24). Augustine’s reading of Genesis 2 in The Trinity books 12–14 interprets the fall and separation of the sexes figurally, as a truncation of human conscious awareness that is repeated anew in every person.106 We fall from Wisdom into knowledge. Originally, our eternal soul contemplated only Wisdom, represented by the primordial androgynous Adam. But as our soul enters the temporal-material realm, part of it is “led off from that rational substance … and deputed to the task of dealing with and controlling these lower matters” (12.1.3). Knowledge emerges out of Wisdom just as Eve emerged from the side of Adam.107 As long as they remain united, there is no problem; as Adam and Eve were “two in one flesh,” Wisdom and knowledge can be “two in one mind” (12.3): “a kind of rational couple of contemplation and action in the mind of everyone, with functions distributed into two several channels and yet the mind’s unity preserved in each” (12.19). The fall happens as the serpent, representing the “senses of the body” (12.20), tempts knowledge to view creation “as one’s very own private good and not as a public and common good which is what the unchangeable good is” (12.17).108 Knowledge, rather than “enjoy the whole universe of creation … strives to grab something more than the whole and to govern it by its own laws … so by being greedy for more it gets less.” Greed for the whole is “thrust back into anxiety over a part” (12.14). The result, in other words, is fallen concupiscence—desire gone wrong. As knowledge 104 Pythagoras and Plato considered music to be a mathematical science: a collection of tones, or vibrational frequencies, ordered in metrical time. Its beauty was thought to emerge from these eternal mathematical ideas. 105 He uses Job 28.28 as the basis of this distinction: “Behold piety is wisdom, while to abstain from evil things is knowledge” (12.4.22). 106 One might call this an existential aspect of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. 107 Augustine’s misogyny is evident here. I will not address it comprehensively except to say that he is somewhat aware of it, and he attempts to mitigate it by distinguishing himself from the more misogynistic theologians of his time: He rejects the idea that “man stands for the mind and the woman for the senses of the body” (12.20); he insists that both women and men are equally the image of God (12.10–21), contradicting the most plain-sense reading of Paul in 1 Cor. 11.4–10; and he insists that both have the capacity to contemplate Wisdom, through the “common nature” in their minds (12.13). 108 Here and elsewhere, Augustine seems to espouse some form of Christian socialism, and he sees private property as a result of the fall.

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falls it is “shut off from the reasoning of Wisdom” (12.17), and if Wisdom also eats the fruit, just as Adam took it from Eve, it too falls into mere knowledge. Truncated human consciousness thus becomes devoted to exploiting the world for its own gain and amassing private property and possessions. The loss of perfect union between Wisdom and knowledge is the loss of Paradise, and the loss of direct awareness of both eternity and immortality. I will refer to this truncation of perception as an “existential Fall”—an aspect of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin that is repeated anew in each soul. When precisely this Fall occurs in the infant is not specified. But Augustine is clear, as noted above, that the eternal archetypes of Wisdom are present in human memory at birth, likely because of the soul’s pre-existence in eternity. This suggests that the infant in the womb has some access to divine Wisdom and some perception of eternity, and that the truncation of perception only occurs as the child leaves the womb and enters the buzzing, blooming world of space-time. It may be that the truncation occurs later as the infant identifies with a bodily and perceptual ego, thus initiating a subject/object divide. Augustine does not specify. But this “existential Fall” seems to be distinct from, and possibly at odds with, Augustine’s more well-known teaching on inherited original sin, in which the infant is born with an inherently sinful perception. Freud later noted this secret intrauterine memory of eternity, in his concept of the “oceanic feeling,” developed in conversation with the poet Romain Rolland. For Freud, “originally the ego includes everything,” even the oceanic sense of eternity (1930, SE21: 64, 68). Below we will see Boehme expand on this motif of the “existential Fall,” showing more precisely how the child loses this perception of eternity, and how the reborn soul recovers it. For Augustine the remedy for this truncated perception is Jesus Christ, conceived as the perfect union of Wisdom and knowledge (Col. 2.1), who repairs the division of the sexes and allows re-entry into Paradise. Here Christ represents the expansion of human conscious awareness back to its original form. Knowledge is the temporal content of faith in Christ—his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection: “all these things that the Word made flesh did and suffered for us in time and space belong … to knowledge and not to Wisdom” (13.24). Wisdom corresponds to the eternal aspect of Jesus Christ as Logos, which we glimpse in the prologue of John’s Gospel, of which Augustine offers a brief exegesis (13.1–5). The knowledge of faith is the “conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11.1; The Trinity 13.3), and Wisdom is seeing God “face to face” (1 Cor. 13.12; The Trinity 14.6). Notice again Augustine’s integral vision. The goal here is not to contemplate Wisdom in abstraction from knowledge, but to perfectly unite Wisdom

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and knowledge, and thus to marry contemplation with action.109 While both Wisdom and knowledge fall under visio intellectualis, Wisdom infused knowledge reaches down, so to speak, to participate in the ordering of spiritual and corporeal vision. And when knowledge is united with Wisdom, all of this ordering is done in harmony with the archetypes of creation and the soul, and Wisdom becomes incarnate like the Word incarnate (13.24). Thus Augustine ends his discussion of human Wisdom in The Trinity book 14, having reached the summit and the truest trinitarian image of God, with another panoramic vista of integral vision: In God “we live and move and are (Acts 17.27) … for from him and through him and in him are all things (Rom. 11.36)” (14.16). “Whoever cleaves to the Lord is one spirit (1 Cor. 6.17) … So when [the mind] blissfully cleaves to [God’s] nature, it will see as unchangeable in it everything that it sees” (14.20). 2.4.3 Wisdom and Creation In the penultimate book of the Confessions, Augustine interprets the first sentence of the Bible to mean that God created two beings in eternity, before time: “heaven and earth.” Here the primordial “heaven” means eternal created Wisdom who, if she mirrors God in unceasing contemplation, remains practically (but not theoretically) immutable. The primordial “earth,” according to Augustine’s translation of the Bible, is “invisible and unorganized” with “darkness upon the abyss”—so formless that it too is practically changeless in its chaotic state.110 In this state “earth” is a “being” with practically no ontological status. From the collision of these two eternal beings, like a coincidentia oppositorum, everything else comes into being (Confessions 12.12.15).111 We will meet these two primordial beings—Wisdom and the chaotic abyss of Nothing— again in Boehme, although in a slightly different form. For Augustine, the seven “days” of Genesis 1 are actually eternal archetypes that are created instantaneously and simultaneously in the “mind” or “sanctuary” of Wisdom, before time.112 These archetypes are then implanted into the formless “earth,” the temporal-material world, like invisible seeds 109 See Gilson (1960, 123) and Madec (1975, 78–81). 110 Many Vetus Latina manuscripts read “invisibilis et inconposita et tenebrae erant super abyssum …” (Fischer 1951, 3–6). 111 In TLMG 1.9.15–17, Augustine interprets the first creative act, “Let there be light,” as the illumination of eternal created Wisdom, and the illumination of the angelic host within her. See also TLMG 1.17.32, 2.8.16, 8.20.39, 8.24.45, 8.26.48–8.27.50. 112 Augustine justifies this view from Sirach 18.1: “He that lives forever created all things together” (TLMG 4.33.52).

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containing in embryonic form their whole process of development.113 Because the “days” of creation are eternal archetypes, they can be read figurally to describe the developmental stages of both history and the human soul, among other things. The importance of these developmental patterns helps explain why Augustine made so many commentaries on Genesis 1, and why the grand finale of the Confessions is a figural reading of its archetypes (books 12 and 13). The most archetypal passage of the Bible is also the most fecund with spiritual meaning.114 Probably the best illustration of these archetypes comes from On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, where Augustine notes that each “day” represents both an age of the world and a stage of human development. I will quote these figural readings at length, because we will see a similar approach in Boehme: The very beginnings of the human race, you see, in which it began to enjoy this light, can be suitably compared to the first day, on which God made light. This age is to be counted as a sort of infancy of the total age of the world, which we ought to think of, in comparison with its vast extent, as one adult human being; every human being, after all, when first born and seeing the light of day, lives through the first stage of infancy. This age stretches from Adam up to Noah … A kind of evening of this day is made by the flood, because our infancy too is sort of blotted out by a flood of oblivion. (GRM 1.23.35) Here Augustine’s figural reading anticipates Freud’s “infantile amnesia.” The second age runs from Noah to Abraham, corresponding to the “firmament” created on the second day, since the covenant with Noah re-affirmed that this firmament would maintain order in the cosmos. This is the stage of childhood, after infantile amnesia, when our memories and self-identity are protected from the “oblivion” of the “waters below” and the “waters above” (GRM 1.23.36). The third age runs from Abraham to David, corresponding to earth being separated from the waters on day three, just as Abraham was called out from the nations. This is the stage of adolescence, when we are “already capable of having children,” just as Abraham was potentially the “father of 113 That is, Augustine distinguishes between eternal rationes, created in Wisdom, and seminal or causal rationes which are implanted in matter (e.g. TLMG 4.33.51). On the latter see Taylor (1982, 252–254) and Gousmett (1988, 218–224). 114 Similarly, the Jewish mystical tradition asserts that Genesis 1 and Ezekiel 1 (the Merkabah) are the most holy texts in the Bible, in this respect.

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many nations” (GRM 1.23.37). The fourth age runs from David to the Babylonian exile, corresponding to the creation of sun, moon, and stars. The sun is the king, the moon is the people, “complying with the royal authority like the synagogue itself, and the stars represent its leaders.” This is the stage when “youth reigns as a king” (GRM 1.23.38). The fifth age runs from the exile to the birth of Christ, corresponding to the creation of the sea creatures below and the birds of heaven above. Like these creatures, Israel in exile had an “unsettled and unstable residence” scattered “among the Gentile nations.” But Israel also blessed these nations and multiplied within them. The “great whales” were the leaders in Israel “who were able to dominate the stormy waves of the world.” This is the stage of the “older ones” or “elders,” whose fruitfulness surrounds them (GRM 1.23.39). The sixth age begins with Jesus Christ, corresponding to the creation of a new humanity. The “age of the old human (Eph. 4.22; Col. 3.9) becomes evident” in that the “kingdom of the flesh has been thoroughly worn down.” In this context “the new human (Eph. 4.24; Col. 3.10) is born, who is already living according to the spirit” (GRM 1.23.40). Finally, the seventh age begins with the second coming of Christ: “those who were told, Be perfect, like your Father who is in heaven (Mt. 5.48), will take their rest with Christ from all their works … after such works indeed a rest is to be hoped for on the seventh day which has no evening” (GRM 1.23.41). Augustine’s figurative reading thus reveals the strong connection between eternal archetypes and their temporal manifestation in both the world and the soul. We will soon see Boehme elaborate on this same motif, although in much more detail. 2.5

Conclusion: Therapeutic Implications

Here I can only sketch the most general therapeutic implications in hopes that readers will take them further. More specific connections will emerge in later chapters as we see how Augustine’s framework was inhabited and shaped by Boehme, Freud, and Jung. The most basic implication is a corollary of the doctrine of the Trinity, and the consubstantiality of Father and Son: If the goal of our soul is to mirror the Trinity, then our task in this life is to seek out all that is hidden within memory and make it fully available to conscious understanding.115 This is in fact the goal that Augustine pursues so beautifully in the Confessions. The archetypes are also hidden in memory, and here the 115 Hill describes the marks of Augustine’s Trinity, derived from Scripture in books 1–7 of The Trinity, as “co-extensive,” “co-equal,” and “consubstantial” (1991, 53).

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word “anamnesis” and its Platonic connotation of remembering the eternal not only influenced Augustine, but through Western medicine it became a crucial psychotherapeutic concept. Freud discovered that patients’ memories of what precipitated their illness often pointed to deeper hidden memories, often stretching back to childhood. Symptoms often appeared like curious echoes of these early memories, as if the symptoms themselves were either hiding the memories, or trying unsuccessfully to dig them up. And indeed Freud discovered that the disclosure of these memories to a sympathetic listener often had remarkable healing effects. Freud noted that these deep memories often contained universal patterns of desire, the most famous of which he called the “Oedipus complex.” Neurotic patterns often emerged from disruptions of desire (i.e. traumas) that began in childhood, and healing often emerged by finding new and viable paths for these deep desires in the present. Jung, in using the word “archetypes” for these universal patterns of desire and transformation, was aware that he was inhabiting a tradition stretching back to Augustine and beyond. The big difference here would seem to be that, for Augustine, the most potent archetypes emerge from the spiritual images of Genesis 1, where the seven “days” figurally describe the structure of both the cosmos and the soul, revealing various ages and stages of unfolding development. But we will see in chapter 7 that Freud’s psychosexual stages and Jung’s stages of individuation can also be reconciled with the Genesis account. For Augustine, archetypes appear not only “below,” as it were, in the hidden caverns of memoria, but also “above” in the visio intellectualis of eternal Wisdom. This accords with the psychodynamic notion that archetypes are evident “below,” in the universal patterns of the instincts, but they can also be reflected upon “above,” in cognition and structured therapeutic conversation. Cognitive insights above can influence instincts below, hence the healing effects of the “talking cure.” For Augustine, the nightly ecstasies of the dream world always reveal a higher reality than the waking corporeal world. They draw us closer to Wisdom because their spiritual symbols are pregnant with archetypal meanings. And in Augustine’s inclusive hierarchy, dream archetypes speak not only to things below, in the soul, the body, and the natural world, but also to eternal meaning above, thus binding together the three levels of vision and being. When dreams are interpreted correctly, according to the archetypes, they offer perspectives that can transcend time, spanning past, present, and future. It is thus not surprising that Freud later saw dreams as oblique revealers of a hidden past, while Jung saw them as proleptic revealers of future possibilities, and both agreed that dreams offered a higher, more objective perspective on the situation of the patient’s troubled ego. This situation, as Augustine knew, was

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often fraught with the conflicts of dark demons, but it could also be blessed by the illumination of ministering angels. The goal, for Augustine, was to interpret the dream realm of visio spiritualis, such that it could be integrated with both visio intellectualis and visio corporealis. By interpreting dreams in light of the eternal archetypes, and allowing those archetypes to shed light on the everyday life of the dreamer, a truly integral vision could emerge. This process of interpretation was also a training in how to see the corporeal world as poetically and spiritually fecund—a training in expanded vision—where everyday life becomes lit by eternal meaning. Vision and perspective expand to reveal what Jung later called “the symbolic life” (1939, CW 18: 267–292). In short, like Jacob’s dream ladder pitched between heaven and earth with angels ascending and descending (Gen. 28.10–19), for Augustine dreams represent a middle realm—a conduit of communication—between time and eternity. They reveal how archetypes infuse space-time bodies and how bodies become poetically sublime. Dreams are the centrepiece of an integral vision, made possible through Jesus Christ, who called himself the living embodiment of Jacob’s dream ladder (Jn. 2.52). As Word he is Wisdom, and as flesh he is knowledge, thus reopening the full spectrum of human consciousness and revealing Paradise.

Chapter 3

Jacob Boehme and the Imaginal Rebirth of Theological Psychology Chapter 2 laid out the Augustinian “framework” of Western theological psychology, and chapters 3–7 now look at how Boehme inhabits, modifies, and in many ways reanimates this framework.1 We will explore the same three themes we looked at in Augustine, this time in successive chapters: Boehme’s map of the soul (chapter 5), followed by his theory of dreams (chapter 6), followed by his hermeneutic of dream interpretation, which enumerates various stages of psychospiritual development structured according to the archetypes of divine Wisdom (chapter 7). Because these themes are all central to Boehme’s mature thought, our journey simply walks through key passages of his later works, particularly the Mysterium Magnum and the Clavis, which will be supplemented at times by earlier works.2 But before we get to that, I want to provide a more 1 Translations of Boehme are my own unless noted, often made with the help of John Sparrow’s seventeenth century English translations, which were updated but not significantly altered in the four volume William Law edition, published by Richardson and Robinson (1764–1781). Boehme’s works are cited according to the chapter and section number of the German facsimile edition, Jacob Böhme Sämtliche Schriften (1955–1961), which is a facsimile of J.G. Gichtel’s Theosophia Revelata (1730). Many English translations follow the chapter and section numbering of the German facsimile edition, but when they differ I have included the year of publication and section numbering of the English edition after the facsimile edition (e.g. Forty Questions 13.5/1764, 13.9). 2 Mysterium Magnum (1622–24) is Boehme’s magnum opus—his longest, most mature, most exegetically explicit, and most comprehensive work. Weeks rightly notes that it “completes the cycle of great treatises” and “ties together in nearly 900 pages virtually everything that precedes it. In this sense, Mysterium Magnum encompasses the full corpus of Boehme’s works” (1991, 195–196). But as Peuckert notes, Mysterium is also Boehme’s “most unknown” work, and he wonders why “this work—his greatest in scope and most significant in content—found fewer friends than the others” (1958, 5–7, my translation). Strangely, many scholars today continue to read Boehme primarily through his early, more well-known, and more abstruse works, particularly the Aurora (1612). According to Boehme, the Aurora was written mainly for himself, and he lamented its public circulation, as well as its “knowledge” and “style” (Letters 12.12–13 [1621]/1886, 2.12–13; see also Letters 10.2ff. [1620]/1886, 3.2ff.). The fact that part three of the Mysterium represents Boehme’s most sustained and comprehensive discussion of dreams might also explain why Boehme’s dream theory has been overlooked. Mysterium was published in 1624, the final year of Boehme’s life, alongside The Way to Christ, which is a collection of more accessible devotional tracts. The Mysterium was also

© Glenn J. McCullough, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004680296_005

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general introduction to Boehme’s thought, which is notoriously difficult to wade into. The present chapter situates Boehme in relation to Augustine by surveying the historical (and historiographical) streams that converged in Boehme’s reanimation of the imaginal realm. This is followed in chapter 4 by an introduction to Boehme’s method, ontology, and general approach, all of which help to situate him as a theological “psychotherapist.” Taken together, these five chapters offer a portrait of Boehme’s theological psychology—his account of the soul’s transformation and rebirth (Wiedergeburt) in God—particularly in relation to dreams. And by situating Boehme in relation to the Augustinian framework we will see that, in almost every case, Boehme’s modifications of this framework represent a more phenomenological, dynamic, and embodied conception of the soul.3 That is, Boehme amplifies Augustine’s attempt to capture the lived-experience of a soul in motion, a soul conceived as a congruence of forces in constant dynamic interplay, and a soul that is thoroughly wedded to the body. Boehme also amplifies the Augustinian idea that dreams are an important window into the

intended to be published alongside the Clavis (Letters 57), which Boehme calls a “short summary” or “key to my writings,” (Clavis 6), but which was not actually published until 1647. Weeks notes that these works were part of a “calculated decision to step out of the shadows and reach out for a wider influence” (1991, 211–212). I see these three works as rather different from Boehme’s earlier works in several ways, one being that they are more orthodox, not so much because Boehme changed his previous views, but because he relates them to more traditional theological categories. In that same year (1624) Boehme was examined by the Lutheran theological intelligentsia at the court of Electoral Saxony in Dresden, which was at the time the “Rome” of Lutheranism. There, as Weeks says, “from all sides, Boehme heard repeated assurances that his works were read and loved” (1991, 213). This was certainly a different reception from the one he received in his hometown of Görlitz, where charges of heresy were stirred up in 1613 by the Lutheran pastor Gregor Richter who got hold of a private copy of the Aurora. As Weeks rightly notes, “the conclusion of Boehme’s career is conducive neither to the Christian orthodox attempt to cast him as an outsider, nor to the heterodox attempt to reclaim him as the conscious founder of an alternative spiritual tradition. The history of Christianity or of Lutheranism is full of doctrines that are considered heretical and alien in one time or place but not in others. The posthumous vilification of Boehme’s memory in Görlitz was brought about by the incendiary polemics of Richter” (2006, 190). 3 It is doubtful that Boehme read Augustine directly, but my argument does not depend on any direct genealogy. Because Augustine basically defined the framework of theological psychology for the West, Boehme was still operating within the Augustinian paradigm, as we will see. Scholars have also noted a more dynamic and interior reading of Augustine’s trinitarian psychology in the Rhineland mysticism of Eckhart, Tauler, and Suso, particularly in their association of the imago Trinitatis with the “ground” of the soul, which influenced Boehme (Sullivan 1963, 288–295; McGinn 2005, 146, 148, 233, 244–246, 254–262). Much has been written on Boehme’s sources, but we have little direct evidence for them (see McGinn 2016, 203).

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soul. All of these modifications of the Augustinian framework bring Boehme into closer alignment with Freud and Jung, whom we will explore in chapter 8. While in a moment we will trace in broad contours the historical streams that converged in Boehme’s work, unfortunately, as was the case with Augustine, I do not have the space to say much about Boehme’s own socio-historical setting, although I am indebted to scholars who have done this work very well.4 Nor am I offering a psycho-history of Boehme himself.5 What I do hope to accomplish is more modest: First, quite generally, to reveal Boehme as a theological “psychotherapist” broadly defined—a theologian who, like Augustine, is primarily concerned with soul-healing. And second, more specifically, I hope to reveal Boehme as the great well-spring of modern psychodynamic therapy—the thinker who originated the field that was later inhabited by Freud and Jung. On this front Boehme’s first great legacy is his concept of the hidden dark aspect of the soul, a concept that is specific enough to presage the unconscious mind of psychodynamic therapy, but also broad enough to encompass the debates about the unconscious that embroiled Freud and Jung. Boehme, I am arguing, defines the larger field within which these later debates took place. We will look at Boehme’s concept of the unconscious, along with the rest of his map of the soul, in chapter 5. Related to this is Boehme’s second great legacy: his concept of a spontaneous, creative, revelatory, and therapeutic imagination that appears nightly in dreams, which we will first explore generally in chapter 6. More specifically, the products of this imagination mark stages and transformations on a developmental and therapeutic path of spiritual rebirth (Wiedergeburt), which we will explore in chapter 7. Some of the most striking similarities between Boehme, Freud, and Jung will emerge as we compare the precise character of these stages. Here Boehme anticipates both Freud’s psychosexual stages and Jung’s 4 See especially Weeks (1991, 2013) who has made the most thorough attempt so far to historicize Boehme’s mysticism. See also Andersson, Martin, Penman, and Weeks (2018). 5 Kielholz has attempted a Freudian reading of Boehme’s work, characterizing it as a pathological “sexualization of the whole cosmos.” He also notes that Richter, the Lutheran pastor in Görlitz who led the extended campaign against Boehme, calls Boehme an “Oedipus” in one of his final and most vitriolic writings (1919, 45; in Weeks 1991, 211). From a Freudian perspective, the question is whether the oceanic feeling of “primary narcissism” reduces all mysticism to pathology. On this point, Jung was generally more affirming of mysticism and less psychologically reductionistic than Freud, as we will see. My view (again) is that Freudian critiques of Boehme are somewhat anachronistic, if they do not first note how Boehme’s thought gave rise to so many basic Freudian categories. Using Freudian categories, we could just as easily say that Freudian critiques of Boehme involve an (unconscious) desire to kill the Father, continuing Freud’s attempt to establish psychoanalysis as a pure science with no religious precursors.

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journey of individuation. For Boehme, the path of rebirth is structured by the seven archetypes of Wisdom/Sophia, which he never tires of describing, almost always from a slightly new angle or facet.6 In brief, these seven qualities,7 as they manifest in the fallen world and the fallen soul, are (1) Nothing-desire, (2) lust-desire, (3) anxiety-anger, (4) fire-light, (5) love-desire, (6) voice/sound, and (7) body (corpus) (see figure 4).8 But in their original goodness, and in their redeemed state, these seven qualities manifest according to the symbolism of the seven days of creation (the Hexameron), using a figural hermeneutic similar to Augustine’s. We will expand on the seven qualities in chapters 5 and 7. 3.1

Imaginal Rebirth

We have already noted that this imaginal realm—the middle-tier of Augustine’s threefold schema—was viewed with increasing ambivalence throughout the medieval period. In a moment we will see that mystical theologians of various stripes—the Victorines, Hugh (ca. 1096–1141 CE) and Richard (d. 1173 CE), the Franciscan, Bonaventure (1221–1274 CE), right up to the early-modern Carmelites, Teresa of Avila (1515–1582 CE) and John of the Cross (1542–1591 CE)—all tended to exclude dreams and visions from their definition of true mysticism,9 even as recorded accounts of these phenomena proliferated in the “flood of visionary narratives” that began in the thirteenth 6 In possibly his most creative insight, Weeks describes how Boehme’s seven major works generally correlate with the seven qualities of Wisdom, noting that in each work the seven qualities are described from a different perspective (1991, 160, 165–75). This might imply that all of the seven qualities can appear on each of seven different levels—a motif also present in Kabbalah, where each sephira also contains the whole set of sephirot. 7 Boehme also refers to the seven “qualities” (Qualitäten) of Wisdom as “source-spirits” (Quellgeister), “forms” (Gestalten), or “properties” (Eigenschaften). 8 Boehme uses different names for each of the seven qualities, depending on the context. My use of these names is derived from the Mysterium Magnum, mainly to highlight the psychological significance of the seven qualities. I will justify my use of these names in chapter 5. 9 Because they are Boehme’s contemporaries, I will quote Teresa and John on this point. Teresa defines mysticism as follows: “I used unexpectedly to experience a consciousness of the presence of God of such a kind that I could not possibly doubt that he was within me … This was in no sense a vision: I believe that it is called mystical theology” (Life of St. Teresa 1.10, quoted in McGinn 1991, xiii). John’s definition is similar: “The soul that will ascend to this perfect union with God, must be careful not to lean upon imaginary visions, forms, figures, and particular intelligible objects, for these things can never serve as proportionate or proximate means towards so great an end; yea, rather they are an obstacle in the way, and therefore to be guarded against and rejected” (Ascent of Mount Carmel 1. ii. cap. xvi, quoted in Underhill 1955, 281).

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century (McGinn 1998, 25). With Boehme the imaginal realm is reborn, both theoretically and practically. And it is reborn precisely in the Augustinian form of an inclusive hierarchy of integral vision—as a mesocosm that mediates between eternal ideas and temporal bodies, in both the soul and the cosmos. For Boehme, Wisdom is this imaginal realm. She is the “divine imagination” in which the human imagination can participate (Clavis 19). And Boehme’s preferred name for her, the “Virgin Sophia,” has a distinct Marian overtone that points to her role as Mediatrix in both the micro- and macrocosm. In her, through the Spirit, the Word becomes incarnate.10 In her the divine body is knit together. And we will soon see that the goal of Boehme’s theological psychotherapy is precisely this birth of God in the soul, which includes the creation of a divine or spiritual body. By the time of Boehme, particularly in the Catholic church, the upper Augustinian realm of visio intellectualis was viewed as a discrete and separate realm of imageless ecstasy. And this was the proper goal of the mystic’s path—a goal that envisioned a soul free of all earthly and bodily struggles, at least for the moment of its ecstasy. In reaching this goal the soul might simply be dissociated from these struggles, and thus dissociated from its own body, and the bodily life around it.11 This dissociation is precisely the opposite of the integral vision that I foregrounded in Augustine, and that we will see amplified in Boehme. I believe that this polarity of dissociation versus integration of mind and body has profound implications for how we understand not only spiritual experiences, but Western culture as a whole in both the past and present, although I cannot expand on these implications here. Suffice it to say that, when the Lutheran Reformation released some of the strictures on both biblical interpretation and spiritual experience, it is remarkable how the imaginal realm was so quickly and so thoroughly reanimated and rehabilitated, in both theology and practice, and not without controversy.12 Connecting spirituality 10 11

12

As the Nicene Creed puts it, “Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine.” Carolyn Walker Bynum brilliantly questions this view of female mystics as escaping bodily life, although she nonetheless admits, “Does this mean that women wished to eschew physicality and become spirit? … there is certainly some evidence to support such an interpretation” (1987, 212). I will have more to say about her contribution shortly. The first flashpoint of controversy was probably the 1524–25 peasants’ revolt, supported by Thomas Müntzer, who was inspired by certain dreams and visions to champion basic agrarian rights for indentured farmers. The history of the influence of dreams on the birth of human rights and the concept of “the commons” is a fascinating one (see e.g. Hill 1972; Thompson 1963; 1993; Sobel 2000). Luther vilified Müntzer and encouraged the aristocracy to swiftly crush the rebellion, which resulted in some 100,000–300,000 poorly armed peasants being slaughtered. Luther’s concept of the Schwärmer (“dreamer” or

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to the daily, bodily life of ordinary people was of course one of the central aims of the Reformation. Imaginal rebirth will thus be our guiding concept through the next five chapters, as we explore both how, in an historical sense, the imaginal was reborn in Boehme’s work, and how Boehme himself understands the imaginal as the primary locus of spiritual rebirth (Wiedergeburt)— as that place where divine ideas take flesh, and where bodies and bodily life become sublime. 3.2

Boehme’s Imaginal Realm in Historical Context

Several scholars have noted Boehme’s crucial role in the rebirth of the Western imaginal, which is evident in two successive historical waves. First, beginning in the seventeenth century, Boehme directly influenced a host of thinkers on the Continent13—many of them classed by historians as “pietists” or “esotericists” (or both).14 During the same century Boehme’s work spread to England where it influenced many circles, including many factions of the “dissenters” (not just the “Behmenists”) who fuelled the ferment of the English Revolution (1640–60 CE).15 In the second wave Boehme became a central influence on “extremist”), which influenced German thought right up to the time of Kant and beyond, “was shaped above all” by Müntzer (La Vopa 1997, 92). 13 For a good summary see Faivre (2000, 10–48). See also Martin, Muratori, and Brink (2023, 1–300). Boehme’s influence was felt far beyond his explicit disciples, who included: (1) in Germany, Abraham von Franckenberg (1593–1652 CE); Johann Theodor von Tschech (1595–1649 CE), who spread Boehme’s works throughout Europe; Johann Georg Gichtel (1638–1710 CE), who relocated to the Netherlands in 1667, where he collaborated with Friedrich Breckling (1629–1711 CE); Quirinus Kuhlmann (1651–1689 CE), who took Boehme to Russia and was eventually burned at the stake in Moscow; Johann Scheffler (1624–1677 CE), better known as the poet Angelus Silesius; Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714 CE); and to some extent Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716 CE; see Edel 2018); (2) in France, the “quietists” Antoinette Bourignon (1616–1680 CE) and Pierre Poiret (1646–1719 CE). On Boehme’s influence in the Netherlands see Heijting (1973), and Martin, Muratori, and Brink (2023, 223–300); and on Boehme’s influence in Sweden and Finland see Mansikka (2008) and Mehtonen (2023). In the eighteenth century Boehme strongly influenced, in Germany, Friedrich Chistoph Oetinger (1702–1782 CE), and in France, after 1788, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803 CE). See Kühlmann and Vollhardt (2012). 14 Mansikka asks in the perceptive title of his paper, “Did the Pietists Become Esotericists When They Read the Works of Jacob Boehme?” (2008). 15 For a good summary see Hessayon (2023). Boehme’s most direct followers in England included his faithful translator, the barrister and linguist John Sparrow (1615–1670 CE), who, with his cousin John Ellistone, and the publisher Humphrey Blunden, printed a complete edition of Bohme’s works in English between 1645 and 1662, hoping that Boehme would bring peace to the Babel of religious discord of the revolutionary period;

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nineteenth century Romanticism, both in England and on the Continent.16 And it seems that wherever Boehme’s influence was felt it sparked a renewed interest in dreams and their interpretation.17 But while historians are beginand the “Philadelphians” John Pordage (1608–1681 CE), and Jane Leade (1623–1704 CE). But Boehme’s influence also extended far beyond these faithful acolytes. Hessayon notes that during and after the English Revolution “engagement with Boehme’s teachings was … more extensive at this crucial moment in English history than has usually been recognized” (Hessayon 2014, 77). And Christopher Hill, who brilliantly traces the socialist radicals of the English Revolution—those who tried to return “the commons” to the common people—notes that Boehme “influenced many of the characters who appear in this book” (Hill 1975, 176; see also Jones 1959, 208–34; Smith 1989, 185–226). The “Cambridge Platonists” Henry More (1614–1618 CE), Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688 CE), and Cromwell’s chaplain, Peter Sterry (1613–1672 CE), were all appreciative of Boehme but ambivalent, especially about his more enthusiastic followers (Hedley 2018; Hengstermann 2023; Muratori 2023). Morgan Llwyd (1619–1659 CE) translated some of Boehme’s works into Welsh. Boehme’s influence can also be detected in John Milton (1608–1683 CE; see Bailey 1914), and Isaac Newton (1642–1727 CE; see Hobhouse 1937). In the eighteenth century Boehme strongly influenced, in Britain, William Law (1686–1761 CE), who published a new edition of his works, and Dionysius Andreas Freher (1649–1728 CE). 16 This “second golden age” of Boehme’s influence shaped Romantic philosophy, literature, art, and medicine including, especially: (1) in Germany, G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831 CE; see Muratori 2016); F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854 CE; see Friedrich 2009); Franz von Baader (1765–1841 CE); F.C. Baur (1792–1860 CE; see Simut 2015); Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801 CE), better known by his pen name, Novalis; Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810 CE; see Möseneder 1981); Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810 CE), the physicist who discovered ultraviolet light; Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853 CE; see Lüer 1997); Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780–1860 CE); Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869 CE), Carl August von Eschenmayer (1768–1852 CE), Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829 CE), Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887 CE), and Johann Friedrich von Meyer (1772–1849 CE); (2) in England, William Blake (1757–1827 CE; see Aubrey 1986), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834 CE), and William Wordsworth (1770–1850 CE). See Hannak (2014) and Jessen (2014). 17 For example, Boehme’s influence on the understanding of dreams in England during this period is evident in the many extant dream-visions of the “Philadelphian Society” of John Pordage and Jane Lead (see Bowerbank 2004; Smith 2010; Apetrei 2010, 2014) and their followers Thomas Bromley and Mary Pocock (Smith 1989, 185–226); in John Beale’s Treatise on the Art of Interpreting Dreams, which argues that Christians have a moral duty to observe their dreams (Scott 2013); in Phillip Goodwin’s Mystery of Dreames (1658), which is an anomaly among orthodox and conformist writings in its suggestion that angelic dream influences might occasionally predominate over demonic ones (Scott 2014, 152); and in Thomas Tryon’s Treatise of Dreams and Visions (1689). The uniqueness of Boehme-inspired dream theories is evident when we compare them, for example, to Richard Burton’s basically pathological view of dreams in his popular Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), or Henry More’s rationalist dream skepticism in Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1656). And yet More also embraces many aspects of Boehme’s thought (Hengstermann 2023; Muratori 2023). In terms of Boehme’s influence on Romantic dreaming, Ellenberger rightly notes that “there is hardly a Romantic philosopher or poet who did not express his ideas on dreams” (1970, 204). On this Romantic dream world that

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ning to reach some consensus on Boehme’s vast legacy, they have yet to find much agreement on how to locate him in terms of the streams of thought that preceded him. Scholars have tended not only to locate but often to assimilate Boehme within one of three antecedent historical streams: (1) the stream of Renaissance Hermeticism, Kabbalah, and magic, particularly as this was distilled by Paracelsus and his followers; (2) the stream of Christian mysticism, particularly as this appears in the “Rhineland” or “speculative” mysticism of Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, and the Theologia Deutsch; and (3) the stream of the Lutheran Reformation and its return to the biblical mythos as the foundation for theology. As we briefly wade into these three streams, the focus will be on locating Boehme in relation to Augustine’s concept of threefold vision and the mediating imaginal realm of visio spiritualis. It will soon become obvious that my preference tilts toward the third stream: I tend to read Boehme as first and foremost a Lutheran who depended primarily on Luther’s Bible, while not neglecting the science of his day. I see this third stream not only as the most accurate, but as the most theoretically capacious in that it allows for a partial synthesis of the other two. The fact that Boehme can be convincingly positioned in each of these streams points to the remarkable synthetic quality of his work—its ability to accommodate diverse perspectives. The fact that he does not fit neatly into any one pigeonhole also points to his remarkable originality—no idea enters Boehme’s thought unchanged. And the fact that scholars have not, to my knowledge, noted the distinctions we will explore below points to some fairly large lacunae in Boehme research,18 which have made him, as McGinn says, “a bone of contention for interpreters” (2016, 172). 3.3

Boehme as Magus

The scholarship of Antoine Faivre and his colleagues locates Boehme in the historical stream of Renaissance Hermeticism and Kabbalah. And Faivre in turn is indebted to the pioneering work of Frances Yates (1964; 1972),19 who first uncovered the surprising influence of Renaissance Hermetic magic, and

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connected poets, philosophers, and scientists see especially Lersch (1923), Béguin (1939), and Ripa (1988). In her introduction to an issue of Aries devoted to Boehme, Lucinda Martin notes that he remains “woefully under-researched” and points to some institutional and historiographical reasons for this (2018). What Yates called the “Hermetic” tradition in her book on Bruno (1964), she later changed to the “Hermetic-Cabalist” tradition, realizing the central place of Jewish Kabbalah in this stream of thought.

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mysterious groups like the Rosicrucians, on early modern thought. In short, Yates brought the suspect area of “occultism”20 under the purview of serious historical scholarship. And building on this, Faivre has almost single-handedly defined an historical field called “Western esotericism,” which now has an impressive body of work.21 Faivre calls Boehme the “prince of Western esotericism” (1994, 64). More specifically, within Western esotericism Faivre identifies several currents, among the most important of which is “theosophy.”22 For Faivre, Boehme’s Aurora is “the definitive birth of the theosophical current strictly speaking,” and Boehme’s work as a whole represents “something like the nucleus of that which constitutes the classical theosophical corpus” (2000, 7). Faivre’s historical lineage of Western esotericism emphasizes the Italian Renaissance, particularly Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499 CE) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494 CE). Ficino is the chief architect of a prisca theologia (“ancient theology”), which in Ficino’s words is “a single system … harmonious in every part, which traced its origins to Mercury [or Hermes] and reached full perfection with the divine Plato.”23 Ficino’s early dating of the Corpus Hermeticum24 led him to see its supposed author, Hermes Trismegistus, as “the founder of theology,” and with him Zoroaster, Orpheus, Pythagoras, the Sibyls, and Plato, as the founders of a coherent philosophical-theological 20

The adjective “occult,” meaning secret or hidden, can be distinguished from the substantive “occultism,” a word that emerged in the nineteenth century Enlightenment context as a pejorative term, and which helped marginalize a good deal of the Renaissance thought described below (see Hanegraaff 2006, 884ff). The Romantic attempt to reconcile religion and science failed, around 1850, when these two fields were emphatically prised apart. Scientific positivism rose to ascendency and the Romantic spirit descended into popular “spiritualism” and “occultism.” This split had much to do with the later split between Freud and Jung. Jung notes that Freud asked him to protect his sexual theory at all cost, “against the black tide of mud … of occultism,” but Jung, a Romantic at heart, found this approach too dogmatic (Jung 1963, 150). Jung’s Romantic project was ultimately to reconcile science and religion, and today we are beginning to see signs of rapprochement. 21 See the excellent Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism edited by Wouter Hanegraaff, in collaboration with Faivre and others. See also Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism. For a good historical overview of the development of this field see Faivre (2000, xiii–xxxv). 22 Faivre admits that both “esotericism” and “theosophy” are contested terms, and in using them to structure his historiography he does an admirable job of defining them according to historical data, while also admitting that any such definitions will be historically selective (Faivre 2000, xiii–xxx, 3–9). 23 This is from Ficino’s introduction to his translation of the Hermetic Pimander (1471). 24 Scholars today generally think that the diverse texts of the Corpus Hermeticum were compiled around the second or third century CE.

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system, which was inherited by Moses, and which culminated in Jesus Christ.25 Into this remarkable amalgam Ficino’s student, Pico della Mirandola, injected a Christianized version of Jewish Kabbalah, which he likewise dated back to the time of Moses.26 Faivre emphasizes the theurgic or magical aspect of this prisca theologia, which flowed into German thought via the Christian Hebraist and kabbalist Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522 CE), and was then give a kind of systematic coherence in the work of Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1487–1535 CE). This Hermetic-kabbalistic-theurgic stream was then wedded more deeply and speculatively to medicine and the healing arts by the enigmatic Swiss-German thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541 CE). For Faivre, in Boehme’s work “above all, it should be emphasized, we find Paracelsism” (2000, 7). For our purposes this is important because the ontology and epistemology of this historical stream are very close to Augustine’s tripartite schema. Ficino, Pico, Reuchlin, and Agrippa all divide the cosmos quite clearly into three levels: 1) the terrestrial material world of the elements; (2) the astral world of stars, planets, and the anima mundi or World Soul, which is accessed through the creative imagination; and (3) the intellectual world of pure ideas and angelic hierarchies. Each world is structured by the influence of those above it, just as we saw with Augustine’s inclusive hierarchy of vision. In fact, Ficino may have been following Augustine when he made this tripartite schema central to his prisca theologia.27 But Ficino bends this system toward a very cautious and 25

According to his definition of “Western esotericism,” Faivre does not emphasize the fact that, as McGinn notes, for Ficino and Pico the prisca theologia finds “its providential fulfillment in the incarnation of the Word and the teaching of the New Testament as enriched and passed on by Christian theologians, notably Dionysius (whom Renaissance thinkers believed to be Paul’s most fervent disciple), Augustine of Hippo, and Thomas Aquinas” (2012, 251). Scholars debate whether Ficino saw Hermes Trismegistus primarily as a theologus or as a magus (see e.g. Copenhaver 1993, 162–165). 26 Scholars today generally agree with Scholem (1965) that the main kabbalistic text, the Zohar, was written by Moses de Léon in thirteenth century Spain, although the text itself claims to be the work of the second century Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Yet scholars also acknowledge other forms of Jewish mysticism, such as the Hekhalot and Merkabah literature, which go back much further. The recent work of biblical scholar Margaret Barker (2012) intriguingly postulates a form of Jewish mysticism dating back to the first temple period that significantly involves Wisdom as a female figure—represented by the seven branched candelabra that, before Josiah’s reforms, was present in the Holy of Holies. The resonances between Barker’s reconstructed first temple mysticism and Boehme are wildly interesting. 27 Ficino outlines his tripartite schema in Libri de vita, book 3 (1489), where he also discusses Augustine’s “seminal reasons,” which he seems to locate in the World Soul of the second level. For an overview of the tripartite schema in these thinkers see Yates (1964, 62–144), Jones (1959, 134–139) and Hanegraaff (2006, 7, 364–6, 951, 992).

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reserved kind of “natural magic” in the astral realm, in which the practitioner can guide the influence of the stars and planets imaginatively, by creating artistic talismans that channel beneficial astral influences into the material realm. For example, Yates notes that Renaissance paintings of Venus can be seen as examples of Ficino’s talismanic magic, thought to produce “healthful, rejuvenating, anti-Saturnian influences on the beholder” (1964, 77). The medical application of these beneficial astral influences became central for Paracelsus and his followers. For Paracelsus the “signatures” of the stars and planets are present in every aspect of material creation, and like Ficino he is primarily concerned with “drawing down” these astral influences for therapeutic purposes.28 But already in this brief description we begin to see sharp differences between Boehme and the Hermetic-magical stream. As we will see shortly, the astral and elemental worlds correspond to what Boehme calls the outer world, the outer soul (the Holy Spirit soul-element) and to outward human reason (Vernunft), which are not his primary concern. Boehme is aware of the magical correspondences that operate here, according to the vast interconnected web of the World Soul, and he sometimes mentions the natural magicians who make use of these astral forces, not doubting the efficacy of their procedures. These natural magicians included the scientists and physicians of Boehme’s day, and we know that there were more than a few admirers of Paracelsus in Görlitz, even within Boehme’s close circle.29 But Boehme is simply not interested in any kind of talismanic or imaginative manipulation of these outer astral forces for personal gain. Rather, like Augustine, Boehme continually directs his readers inward and upward, away from the astral-elemental outer world, and toward the inner eternal dark and light worlds of the soul, where the focus is not on manipulating but on understanding (through Verstand) the seven qualities of Wisdom. In so doing Boehme continually moves his readers beyond any self-willed astral-elemental theurgy into the much more significant realm 28 Like Ficino, Paracelsus is primarily concerned with the lower two levels of the tripartite schema, but in Paracelsus’ later magnum opus, the Astronomia Magna (1538), he also speaks of the third level of “religion,” which surpasses “astronomy,” and which is ruled not by the “light of nature,” but the “light of the Holy Ghost” (Hanegraaff 2006, 922–31). This later work was not always emphasized by Paracelsus’ followers, or by later historians. 29 Weeks describes the Paracelsians in Görlitz, including the mayor, Bartolomäus Scultetus, who corresponded with Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, and “dominated the intellectual life of his city.” Weeks also notes that in 1570 a book printed in Görlitz denounced the “unheard-of blasphemies and lies which Paracelsus spewed out against God, His Word, and the laudable art of medicine” (1991, 27–31). Paracelsus’ many followers were a diverse group who did not always adhere closely to their master’s teachings (Hanegraaff 2006, 915–22).

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of divine grace and revelation. And this differentiates Boehme from Paracelsus and his followers, whose writings tend to reflect the self-willed bombast of the magus.30 Rather than manipulating the divine order for personal gain, Boehme wants to help the soul realize its rightful place within this order, through the “releasement” (Gelassenheit)31 of self-will into divine grace.32 While Ficino’s “natural magic” in the astral and elemental worlds was quite cautious, Pico della Mirandola’s kabbalistic magic was far more ambitious, invoking the angels (and hopefully excluding the demons) of the intellectual world. At age twenty-three, the determined Pico went to Rome with 900 theses or Conclusions in which he attempted to prove that Kabbalah could reconcile all known philosophies and sects—pagan, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim.33 And his introduction to these theses became a classic Renaissance humanist manifesto: Oration on the Dignity of Man (1487). Pico’s kabbalistic magic is meant to surpass his teacher’s astral-elemental magic, since Ficino unfortunately did not read Hebrew, which (as Pico points out in thesis twenty-two) is a prerequisite for any decent magical operation. But the young kabbalist was also less wary of ecclesiastical censure than his teacher, which landed him in jail briefly at the request of Pope Innocent VIII. For our purposes, the important thing is this: Pico is clear that his angelic realm of “pure” Kabbalah corresponds to the intellectual part of the soul— Augustine’s visio intellectualis—and yet, for Pico, access to this realm is granted largely through the imagination.34 Here we begin to see the imaginative life 30 “Bombast” was literally Paracelsus’ middle name. And yet Paracelsus’ final work marks something of a change. Boehme distances himself from the Paracelsians quite early in his writings (e.g. Aurora 23.107–8). 31 This term was coined by Meister Eckhart, became central for many of the Rhineland mystics, and was later important for Heidegger. It connotes serenity, letting be, detachment, and abandonment, but many scholars today prefer the translation “releasement” (see Schürmann 1973). Theologically it connotes an emptying of the creature in receptiveness to God, a letting go of self-will and opening to divine will. 32 Thus, contra Faivre’s tendency in the historiography of “Western esotericism,” I agree with Weeks that “Boehme scholarship needs to look beyond the frequent tendency to segregate the author in an esoteric tradition” (2006, 191). 33 Fabrizio Lelli calls this “Pico’s attempt to create an all-comprehensive system of knowledge, intended to embrace and reconcile the most different rational and religious disciplines” (in Hanegraaff 2006, 950). 34 See Pico (Conclusions 9.16–18, 9.26, 11.12). As Yates notes “The operations of pure Cabala are done in the intellectual part of the soul. This immediately marks them off from the operations of natural magic, which are done only with the natural spiritus.” And yet this kabbalistic magic “worked through the imagination, by conditioning the imagination through various ways of life and rituals towards receiving inwardly the divine forms of the natural gods” (1964, 99, 103).

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of visio spiritualis creeping into the highest realm of visio intellectualis, likely through the influence of kabbalistic ideas. This trend will become more pronounced in Boehme. But again, notwithstanding this expansion of imaginative visio spiritualis into the highest realm, and the fact that Boehme shares both Pico’s ecumenical aspirations35 and his emphasis on angelic hierarchies,36 we do not find Pico’s magical ambitions in Boehme, ambitions that became even more pronounced in Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy (1533).37 In short, where the Hermetic-kabbalistic-magical stream emphasizes the magus ascending, Boehme emphasizes grace descending. Where Pico’s and Agrippa’s ideal magus uses ceremonial operations to climb through the angelic hierarchies,38 Boehme’s ideal Christian remains earth-bound, humbly turns inward, and through introspection, confession, stillness, and the nightly imaginative world of dreaming, encounters the grace of Wisdom. That said, it must be admitted that Boehme inherited a great deal from this Hermetic-kabbalistic-magical stream, and particularly the central importance it confers on the imagination.39 Boehme often uses the word “magia” as a kind of shorthand for both the imagination and the imaginal realm. For Boehme, God creates the world through magia: Wisdom is the imagination of God (Clavis 19), and her seven qualities, described in the seven eternal days of Genesis 1, are not only archetypes but drives,40 meaning that through 35 Pico’s ecumenical aspirations were also passed on to Reuchlin, whose De verbo mirifico (1494) attempts to unite all known religious systems. 36 On this see Weeks (1991, 78–81). 37 Lelli speaks of a general scholarly consensus that sees “Pico’s speculation as an attempt to transcend physical limits to search for a superior spirituality by means of occult kabbalistic techniques …” (Hanegraaff 2006, 952). 38 In his later years Pico distanced himself from both astral divination and ceremonial invocation, and also donned the Dominican habit. More recent scholarship has emphasized his orthodoxy (Hanegraaff 2006, 943–4). 39 Wolfson says that “the aspect of Boehme’s incarnational theosophy that is most indebted to the Kabbalah concerns the role he assigns to the imagination  …” and for support Wolfson quotes Boehme’s Quaestiones Theosophicae: “For what the angels will and desire is by their imagination brought into shape and forms [das wird durch ihre Imaginirung in Bildung und Formen gebracht], which forms are pure ideas [eitel Ideen]” (2018, 29). Faivre also notes that Paracelsus was remarkable for the importance “he confers on the imagination, the queen of faculties, understood as essentially active and creative” (2000, xvi). Along with the influence of Paracelsus, Faivre notes Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605 CE), whose Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (1595 and 1609) “dedicated to Divine Wisdom, would almost certainly have caught Boehme’s attention.” Faivre says this work inaugurated a “theosophical iconography—a ‘theosophy of the image,’” which “had considerable influence on most of the esoteric currents in the 17th century” (2000, 7, 11, 13). 40 Early in the Aurora Boehme defines a quality (Qualität) as the “mobility, surging, or driving (Trieben) of a thing” (Aurora 1.3). The word Trieb (drive) later became very important for Freud.

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them everything in the cosmos not only comes into being but continually subsists. For Boehme, divine “magia” thus emphasizes the fact that divine imagination continually “makes substance,” and “creates where nothing is” (Forty Questions 13.5/1764, 13.9). The archetypal image-language of the seven qualities of Wisdom, and their web of interconnecting forces, continually influence and sustain all things. For Boehme, the fabric of existence, both eternal and temporal, is imaginative, and the continuous divine creative drive at the heart of existence is magia.41 The human imagination is also magical, in that it too can create out of nothing, for better or worse. Most importantly, the human imagination can understand and participate in the workings of divine magia, and it is precisely this understanding (Verstand) that Boehme is trying to inspire in his readers. In regard to human imagination Boehme clearly distinguishes between good and evil magia.42 We will soon see that evil or false magia is a product of the “two-fold” soul, where the self-will or “I-ness” (Ichheit) harnesses the evil qualities of the eternal dark world to manipulate the space-time world for its own benefit. That is, false magia basically corresponds to the self-willed magical manipulations of the Hermetic-magical stream described above. While Boehme admits that these manipulations have short-term benefits, they also tend to produce unintended negative consequences by destabilizing the natural order. Boehme’s good or true magia is not really magic at all according to the prevailing Hermetic definition, since it does not involve the self-will of the magus. True magia describes the process of the soul’s rebirth in the seven qualities of divine Wisdom, whereby self-will surrenders (in Gelassenheit) to the divine will, and the “two-fold” soul becomes “three-fold” and trinitarian, transformed from darkness into light by divine grace. For Boehme the ultimate pattern for this divine magical path is the life of Christ, who not only reveals the path but provides the desire to pursue it and the power to complete it (e.g. Signature 7.28–81/1781, 7.26–75).43 The reborn soul can understand (through 41 See e.g. Forty Questions 1.118, 19.7, 30.19, 20–21, 82/1764, 1.177, 19.10, 30.22, 24–5, 95. 42 False magic is discussed especially in Forty Questions, and Incarnation. It is summarized again in Mysterium (e.g. 11.1–26, 68.24). See Weeks (2013, 57). 43 The Christocentric and cruciform nature of Boehme’s theology has generally been overlooked by his interpreters. Boehme’s “divine magical process” includes the whole life of Christ: “In the sweet name, Jesus Christ, the whole process is contained … the wise seeker should consider the whole process of Christ’s humanity, from his opening of the womb of his mother Mary, to his resurrection and ascension” (Signature 7.28, 7.35/1781, 7.26, 7.32). Boehme’s Christology affirms both the Chalcedonian hypostatic union (Signature 7.45/1781, 7.40; Incarnation 1.9.11–12/1764, 1.9.21–23) and the doctrine of two wills (“dyothelitism”) from the sixth ecumenical council (Signature 7.63–65/1781, 7.58–60). While

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Verstand) divine magia, in the basic sense that it can see what God is doing in the world and participate in the divine will, just as the biblical prophets did (Forty Questions 38.2–3). Thus while Boehme’s use of magia signals that he has inherited the Renaissance Hermetic reanimation of the imaginal, he also resituates the ascending self-will of the magus within the greater boundary of descending divine grace, and posits Christ as the ultimate magus. To conclude this section, let me simply note that for Antoine Faivre, “Western esotericism” is defined in contrast to “mysticism.” The imaginal realm “makes the difference between what is mystical and what is esoteric … the mystic—in the very classical sense—aspires to a more or less complete suppression of images” (2000, xxiii).44 It would seem that, for Faivre, if Boehme is an “esotericist,” then he cannot be a “mystic,” which brings us to our next topic. 3.4

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Boehme’s work has also been situated within the Christian mystical tradition,45 but here the historiographical category tends to frame Boehme in a more inferior light: where the Hermetic-magical stream casts Boehme as a fairly typical magus, or even a remarkable one, the Christian mystical stream casts him as a fairly poor mystic, or at least a rather confused one. And both of these Boehme does not use the term, “prevenient grace” is implied throughout this process (Signature 7.44/1781, 7.39). All of the above are characteristic features of Lutheran theology. For Boehme, “the light of nature dwells in the light of grace” (Mysterium 34.14), and thus while this “divine magical process” has astrological-alchemical analogies in the astral-elemental realm, it is superior to them. 44 Faivre makes this distinction in his section on “imagination and mediations,” which is one of six “basic characteristics” by which he circumscribes the field of “Western esotericism,” and he also notes it as a key aspect of “theosophy” (2000, xxi–xxv, 8). To be fair, Faivre concedes that “such a distinction is only a matter of methodological convenience. In practice, there is sometimes much esotericism among the mystics (let us think of Saint Hildegard), and one observes a pronounced mystical tendency in some esotericists (Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, for example)” (2000, xxiii). I will be emphasizing this ambiguity in what follows. Faivre also notes that the concept of imagination in Boehme’s “theosophical” successors has precursors in both the Western esoteric tradition and the Christian mystical tradition: “This faculty may of course be compared with the human mens (noûs) according to the Corpus Hermeticum, and with the spark of the soul (Seelenfunken) found in Meister Eckhart” (2000, 33). 45 See e.g. Steiner (1911), Weeks (1993), O’Regan (2017). In this historical stream Boehme is often compared to the Rhineland mysticism of Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, and the Theologia Deutsche.

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characterizations have tended to marginalize Boehme in terms of mainstream historiography, whether by church or secular historians. My own view hopes to mitigate this marginalization on both fronts: I think Boehme generally subordinates the magical will of the Hermetic stream within a Lutheran (and Augustinian) doctrine of grace; and I see Boehme’s mysticism as a reformist response to longstanding and deeply felt issues within the Catholic mystical tradition itself, through a Lutheran return to the Scriptural mythos. Boehme’s reformist response also reclaims an inclusive rather than a discrete view of Augustinian threefold vision, as we will see in a moment. One of the most recent and impressive scholars to frame Boehme in relation to Western Christian mysticism is Bernard McGinn, who sees Boehme as “an outsider, brilliant and obscure, attractive and mystifying,” who “created his own reenvisioning of Christianity,” and whose views are “outliers to the main Christian tradition.” For McGinn, “it is legitimate to ask to what extent Boehme can be considered a Christian mystic,” and thus he reluctantly creates a new category for Boehme, calling him a “theosophical or pansophical mystic” (2016, 148, 195–7).46 While I hesitate to offer any critique of McGinn’s magisterial oevre, the issues I will foreground below are taken from McGinn’s own account, so I hope they will not be overly controversial. That is, I want to use McGinn’s own historiography to contend that Boehme’s approach has some significant antecedents in the Western mystical tradition itself, and thus that he is more of a reformist “insider” than an “outsider.” In his multivolume history, McGinn generally follows the definition of mysticism given by prominent Christian mystics themselves, which tends to see the imaginal realm of dreams and visions as distinct from, and inferior to, the imageless ecstasy of visio intellectualis. As McGinn says, “visions of the corporeal or imaginative types carefully delineated by Augustine, do not constitute the essence of mysticism.”47 He thus distinguishes between “visionaries” and “mystics,” while allowing that some visionaries are also mystics.48 The 46 McGinn helpfully points out that his reading of Boehme was “much aided” by Weeks (1991), O’Regan (2002), and Walsh (1983) (2016, 205). The influence of the latter two scholars is particularly evident in McGinn’s view of Boehme as an “outsider.” 47 In McGinn’s first volume, Augustine is the only figure who is given his own chapter as “The Founding Father,” and McGinn takes Augustine’s threefold schema of vision as paradigmatic for everything that follows, which is similar to my approach here. 48 McGinn actually posits three categories: “visionaries, whose visions may or may not be mystical in content, depending on whether or not they involve direct contact with the divine,” “mystics  … who recount experiences of the immediate presence of God,” and “mystical authors, who have not only had such experience, but have written and taught about the process of attaining and living out lives based on mystical experience of God’s

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ambivalence I want to foreground becomes apparent in what McGinn calls the new type of vision, “which began in the twelfth century and become predominant in the later middle ages.” While McGinn does not note this, from his description it seems that these new visions are moving closer to the more mundane narratives of dreams, in that they tend to be “shorter,” more “repeatable,” and less “otherworldly,” meaning that they do not typically involve journeys to heaven or hell. They also frequently involve “an encounter with a heavenly figure” (1994, 325–6),49 which is a longstanding dream motif stretching back to the ancient world.50 And of course many of these new visions actually took place in dreams.51 As an example of this new type, McGinn describes the visions of Rupert of Deutz (1077–1129 CE), which are “mostly dream visions in which he is lightly sleeping” (1994, 329). And here McGinn notes a striking feature: The visions of Rupert seem to be of the kind Augustine would have called visio spiritualis  … but their overall intent … was to grant the monk something more like an Augustinian visio intellectualis of the inner truth of the Bible. Indeed, the abbot of Deutz is highly traditional in his insistence that it is in relation to the biblical text itself that what we call mystical experience is both possible and actually realized. In the prefatory letter to his Commentary on the Apocalypse (ca. 1121), he wrote to Archbishop Frederick of Cologne, “When we read or understand scripture aren’t we seeing God face-to-face? Truly, the vision of God which will be made perfect at some day is already begun here through scripture.” (1994, 333) presence” (1994, 326–7). Thus McGinn says that whether a vision is “mystical” should be taken on a case-by-case basis (1994, 325–7). But in order to evaluate a vision, we must first interpret it, and here the mystical authors McGinn foregrounds leave us very few resources. Even the extensive literature on “discernment of spirits” offers little help in interpreting dreams and visions, as it tends to dismiss anything it cannot easily understand. What we need is precisely what Boehme’s work offers us: an interpretive guide to the symbols of dreams and visions. 49 McGinn follows Dinzelbacher (1981) in his description of this new type of vision. 50 See Oppenheim’s (1956) form critical approach to dreams in the ancient near east (Sumeria, Akkad, Babylonia, Assyria, the Hittite Empire, and Egypt) where “message dreams” typically begin with the appearance of a divinity or divine messenger. For the influence of Oppenheim’s typology see S. Butler (1998, 15–18), Flannery-Dailey (2004, 7–10), Gnuse (1984, 1996), W. Harris (2009, 23–89), and Noegel (2001, 45–46). 51 Kruger also notes that the “twelfth century renaissance” rejuvenated interest in dreams through the recovery of the writings of Macrobius and Calcidius, who both discuss dreams quite extensively (1992, 21–34, 63–66).

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I want to emphasize the continuity here between imagination and visio intellectualis, and the related continuity between biblical imagery and visio intellectualis, because I am suggesting that Boehme is quite similar to Rupert in this regard. Boehme’s imagistic descriptions of Wisdom’s seven qualities likewise represent something like “visio intellectualis of the inner truth of the Bible.” And Boehme likewise found the imagery of the book of Revelation a particularly important aspect of this “inner truth.” The seven spirits before God’s throne (Rev. 1.4) represent for Boehme something like an anti-type to the seven days of creation (Gen. 1.1–2.3), and thus Wisdom’s seven pillars (Prov. 9.1) stand like eternal revelatory “bookends” to the entire biblical narrative, informing it throughout. Above we saw that for Augustine the seven days of Genesis 1 are among the eternal archetypes of Wisdom, and that while they are expressed in biblical images, they nonetheless exist in continuity with the highest realm of visio intellectualis. My contention here is that Boehme’s typically Lutheran recovery of both Augustine and scripture is building on visionary tendencies within Christian mysticism that stretch back at least to the twelfth century. McGinn notes another example of this new type of twelfth century vision in Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202 CE), who describes an experience that occurred on Easter while he was struggling to write his Exposition on the Apocalypse: Awakened from sleep about midnight, something happened to me as I was meditating on this book [i.e. Revelation/the Apocalypse] … suddenly something of the fullness of this book and of the entire harmony of the Old and New Testaments was perceived with clarity and understanding in my mind’s eye. (quoted in McGinn 1994, 338) Commenting on this vision, McGinn again notes that in form, this is an example of what Augustine would have called a visio intellectualis, an immediate and infallible reception of divine truth in the mind. The content of this vision, however, is distinctive of Joachim—the gift of intellectus spiritualis, the grasp of the presence of the Trinity in history revealed throughout the Bible, but nowhere more completely than in its final book, the Apocalypse. (1994, 338) For Joachim, as McGinn notes, this intellectus spiritualis is the highest state of mystical awareness, corresponding to Paul’s third heaven, and capable of perceiving Biblical images in terms of a complex symbology that reveals the divine order and harmony of both scripture and history (1994, 338–9).

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Likewise McGinn notes Joachim’s vision on Pentecost, where “the shape of a ten-stringed psaltery appeared in my mind. The mystery of the Holy Trinity shone so brightly and clearly in it that I was at once impelled to cry out, ‘What God is as great as our God’ (Ps. 76.14).” McGinn comments, “we are dealing here with an imaginative visio spiritualis, but one which, contrary to Augustine’s teaching, seems to provide a form of direct contact with the innermost divine mystery of the Trinity” (1994, 338–9). As outlined above, I am not sure whether this experience is “contrary” to Augustine’s teaching, or simply a different reading of it.52 But we again see continuity between the imaginal realm and Augustinian visio intellectualis, in a way that posits certain archetypal biblical images as something like the deep structure of both the Bible and history. Boehme continues this trend. The ambivalence I am foregrounding can be framed in terms of whether we see Augustine’s threefold vision as an inclusive or as a discrete hierarchy. In an inclusive hierarchy, intellectual vision penetrates down into the two levels below it—it can structure and inform both spiritual and corporeal vision. When it informs spiritual vision, for example, a dream vision can be given along with its interpretation, or images can reveal the deep structure of the Bible and history. In short, images in the imaginal realm become icons that can facilitate a direct encounter with the divine.53 McGinn tends to see such “double vision” as blurring the lines of Augustine’s original hierarchy, and yet it accords with Augustine’s view of Daniel as one of the “greatest prophets,” because he saw both spiritually and intellectually. When intellectual vision informs corporeal vision, this would seem to be an experience of what McGinn calls “theophanic nature mysticism,” where God’s presence shines through the whole natural order, revealing its harmonic structure centred in the divine Logos, in whom “all things hold together” (Col. 1.17). In such a vision, every object in the cosmos reveals itself, poetically and symbolically, as interconnected and pregnant with divine meaning.54 My contention, as mentioned above, is that Augustine himself may have advocated this inclusive hierarchy of integral vision as the true 52

This vision of God as a ten stringed instrument has intriguing resonances with the kabbalistic Tree of Life, which I will not pursue here. We have already seen with Pico that Kabbalah generally did not hesitate to depict God in mythological-imagistic forms, and thus to extend imagination into the realm of Augustinian visio intellectualis. 53 The iconoclastic controversy and its resolution in the seventh ecumenical council, at Nicaea, are relevant here. 54 This theophanic view of the created order is quite Johannine. John is the only Gospel, for example, that does not contain an account of the transfiguration likely because, from first to last, John’s Gospel is a transfiguration, where mundane objects continually reveal divine glory.

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mystical goal, whereas later writers interpreted his tripartite schema as discrete and dissociated, positing imageless ecstasy in an isolated realm of visio intellectualis as the true goal, or as McGinn calls it, “the essence of mysticism.” Intriguingly, in yet another example of the new kind of vision emerging in the twelfth century, McGinn notes Peter of Celle (ca. 1115–1183 CE), who develops “an original treatment of how Augustine’s three kinds of visions relate to life hic, that is, on earth, and ibi, there in the eternal sabbath” of heaven. For Peter, on earth, Augustine’s three forms of vision are generally discrete and disconnected, while in heaven, in their eschatological fulfilment, Peter says that both corporeal and spiritual vision will pour all their illumination into one of the eyes of intellectual contemplation so that whatever corporeal vision shall have gazed upon will be subject to intellectual vision’s direction and whatever spiritual vision remembers will not presumptuously expel anything from its bosom. (quoted in McGinn 1994, 346) Again, we get more than a hint of integral vision here. And if this is an “original treatment” of Augustine, it may also be an accurate one. While Peter consigns it to the next world, other late medieval mystics seem to speak of this integral vision in their own experience. The ambivalence I am noting here also involves a certain divergence between mystical experience and mystical theology. While certain mystical experiences of the twelfth century, like those above, depict an integral view of threefold vision, mystical theology tends to move in the opposite direction, promoting a discrete view. This divergence becomes apparent, maybe for the first time, in the scholastic mystical theology of Hugh of St. Victor (ca. 1090–1141 CE), with its discrete stages of mystical ascent culminating in contemplation, which Hugh defines as “the illumination of the mind that draws the intellectual soul to the invisible things of God in a saving way” (McGinn 1994, 387).55 Notably, here contemplation is restricted to invisible things, whereas in Hugh’s contemporary, the great Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153 CE), contemplation was, as McGinn says, “a rich term used to express a continuum of the experience of

55 McGinn also notes that Hugh’s writing may have had the unintentional effect of separating biblical imagery from true mysticism: “the ordering mentality of the scholastic method has here begun to introduce a concern for systematization of the forms of meditation that was to have both positive and negative results, especially on the relation between reading the biblical text and arriving at contemplation” (1994, 386).

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God’s presence symbolized in visual form,” and here McGinn says Bernard is in keeping with his “patristic sources” (1994, 211).56 This divergence between mystical experience and mystical theology is even more pronounced in the thirteenth century Franciscan movement. Bonaventure (1217–1274 CE), who was called the “second founder of the order,” and who McGinn ranks with Bernard of Clairvaux as “the two premier mystical teachers of the medieval West,” is fairly blunt about his view of visions: they are “more to be feared than desired” (in McGinn 1998, 74, 87, 111).57 But Francis himself (1181–1226 CE) was apparently a “remarkable visionary,” who was goaded toward his vocation by “two dream manifestations prior to his conversion” and many dream visions thereafter, at least according to the hagiographic accounts.58 McGinn notes that, partly because of these hagiographies, Francis “came to be represented as the mystic par excellence.” And in Francis’ own writings, like the famed “Canticle of Brother Sun,” we also see what McGinn calls “a form of theophanic nature mysticism.” Yet McGinn, according to his own definition, is forced to conclude that “it is difficult to claim” that Francis’ writings “can, in general, be called mystical literature, despite the efforts of some to make them so” (1998, 51). We see a growing divergence here between the mystical experiences attributed to Francis and the mystical theology of the great Franciscan theologian Bonaventure, which can be interpreted as a divergence between an integral versus a discrete reading of Augustinian vision. This divergence continued and became more entrenched, particularly in the Catholic world, right up to the time of Boehme. 56

McGinn also notes in Bernard a “mingling of the intellectual [visio intellectualis] with the imaginative [visio spiritualis]” that “accords well with the coherence of the book of experience and the book of scripture … unlike his contemporaries the Victorines, [Bernard] was not so much interested in detailing the kinds and stages of contemplation as he was in describing its personal dynamics through the comparison of the book of scripture and the book of experience” (1994, 210–11). 57 This brief sentence of course cannot do any justice to the beauty and complexity of Bonaventure’s thought, which involves a more inclusive view of contemplation than that of Hugh of St. Victor. For example, The Mind’s Journey into God (1259) captures the Franciscan view of creation as a “theophany … a world of signs,” which is the first of six successive stages of contemplation. My point is simply that Bonaventure’s view of these six stages is still more discrete than integral, which means that the true goal and even the definition of “mysticism” is found in imageless ecstasy and rapture, as McGinn notes (1998, 102, 111–2). 58 Francis’ own writings, McGinn notes, “provide no accounts of his own visions … If Francis had visionary and ecstatic experiences, it is salutary to know that he did not think them worth writing about. This marks him as belonging to the older Christian tradition in which depth of spiritual teaching was more important than personal charisms or accounts of one’s own experience of God” (1998, 56).

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The hagiographies of Francis also emphasize what Ewert Cousins calls “the mysticism of the historical event,” defined as an intense imaginative recreation and reliving of the biblical events of Jesus’ life.59 And this is related to the hagiographic account of Francis’ bodily manifestation of the stigmata. As McGinn says, “Francis remains the stigmatic” (1998, 58–60).60 Here we begin to see the crucial historical and bodily aspect of what McGinn calls “the new mysticism” of the thirteenth century, and its connection with the imaginal realm of visio spiritualis: “the flood of visionary narratives, especially by and about women … signal a new form of mystical consciousness … more direct, more excessive, more bodily in nature than older forms” (1998, 25). It would seem that as mystical theologians worked to confine and discipline “true” mysticism within the imageless ecstasy of visio intellectualis, mystical experiences increasingly transgressed this boundary in more excessive and unruly visionary and physical forms, especially among women. Let me quote McGinn one last time in this regard: Many of the visions found in late medieval mystical texts, especially by women, tend to collapse the Augustinian hierarchy, not only by merging the spiritual and intellectual visions so that inner images become the immediate source of new insights into divine truths, but also in ways that meld all three modes of vision into direct forms of “total” conscious experience of God realized as much in and through the body as in a purely spiritual way. (1998, 155)

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Cousins describes the imaginative process of this mysticism of the historical event: “one recalls a significant event in the past, enters into its drama and draws from it spiritual energy, eventually moving beyond the event to union with God” (1983, 166; quoted in McGinn 1998, 348). McGinn also notes that this “is not, however, mere recalling, but a transcending of present time to enter into real unity with a past event” (1998, 348). There are strong analogies here with the psychodynamic process of working with dreams. McGinn notes that “the stigmata are not, in themselves, necessarily miraculous, because it is not possible to rule out a psychological origin (indeed, there have been modern cases in which the stigmata have appeared outside a specifically Christian context)” (1998, 60). If stigmata appear as the result of deep imaginative identification with the crucifixion, then the phenomenon could be called “magical” in the Hermetic sense described above, since the individual will and imagination are influencing the material realm. Today we would call this a psycho-somatic manifestation or “conversion disorder,” a term coined by Freud to describe psychological disorders that manifest in physical form, and in which the physical symptoms are usually symbolic of the psychological disorder. Of course, there are many such physical manifestations that do not indicate disorder or illness but rather extraordinary abilities.

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Again, in my view this is not so much a “collapsing” of the Augustinian hierarchy, as an inclusive and integral reading of it. For example, in the case of stigmata, an imaginative symbol of visio spiritualis manifests in bodily form precisely because it symbolizes everything implied by the wounds of Christ—the whole rich context of polyvalent meaning—which both supersedes and includes the physical manifestation, but not the reverse. In making this claim I am not saying that all manifestations of stigmata are healthy or salutary. Nor am I claiming that all instances of integral vision are salutary. What I am saying is that we cannot discern whether a particular bodily manifestation is healthy or salutary until we discern its meaning. And to do so we must involve both the symbolic realm of visio spiritualis and the interpretive realm of visio intellectualis. I recognize the need for a clear definition of mysticism in a multivolume work like McGinn’s, in order to delimit the topic and provide continuity over a vast swath of material. And I support McGinn’s desire not to separate mystical experience from mystical theology. But in contrast to the academic historian, for the experiencers themselves, the most important question is not whether a particular imaginal or bodily experience fits within the boundaries of what is properly “mystical.” The most important question is what the experience itself means, and thus what guidance it might offer the experiencer on the path of spiritual growth. This is especially true for the more bizarre experiences, which were by no means infrequent in the later middle ages. What do these bizarre visionary and bodily manifestations mean symbolically? And here, we must admit, the great mystical theologians themselves offer very little help. The overwhelming tendency was to dismiss anything that could not be readily understood, and defining true “mysticism” as imageless ecstasy became one of the primary means for doing so.61 This is perhaps especially true in the burgeoning discussion of “discernment of spirits” (discretio spirituum), which seemed to grow in direct proportion to the explosion of visionary and bodily experiences. Here even visions and manifestations that could be readily understood and that seemed self-evidently salutary were often consigned to the category of demonic trickery.62 In short, the symbolic interpretation of visions and 61

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Even the experience of the immediate presence of God in imageless ecstasy needs interpretation and discernment. For example, what if this experience is accompanied by selfinflicted suffering, even to the point of death, as in the cases of physical starvation (“holy anorexia”) we will see below? Such cases demonstrate that all three Augustinian levels— physical, imaginal, and intellectual—must be kept in view even when evaluating imageless ecstasies. Caciola notes that “the later medieval context was marked by a quite successful campaign, on the part of the ecclesiastical intelligentsia, to teach the laity and lower clergy to watch out for demonic deceptions—particularly among women. Not surprisingly, laywomen

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bodily manifestations is precisely what is lacking in the late-medieval discussion, and this is precisely where the genius of Boehme enters the picture with a biblically based symbology—an interpretive key—based on an exploration of the imaginal realm guided by biblical imagery. In fact, until recent decades even scholars of mysticism did not know what to make of these bizarre late medieval experiences. It was basically the work of Carolyn Walker Bynum that first gave us some interpretive purchase on them, in her pioneering book Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987). And with a view toward later chapters, it will be helpful to glance at her brilliant discussion of the role of food in late-medieval mystical experiences, and particularly its relation to psychodynamic theory. In her chapter “Was Women’s Fasting Anorexia Nervosa?” while noting that many psychological definitions of anorexia are “so narrow and culture-bound as to be quite inapplicable to women’s behaviour before the nineteenth century,” she also admits that much of the extended fasting done by medieval women fits the contemporary symptomatology.63 But more importantly she notes that, as psychodynamic theory points out, anorexia is an inescapably symbolic illness, in that it is determined in large part by the matrix of cultural symbols from which it emerges, especially the related symbols of “food” and “body” (1987, 198). She concludes that we “cannot understand the voluntary starvation of any particular woman unless we understand fully what food means to those among whom she lives.” And thus we must “take seriously the images and symbols in which guilt, responsibility, joy, and unhappiness

who claimed visionary experiences were scrutinized harshly under the rubric of discernment, sometimes for years on end. Becoming the target of divisive debates about inspiration counts as one of the most predictable elements in the lives of laywomen visionaries in this period” (2003, 35). She also notes that “explicit treatises devoted to theories of discernment were few in the Middle Ages, and were produced at the very end of the period” (2003, 23–4). Sluhovsky, in describing some of the early modern Catholic theories of discernment (ca. 1500–1650 CE), notes that women were scrutinized more harshly partly because the female imagination was thought to be stronger than the male, and the rational faculties were thought to be weaker (2007, 27, 145–46). To take one of the most prolific examples of these early modern theories of discernment, Ignatius, who was quite open to employing the imagination in the Spiritual Exercises, nonetheless begins his rules of discernment with a fundamental opposition between good spirits who appeal to reason and conscience, and bad spirits who appeal to the imagination ([1548] 1914, 169). 63 She notes a long list of female mystics who “went through intense periods of inability to eat, often beginning in adolescence. They ate and vomited until they damaged their throats and digestive systems. Some of them (for example, Angela of Foligno and Catherine of Genoa) later ‘recovered,’ at least partly, from their fasting; some (for example, Elsbet Achler, Catherine of Siena, and Columba of Rieti) died. Like modern anorectics, many of these saints lost ‘normal’ body concept or perception” (1987, 203).

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manifest themselves” (1987, 206).64 The remainder of her book then develops a brilliant medieval cultural symbology of food as an aid to understanding the visions and bodily experiences of late-medieval female mystics.65 My point then is, first, that this symbolic understanding—based on an inclusive and integral reading of Augustine’s threefold vision—is precisely what women at the time would have needed in order to assess their experiences, and, second, that modern historians have only begun a serious exploration of this symbolic understanding in recent decades.66 This symbolic understanding is also important for therapists today, who often see psychological issues surfacing in physical symptoms.67 This symbolic understanding is precisely the central focus of Boehme’s work. He not only reanimates the imaginal realm, he offers a biblically based and psychologically integrated understanding of its symbols—a way to unite the upper Augustinian realm of intellect with the lower bodily and physical realm. And in doing so Boehme is responding to a longstanding and deeply felt need within late medieval and early modern Western religious life, and particularly those aspects of it deemed “mystical.” In this sense I see Boehme not only as an “insider” on the Western Christian mystical tradition, attuned to its inner workings and challenges, but as himself a mystic and mystical theologian who was far ahead of his time.68

64 This quotation continues by noting the inadequacy of psychodynamic explanations, which “cut a portion of the behavior of medieval women off from its broader and richer context” (1987, 206). Here she is critiquing the tendency of early psychodynamic theory to see symbols as universal rather than culturally conditioned. Jung’s (and Binswanger’s) phenomenological approach first questioned this tendency. 65 For a contemporary cultural symbology of eating disorders, with wonderful therapeutic insights, see Marion Woodman’s Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride (1982). 66 McGinn agrees: “It is only within the past decade or so that the extravagant corporeal manifestations of the medieval mystics, largely female, have been hailed as indications of a breakthrough beyond the more restrained, ‘intellectualized’ conceptions found in the earlier mystical tradition, rather than as indications of some form of personal imbalance, even hysteria” (1998, 25). 67 Examples could include chest pains around the heart, with no medical cause, as indications of repressed grief—a “broken heart”; agitation in the stomach or bowels coincident with anxiety about something one “cannot stomach”; or even conversion disorders like numbness or blindness in reaction to trauma that one is trying not to “feel” or “see.” 68 After writing this chapter I noticed that one of Boehme’s wisest heirs, Gottfried Arnold, attempted to expand the definition of “mysticism” in a somewhat similar way in his 1703 Historie und beschreibung der Mystischen Theologie (see Erb 2005, 181–4).

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Other scholars have located Boehme firmly in the Lutheran tradition, and indeed this seems to be the emerging scholarly consensus.69 But here the tendency is to neglect the extent to which Boehme, as a Lutheran, incorporates the historical streams explored above, and actually resolves some of their inherent tensions.70 Historians have not always noticed the synthetic possibilities of Lutheranism, which are easily overshadowed by Luther’s renowned polemics and the factionalism of early Protestantism.71 I will mention just a few of these possibilities here as they relate to the discussion above. The first is the integration of scripture and experience. While Lutheran theology downplays human experience in some respects, Luther’s own “Reformation discovery” of passive righteousness (iustitia passive) and justification by faith likely emerged from a seminal personal experience.72 And this fact likely influenced later Lutherans, including the many strands of “Spiritualism” and 69 E.g. McGinn (2016, 170), Weeks (1991, 35–48; 2013, 13–44). See also Bornkamm (1925), Erb (1978, 8–21), and A. Miller (1970). 70 McGinn, for example, notes that “Lutheranism was the major element in Boehme’s background, and Luther’s Bible was his essential book.” This seems to contribute to his view of Boehme as an “outsider” whose views are “outliers to the main Christian tradition” (2016, 170, 195, 197). On the other hand, Weeks situates Boehme as a Lutheran, while also noting that a “surprising number of the themes of German mysticism are reassembled and synthesized in his oevre: Hildegard’s epic struggle between the forces of good and evil …; Eckhart’s reflective knowledge which knows God in self-knowledge; Seuse’s chivalrous devotion to Lady Wisdom; Tauler’s use of parabolic symbols; the Christian Kabbalah and Hermetism of the Renaissance …; the Spiritualist’s defence of freedom and toleration …” (1993, 171–2). 71 On Calvin’s attempt to expand on the synthetic possibilities inherent in Lutheranism, see Barth (1922). Calvin begins the Institutes with the well-known aphorism that “wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves” ([1559] 1986, 1). This is a thoroughly Augustinian principle with remarkably synthetic possibilities in Calvin’s thought and beyond. When read through a Chalcedonian view of Christ’s two natures as both fully (totus) human and fully (totus) divine, it allows for a principled synthesis of Renaissance Humanism and biblical revelation. On using the Chalcedonian formula to structure an interdisciplinary method, with significant discussion of psychotherapy, see D. van Deusen Hunsinger (1995). Boehme’s method (insofar as he has one) is in many ways similar, as we will see. 72 Luther describes this experience and its relation to iustitia passiva in his 1545 Preface to his Latin Works (Luther’s Works 34:336–7). This experience might be the same as the “tower experience” mentioned in Table Talk (Luther’s Works 54:193), and likewise this “tower experience” might have involved a bowel movement, as suggested intriguingly by Erikson in Young Man Luther (1958, 204–6). Wengert notes that Luther’s “theology of the cross is strictly a matter of experience” (2002, 196).

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“Pietism,” in their attempts to reconcile the book of scripture with the book of experience.73 Boehme’s own seminal illumination resembles Luther’s in certain respects, in that both were preceded by a deep existential theological conflict, although Luther’s famous Anfechtung (“affliction” or “temptation”) was focussed mainly on his own unrighteousness, whereas Boehme’s “melancholy” was focused more on the presence and persistence of evil in the world around him, and the distance of God.74 Boehme’s account of his seminal illumination75 is extraordinary in that it seems to include all three tiers of Augustinian vision. The first part of the experience indicates intellectual vision—an immediate consciousness of God’s loving presence, which is both imageless and ineffable, although Boehme does attempt to clothe its profound emotional tones in traditional imagery: my spirit broke through the gates of hell and into the innermost birth of the divinity, and there I was embraced by love as a bridegroom embraces his beloved bride.76 As for my exultation of spirit, I cannot express it in writing or in speech, nor can it be compared to anything, except when life is born in the midst of death, like the resurrection from the dead. (Aurora 19.11–12)77 73 As McGinn notes, this attempt stretches back at least to Bernard of Clairvaux whose “insistence on the role of experience, the necessity for his audience to read not only the scripture but also the ‘book of experience’ (liber experientiae), marks a new and important shift in the development of Christian mysticism” (1994, xiii). Boehme also invokes the metaphor of the book of experience (e.g. Letters 12.14/1886, 2.14). On the “Spiritualist” reformers see Jones (1959). 74 On the philosophical sophistication of Boehme’s theodicy, see especially Michael Stoeber (1992, 143–164). 75 Boehme claimed that this illumination informed all his subsequent work (e.g. Aurora 19.17). It appears to have taken place in 1600, the same year as the birth of his first child. His gives two accounts of the experience, first in the Aurora (19.5–17), and later in Letters (12.5–20/1886, 2.5–20), where he says “I saw and knew more in a quarter of an hour than if I had been many years in the universities” (12.7/1886, 2.7). In another letter he claims, “I have always written as the Spirit dictated … I do not acknowledge it as a work of my own reason, which is too weak, but as the work of the Spirit … I set it down as the Spirit represented it;” (10.17–18/1886, 3.17–18; see also 10.44, 48/1886, 3.44, 48). In the Three Principles he also says, “I do not wish to set down anything strange which I did not myself experience so that I do not find myself a liar before God” (24.1), 76 This transition from a state of “hell” to one of “love” is likely the experiential prototype for his description of the transition from a “two-fold” to a “three-fold” soul, discussed below. 77 This part of Boehme’s experience seems to fit McGinn’s definition of a truly “mystical” experience, although McGinn does not describe it as such. The bridal mysticism here is a common late medieval motif, and the ineffability is a famous element of William James’ definition of mysticism. In the Clavis (2) Boehme also describes the hidden or unmanifest

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Here the ineffable and incomparable is assimilated to the core Christian figure of death and resurrection. Boehme then continues his account with a description of what McGinn would call “theophanic nature mysticism”—he sees God’s presence shining through all creation: “In this light my spirit soon saw through everything, recognizing God in all creatures, in vegetation and grass;78 I recognized who he is, and how he persists, and what his will is” (Aurora 19.13).79 Finally, Boehme’s experience culminates by charting a course for his entire corpus and identifying its central purpose: to describe the being of God that unites the previous two aspects of his vision, connecting the ineffable, innermost birth of God to the God present in every aspect of creation: In this light, my will was possessed by a mighty impulse to describe the being of God. But because I could not then grasp and comprehend with my reason (Vernunft) the deep births of God in their being, twelve years went by before the true understanding (Verstand) of them was granted to me … It is from this light that I take my knowledge, and also my will, impulse and drive, and therefore I will set down this knowledge in writing according to my gifts, letting God have his way. (Aurora 19.13–14, 17) What Boehme “set down” was primarily the seven archetypal qualities of Wisdom in the form of images that establish a symbolic relationship between

God as both good and ineffable (“the eternal good that cannot be expressed” [“das ewige Gut, das man nicht aussprechen kann”]). If we believe Boehme’s friend and first biographer, Franckenberg, this illumination was occasioned by a beam of light reflected off a pewter dish, which caused Boehme to become “enraptured … with the light of God … by means of an instantaneous glance of the eye” ([1651] 1780, 7). In this respect the experience resembles Benedict’s vision, described by Gregory the Great, which McGinn calls “perhaps the most famous nonbiblical vision of the early Middle Ages”: “The whole world was brought before his eyes, gathered together, as it were, in a single ray of light” (Dialogues 2.35; McGinn 1994, 71). 78 For a discussion of Boehme’s influence on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass see Tisiker (1974). Whitman’s friend, the Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke, had a similar experience of “theophanic nature mysticism” while contemplating Whitman’s work, an experience he described as a “consciousness of the cosmos … of the life and order of the universe” in his book Cosmic Consciousness (1905, 2). Here Bucke also describes a lineage of those he believes to have experienced the same consciousness, including Francis Bacon, Boehme, William Blake, and Whitman himself. Bucke is cited favorably in James’ Varieties of Mystical Experience (1902, 84–5, 398–9, 492, 505). 79 This might be the best place to mention that Solomon’s famous gift of Wisdom, which was granted to him in a dream in 1 Kgs. 4.29–34, included knowledge of the created order, the content of which is elaborated in Wisdom 7.17–22.

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God and all created beings. In other words, his inspired life’s work was to connect the ineffable to the corporeal through the imaginal realm. As McGinn notes, it is important neither to exaggerate nor undervalue the significance of this experience. But it seems to fit the Lutheran pattern of an initial illumination that reframes the interpretation of scripture and gives its narrative renewed coherence. Boehme says that prior to this experience, “scripture could not comfort me, though I knew it very well ….” And he continues this sentence by mirroring Luther’s well-known struggle with the adversary: “at this time the devil was constantly beating into me many heathenish thoughts” (Aurora 19.9). Like Luther, Boehme’s illumination seems to reconfigure scripture in his mind,80 giving him a new awareness of the central event of “resurrection from the dead.” But for Boehme this resurrection comes to include both “the innermost birth of divinity” and God’s presence in all things. In Boehme’s reframing, the motifs of death, resurrection, inner rebirth, and integral vision are encapsulated in the revelatory bookends of the Bible—the seven days of Genesis 1 and the seven spirits of Revelation 1—which form a polarity that figures the seven pillars of Wisdom in Proverbs 9 and pervades the whole of scripture. Further, Boehme’s reanimation of the imaginal realm follows Luther’s return to scripture, in that biblical theophanies are overwhelmingly imagistic. Augustine actually notes this fact just before delineating his theory of threefold vision: Hence, if Paul saw Paradise as Peter saw the dish sent from heaven; as John, what he described in the Apocalypse; as Ezekiel, the plain with the bones of the dead and their resurrection; as Isaiah, God seated and before Him the seraphim and the altar from which the live coal was taken to cleanse the lips of the prophet; it is obvious that he could have been unable to determine whether he saw Paradise in the body or out of the body. (TLMG 12.2.5) Along with the above biblical visions, Boehme surely would have noticed that in Acts 2 Peter accounts for the pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Spirit by quoting the prophet Joel: “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” (Acts 2.17; Joel 2.28). There is a good chance that the Lutheran recovery of both 80

For a contemporary theological and psychological analysis of such mental reconfigurations, which resonates with Boehme via Kierkegaard, see James Loder’s The Logic of the Spirit (1998).

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scripture and Augustine influenced Boehme, either directly or indirectly, in his reanimation of the imaginal realm and his recovery of Augustine’s integral vision.81 Finally, Boehme’s Lutheran integrationist tendencies include not only the book of scripture and the book of experience but also the book of nature, the natural science of the day. As Weeks notes: In declaring Luther free of medieval nature philosophy and superstition, we set up a false dichotomy. Luther’s humanistic colleague Philip Melanchthon [1497–1560 CE] embraced astrology on grounds which were arguably as rational as those on which Luther rejected it. Much of what Boehme means by astrology would have been unobjectionable to many people in that age, Luther included. (2013, 27) It is thus no surprise that Boehme integrates Copernicus’ new heliocentric cosmology into his theological system. Astrology and astronomy were so closely associated at the time that Melanchthon’s son-in-law, Caspar Peucer (1525–1602 CE), a mathematics Professor at Wittenberg, published handbooks equipped with mathematical tables and moveable dials for charting astrological nativities (Weeks 2013, 27; see also Thorndike 1941, 6: 493–501). In a similar spirit Melanchthon himself wrote a German introduction to the most famous dream book of the ancient world, Artemidorus’ Onierocritica. And Peucer discusses dreams at length in the same book in which he attempts to prove that astrology is a science, relating dreams to the Bible, the ancient theories of Macrobius, and the then-current understanding of brain function.82 This Lutheran attitude to natural philosophy helps explain Boehme’s incorporation of Paracelsian medical motifs, which he likewise subordinates to scriptural principles and Luther’s doctrine of grace. In short, Boehme’s reanimation of the imaginal, including dreams, can be viewed as a typically Lutheran integration of scripture, experience, and the natural science of the day.83 81

Boehme likely did not read Augustine directly, but Augustine was very much “in the air” of Lutheranism. The Lutheran recovery of Augustine was not limited to Luther himself: by 1518 the Wittenberg faculty of theology, under Carlstadt, was “committed to a programme of theological reform based on ‘the Bible and St. Augustine’” (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd rev. ed., s.v. “Luther, Martin”). 82 See Jung ([1936–41] 2014, 32–44) for a discussion of Peucer’s De Somniis, a chapter of his Commentarius de praecipuis divinationum generibus (Wittenberg, 1553). Von Franz claims that after Melanchthon’s death, Peucer was viewed as the “standard-bearer of Lutheran orthodoxy” (in Jung [1936–41] 2014, 33). 83 Remarkably, a very similar kind of “Protestant mysticism” emerged independently in the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, who as far as we know did not read Boehme, but who

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To be clear, I am not suggesting that Boehme was aware of all the historical tributaries noted above. His genius was nonetheless a product of them—born at a remarkable nexus point and pushed forward by their combined current. But I do want to emphasize that the imaginal realm is itself inherently synthetic and integrationist, both in its ability to reveal the mythical basis of rational doctrine, and in its tendency to reconcile abstract ideas with concrete bodies. In terms of Boehme’s actual historical awareness, the proximate stimulus for his recovery of the imaginal realm, which partly accounts for the deep melancholy preceding his seminal illumination and his calling to understand this realm, was likely the intractable blood-soaked theological polemics of his day. Here reason was impotent, but the imaginal offered possibilities, not only to reconcile warring Christendom, but to help understand the differences that separated Christians from “Jew, Turk, and heathen” (e.g. Aurora 11.29, 13.15). Boehme seems to have been caught by an idea inherent in the Greek etymology of the word “symbol,” a word that was once commonly used to describe the Christian creeds. Sym-bolon means “to bring together,” and the opposite of this integrating tendency is dia-bolon, “to divide,” a noun that names the devil himself.84 In other words, because the imaginal realm is symbolic it is also inherently conciliatory. But reason by itself—abstracted and dissociated from bodily existence—can be truly diabolical. In its attempt to escape the body, reason easily becomes the unwitting plaything of powerful bodily drives, drives that Boehme describes so perceptively in the dark world of the soul. Boehme seems aware that the pious tones of doctrinal disputes can easily conceal the dark desire to dominate and annihilate the other, and even to create a veritable hell on earth. Clearly this desire was realized in the inquisitions, witch hunts, and religious wars of Boehme’s day. To my knowledge, Boehme was the first not only to take in the full weight and scope of this horrific time, but to accurately diagnose its disease. His deep polemic against the institutional church and its clergy needs to be heard against this backdrop, and the profound sadness it provoked in Boehme’s own soul.

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was likewise concerned to reconcile scripture, experience, and nature. Swedenborg was an eminent Enlightenment scientist, and his own interpretation of his many visions included a distinction between what Kant would later call the phenomenal (the realm of epistemology) and the noumenal (the realm of morality). Kant acknowledged this debt (slightly) while vilifying Swedenborg as the “arch enthusiast of all enthusiasts!” (see McGee 2003). Swedenborg’s enlightenment began with a series of dreams that came to him along with their interpretations ([1744] 1977). I am indebted to Robert Gardner for this idea.

Chapter 4

Boehme as Psychotherapist This chapter provides an introduction to Boehme’s work as a whole, and highlights his orientation as a theological “psychotherapist”—a theologian who is primarily concerned, like Augustine, with soul-healing. We begin by exploring his method, which generally takes its bearings from experience, including Boehme’s own experience of illumination, which was also informed by the many literary and social currents of his own time and place: biblical, theological, philosophical, and scientific. We then look more specifically at how Boehme relates God to the human soul in terms of a three-tiered ontology. Finally, we explore the most challenging aspect of Boehme’s writing: his “psycho-mythical” approach, which pulls the reader into a vast web of symbolic correspondences. Boehme’s core symbols are the seven qualities of Wisdom, which structure both the soul and the cosmos. But these archetypes radiate polyvalent meanings in a widening gyre of associations that can, in theory, expand to encompass a breathtaking view: the symphonic harmony of the whole created order, connected by invisible threads to the soul’s inner world. 4.1

Method: Psychology and Theology

When compared to Augustine in broad strokes, Boehme’s work shows two contrary tendencies. On one hand Boehme connects psychology more closely with theology, and on the other hand God is more distant from the psyche, mediated by the crucial figure of Wisdom or Sophia. Let me unpack these two tendencies in turn. First, it is no exaggeration to say that when Boehme speaks of God he is almost always speaking of God’s formation and transformation of the soul,1 a transformation that Boehme calls the “new birth” (die Wiedergeburt). Thus for Boehme, even more than for Augustine, theology is always both psychology and psychotherapy. We see this tendency, for example, in the programmatic opening lines of the Mysterium Magnum, chapter 1: “What the Manifested/Revealed (geoffenbarte) God is and of the Trinity”:

1 E.g. “All that God has, and can do, and that God is in the Trinity, that the soul is in its essence (Essenz)” (Forty Questions 2.1).

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1. If we want to understand the new birth, what it is, and how it happens, then we must first know what the human being is, and how he is the image of God, and what the divine indwelling is; also what the revealed God is, of whom the human being is an image. (Mysterium 1.1) The sequence of this sentence indicates Boehme’s general theological method, not only in the Mysterium but in his entire corpus. To use modern theological language, where Augustine in The Trinity begins “from above”—from the revelation of the triune God in scripture (in the first half of The Trinity)—and only then moves to an experiential understanding of the Trinity’s reflection in the human soul (in the second half), Boehme tends to begin “from below”—from an experiential understanding of God’s presence in the world and the soul—only then moving to biblical interpretation and theology. And yet the distinction I am drawing here is very much quantitative, not qualitative. Both thinkers were writing long before modernity’s obsession with method, and for both thinkers the biblical text exists in a constant dialogical interplay with human experience. Importantly, both thinkers also have a higher view of the revelatory power of scripture than the majority of modern theologians. For both thinkers the result is an attempt to establish congruence between the Word’s activity in three spheres: the biblical text, the natural world, and the human soul, although Boehme likely stresses the symmetry of this triad more thoroughly than Augustine.2 In Boehme’s day, Renaissance natural science and the new heliocentric cosmology were providing greater impetus to reconcile the book of scripture with the book of nature, just as various “Spiritualists” and “Radical Reformers” were placing greater stress on the action of the Word in the soul, the book of experience.3 Boehme harmonizes these three 2 Faivre sees this “God/Human/Nature Triangle” as one of three distinguishing characteristics of what he calls “theosophy,” a moniker by which he distances Boehme and his followers from the mainstream theological tradition of the West (2000, 7). And yet this triad is also clearly present in Augustine’s major works: God’s presence in the human soul is explored most fully in the Confessions and the second half of The Trinity, just as God’s presence in nature is explored most fully in the The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Further, this triad is also explicit in the Christian monastic tradition beginning with Bernard of Clairvaux, who introduced the “book of experience” as a compliment to the traditional “book of nature” and “book of scripture” (McGinn 1994, 185–6). 3 For a general survey of Boehme’s “spiritualist” precursors, like Hans Denck (1500–1527 CE), Sebastian Franck (1499–1542 CE), Caspar Schwenckfeld (1490–1561 CE), Valentin Weigel (1533–1588 CE), and Johann Arndt (1555–1621 CE), see Jones (1959) and McGinn (2016). Boehme acknowledges the influence of Schwenkfeld and Weigel, while also distancing himself from their heterodox (mainly docetist) tendencies (e.g. Letters 12.54,59–60/1886, 2.54,59–60).

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spheres—theology, cosmology, and anthropology—through the dialectic polarity of a hidden and revealed God, which is also a polarity of being (Wesen) and non-being, as the opening lines of the Preface to the Mysterium Magnum make clear: 1. When we consider the visible world with its being (Wesen), and consider the life of its creatures, we discover in them the likeness of the invisible spiritual world, which is hidden in the visible world, like the soul (Seele) in the body. And we see thereby that the hidden God is close to all and through all and yet completely hidden in the visible being (Wesen). (Mysterium Preface 1) For Boehme, we come to know the invisible action of the Word in nature and the soul just as we come to know his invisible presence hidden in the literal, manifest text of the Bible. While both Augustine and Boehme would agree that figural (or “spiritual”) readings of scripture are higher than literal readings, for Boehme these figural readings assume greater prominence, as they unveil the invisible Word that is also operative in nature and the soul.4 Boehme’s theological psychology is thus thoroughly apocalyptic, in the true sense of an “unveiling.” Yet in comparison with Augustine, while Boehme aligns theology more closely with psychology, he also imposes a greater barrier between them, in that God’s presence is always mediated through the enigmatic figure of Wisdom. Eternal Sophia is Boehme’s most important and likely his most challenging concept. His works are filled with extended elaborations of her seven qualities, which we will explore in the next chapter. But while Wisdom has greater prominence in Boehme than Augustine, this does not obviate the similarities that justify situating Boehme in the Augustinian tradition: Both 4 Figural readings are dispersed throughout Boehme’s corpus, but they are most evident in the Mysterium Magnum, which has the informative subtitle, “An exposition of the first book of Moses called Genesis, concerning the manifestation/revelation (Offenbarung) of the divine Word through the three principles of the divine essence (Wesen), and of the origin of the world and the creation, wherein the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace are described for the better understanding (Verstande) of the Old and New Testament ….” Interestingly, as Peuckert notes, the Mysterium “became decisive” for Boehme’s first popularizer in Russia, Quirinus Kuhlmann, who said it revealed “Boehme’s method of seeing in the figure,” how an “internal event could anticipate and give direction to a future event” (1958, 5, my translation). We will explore these figural hermeneutics in chapter 6 in relation to dreams. The exegetical basis of Boehme’s work is generally underemphasized, mostly because it is implied rather than explicit: Boehme assumed a high degree of biblical literacy in his Lutheran readers.

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thinkers see Wisdom as an eternally created feminine being—a partner of the Godhead as described in the biblical Wisdom literature;5 both also see Wisdom as a realm of eternal creation, figured in the seven eternal days of Genesis 1; both see Wisdom as the realm of the eternal angels—a realm that becomes divided by the fall of Lucifer and his rebel angels prior to creation and the fall of humanity;6 and finally, for both thinkers Wisdom represents a higher form of human cognition: Augustine’s distinction between scientia (knowledge) and sapientia (Wisdom) roughly corresponds to Boehme’s distinction between Vernunft (reason) and Verstand (understanding), as we will see. 4.2

Ontology: Three Levels

Confusion about Boehme’s concept of Wisdom has tended to marginalize his thought in relation to mainstream Western theology. Boehme has, for example, been called a “monist” or “pantheist” who fuses God and creation,7 and a “gnostic” who locates evil in God.8 Some of these charges stem from a failure 5 Like Augustine, Boehme sees the Wisdom literature as an important part of the biblical canon and he alludes to it frequently. Luther’s Bible of course reorganized the Latin canon and assigned several books of Wisdom literature a secondary status as “apocrypha.” Boehme’s frequent use of these books can be seen as an indirect critique of Luther’s canon. 6 The difference here is that, for Boehme, both fallen creation and the fallen soul mirror the angelic fall in the realm of Wisdom, while for Augustine it is primarily the soul that is fallen, not the created order. Mathewes calls this Augustine’s “noetic fall” (2010). For Boehme, because of this angelic fall, evil is nascent in the temporal creation (which explains the tempting serpent’s presence in Paradise) but evil is not expressed until the fall of humanity when “Adam stirred up the curse” (Mysterium 10.5). This is why, for Boehme, the redeemed soul also has an effect on the macrocosm, as Paul implies in Rom. 8.19–23. The contrast between Augustine and Boehme on this point might be due to a very simple exegetical difference: Augustine’s Old Latin (Vetus Latina) Bible contained a mistranslation, in which God declares the second day of creation and its firmament between the waters “good” (see TLMG 2.1.1). In the original Hebrew, the second day of creation is the only day that God does not declare “good,” a detail that was not overlooked by the Rabbis (Midrash Rabba 1:4.6; Tikunei Zohar, tikun 5.19b; see Wolfson 1995, 246n112). This mistranslation was corrected in the Vulgate, and in Boehme’s Luther Bible. 7 Boehme could be seen as a “monist” or “pantheist” if he is read through the lens of his more prolific philosophical heirs (e.g. Hegel or Schelling). But I do not know of any Boehme scholars who would see these terms as adequate. McGinn says Boehme is “not a pantheist” (2016, 176). Wolfson says that “pantheism” and “panentheism” are inadequate descriptors, both for Boehme and Jewish Kabbalah (2018, 34). And Boehme’s contemporary Henry More (1614–1687) distinguished Boehme’s thought from the monism of Spinoza (Hedley 2018). 8 The word “gnostic” is both loaded and contested, but I will not contest it here. Suffice it to say that early Christianity recognized both orthodox and heterodox forms of gnosis. Clement

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to distinguish three ontological levels in Boehme’s thought, and to understand Wisdom’s place in this schema. It might help to clarify this at the outset, since of Alexandria, for example, called his ideal Christian a “true gnostic,” and the apostle Paul speaks of a “secret and hidden Wisdom of God, decreed before the ages,” which is “foolishness to the world,” and which is spoken only to the “mature” (1 Cor. 1.18, 2.6–7), in a passage that was also central for Luther’s theologia crucis (1518; cf. Boehme Incarnation 1.5.13/1764, 1.5.64; Clavis Preface). Berdyaev calls Boehme “one of the greatest of Christian gnostics,” though importantly he is not using the term to identify “heresies” (1957, 247). David Walsh (1983) and Cyril O’Regan (2001, 2002) both use the term “gnostic” to impute heresy to Boehme, but only O’Regan defines the term carefully, including the criterion of locating evil within God. O’Regan’s overall project builds on the work of Eric Voegelin (1968; 1971) tracing the evils of modern totalitarian states back to Hegel’s “totalizing” system, and for O’Regan the fault ultimately lies with Boehme, since “massive structural correspondences can be shown to exist between Boehmian theosophy and Hegelian ontotheology” (1994, 18). While I agree with O’Regan’s critique of Hegel, I am not sure that it holds for Boehme, whose work is far from “totalizing.” Voegelin differentiates Boehme’s “gnosticism” from that of Hegel, noting “the warning of Jacob Boehme, in his Mysterium Magnum, against precisely the type of magia that Hegel was to pursue” (1975, 768). O’Regan is an impressive and careful scholar, and I will note my differences with him below. O’Regan is also building on the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, for which I have profound respect, and which I see as closely allied with what I am attempting in this book. It is unfortunate that Balthasar’s reading of Boehme, Freud, and Jung is so negative and so thin (e.g. Theo-Drama 1: 48–49, 505–522), especially given his great love for the “dream world” of Georges Bernanos, for whom “nothing is more real or more objective than dreams” (in Balthasar 1996, 125). Balthasar’s theology was called “gnostic” by Karl Rahner, unfairly I think, but in much the same spirit as Boehme has been called “gnostic” (see Balthasar, Theo-Drama 5: 13). Balthasar’s anticipation of this charge against him might be precisely why he attempts to separate himself from Boehme (and Freud and Jung), while maintaining a strong indebtedness to Schelling. Sean McGrath offers a helpful critique of O’Regan’s reading of Boehme as a Valentinian gnostic: “While Boehme shares with Gnosticism a substantive and productive account of evil … he shares nothing of the Valentinian or Manichaean matter-vilifying dualism. On the contrary, Boehme’s cosmology is one of the most affirmative philosophies of nature in the history of theology. Personality is for Boehme essentially embodied” (2012, 51). Here McGrath notes Boehme’s influence on F.C. Oetinger, for whom “embodiment is the end of all God’s work” (Oetinger 1776, 1: 223; in McGrath 2012, 77n20). McGrath further notes the tendency to conflate Boehme with Hegel on the question of “historical immanentism, the position that God only knows himself through the history of man.” And here McGrath parts company with Dourley (2008), who claims that Boehme (like Jung) sees human consciousness as necessary for divine consciousness. As McGrath says, “More careful readers of Boehme (Friesen 2008; O’Regan 2002) follow [Franz von] Baader and [Alexandre] Koyré in arguing that for Boehme, God’s self-revelation is always already achieved prior to God’s creation of the world.” McGrath rightly notes that unlike “Hegel and Jung, and in accordance with Schelling and Tillich, Boehme does not hold actual evil to be necessary to God’s self-revelation. Both arguments, that human history is necessary to God’s self-knowledge and that actual evil is necessary to God’s perfection, violate the founding presupposition of Boehme’s thought: the freedom of the divine” (2012, 78–79n23). Among modern theologians, Boehme shares this founding

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Boehme’s ontology in the macrocosm mirrors his psychology in the microcosm, just as we saw with Augustine’s tripartite ontology and epistemology. On the first and highest ontological level is God, considered “outside nature and creature” and thus logically prior to revelation (see figure 2). And here Boehme clearly defines. God as a “unity,” an “eternal good,” (Clavis 2) and “in reference to the creature … an eternal Nothing (Nichts)” (Mysterium 1.2). In other words, God is ineffable on this level (Clavis 2), which is why Boehme rarely speaks of God on this level, except in passing.9 On the second level is God’s revelation/manifestation (Offenbarung) as Trinity, a revelation that includes the dialectic of hidden and revealed in relation to Father and Son respectively, which is then expressed in the “outgoing” (Ausgang) of the Holy Spirit (e.g. Mysterium 1.1–5; Clavis 3–11). Also on this second level is the eternal creation of Wisdom with her seven qualities (Mysterium 1.6–8; Clavis 17–19). As a reflection of God, and as God’s “house” or “temple,” Wisdom is likewise purely good (e.g. Mysterium 1.5–6, 3.2–4). And while there is a potential for evil arising from Wisdom, if certain of

presupposition notably with Karl Barth. Such debates might seem like hair-splitting to contemporary therapists, but they have crucial theological (and therapeutic) consequences, which stand at the heart of the important but unfinished dialogue between Jung and Dominican theologian Victor White (Jung 2007). In many ways, this book is an attempt to complete that unfinished dialogue. 9 The first chapter of the Clavis is entitled “How God outside nature and creature should be thought of,” and in this respect Boehme says that God is “an eternal immeasurable (unchanging) unity … the eternal good that cannot be spoken of” (2). The first chapter of the Mysterium Magnum is “What the Manifest/Revealed (geoffenbarte) God is, and on the Trinity,” and here Boehme suggests that the revealed God is the only God humans have access to, since all we can say about God in Se is that “God is the One; in reference to the creature, as an eternal Nothing (Nichts)” (1.2). Likewise Boehme says that the “Word” considered “beyond or without all nature or beginning” has “neither darkness nor light, neither thick nor thin, neither joy nor sorrow  … for it is the eternal good, and nothing else” (Mysterium 3.3; see also 7.11). In his earlier work Boehme also insists that God is wholly good (e.g. Aurora 2.35; Forty Questions 1.6/1764, 1.8; Incarnation 1.14.7–8/1764, 1.14.34–37). O’Regan (and Balthasar) downplay these passages when they claim that Boehme locates evil in God. In the schema I am outlining here, it is truer to say that Boehme locates evil in the rebel angels and in fallen divine Wisdom (or “Eternal Nature”). My schema is nonetheless quite similar to O’Regan’s (2002, 32–50). Throughout the Mysterium Boehme reminds us that he speaking only of the “manifest/ revealed” God (e.g. 4.7, 5.10, 7.12). To use modern theological language, Boehme posits an “immanent” God who is distinct from and logically prior to a revealed or “economic” Trinity. He does this to protect God’s freedom, sovereignty, and grace, an approach he shares with Karl Barth against other modern theologians who follow Karl Rahner in identifying the immanent with the economic Trinity, like Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Eberhard Jüngel (see e.g. Molnar 1982). One of Boehme’s fundamental theological principles is that God’s free nature is revelatory, because the Word is by nature manifesting/revealing, which is another idea he shares with Karl Barth (see e.g. Church Dogmatics 1.1: 172).

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Level 1 Hidden God

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her seven qualities are separated from the whole, this potential is only actualized on the third level—the level of the eternally created angels and the three “principles” (Principia), “kingdoms” (Reichen), or “worlds” (Welten), the third of which is temporal reality.10 For Boehme, the angels were originally created in the pure goodness and harmony of Wisdom. But Lucifer and his rebel angels fell when they seized the first three qualities of Wisdom in hubristic self-will, and used these qualities over against Wisdom’s remaining qualities. That is, they freely chose to divert the primal desire of Wisdom toward their own narcissistic ends, away from its divinely ordained expression in love. They hoarded Wisdom’s primal desire, rather than surrendering it. In short, the rebel angels divided Wisdom against herself, seizing a part to challenge the whole. This act, and God’s judgement of it, brought three worlds into existence, each with its own angelic hierarchy: (1) a dark demonic fire-world (the kingdom of hell) defined by the first three qualities of Wisdom, (2) a light angelic world (the kingdom of heaven) defined by the last three qualities of Wisdom, and (3) the temporal-spatial world (the kingdom of creation), which derives especially from the middle quality of Wisdom, and which, after the fall of Adam, becomes an amalgam of the previous two eternal worlds (e.g. Mysterium 8.4–10). That is, like the angelic world, the temporal world was originally created in pure goodness, but with the fall of humanity it becomes “cursed” and likewise divided between good and evil (e.g. Mysterium 24.1–35). In this fallen state, the world and the soul mirror each other as macrocosm and microcosm respectively (e.g. Mysterium 2.5), and the redemption of the soul is also mirrored in the redemption of creation. In summary, on the third ontological level we have both creation and the soul in a fallen state, and both are composed of three worlds or kingdoms: the first two worlds are eternal, representing 10 If we were to compare these three levels to the kabbalistic Tree of Life, we could say that the first level corresponds to the Ein Sof (see Necker 2019, 199; Wolfson 2018, 35–47). On the second level, the Trinity resembles the first three emanations (sefirot), and Wisdom the final seven. Wolfson notes that “it is not uncommon for kabbalists to divide the divine realm into the upper three emanations and the lower seven” (2018, 32). And on the third level, the whole Tree is recapitulated, but this time from the perspective of the final emanation (Malkhut) in exile. As Scholem notes, Malkhut is identified with the Shekhinah, in which “all the preceding sefirot are encompassed,” and which is in turn identified “on the one hand with the mystical Ecclesia of Israel and on the other hand with the soul.” This Shekhinah in exile is characterized by “ambivalence”—a mix of good and evil. And the “reunion of God and his Shekinah,” symbolized by a mystical marriage, “constitutes the meaning of redemption,” (Scholem 1965, 106–9). Strangely, Wolfson does not mention these Boehmian resonances with the Tree of Life in his otherwise good article on Boehme and Kabbalah (2018).

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Wisdom’s seven qualities divided against each other into darkness and light, and the third world is temporal, representing an amalgam of the previous two eternal worlds. While in several passages Boehme clearly distinguishes these three ontological levels,11 in many other places he is not precise. And because each level participates in those next to it in a kind of seamless blending, confusion can easily arise. The third level is particularly confusing because here Boehme often identifies the three worlds with the three persons of the Trinity: the dark world is identified with the Father, where God “is called an angry jealous God,” the light world is identified with the Son, where “God is called a loving merciful God,” and the temporal world is identified with the Holy Spirit (Clavis 21; see also Mysterium 7.13). But importantly, on this third ontological level, Boehme is not speaking of the actual persons of the Trinity, but only of their reflection in a fallen world (e.g. Mysterium 5.10), where evil becomes associated with the law and wrath of God in typical Lutheran fashion.12 On this third level, Boehme seems to follow Luther’s idea that God hides under God’s opposite (sub contrario), since Boehme is clear that only the light world of the Son, not the dark world of the Father, is God’s “proper manifestation,” where God’s true nature is revealed as grace, mercy, and love (Mysterium 7.14). 11

These three levels are more clearly distinguished in his later works. The first level is usually mentioned in passing while the second and third levels are distinguished in various ways, and Boehme’s terminology is not consistent: In the Clavis Boehme distinguishes the second level of “Wisdom,” which is the “emanated Word of divine … holiness,” from the third level of the “Mysterium Magnum,” out of which “originate good and evil … heaven and hell” (Clavis 17, 23). The latter seems to be what results from the fall of the rebel angels prior to creation. In the Mysterium Magnum he is more specific, and he distinguishes “1. The free lubet” (die freie Lust), which is “the Wisdom,” and which is a desire that is “free from all inclination and is one with God” from “2. The desire (Begierde) of the free lubet in itself” (Mysterium 3.7), which seems to be a desire separated for a particular end, as with the rebel angels. This leads to a distinction between “Wisdom,” which is purely good, and “Eternal Nature,” which is basically fallen Wisdom. (And thus I agree with O’Regan’s characterization of “Eternal Nature” as an “antitype” to Wisdom [2002, 37–38]). This distinction is meant to explain, as the chapter title says, “How out of the eternal good an evil is come to be, which had no beginning in the good, and of the origin of the Dark World, or Hell, where the devils dwell” (Mysterium 3). In Mysterium 8.1 Boehme likewise distinguishes the second level of the Trinity and Wisdom from the third level of the angels, and in Mysterium 4.1 he distinguishes the Trinity from the eternal beginning of the Three Worlds. 12 Luther is of course drawing on the Pauline dialectic of law and grace, especially as it appears in Galatians. Interestingly, Boehme espouses something like a “two covenants” theory of Christianity and Judaism (Mysterium 51.25–41), long before Pope John Paul II hinted at it, and before the “new perspective” on Paul (e.g. E.P. Sanders, James Dunn) began to read Romans 9–11 as the heart of Paul’s thought.

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In fact, we might even distinguish Boehme’s first and third ontological levels by looking at Luther’s appropriation of Pseudo-Dionysian apophaticism. In Luther’s early work, while discussing the darkness that hides God (Ps. 18.11), Luther approved of the apophatic approach: “Dionysius teaches that someone must enter into anagogical darkness and ascend by negations, because God is hidden and incomprehensible” (1513–15, WA 3: 124.30–33).13 This is precisely how God appears on Boehme’s first ontological level, where the dark Nothing is defined as an ineffable, eternal good. But as McGinn notes, Luther later repudiated Dionysius and came to see God’s dark hiddenness as “the darkness of affliction and suffering (Anfechtung) caused by the God who hides himself sub contrariis, that is, under contrary appearances, such as temptation, suffering, even despair and human reason itself” (McGinn 2016, 24; see also 2002, 94–114).14 This is precisely how the Father appears in the dark world of Boehme’s third ontological level, where the dark Nothing does not represent goodness, but wrath and hell. On this level Boehme is clear that this “Father” is not the true face of God,15 which is only revealed in the light world of the Son.16 On this third level, the good Nothing of the first two levels appears as a wrathful, hellish Nothing. Boehme’s second and third ontological levels can also be difficult to distinguish because, in many passages, when he is describing the seven qualities of Wisdom, he does not distinguish between original versus fallen Wisdom. (Below this distinction will become clear when we explore the seven qualities 13

In his early work Luther calls Dionysius’ “ecstatic and negative theology … the true Cabala which is very rare” (1513/15, WA3: 372.13–19). Luther’s later brutal anti-Jewish writings are fairly well known. What is less known is that Luther saw his early theology as a rapprochement with Judaism, in contrast to Catholicism, and indeed Luther’s law-grace dialectic, and his “two hands of God,” have some affinities with Kabbalah. In Boehme the attempted rapprochement with Judaism is even more pronounced, and it also extends to Muslims (something we certainly do not see in Luther) and other faiths. 14 See also McGinn (2002, 94–114). 15 Drawing on Boehme, Blake will later call this counterfeit Father “Nobodaddy” (1988, 471). Freud, as we will see, also wanted to dethrone this dark fatherly lawgiver, although he also recognized his usefulness in restraining evil and maintaining social order. 16 Much has been written about Boehme’s neologism “Ungrund,” which in his later works he seems to use interchangeably with “Abgrund,” and “Nichts” (“Nothing”) to describe the “abyss” (for a good summary see McGinn 2016, 180–184). But this abyss means very different things depending on which ontological level it is describing. For McGinn, who depends mostly on Boehme’s earlier works, Boehme’s “view of the Ungrund differs from … the divine nihil of Eriugena, or the grund/abgrund of Eckhart, Tauler, Ruusbroec, and others” (2016, 195). My sense is that McGinn neglects the three ontological levels, which are especially evident in Boehme’s later work. On the highest level, Boehme’s Nothing is very close to that of Eckhart and his followers, although Boehme is more reticent than Eckhart to say anything about this highest level, beyond the fact that it is ineffable and good.

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of fallen Wisdom in the soul in chapter 5, and the seven qualities of original Wisdom from Genesis 1 in chapter 7.) Usually, because Boehme is talking about the current state of nature and the soul, he is talking about the qualities of fallen Wisdom, which he generally refers to as “Eternal Nature.” But these fallen qualities always exist in participation with the originally good qualities of Wisdom, because this original goodness is being continually distorted by the fallen angels who divide Wisdom against herself. Further, in describing the current fallen state of the soul, Boehme is always concerned to show that the soul can be reborn as divided Wisdom finds harmony again, through the mediation of Christ. Thus there is often a kind of fuzziness in his description of the seven qualities, as he attempts to account both for their current division and corruption, and their possible unity and reconciliation. It is of course the very nature of Wisdom’s qualities, mirroring the Trinity, to effect this transformation and rebirth in the soul, and Boehme always wants to keep this therapeutic transformation in view. Likewise, the second and third ontological levels are easily confused when Boehme divides the seven qualities of Wisdom into “darkness” and “light,” since darkness is not always equated with evil. Darkness only becomes evil when it is divided against the light; it remains good when it functions harmoniously with the light (e.g. Forty Questions 1.6–9/1764, 1.7–14; Clavis 20–24). Originally, for example, in the eternal creation figured in Genesis 1, darkness and light coexisted harmoniously in a purely good creation. In many cases when Boehme speaks of “darkness” in the first three qualities of Wisdom, he means to convey a sense of hiddenness, but not necessarily of evil. In the fallen world and the fallen soul, this darkness also conveys a sense of pain and suffering. And the suffering of these dark qualities is both revealed and transformed in the sacrificial death of Christ on the cross, which for Boehme is a temporal event with an eternal potential to transform darkness into light, and to mend fallen Wisdom or “Eternal Nature” in both the soul and the cosmos. For Boehme, and this is crucial for our psychotherapeutic exploration below, it is especially when these dark painful qualities remain hidden and suppressed—cut off from the light—that they are “evil.” When opened and surrendered to the light they themselves are transformed into it, and they actually increase the light’s potency. In short, when the dark qualities function harmoniously with the light as they were intended, they are good. And the darkness of affliction (Anfechtung), on the third ontological level, is transformed into a darkness of ineffable good, on the first ontological level, thus accounting for both of Luther’s readings of the hidden God.17 17

Karl Barth’s famous statement that “mysticism is esoteric atheism” (Church Dogmatics 1.2: 322) was meant to be derogatory, and it is consonant with the later Luther’s denigration

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Boehme’s ontology is certainly more complex than Augustine’s Platonic notion of evil as a privation of good (privatio boni).18 The classic biblical theophany of Exodus 3 might provide a helpful way to distinguish them on this point. When asked to provide a name, the God of Moses’ burning bush said only ehyeh asher ehyeh (‫) ֶא ְהיֶ ה ֲא ֶשר ֶא ְהיֶ ה‬, a Hebrew phrase that can be translated in two very different ways: For Augustine, God’s name is “I am who am,” and thus the image of eternal fire is assimilated to Augustine’s ontological schema, where God and goodness represent being itself,19 and evil is a privatio boni. For Augustine, all that is is good. Boehme seems to follow the other translation, where God’s name is “I will be who I will be.”20 And here the eternal fire becomes an image of deep mystery, where God and goodness ultimately transcend human ontological categories. On the highest ontological level Boehme defines God as the “eternal good,” which is “Nothing,” and on this level “God in his own being (Wesen) is no being” (Mysterium 6.1).21 As God reveals Godself as Trinity and Wisdom on the second ontological level, goodness manifests as being, although always with traces of its former hiddenness. In short, for Boehme, both God and goodness are never ontologically static, and thus they can never be reified in human conceptual categories. In God both being and goodness continually emerge from Nothing, as a desire from an abyss, in an eternal process that is the precondition for all existence in the macrocosm, and all awareness, thought, and language in the microcosm.22 In summary, it is important for the exposition ahead that we understand how Boehme’s “abyss” appears differently on these three ontological levels (see of Dionysian apophaticism. But in Boehme that same statement can appear as both positive and descriptively true, in a way that both incorporates and goes beyond Barthian theology. That is, for Boehme, a mystical experience of ineffable goodness emerges from a “releasement” (Gelassenheit) into the “God beyond God,” the abyss of “eternal silence/stillness without being” (Forty Questions 1.6/1764, 1.9; see Pektas 2006, 103), which is a kind of non-theism. It appears that Barth never had such an experience, although I suspect he was urged toward it in his famous dream of Mozart, where Barth’s favourite composer revealed what he likely most needed to learn: silence (Barth [1956] 1986; see Merton 1965). 18 Although the privatio boni doctrine is not expressed in the ecumenical creeds, it became a kind of de facto orthodoxy in the medieval West. 19 In Augustine’s phrase, “ipsum esse” (e.g. Commentary on Psalm 134. 4). 20 Augustine’s Old Latin (Vetus Latina) Bible has Exod. 3.14 as “ego sum qui sum,” which captures the meaning of the LXX quite well: “ego eimi ho on.” Whereas Boehme’s Luther Bible has “Ich werde sein, der ich sein werde.” 21 See Weeks for a discussion of Boehme’s use of Wesen (1991, 100–101). 22 It would be interesting in this context to explore Heidegger and Nietzsche, who critique the Platonic ontology of the West. One could argue that their alternative ontologies ultimately derive from Boehme via Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. Both see their critique as a thorough critique of Christianity, and yet Boehme derives his ontology from the Bible.

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figure 2). On the first level the dark Nothing is an ineffable “eternal good.”23 Here God is beyond being, and beyond any distinction, so it would seem that whatever Boehme means by “good,” it is not defined in opposition to “evil.”24 On the second level God is revealed as Trinity, and Wisdom is revealed as God’s first object.25 Both manifest in a dialectical emergence of Being from Nothing, and both exist in pure goodness. And here, importantly, Boehme at times suggests that the dark Nothing has a light within it, as described on the first day of the biblical creation account, which we will explore in chapter 7.26 Here there is a potential for evil to emerge from Wisdom if her dark qualities become isolated from the whole. But this potential is only actualized on the third ontological level by the rebel angels, who, as autonomous beings, misuse Wisdom. And when this happens, importantly, Augustine’s doctrine of privatio boni no longer holds. As Wisdom becomes divided against herself, the dark abyss becomes hell, divided against heaven, with their respective angelic hierarchies. Here the abyss is not only evil, but it has an existence of its own as an ontological power energized by the demonic hierarchies and manifesting in physical reality. Evil is real. On this third level Boehme depicts both creation and the soul as a dualistic battle between good and evil—a coincidentia oppositorum—meaning a collision or coincidence of opposites.27 On this third level Boehme can easily sound Manichaean or “gnostic” (in the heretical sense), but only if this level is isolated from the levels above it.28

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At times Boehme also implies that the Nothing on the first ontological level has an ineffable light within it: e.g. “The pure Godhead is a light that is incomprehensible, unperceivable, almighty and all-powerful” (Three Principles 4.32). This is not quite the view of Berdyaev, who thinks that Boehme’s Nothing is “beyond good and evil,” anticipating Nietzsche (1958, xxi). Boehme’s differences from Nietzsche on this point suggest that Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is not fatal: it arises from Christian sources, and only implicates certain aspects of Christian thought. E.g. “Wisdom is … a medium or object of the infinite One in existence, in which the Holy Spirit works, forms, moulds … for Wisdom is the passive one, and the Spirit of God in it is the active” (Clavis 18). E.g. “Behold I will tell you a mystery … in the center of the astringent quality [i.e. the dark Nothing] the light grows clear and bright” (Aurora 11.43; see also 11.19). The coincidentia oppositorum motif seems to originate with Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464). See C. Miller (2003). We will later see that Jung uses Boehme’s ontology to critique Augustine’s privatio boni doctrine, particularly for its neglect of evil as a concrete physical and psychological reality. For Jung, the privatio boni tradition encourages us to conceal and neglect the human shadow, with disastrous results, most evident in the bloody wars of the modern West.

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4.3 Approach: Psycho-Mythical Theology To conclude this introduction to Boehme’s work, let me briefly note the most significant difference between Boehme and Augustine, and likely the main reason that Boehme has been excluded by the mainstream Western theological tradition that was defined by Augustine: Boehme is extremely difficult to read. Instead of clear rational concepts Boehme gives us an impressionistic whirlwind of symbols. He blurs conceptual boundaries by piling up partially synonymous images, whose semantic associations continually expand his categories of thought, forging new connections while obscuring old ones. This associative style has always frustrated Boehme’s more rationalistic readers. Cyril O’Regan, for example, calls it “a coagulated cyclone of language, a form or nonform of linguistic implosion that repels and excludes.”29 Boehme might even have intended to exclude the more hardened rationalists among his readers, just as he often criticized the university-trained theologians and clerics of his day. But it is important to note that there is more going on here than sloppy thinking. There is method in the madness. And for those with the patience to contemplate Boehme’s prose with an open mind, there is a new and strange logic to be discovered, with its own rules and structure.30 In fact, something quite similar was discovered by Freud and Jung when they tried to understand the symbolism of dreams. They uncovered a mode of thought that functions, for most of us, outside conscious awareness, yet which continually undergirds consciousness. Freud called it “primary process thinking,” and he attempted to recreate it in the consulting room with his method of “free association,” a method similar to Jung’s symbolic “amplification.” Both thinkers realized that this strange dream logic was structured by symbolic images with a surplus of divergent meanings, and that the way these meanings coalesced and condensed was itself quite significant, and never random. Boehme calls his 29 O’Regan continues, calling Boehme “simply one of the most difficult reads in the history of Christian Thought” (2001, 3). Likewise John Wesley called Boehme’s writing “most sublime nonsense; inimitable bombast; fustian not to be paralleled!” ( Journals and Diaries 2: 272). 30 Some who discover this structure even describe it as a coherent “system,” like Grunsky in his formidable work ([1956] 1984), which even attempts a precise Boehmian lexicon. This systematic coherence explains why many have called Boehme a “philosopher,” as does Koyré ([1929] 1968) who is still my favourite reader of Boehme. But if Boehme’s writing is “philosophy” it certainly does not obey the conventional rules of logic. As Erb says, Boehme has “gone beyond the axiom of contradiction … A is both B and non-B, and he must develop a language to describe his experience, an experience for which there is no human language” (1978, 22).

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symbolic, associative mode of thinking Verstand or “understanding,” by which he means the understanding of divine Wisdom, and he contrasts it with Vernunft or “reason,” by which we explore outer knowledge—a distinction we will unpack further in a moment. Suffice it to say that the resistance Boehme’s writing evokes in rationalistic readers can be compared to the resistance Freud and Jung encountered in their consulting rooms. The resistance emerges partly from the fact that, to really understand Boehme’s prose, we must learn to understand deeper aspects of ourselves. My sense is that the early charges of heresy against Boehme had more to do with his bewildering style than with the actual dogmatic content of his work. And Boehme’s blunt critiques of the scholastic clergy of his day certainly didn’t help matters, especially in his hometown of Görlitz, where the contentious Lutheran pastor Gregor Richter led an extended campaign against him.31 But it seems clear even from Boehme’s earliest writings that he saw himself as an orthodox Christian, even an orthodox Lutheran. And he was surprised by the early charges of heresy against him, even in an age of hair-splitting and heresy hunting. His later works are more careful in this regard.32 But even when Boehme is clearly defending orthodox dogma, he never attempts to conform to the style and approach of the theologians of his day. As he says in the Aurora, “I can do nothing with their methods and their formulas, since I have not studied by them” (22.11). For Boehme, traditional doctrinal formulations function mainly in the realm of rationalistic Vernunft; his aim is to find the mythical-symbolic substrate of Verstand behind these formulations. The bloody religious wars of the time had given Boehme ample evidence of reason’s impotence in the face of doctrinal disputes, and of reason’s power to fuel useless orgies of violence. Ultimately Boehme hoped that by describing dogma in the deeper language of Verstand, he would unite not only the various Protestant factions, but even the warring monotheisms.33 31 32

Boehme seemed to get along quite well with the previous pastor in Görlitz, Martin Moller. As stated above (note 149) I agree with Weeks that “the conclusion of Boehme’s career is conducive neither to the Christian orthodox attempt to cast him as an outsider, nor to the heterodox attempt to reclaim him as the conscious founder of an alternative spiritual tradition” (2006, 190). The former attempt can be seen in O’Regan (2002) and McGinn (2016), and the latter attempt can be seen in Faivre (1996) and his heirs. 33 Boehme’s desire to unite “Jew, Turk, and heathen” first appears in the Aurora (22.43, 52), and is given more doctrinal substance in terms of grace and salvation in the Mysterium Magnum (70.83–85), in a way that resembles Rahner’s “anonymous Christianity.” Weeks notes that the “tolerant ecumenicism” of Boehme’s writings “was doomed to fail almost from the start” (2006, 187). I think Boehme, in this regard, was way ahead of his time. The remarkable interfaith bridges that Wisdom builds did not become fully obvious until the twentieth century, when Henri Corbin noticed the deep resonances between Boehme

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Because of this preference for symbolic Wisdom over discursive reason, Boehme’s work has been categorized as “theosophy” rather than “theology.” But Boehme himself never made this distinction, and there is nothing to suggest that he would have wanted to segregate his work in this way.34 I would prefer to keep him under the rubric of “theology,” partly to emphasize that there is a kind of logic in his writing, not unlike the strange logic we find in mythic narratives and in the psyche, the study of which we likewise designate as “mythology” and “psychology.” In fact, Boehme’s work reveals how the strange logic of these three fields is quite connected. We will soon see that part of the genius of both Freud and Jung was in describing how “psyche-logic” and “myth-logic” have much in common. Freud voiced this idea in an early (1897) letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess: Can you imagine what ‘endopsychic myths’ are? The latest product of my mental labor. The dim inner perception of one’s own psychic apparatus stimulates thought illusions, which of course are projected onto the outside and, characteristically, into the future and the beyond. Immortality, retribution, the entire world beyond are all reflections of our psychic internal. Meschugge? [crazy?] Psycho-mythology. (1985, 286) Crazy or not, Freud eventually discovered remarkable heuristic value in the myth of Oedipus. But even in the above quotation we see a somewhat pejorative view of myths as “thought illusions.” Freud later proposed that such illusions—including the sacred myths of Christianity and Judaism—should be dispelled, or at least reduced to psychological explanations (1928). In many ways Freud’s Enlightenment leanings prompted him to try to escape from myth; whereas Jung’s Romanticist leanings prompted him to see the Enlightenment itself as structured by a potent (and largely hidden) Promethean or Faustian myth. For Jung, escaping myth was not really a human

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and Sufism (1958, 1971). Valentin Tomberg has since used Boehme to build bridges with Jewish Kabbalah and Hindu yoga. Tomberg’s magnum opus (1985) contains a very favourable preface by Hans Urs von Balthasar, who cites Tomberg in his epigraph to the Theo-Drama vol. 3. Boehme uses the word “theosophy” in his work, but never to distinguish it from “theology.” At times he uses it to clarify that he is not confusing nature with God, as “pagans” do (Aurora 8.56; see Faivre 1996, 13). It was Boehme’s followers and their critics who used “theosophy” to distinguish his work from “theology,” beginning with Gichtel’s first edition of Boehme’s complete works, Alle Theosophische Werken, published in Amsterdam in 1682 (see Faivre 1996, 14). McGinn notes that Pseudo-Dionysius and John Scotus Eriugena “both use the word theosophi to describe theologians” (2016, 204).

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option, and the attempt to do so reflected modernity’s tragic hubris. Jung’s goal was to find what Northrop Frye and others have called “myths to live by.” My general point here is that the deep connection between myth and the “psychic internal” noted by Freud does not necessitate the reduction of one to the other; it can just as easily suggest a reciprocity between them. Jung, for example, saw the psychological potency of the Christ myth as evidence for its historical veracity, rather than as evidence that theology should be subsumed under psychology. For all of these reasons, rather than designating Boehme’s approach “theosophy,” which tends to segregate his work,35 I would prefer to describe it as “psycho-mythical theology”—theology that is primarily concerned not with explaining dogmatic formulas in discursive logic, but with charting the strange logic that connects sacred myth to the soul, with the goal of psychological healing and transformation.36 The implications of this definition will become more obvious in what follows. Certain movements in modern theology have also emphasized that the discursive logic of traditional dogmatics must remain connected to the deeper logic of sacred myth and narrative.37 Boehme’s work makes the same claim, 35

I recognize the value of the words “theosophy” and “esotericism” for designating a fairly coherent historical stream that emerged (in part) from Boehme, so I hope I am not just quibbling about words. The point is to look at the historiographical basis for Boehme’s marginalization. Some of this has to do with the pioneering work of Frances Yates. As Hanegraff notes, Yates viewed “the Hermetic tradition” and its related strands of “gnosis,” “occultism,” and “esotericism” as a “quasi autonomous counterculture.” This has been questioned by subsequent historians who believe it “was by no means limited to some magical subculture but was abundantly present in ‘mainstream’ religious, philosophical, and scientific discourse as well,” and which is therefore a “traditionally underestimated dimension of general religious and cultural developments in pre- and early modern Western society” (2006, ix–x). As noted above, I am not sure that Boehme fits comfortably within “the Hermetic tradition,” but even if he does this should not be a cause for his marginalization. 36 What I mean by “psycho-mythical” in relation to theology is illustrated quite well by Gustav Aulén’s classic study Christus Victor ([1930] 1988), which describes how Luther recovered the myth-logic behind the traditional doctrine of the atonement. Luther framed the atonement in terms of the mythic powers of “sin, death, and the devil,” in contrast to the more rationalistic “objective” Anselmian and “subjective” humanistic views. And yet Luther’s heirs, like Melanchthon, quickly reverted from myth to rationalism. In this regard, Boehme is again extending Luther’s approach. 37 I am thinking here of Balthasar’s “dramatic” approach, and the emphasis on “narrative” in the so-called “Yale school” inspired mainly by Karl Barth. As I said above, I see Balthasar’s work as closely allied with what I am attempting here. To take just one example, in Theo-drama vol. 4 (Balthasar’s dramatic approach to soteriology) he begins, provocatively, with the Book of Revelation: “we must assume that an objective world of images exists in God; excerpts from it are communicated now to this prophet, now to that, until

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since his ultimate goal is not a separation but a union of Vernunft and Verstand. But Boehme goes much further than most modern theologians in that, rather than simply describing this psycho-mythical logic in discursive terms, he immerses his readers in it.38 And in so doing he attempts to awaken deeper aspects of the soul itself. But I see no reason to separate Boehme’s use of figural biblical exegesis from that of someone like Augustine, since for both thinkers the psychologically informed interpretation of these figures is the bedrock that structures their work. In other words, I am claiming that Western theology has always involved a conversation between the psycho-mythical logic of Verstand and the rational logic of Vernunft, and in this respect Boehme’s work seems different in degree, but not in kind. Boehme’s work has also been called “esoteric,” but I find nothing in it to suggest that he was attempting to create a secretive or elitist spiritual group (although some of his followers may have attempted to use his work in this way).39 Boehme tried to disseminate his work widely in his later years, and the spiritual elites of his day were his main targets. Boehme calls himself the “philosopher of the simple folk (Philosophus der Einfältigen)” (Aurora 18.80), likely believing that uneducated minds had a better chance of grasping his thought than the university-trained intelligentsia.40 If there is anything esoteric about Boehme, it is that one can only understand him by looking at the in the Apocalypse of John a kind of summa is distilled from it” (16). Boehme would be in profound agreement with this statement, for Wisdom is this objective world of images, and Wisdom’s seven qualities or “source-spirits” are derived from the seven spirits surrounding the throne of God (Rev. 1.4, 4.5), which form a kind of anti-type to the seven days of creation (Gen. 1.1–2.3). 38 Interestingly, several streams of modern theology seem to be converging on this psycho-mythical approach: Bultmann gave us psychological depth with his “existentialist” approach, which was nonetheless explicitly “demythologized.” Tillich follows this “existentialist” stream, but he recognizes that myth contains “elements of infinity which express ultimate concern” (1951, 80), and yet he barely engages the sacred myths of the biblical text. Barth enters the fray almost as an anti-Tillich, by profoundly engaging the narrative structure of the Bible, and yet strongly disengaging from any psychological analogies. Balthasar can be seen then as a remarkable mediating figure, who, like Boehme, lets the drama of the biblical text itself set the terms for the emergent psychology. Balthasar notes some of the convergences I am alluding to here (Theo-Drama 1: 15–50). This oversimplified sketch is simply to note that Boehme’s approach is sophisticated, relevant, and in many ways ahead of its time. 39 Boehme’s work was taken up by Freemasonry and other “initiatory societies” throughout Europe, Russia, and North America in the late eighteenth century (see Faivre 2000, 20–24). 40 As Weeks says, “Doctrine, as the province of the professional clerical class, is exclusionary and authoritarian. By contrast, the writings of Boehme … were intended to be non-exclusionary and antiauthoritarian” (2006, 187).

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Boehme’s map of everything. By Andreas Freher, in the William Law edition of The Works of Jacob Boehme (1764, vol. 3)

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secret aspects of one’s own soul. His key symbols represent something like a psychological and mythical bedrock: Wisdom’s seven pillars form the deep structure of the entire biblical narrative, starting with the seven days of creation in Genesis 1, and ending with the seven spirits of the Book of Revelation.41 These seven qualities also represent both the soul’s structure and its path to transformation. At first glance, Boehme’s frequent descriptions of Wisdom’s qualities can seem repetitive and bewildering, but a closer look reveals that he is not repeating but amplifying. His writing circles centrifugally, drawing more associations into each archetypal symbol, and drawing the reader deeper into the inner world. This widening gyre of meaning is meant to eventually extend to all reality—visible and invisible, inner and outer. And the most significant corollary of Boehme’s psycho-mythical approach is that he believed his theological corpus, with God’s help, could effect the change it was describing. 41 Wisdom’s association with the number seven comes from Prov. 9.1–6, a passage that could be taken as the leitmotif of Boehme’s whole corpus, in its description of a joyful banquet of the simple: “Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars. She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table. She has sent out her servant-girls, she calls from the highest places in the town, ‘You that are simple, turn in here!’ To those without sense she says, ‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.’” This passage would have Eucharistic overtones, particularly for Protestants, who tended to emphasize the “joyful feast” aspect of the Eucharist over the usual Roman “sacrificial” aspect. It is also echoed in Jesus’ parable of the feast (Mt. 22.1–14; Lk. 14.15–24). Margaret Barker’s hypothesis, that Wisdom and her seven pillars were a crucial aspect of the first temple cult, which were purged from the second temple, and later recovered in Christianity, is very intriguing in this regard (Barker 2012).

Chapter 5

Boehme’s Map of the Soul: the Birth of the Unconscious Mind This chapter explores Boehme’s map of the soul. Augustine’s three soulelements of memory (corresponding to the Father), understanding (corresponding to the Son), and will/love (corresponding to the Holy Spirit) are modified in Boehme’s soul schema of abyss (corresponding to the Father), Wisdom or Verstand (corresponding to the Son), and knowledge or Vernunft (corresponding to the Holy Spirit). This initial formulation is somewhat simplistic, but it will become more nuanced in what follows. Boehme’s schema includes four key divergences from Augustine, each of which brings him into closer alignment with the eventual theories of Freud and Jung. First, for Boehme, will/love is no longer confined to the Holy Spirit element of the soul; it infuses all three elements. The psychological priority of will/love that we saw in Augustine’s schema is thus amplified in Boehme’s formulation, such that desire permeates every aspect of the soul and its movements, just as it permeates each member of Boehme’s Trinity, and indeed every object in the created cosmos. For Boehme everything is charged with and driven by desire, and we will hear an echo of this notion in what Freud and Jung later called libido.1 Second, while Augustine’s Father-element of the soul, memoria, is explicitly tied to recall of past experience, for Boehme this Father-element includes past, present and future experience.2 Here the idea clearly emerges that cognition is undergirded at every moment and in all three “tenses” by a hidden inner abyss of desire. We saw in chapter 2 that Augustine describes memoria, as the “abyss” of consciousness, and Boehme again amplifies this Augustinian concept. For Boehme the abyss of the Father-element has many names, which together form a pastiche that attempts the impossible task of representing a concept that should have no predicates. In some ways the concept is typically apophatic, in that the abyss is defined by negation: Boehme’s Son-element of the soul is “Grund” or “Ground,” whereas the Father-element is “Ungrund,” “Abgrund,” or 1 The idea that all objects are charged with the energy of desire may also have played a role, via a Boehmian pedigree, in the discovery of electricity. See Benz (1989). 2 Boehme’s view is hinted at by Augustine, for whom the cumulative past of memoria represents the present being of the soul. For Augustine memoria also contains the archetypes of Wisdom, which structure past, present and future.

© Glenn J. McCullough, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004680296_007

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“No-ground,”3 the Nothing (“Nichts”) before all differentiation and duality (e.g. Mysterium 2.24, 5.3). But this Nothing is not simply nothing. And here Northrop Frye, with characteristic wit, helps us distinguish Augustine from Boehme on this point: “We might put it this way,” says Frye, A. There is nothing to be afraid of. B. Wrong. There is Nothing to be afraid of. (1990, 289) For Boehme, this absence has a phenomenological presence, which is best described by the psychological feelings and experiences it evokes in the soul, including the existential angst noted by Frye.4 Keep in mind that here and in what follows we are speaking of the fallen soul (Boehme’s third ontological level in figure 2), where the “Father” hides under his opposite (sub contrario). Third, following what was said above, for Boehme this hidden abyss in the soul has a hidden will of its own. While Augustine clearly emphasizes that the human will can be divided, Boehme extends the possibility of division: For Augustine, any one movement of the soul will take place either in a disposition of love-of-self or in a disposition of love-of-God/other/self. With Boehme the idea clearly emerges that one movement of the soul can involve two separate wills, possibly in conflict. Further, the soul in this divided state might have no awareness of its division. The dark will can remain entirely hidden, while the mind ascribes its motivation entirely to the conscious will. In short, by assigning will/love to all three soul-elements, Boehme intensifies the possibility that the soul can have ulterior motives of which it remains unaware. These last two modifications of the Augustinian framework, on their own, likely justify 3 Sparrow captures this in his English translation, using the words “byss” and “abyss.” 4 Boehme’s influence on two philosophical schools, eventually called “existentialism” and “phenomenology,” has yet to be detailed. Both seem to emerge from Boehme’s shattering of traditional ontological categories: “God in his own being (Wesen) is no being” (Mysterium 6.1). “The something is yet Nothing” (Clavis 38). This shattering of rationalistic ontology allows direct human psychological experience to come to the fore. Boehme’s strong influence on Kierkegaard was mediated through Kierkegaard’s teacher, Hans Martensen, who wrote one of the best early monographs on Boehme ([1882] 1949). For a brilliant psychological study of Kierkegaard’s Nothing, with strong Boehmian resonances, see Becker (1973). Boehme’s influence on Nietzsche (mainly indirect through Hegel, Schelling, and especially Schopenhauer) has been mentioned but not detailed. This connects Boehme with a vast swath of existential and so-called postmodern thought that sees the angst of the abyss as primary. Lutheran theologian Rudolf Otto also recovers a Boehmian approach in The Idea of the Holy (1917), a charter document for the phenomenology of religion and the history of religions school. Here the “numinous” is the wholly other that precedes rationality and morality, that both terrifies and fascinates, and that induces feelings of creaturely dependence.

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crediting Boehme as the originator of the psychodynamic concept of the unconscious mind.5 Fourth and finally, Boehme modifies the Augustinian framework by taking Augustine’s distinction between knowledge and Wisdom and building it into the structure of his soul-trinity. For Augustine, the three elements of the soul-trinity, taken together, can function either in knowledge (scientia) or in Wisdom (sapientia). For Boehme, two elements of the soul-trinity (corresponding to Father and Son), when they function harmoniously, represent eternal Wisdom or “understanding” (Verstand), and the third element (corresponding to the Holy Spirit) represents temporal knowledge or “reason” (Vernunft). For both Boehme and Augustine, Wisdom is a higher, inward, eternal, receptive, and contemplative form of cognition (corresponding to the biblical Sophia), while knowledge is a lower, outward, temporal, active, and administrative form of cognition.6 And for both thinkers, when the soul functions harmoniously, Wisdom is united with knowledge in a perfect marriage. The big difference here is that, for Boehme, Wisdom or “understanding,” as a form of cognition, is explicitly identified with the imagination, and Sophia herself is identified with the imagination of God. Wisdom is herself the divine understanding (Verstand), or the divine contemplation/ tranquillity (Beschaulichkeit), in which the One is manifest/revealed (offenbar). She is … a divine imagination (Imaginatio). (Clavis 19) Just as (in the macrocosm) eternal Wisdom is the hidden fundament of the outer temporal realm, so (in the microcosm) inner imaginative “understanding” (Verstand) is the secret source of outward “reason” (Vernunft):

5 Importantly, these modifications originate with Boehme. To my knowledge they are not found in any previous theological thinkers. 6 Following John Sparrow’s original English translation, Boehme’s “Verstand” is usually translated as “understanding,” and “Vernunft” is usually translated as “reason.” But as this sentence indicates, Boehme uses these words in much the same way as Augustine uses sapientia and scientia respectively, and I will treat them as basically synonymous in what follows. In crucial places Boehme uses “Wisdom” (Weisheit) and “understanding” (Verstand) synonymously (e.g. Mysterium Preface 6; 1.2–6), although the latter often connotes the human reception of divine Wisdom. At times Boehme refers to Wisdom as “divine knowledge” (Göttlicher Erkentniss) or “divine science” (Göttlicher Wissenschaft), but the modifier is important here, and these should not be confused with Augustinian scientia. Koyré calls Vernunft “discursive” cognition, and Verstand “intuitive” cognition ([1929] 1968, 86). See also Schaublin (1963, 112, 125).

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The outer world … is a housing and tool of the inner spiritual world that is hidden within it and works through it, and thus the inner spiritual world introduces images into the outer world (und sich also mit in Bildungen einführet). And likewise human reason (Vernunft) is also only a housing of the true understanding (Verstandes). (Clavis 115–116) For Boehme Wisdom or “understanding” (Verstand) is explicitly an image-based cognition, and this seems to modify Augustine’s formulation by granting the image-based cognition of visio spiritualis a certain kind of parity with visio intellectualis, a tendency we also saw in some of Boehme’s precursors in the Western mystical tradition in chapter 3.7 This modification, in combination with those above, eventually had immense importance for early psychotherapy, introducing the idea that conscious cognition is ultimately guided and undergirded by an (often hidden) imaginative realm, revealed most commonly in dreams. 5.1 The Soul-Body Nexus in the Micro- and Macrocosm Before exploring the Boehmian soul in detail I will sketch its general contours,8 which are more complex than its Augustinian counterpart in two main ways: First, whereas Augustine tends to distinguish between a temporal body and an eternal soul, for Boehme both body and soul have eternal qualities proceeding from eternal Wisdom/Sophia, which leads to a more complex integration: Boehme’s body-soul nexus includes three aspects of body interwoven with his three soul-elements. The “outward” Holy Spirit soul-element, representing temporal knowledge or reason (Vernunft), corresponds to two “outward” levels of the body—the “elemental” and the “astral” bodies. The two “inward” levels of the soul—the fiery abyss of the Father-element, which begets the light of eternal Wisdom in the Son-element—in turn correspond to the “inward” body, 7 In a sense, Boehme’s modification here emerges from a tension inherent in Augustine’s original formulation: For Augustine, Wisdom is partly defined by the images of the seven “eternal days” of Genesis 1. And in the case of these images, it is hard to see how one can “rise above” them—from visio spiritualis to visio intellectualis—even via figural interpretation. One can never fully dispense with the images. With other Augustinian qualities of Wisdom, like love, it does seem possible to move from visio spiritualis to a pure concept—dispensing even with the image of the word “love,” to arrive at a pure imageless concept of love. But in the case of certain biblical images (like those of Genesis 1), even for Augustine, visio spiritualis seems to have a certain parity with visio intellectualis. 8 This discussion is based mainly on Mysterium Magnum 15.10–31.

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which Boehme calls the divine, spiritual, or light body. This inward body is unique to the human species while the two outward bodies—the elemental and astral—are shared by the rest of creation. And at death this spiritual body accompanies the soul into eternity while the two outward bodies remain with the corpse.9 Most importantly, the inward spiritual body is the key locus of Boehme’s psychotherapeutic theory: the loss of this spiritual body is the tragic consequence of the Fall, and its recovery is the main goal of spiritual regeneration or rebirth (Wiedergeburt). Second, following the Renaissance fashion, Boehme’s threefold body-soul nexus is a microcosm with a complex correspondence to the macrocosm. Beginning with the two outward bodies associated with the outer Holy Spirit soul-element of knowledge (Vernunft), we have a lower “elemental” body corresponding to the four elements (air, earth, fire, and water), and a higher “astral” or “sidereal” body, corresponding to the sun, stars, and planets. For Boehme the elemental body has a spiritual character that is “inanimate and void of understanding,” having “only lust and desire in it” (Mysterium 11.24). Likewise the astral body has a spiritual character that is “the true rational (vernünftige) life of all creatures,” capable of discerning the “knowledge of all essences in the elements” (Mysterium 11.24, 25). These two bodies have a symbiotic relationship: the elemental body is the “servant or dwelling house” for the astral body (Mysterium 11.23), and likewise in the macrocosm the “sun is the centre of the astrum, and the earth is the centre of the elements. They are to each other … as man and wife” (Mysterium 11.31). This corresponds to the fact that astronomy and astrology had a certain influence and priority over alchemy in the natural science of Boehme’s day.10 Taken together, these sciences explore the logic of the “soul of the great world”: the anima mundi or World Soul (Mysterium 11.30), which connects and governs the astral and elemental worlds, and in which reason (Vernunft) participates. Note that the World Soul and reason both operate according to “scientific” causality, which in Boehme’s day included both the logic of linear materialistic causality, and the non-materialistic “action at a distance” of magical correspondences.11 9 Boehme’s thinking here seems to be based on the apostle Paul’s discussion of the spiritual body (e.g. 1 Cor. 15.35–58), which stands in conversation with the accounts of Jesus’ resurrected body in Luke-Acts, and John, and possibly in the synoptic accounts of the transfiguration. 10 For a good summary of this science see Weeks (2013, 26–38). 11 On magical correspondences Faivre says, “Here the principles of noncontradiction and excluded third middle, as of causal linearity, are replaced by those of synchronicity and included middle” (1996, xxi–xxii). The idea of synchronous “action at a distance” is once again appearing somewhat viable for a few contemporary scientists, thanks to the now

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Moving from the outward to the inward soul-body nexus means moving from outward knowledge (Vernunft) of the World Soul to inner understanding (Verstand) of eternal Wisdom and her seven qualities.12 The inward, spiritual body is thus associated with the two inward soul-elements—the dark Father and the light Son elements—which together are composed of the seven qualities of Wisdom/Sophia. In the regenerate soul these two soul-elements function harmoniously, as darkness is sublated13 into light, and desire is sublated into Wisdom or understanding (Verstand). As modes of cognition, remember that knowledge (Vernunft) is basically language-based, and Wisdom or understanding (Verstand) is basically image-based.14 More specifically, understanding (Verstand) involves using imaginative metaphorical and symbolic amplification of Sophia’s seven qualities in order to see how they order and influence all things, just as Boehme does throughout his writings. As this takes place, and as the soul participates in Sophia’s seven qualities, it is transformed, and the inner spiritual body is formed, composed of the “holy element” or “spiritual water” that was separated from physical water by the “firmament” on the second day of creation in Genesis 1 (Mysterium 11.18–26; 15.30). Jesus refers to this spiritual water in his famous nocturnal teaching on rebirth: “you must

accepted theory of quantum entanglement, which Einstein at first referred to as “spooky action at a distance” (see e.g. Radin 2018). 12 E.g. “The inward light, and power of the light, gives humans the right divine understanding (Verstand); but there is no right divine apprehension in the sidereal spirit; for the astrum has another principle” (Mysterium 11.25). 13 To avoid anachronism, I will use the term “sublate” to refer to Boehme’s concept, rather than “sublimate”—a word that has come to be associated almost totally with Freud— although I see the two words as synonymous. Weeks, who does not suggest that Boehme is a precursor to Freud, uses the term “sublimate” to refer to Boehme’s concept (e.g. 1991, 107). 14 The connection here with the two hemispheres of the brain, as outlined by Iain McGilchrist, is wildly interesting. McGilchrist notes that “our conscious left hemisphere may be unable to conceive of meaning that is not conveyed in words,” and, further, “only the right hemisphere has the capacity to understand metaphor” (2019, 108, 115). The right and left hemispheres, which thus seem to generally correlate with Boehmian image-based “understanding” (Verstand) and language-based “reason” (Vernunft) respectively, are further distinguished by McGilchrist in terms of, respectively, the new vs. the known; possibility vs. predictability; integration vs. division; the whole vs. the part; context vs. abstraction; individuals vs. categories; and the personal vs. the impersonal. Further, the right hemisphere is heavily implicated in empathy; emotions and the bodily experience of them (with the exception of anger, which is left hemisphere dominant); insight or “aha!” moments; and embodiment. These simplistic dichotomies do not do justice to McGilchrist’s subtle and brilliant elaborations of them, but they are nonetheless highly suggestive, and correlate in marvelous ways with Boehme’s thought.

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be born from above … from water and spirit” (Jn. 3.3–5),15 and also in his conversation with the Samaritan woman (Mysterium 4.15, 10.57)—two passages that Boehme liked very much.16 This spiritual body is also called a light body (e.g. Way to Christ 4.2.8/1978, 5.2.8).17 We will explore the developmental stages of this rebirth in detail in chapter 7. 5.2

Abyss: the Eternal Dark Fire of Inner Desire

We will now take a more detailed look at Boehme’s trinitarian soul,18 beginning with the Father-element, and keeping in mind that here it represents the “Father” hidden under his opposite (sub contrario), and the soul in the fallen state (Boehme’s third ontological level in figure 2). To summarize, this first soul-element is the inner eternal dark hidden foundation of the soul (see figure 4). It contains three qualities or drives19 that Boehme illustrates with help from the planetary attributes20 of the science of his day: (1) a Nothing-desire 15

This verse will likewise be central for Jung, in his attempt to transform Freud’s Oedipus complex into a more mythically based “Jonah-and-the-whale” complex, as we will see. 16 Boehme: “The holy human body must be regenerated if the spirit will see God; otherwise one cannot see God. Unless one is again born anew of the water of the holy element, in the Spirit of God who has manifested in Christ with this same water-source in order that the disappeared body may be made alive in the holy water and Spirit, one has no sense nor sight in the holy life of God” (Mysterium 11.21). 17 Faivre notes that a key aspect of the theosophical tradition he traces from Boehme is that “the imagination … gives our spirit the possibility to ‘fix’ itself in a body of light, that is to say, to effectuate a ‘second birth’” (2000, 9). For Boehme this body is effectuated by the grace of God. There is also a remarkable inter-religious quality to the seven archetypes of Wisdom that together compose the body of light: Boehme’s descriptions of them show remarkable resemblances with Iranian Sufism (Corbin [1971] 1994, 121–144), and with the chakra system of tantric yoga (Tomberg 1985). 18 These descriptions are summarized mainly from Mysterium 3.1–26 and Clavis 38–47. 19 As mentioned above, early in the Aurora Boehme defines a quality (Qualität) as the “mobility, surging, or driving (Trieben) of a thing” (Aurora 1.3). The word Trieb (drive) later became very important for Freud. 20 I have included Boehme’s planetary correspondences because their deep psychological resonances help flesh out his ideas. In typical Renaissance fashion, the astrological planets and their corresponding alchemical metals carry the psychological “personality traits” of the respective Greco-Roman gods. For example, melancholy was generally accepted as a Saturnine trait. But importantly, Boehme subordinates this scientific view to the biblical view: he only uses the planetary attributions that accord with the biblical archetypes of Wisdom described in Genesis 1 and Revelation, presumably informed by his own experience. Also, as Stoudt notes, Boehme stopped using “alchemical tools” to describe the universe after Signatura Rerum in 1622 (1968; see also Weeks 1991, 74). Boehme hardly

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Fallen Wisdom or “Eternal Nature”

5 6 7

4

1 2 3 NothingDesire

Lust-Desire

Anxiety/ Anger

Fire/Light

Love-Desire

Voice, Sound

Body of Light

Hungry Abyss Death

Life Sexuality

Tension “I-ness”

Division/ Sublation

Perception of Wisdom

Expression of Wisdom

Mansion and House of Wisdom

Eternal Light “Son”

Eternal Dark “Father”

Inner Gentle Joyful Playful Selfless Artistic Embodied Understanding (Verstand)

Inner Chaotic Irrational Emotional Hungry Sexual Anxious/Aggressive Desire

Temporal “H. Spirit” Outer Senses (Sinne) Astral Mind (Gemüt) Reason (Vernunft)

Figure 4

Boehme’s map of the fallen soul

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for death, like a hungry abyss, corresponding to Saturn (♄); (2) a lust-desire21 for life, that emerges in opposition to the Nothing-desire, corresponding to Mercury (☿); and (3) an anxiety and/or anger, resulting from the tension between the previous two qualities, corresponding to Mars (♂). These three drives can compete and combine to produce various unique expressions in each individual soul. But taken together they generally coalesce into a chaotic, irrational, and emotionally volatile soul-element, defined primarily by a hungry void and a sexual, anxious, and/or aggressive desire. And importantly, they generally remain hidden to conscious awareness. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the Freudian unconscious will see marked resonances here, which we will explore further below. Morally this soul-element is evil, through its participation in the dark world of the rebel angels and the kingdom of hell. It is the source of evil in human thought and action, and also the source of the rebellious individual will (“Ichheit” meaning “I-ness” or ego) that seeks personal gain over against the collective good. But as we will see, when this individual will offers itself for the collective good, what feels like the death of “I-ness” becomes a rebirth: evil is sublated into good, and the dark fire of the Father-element becomes the motive force serving the light world of the Son-element. Since the Father-element is defined mainly by irrational emotions, it will help to flesh out the psychological “feeling-tones” of its three qualities. Boehme describes the first quality, the Nothing-desire, variously as “cold,” “hard,” “harsh,” “austere,” and as the source of “the great darkness of the abyss.”

21

mentions the planets in his description of the qualities in his late works, the Clavis and the Mysterium, but their symbols are still present. In his later works, including the Mysterium Magnum and the Clavis, Boehme mainly uses two words for the desire that pervades all seven qualities: “Begierde” and “Lust,” both of which have a sexual connotation according to Grimm’s Dictionary. Both translate the Latin cupido and desiderium, while Begierde also translates cupiditas, and Lust also translates concupiscentia and libido. (DWB 1: 1292; 6: 1315). When Boehme uses these words by themselves, without a modifier, he seems to intend the sexual connotation; whereas in the light world where this desire has been transformed, he uses modifiers that seem to mitigate the strictly sexual connotation (e.g. “freien Lust” [free lust, or free pleasure], and “Liebe-Begierde” [love-desire]). Accordingly, I am using “lust-desire” to describe this desire in the dark world, and “love-desire” to describe it in the light world. John Sparrow’s early English translation mitigates the sexual connotation of “Lust” by translating it with the Latin “Lubet,” but only when it refers to Wisdom’s seven qualities, otherwise it is “lust.” And surprisingly Weeks does not mention the sexual connotations of either Begierde or Lust in his otherwise excellent word study. He translates Lust as “desire or joy” (2013, 55), whereas Grimm’s dictionary notes that Lust is “particularly the pleasure of the sexual drive” (DWB 6: 1315). The Nothing-desire of the first quality is also driven by this desire, as is the anguish/anger of the third quality.

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Its core metaphor seems to be “astringency” (herbe), a kind of absorption or vacuum suction, like that of a black hole (Mysterium 3.9).22 Boehme often calls this Nothing-desire “a hunger” (e.g. Mysterium 3.5; Clavis 38), and we will soon see Freud and Jung debate whether the hunger drive is anterior to, or concomitant with, the sexual drive in the unconscious.23 Its planet, Saturn, is associated with death (e.g. Threefold Life 1.34/1764, 1.31). And Saturn also corresponds alchemically to lead, the initial substance (prima materia) of the alchemical great work. As such this quality is intractable and inscrutable, with a dark inertia that can immobilize or paralyze when it manifests, for example, as Saturnine melancholy,24 which is basically the early modern precursor to today’s second most common category of mental distress: depression.25 The feeling tone of the second quality is partly determined by the fact that it emerges from the first quality: from the Nothing-desire springs a “countervailing” (Einziehen) lust-desire that is “the beginning of motion, stirring, and life” (Mysterium 3.10–11). As such this sexually-charged drive for life feels (secretly) bounded by Nothingness and death. Boehme even defines this relation between the first and second qualities in a way that surely would have pleased Freud and Jung: the first quality is like the “father” who attempts “to hold and shut in the disobedient son; whereby the son only grows stronger in his uneasiness” (Mysterium 3.11).26 Like the alchemical Mercury, this lust-desire is fluid and shimmering, with a tendency to both meld with and illuminate its desired objects.27 The science of Boehme’s day saw mercury as an “exceptional” planet and metal because of its chameleon-like character: it could assume both sides of various binary opposites, and could be either beneficent or maleficent (mercurius duplex) (see Weeks 2013, 29). Boehme notes that this lust-desire is “the 22 E.g. “The first property is the desire, like a magnet … the grasping in of the will … a sharp magnetic hunger, an astringency” (Clavis 38). Connections could be made here with the initial “contraction” or “tsim-tsum” of Lurianic Kabbalah. 23 Boehme could be used to plausibly support either side of this debate, which supports my contention that he defines the larger boundary in which these later debates took place. 24 Boehme: “The melancholy nature  … corrodes and consumes itself inwardly in its own being, and abides always in the house of sorrow and sadness” (Way to Christ 8.8/1978, 9.8). We saw above that Boehme’s own seminal illumination was preceded by a period of melancholy. The psychology of melancholy was much discussed in the Renaissance, for example in Cornelius Agrippa’s Philosophia Occulta (1533), Albrecht Dürer’s famous Melancholia I (1514), and later in Robert Burton’s popular The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). 25 American Psychiatric Association (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). 26 Freud will later call this motif “castration anxiety,” associated with the Oedipus complex. 27 Freud will later call this melding with the object “libidinal cathexis.”

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ground for the ‘I-ness’ (Ichheit),”28 which will fully emerge in the third quality (Clavis 41). These first two properties continually pull against each other in opposition, yet they remain tethered and dependent, and the tension between them produces the feeling-tone of the third property, which is both “anxiety” (Angst) and “anger” (Zorn) (Mysterium 3.12; Clavis 31). Boehme goes so far as to call it a “raging madness,” which, like all the drives of the dark world, is only partially “perceived” and never comprehended by consciousness (Mysterium 3.16). Its planet is Mars, god of war. And accordingly Boehme associates it with both the wrath of God, and the fear and anguish induced by that wrath, which together form the picture of hell (Clavis 44). The angst of this quality is basically the early modern precursor to today’s most common category of mental distress: anxiety.29 In this third quality the fiery “I-ness” (Ichheit) or “independent will” (eigene Wille) emerges in full, and this in turn is the root of “mind (Gemüt), and the senses (Sinne)” which will fully emerge in the fourth quality (Clavis 43). The “I-ness” of this third quality is connected to both its anger and anxiety, and anger forms something like the mirror image of anxiety: the “I-ness” either succumbs to anxious fear of a wrathful God, or it overcomes this anxiety by attempting to become “like God” itself (Gen. 3.5). It will thus either underestimate or overestimate its actual abilities (or both in turn). Jung called the latter condition “psychic inflation,” where the ego becomes “puffed up” beyond natural limits (1 Cor. 8.1), noting that an inflated ego always corresponds to secret insecurities in the unconscious. In Boehme’s day this inflated condition was known as a “choleric temperament” which Boehme says is “of the fire’s property. It produces stout courage, violent anger, aspiring pride, self-centredness, and disregard of others” (Way to Christ 8.3/1978, 9.3). With this third quality a kind of circulation begins in the dark world. A “whirling wheel” begins to turn around a centre, and the three drives of Nothing-desire, lust-desire, and anxiety/anger take on a unified character, like a kind of infernal trinity (Clavis 44). Boehme explicitly compares this to the alchemical trinity of salt, mercury, and sulphur, from which all matter was said to arise (Mysterium 3.17; Clavis 46). The crucial transition between the dark world and the light world is found in the fourth quality, which strictly speaking belongs to neither world but separates and mediates between them (e.g. Clavis 75). This fourth quality 28 Freud will later say that the ego emerges from the Id. 29 American Psychiatric Association (2013) DSM-5. In Boehme’s day anxiety was often included under the melancholic temperament, which Boehme says “stands in continual fear of the anger of God” (Way to Christ 8.6/1978, 9.6).

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corresponds to the sun (☉), the alchemical Sol, and Boehme characterizes it by a sudden “enkindling of the fire,” also called a “lightening flash” (Blitz) or “fright” (Schrack)30 that divides the dark fire world from the holy light world (Mysterium 3.25–26). This is also a division between the natural and the spiritual: the “fourth form of nature is the enkindling of the fire, where the sentient ( fühlende) and intellective (verständige) life first arises, and the hidden God reveals himself … in the fire and light; in the fire the natural, and in the light the oily spiritual” (Mysterium 3.18–19). That is, in this flash the light of Wisdom begins to be revealed. The fourth quality is mysterious in that it both divides and transforms—it both sunders darkness from light, and sublates one into the other: In this fright or enkindling of the fire two kingdoms sever themselves … the one comprehends not the other in its own source; and yet they proceed from one original, and are dependent on one another; and the one without the other were a nothing. (Mysterium 4.1) The dualistic character of this fourth quality also influences a vertical axis, so to speak (see figure 4). That is, horizontally, in the realm of eternal Wisdom, the fourth quality divides and transforms darkness into light. Vertically, the dualistic character of the fourth quality is passed down into the time-space realm of both the World Soul in the macrocosm, and temporal reason or Vernunft in the microcosm (see figures 2, 3, and 4). That is, the temporal realm of outer reason that we will explore shortly (section 5.4) proceeds from this fourth quality. Boehme associates this fourth quality with the mystery of the crucifixion of Christ,31 which, as an event that defines God’s righteousness or goodness, also serves to define and differentiate unrighteousness or evil. Mysteriously, the crucifixion also transforms virtue into vice, and vice into virtue, though without confusing the two. That is, Boehme agrees with the Pauline (and Lutheran) view of the crucifixion, that “God made him who had no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (1 Cor. 5.21). Good is made evil and evil is made good in this mysterious exchange.32 Thus the fourth qual-

30 This word is likely a dialectical variation of the German “Schreck” meaning “fright” or “shock.” Sparrow’s English edition uses its own neologism to translate it: “flagrat.” See Grimm (DWB 9: 1615). 31 The Christocentric and cruciform nature of Boehme’s theology has generally been understated by his interpreters. 32 Luther calls this the “wonderful exchange” (e.g. 1519/21 WA5:608).

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ity exists like a cross at the centre of Wisdom, running right through time and eternity, in both the macro- and the microcosm. 5.3

Wisdom: the Eternal Holy Light of Inner Understanding (“Verstand”)

In contrast to the Father-element, the Son-element reveals the true face of God, and represents the soul in the regenerate state. To summarize, this second soul-element is the inner eternal holy light of Wisdom or understanding (Verstand), which is the manifestation of the hidden dark-element.33 As such it can exist either in conflict with the dark element, or in a harmony that sublates and transforms the darkness into light.34 At times Boehme suggests that this sublation cancels the dark element, in a way similar to the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung, meaning both a cancelation and a completion. At other times he suggests that the light properties of the Son-element enlighten the dark properties of the Father retroactively, so to speak.35 It is important to note that the light soul-element does not “manifest” the dark soul-element in the 33 Boehme: “the abyss (Ungrundes) introduces itself into the byss (Grund) and being (Wesen) … wherein the manifestation/revelation of the abyss consists” (Mysterium 5.3). Each of the qualities of the dark soul-element finds its manifestation in the corresponding quality of the light soul-element: “Above all it should be noted that the first and seventh properties must always be accounted one, and also the second and the sixth are one, equally the third and fifth are one; the fourth is simply the dividing line” (Clavis 75). 34 Fallen and regenerate aspects of the soul can coexist simultaneously for Boehme, following the Lutheran concept of simul iustus et peccator (“both sinner and saint”) (e.g. Three Principles, Preface 9–10). As we saw above, Boehme at times says that the dark and light soul-elements are dependent on each other (e.g. Mysterium 4.1). This can sound dualistic (e.g. Manichaean or “gnostic”), but it need not be: The light-element only exists as a result of the harmony of all seven qualities of Wisdom, and in this harmony the so-called dark-element is no longer dark. In this sense, the light-element is not truly dependent on the dark. But when the dark-element is in conflict with the light, it remains in darkness, and in this sense the dark-element is still dependent on the light in that it depends on the existence of the full spectrum of Wisdom in order to seize part of that spectrum for its own wilful purposes. 35 E.g. “Behold I will tell you a mystery … in the center of the astringent quality [i.e. the dark Nothing] the light grows clear and bright” (Aurora 11.43; see also 11.19). In chapter 7 we will see Boehme’s exegesis of Genesis 1, where the seven qualities appear in their original goodness. Here the first quality is defined by the light created within the dark abyss on the first day. Boehme reads Genesis 1 in concert with John 1, where “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome/comprehend it” (Jn. 1.5). At other times Boehme also suggests that all seven qualities can exist either in a fallen or a regenerate state.

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sense of making it conscious. Consciousness roughly corresponds to the Holy Spirit-element that we will explore shortly, which is “outward” and thus bound by space and time.36 The dark and light soul-elements are both “inward,” meaning that they participate in the eternal realm of Wisdom/Sophia, which is accessed through the symbolism of the creative imagination, including the realm of dreams. That is, understanding (Verstand) is explicitly an imagebased cognition, which participates in divine Wisdom/Sophia, whereas knowledge (Vernunft) is explicitly a language-based cognition, directed toward the external manipulation and administration of the temporal realm, as we will see in a moment. The Son-element contains three qualities or drives, which Boehme again illustrates using the planetary attributes of the science of his day: (5) a gentle, joyful, playful “love-desire” (Liebe-Begierde), corresponding to Venus (♀), which allows the soul to perceive Wisdom; (6) a voice, sound, speech, or “melodious song,” representing the soul’s expression of Wisdom,37 corresponding to Jupiter (♃); and (7) a spiritual body of light, which is the “mansion and house” that gathers the previous six qualities (Mysterium 6.20), corresponding to both Saturn (♄) and Luna (☽), the moon. Each of these three qualities reflects an aspect of Christ the Son as cosmic Logos, the template and fulfilment of both the micro- and macrocosm, representing the soul’s harmonious participation in the eternal order of creation. These three drives can combine to produce various unique expressions in each individual soul. But taken together they generally coalesce into a loving, free, joyful, playful, selfless, artistic and fully embodied soul-element, defined primarily by “understanding” (Verstand), which is the soul’s ability to perceive and express divine Wisdom. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Jung’s concept of “individuation,” and particularly the ego’s relation to the “Self,” will see marked resonances here, which we will explore further below. Morally this Son-element is good, through its participation in the light world of the holy angels and the kingdom of heaven. It is the source of goodness in human thought and action, and as such it involves a “releasement” (Gelassenheit) of the individual will or “I-ness” (Ichheit) of the Father-element, in such a way that collective good now takes priority over personal gain. As mentioned above, in this releasement what at first feels like the death of “I-ness” turns out in fact to be a resurrection—a transformation or rebirth 36 37

Comparisons could be made here with Kant, which is important because both Freud and Jung are avowed Kantians. Sometimes Boehme seems to ascribe both the perception and expression of Wisdom to the sixth quality (e.g. Clavis 71).

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experienced as a free gift of grace (e.g. Incarnation 2.10.9–11/1764, 2.10.42–52). Here the basic similarity with Augustine is obvious: Released from self-will and solipsism (Augustine’s love-of-self), the soul no longer situates itself at the centre of the universe. Self-will recedes as perception and awareness expand to include ever greater vistas. In this way the soul becomes aware of a vast universe pulsating with loving abundance, and it takes its place joyfully in the harmonious order of the whole. It will help to note, in general terms, the way that Boehme differentiates the first (Father) soul-element from the second (Son) soul-element. He sometimes refers to the first simply as the “soul” (Seele) and the second as the “spirit (Geist) of the soul.”38 Similarly he calls the first element the “true desiring soul,” and the second the “true understanding (verständigen) spirit” (Clavis 59). This spirit is both affective and cognitive, defined both by its joyful love and its discernment of Wisdom, and thus Boehme describes it as both “mind” (Gemüthe) and “heart” (Herze) (e.g. Mysterium 1.4). At times he is even more specific about the relation between these two: “The spirit … is born in the heart … and keeps its seat there, and goes forth from that seat in power to the brain. The brain itself is a product, or a gentle power of the heart” (Aurora 5.21). As with Augustine, we see here a certain priority of love over knowledge. We also see that the character and quality of love affects the character and quality of cognition. Augustine’s love-of-self and Boehme’s “lust-desire” generally inspire a knowledge that is detached from eternal Wisdom and serves merely individual aims. Augustine’s love-of-God/other/self and Boehme’s “love-desire” generally inspire a knowledge that is harmonized with eternal Wisdom and serves the whole. To describe the actual content of understanding (Verstand), Boehme often uses a kind of shorthand: understanding perceives the “powers, colours, and virtues” that together compose Wisdom (e.g. Mysterium 1.6–7, 2.9; Incarnation 2.2.2/1764, 2.2.9). The metaphor suggests a perception of how the seven colours of the spectrum illuminate all things, and are yet aspects of one light. It also shows that Boehme, like Augustine, sees the virtues as eternal archetypes, with all of the virtues arising from the free love-desire of the fifth quality. Also, like Augustine, for Boehme virtue is defined as the Wisdom to discern our place and role in a morally ordered cosmos. In short, understanding grants the ability to perceive all of the archetypes and their “signatures” in

38 E.g. “The soul is the pearl, and the spirit of the soul is the finder of the pearl” (Forty Questions 16.5/1764, 16.6).

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the created order,39 with an emphasis on the ability to see how they all form a unity in God.40 Let me emphasize that the perception of these “powers, colours, and virtues” is facilitated primarily by the imagination. Let me quote Boehme at length on this point, as he describes how imagination drives the process of regeneration, including the death of self-will and the birth of imaginative freedom, which allows the perception and expression of Wisdom: The soul [i.e. the dark soul-element] desires or hungers to manifest itself; hence, it needs food or substance. To get substance for manifestation it has to cast its imagination forward into the light—the only place or state in which genuine substance is to be found—and thus it goes out of itself into another vibration. It has as it were to sink into death and rise out of it into life. It has to die as to its fiery, proud self-will, and to re-enter the will of God in the light … For its root is the anger of God and the hell-fire, and its predominant love is dominion—a hellish love. When desire’s imagination goes strongly forward out of itself it produces a terrible flash, which, like a cross, separates the dark substance caused by the contractive force in itself from the light substance caused by the expansive force, and the light kindles in the light substance. Thus the brimstone worm [i.e. the dark soul-element] is reborn as a new creature—an angel; humble, gentle, loving, and altruistic—in God’s Kingdom, which is in the sphere of the light. (Incarnation 2.5.12/2.5.56) 39 Boehme’s De Signatura Rerum (English: The Signature of all Things) is based on the Renaissance idea of the Book of Nature, where the unity of all things in God can be discerned in the interconnected harmony of the cosmos. At Boehme’s time this harmony was symbolic, aesthetic, and mathematical. Thus Kepler (1571–1630), in his Harmonies of the World, prays to “the Father of Intellects”: “through the sweetest bonds of harmonies Thou hast made all Thy works one.” Kepler further notes, in his Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, that “Copernicus reckons up the principal parts of the world by dividing the figure of the world into regions. For in the sphere, which is the image of God the Creator and Archetype of the world … there are three regions, symbols of the three persons of the Holy Trinity—the centre, a symbol of the Father; the surface, of the Son; and the intermediate space, of the Holy Ghost.” Kepler visited Görlitz in Boehme’s day (quoted in Weeks 1991, 189; 2013, 30). 40 Boehme sometimes describes eternal Wisdom as “the One, which is All” (Mysterium 5.14). In this sense she is the solution to the ancient problem of the one and the many. Just as all things “spring out of the One, so they all go back into one ground … although all alike work in distinct ways and properties” (Clavis 73). In Boehme’s account of his own seminal illumination he says: “In this light my spirit soon saw everything, recognizing God in all creatures, in vegetation and grass; I recognized who he is, and how he is, and what is his intention” (Aurora 19.10–13).

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The imagination seeks manifestation and embodiment, and this search drives the self-will out of its protective cocoon—a death that causes the birth of imaginative freedom, which itself facilitates the perception and expression of embodied Wisdom. We will discuss Boehme’s view of the creative imagination, including the crucial role of dreams, more fully in the next chapter. Whereas the three qualities of the Father-element are defined primarily in terms of irrational, chaotic and (often hidden) feelings, the three qualities of the Son-element are defined primarily in terms of an imaginative affective cognition that promotes creative freedom. Boehme’s central metaphor for this joyful, loving, and embodied creativity is birth,41 a metaphor that will later become central for Jung in his recasting of Freud’s Oedipus complex into a Jonah-and-the-whale complex. It will help to unpack the character of this imaginative affective cognition that promotes creative freedom in each of the three qualities: The love-desire of the fifth quality is associated with the all-embracing love of Venus (♀), and also with the five senses, which became fully activated to perceive Wisdom in all things. The sixth quality is associated with the jovial ebullience of Jupiter (♃), which guides the imaginative expression of this “understanding” (Verstand) in a multitude of forms, including speech, writing, music, and all of the creative arts. These artistic expressions are of the highest value because they allow humans to create in the image of the Creator. For Boehme, the whole creation is emphatically an artistic expression that rings with the Creator’s music (Mysterium 5.11). And “understanding” (Verstand) allows the soul to participate in this theophanic poiēsis, for “Wisdom is the great mystery of the divine art” (Clavis 19). The seventh quality, corresponds to both the moon (☽) and Saturn (♄) in that it recapitulates all seven qualities. Boehme calls it “the medium or container of the other six properties, in which they work, as life does in flesh” (Clavis 35). It represents the “melodious play of the divine Wisdom,” where all the properties “act their love-play … mutually to play and melodise one with another in their wrestling sport of love” (Mysterium 6.1, 6.3). It is also “the essence of corporeality,” by which Boehme means that the six qualities or “powers stand manifest … in a spiritual water, that is, in the holy element, whence this world with the four elements was brought forth and created into a substantial form.” (Mysterium 6.5). This primordial holy element, as mentioned above, was present throughout creation in its paradisiacal state, but was lost when the earth became disordered after the Fall. Similarly, in the microcosm, this element

41

Boehme seems to have inherited the motif of the birth of God in the soul from Valentin Weigel (see McGinn 2016, 112–128).

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constitutes the spiritual body that was lost after the Fall and is regained in the second birth (die Wiedergeburt). 5.4

Knowledge: the Temporal Realm of Outer Reason (“Vernunft”)

To summarize, the third soul-element, corresponding to the Holy Spirit, is the soul applied to the outer world of space and time. Boehme calls this the “astral mind,” and it basically corresponds to what Freud and Jung will later call the conscious mind.42 For Boehme the outer visible temporal world exists as an amalgam of the previous two eternal worlds, although in its physicality it is primarily the product of the dark fire world. Likewise, in the microcosm of the soul, the third soul-element is that part of the soul that administers and interacts with the outer temporal world. It too exists as an amalgam of the eternal dark and light soul-elements, although in its fallen state it is primarily attuned to a dark perception that sees the world as a theatre for its own self-aggrandizement. For Boehme this third element or “astral mind” is defined by outward knowledge or reason (Vernunft), which is common to all animals, although more developed in humans, especially due to the development of language-based thought. In its lower aspect, Vernunft manages the most basic aspects of existence: it allows the soul to provide for itself, “to eat and procreate” (Mysterium 10.2). In its higher aspect, where humans seem to surpass the rest of the animal kingdom in linguistic complexity, Vernunft explores the vast interconnected cosmos of stars, planets, and elements—of astronomy, astrology, and alchemy—which together defined the World Soul in the science of Boehme’s day. Importantly, this higher aspect of Vernunft as scientific knowledge is not value-neutral. Especially when it is detached from eternal Wisdom, its knowledge is Faustian, intent on manipulating this vast causal web of space-time creation for its own aggrandizement.43 42 I will, however, qualify this generalization in what follows, since for all three thinkers what is conscious is not static but is meant to be expanded in very particular ways, and dreams play a crucial role in this expansion. 43 On Boehme as a response to Faust see Weeks (1991, 51–54). The Faustian nature of modern science was just becoming evident in Boehme’s day, for example, as Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna called for “a line and race of inventions that may in some degree subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity” (1620, Preface). In Boehme’s system, certain techno-scientific productions fall under the category of “black magic,” but their dark nature remains hidden just as the dark soul-element that motivates them remains hidden. In this respect Boehme was again prophetically prescient.

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Before moving to the next section, it might help to summarize these three soul-elements, and their respective three worlds, in Boehme’s own words: the soul stands in three kingdoms … the first is the eternal nature: the potent might of eternity, the dark and fire-world, according to which God calls himself a strong zealous angry God and a consuming fire, in which Lucifer hath wholly diabolised himself. The second is the holy light-world, where the eternal understanding (Verstand) has displayed itself through the fire’s sharpness, in the light of the great fiery love-desire, and turned the wrathful dark-and-fiery property to a kingdom of joy, which is the true manifestation of the Deity, and it is called the holy heaven of the angelical delight and bliss. The third kingdom or world is the outward astral and elemental kingdom: the air with its domineering stars, wherein all the five outward constellations rule, and the higher and lower of the four elements, out of which the five senses take their origins, wherein the vegetable and reasonable (vernünftige) life consists. This is the animal soul, which rules in all the creatures of this world, in all the outward heavens or constellations, and in all the earth or essences of the outward world. (Mysterium 15.18–20)44 The harmonious functioning of these three worlds is the goal of Boehmian psychology. And just as we saw with Augustine, as the soul is healed, its three elements resemble the Trinity more fully. The elements begin to interpenetrate (“perichoresis”) as darkness is sublated into light, and time is wedded to eternity.45

44 45

The dark unconsciousness of modern science is probably best exemplified in the words that Oppenheimer used to justify the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it” (Polenberg 2002, 46–47). It is easy to see why the Romantics were so fond of Boehme as an antidote to Enlightenment scientism. See also Signature 3.8, 13.22–26/1781, 3.6, 13.19–23; Election of Grace 4.27/1781, 4.61–68. McGrath describes Boehme’s three soul-elements or principles as follows: The first is “the principle of ipseity or self, defined, as it must be, over and against the ‘other.’ The second principle is the principle of alterity or otherness, defined over against the ‘self’” (2012, 55). I tend to see this as going beyond Boehme’s own formulation. In a footnote McGrath notes, “to be precise, Boehme does not speak of alterity, difference, or otherness,” and he notes that the term alterity is “less than precise” (78n28). These terms were, however, used by S.T. Coleridge in a way that was likely influenced by Boehme and Schelling: “In the Trinity there is, 1. Ipseity. 2. Alterity. 3. Community” [H.N. Coleridge 1835, i. 77]. For McGrath, the first two soul-elements or principles are distinguished by conflicting drives: “One drive

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Interactions and Transformations: the Twofold and Threefold Soul

Having introduced Boehme’s three soul-elements, we are now in a position to see how they interact to produce various psychological states and transformations. It is important to underline Boehme’s originality in both his description of the seven qualities or drives, and in his schematic organization of them into three soul-elements. While Boehme draws on the planetary attributes of the science of his day, he also subordinates this scientific view to the biblical view of Wisdom’s seven qualities or “source-spirits” as described in Genesis 1 and the book of Revelation. That is, he only includes those planetary attributes that align with his reading of the biblical text, informed by his own experience.46 But as we will see, Boehme is even more original in his description of the interactive dynamics of these three soul-elements. And importantly, these dynamics reveal very striking large-scale structural analogies with Freud and Jung. It is precisely the most original aspects of Boehme’s schema that bring him into alignment with Freud and Jung.

directs eros within, toward the self; the other drive directs eros without, toward the other. But the second drive presupposes the subordination and support of the first. Relatedness to the other is not simply a negation of narcissism; to speak in the language of Freud, love is the sublimation of narcissism” (2016, 49). I tend to see these conflicting drives (within vs. without) emerging already in the first two qualities of Boehme’s first soul-element. The “Nothing-desire” of the first quality is an inward drive, and the “lust-desire” of the second quality is an outward drive. This language of inner and outer, however, is confusing because Boehme uses “inner” mainly to distinguish the eternal nature of first two soul-elements, and “outer” to distinguish the temporal nature of the third soul-element. Further, the “lust-desire” of the first soul-element involves relations with both inner and outer objects, and likewise for the “love-desire” of the second soul-element. On the third principle or soul-element McGrath says, “if one reads Boehme carefully one notices that the third principle does not add anything new to the drama that transpires between the first and the second principles” (2012, 56). My view is that the third principle is temporal, distinct from the other two as eternal. McGrath further notes that the third principle does not represent a “resolution of the opposites” as in Hegel’s logic (78n33), and I agree. But the third principle does represent a temporal resolution or instantiation of the two eternal principles. I also agree with McGrath that the first two principles remain partially unconscious, while the “fullness of self-manifestation is in the third principle, which, anticipating Schelling, we call personality” (2012, 71). In general, McGrath’s reading of Boehme looks forward both to Schelling and von Baader (e.g. 2012, 54, 55, 78n24, 78n26). I differ from him mainly by emphasizing the particularity of the seven qualities, and how they coalesce in the three principles uniquely in each individual, and in each movement of the individual psyche. 46 As Weeks says, referring to the Aurora, the “more or less traditional astrological associations are the raw materials of Boehme’s ‘system,’ not the final results” (1991, 73).

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At times Boehme speaks of the fallen soul as “twofold,” and the reborn soul as “threefold” (e.g. Incarnation 1.2.14, 1.13.1–17, 3.5.9/1764, 1.2.58, 1.13.1–110, 3.5.35). And while these terms represent ideal types that can vary by degree, they provide a helpful shorthand for the discussion below, since the twofold soul is roughly Freudian, and the threefold soul is roughly Jungian. This general statement also holds true for the respective dream theories of Freud and Jung: Freud’s “wish fulfilment” theory of dreams generally corresponds to the “phantasy” dreams of Boehme’s twofold soul, and Jung’s “compensatory” theory, where dreams structure the developmental process of individuation, generally corresponds to the “imagination” dreams of Boehme’s threefold soul. I will unpack these statements here generally and revisit them in later chapters. The twofold soul functions according to the first and third soul-elements described above: the hidden inner dark element of chaotic desire, and the outer time-space element of worldly rationality (Vernunft). A twofold soul thus generally sees itself as contained and defined by the outer world of time and space, while it is driven (unconsciously) by the hidden dark desires of the first soul-element: a Nothing-desire for death, a lust-desire for life, and an anxiety and/or anger resulting from the tension between them. This twofold soul likewise has a twofold will, but it is generally only aware of the conscious will of the third soul-element, while the dark will of the first soul-element remains hidden. A soul in this state might be very socially adapted in its occupation with worldly affairs, particularly if it is skilled at using outward rationality (Vernunft) to navigate the space-time realm, and it will generally see itself as “a good person,” while in a larger sense it remains totally unaware of the dark motives for its actions. In fact, a soul in this state is more likely to notice the many evils in the world around it than to notice any darkness in itself.47 The twofold soul remains conflicted, with its two wills divided. But because the dark will and its desires remain unconscious, the outer soul often fails to understand the source or reason for the conflict, much like the state described by the apostle Paul: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7.15). The dark world can manifest in the twofold soul in a variety of ways that will thus seem generally incomprehensible to the outward cognition of the third soul-element: depression, fear, anxiety, moodiness, anger, obsessions, compulsions, etc. Much more radical evil can manifest if the third soul-element surrenders itself to, or is “swallowed” by, the dark world. But in general, the most 47

This follows Jesus’ teaching about what Freud and Jung will later call projection: we see the “speck” in our neighbour’s eye rather than the “beam” in our own (Mt. 7.3–5).

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common (and generally unnoticed) manifestation of the dark soul-element is its desire to control and consume the world around it: it neglects the innate beauty and goodness of objects and sees only how they serve “I-ness.”48 In attempting to control space-time reality for its own benefit, the twofold soul finds itself increasingly (and paradoxically) alienated from any true and deep relationship with the world around it. For Boehme, the dreams of the twofold soul primarily contain “phantasy,” where the dark world conjures false visions that, on the surface, largely reflect the whims and wishes of “I-ness” as it navigates the time-space realm. But on a deeper level, as Freud discovered, beneath the surface narrative, such phantasy dreams also reveal the drives of the dark world, including its overwhelming lust-desire, which tends to fuel unrealistic egoic desires for power and control, while always pushing against the shadow of Nothingness and death with its haunting, angst inducing inevitability.49 While the wishes of these “phantasy” dreams are ultimately unrealistic they are nonetheless revelatory in that they reveal the dark inner world, and the dark desires hiding beneath the wishes of “I-ness.” We cannot help but be surprised by the fact that Freud’s observation of dreams eventually led him to posit an unconscious mind or “Id” (Es) with qualities virtually identical to those of Boehme’s dark world: a death-drive (later called “Thanatos”), a lifedrive or libido (“Eros”), and an angst induced by their polar tension.50 Likewise for Freud the “ego” (Ich) is that time-space aspect of the soul that emerges from the Id, and mediates between the Id and the outer world. Freud’s ego thus attempts to function according to the “reality principle,” while the Id functions according to the desires of the “pleasure principle.” Finally, the third element of Freud’s structural model, the “super-ego” (Über-Ich), gives us a hint 48

Boehme describes this as a “fierce wrathful dragon, which only wills to devour, as in the Revelation of John” (Incarnation 1.13.4/1764, 1.13.23). Comparisons could be made here to contemporary “consumerism,” and its roots in an advertising genre that was pioneered on Freudian principles by Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernay’s also influenced the field of propaganda, not least by renaming it “public relations.” 49 Boehme’s “kingdom of phantasy” is the astral-elemental realm and the outward soul, inasmuch as it is the manifestation of the hidden dark world (see e.g. Election of Grace 2.12–13, 4.29, 5.20, 7.7/1781, 2.37–40, 4.71–2, 5.59–67, 7.15–17; Way to Christ 3.1.42/1978, 4.1.42). On the difference between dreams of “phantasy” and “imagination” see Mysterium 67.5–14. At other times Boehme calls “phantasy” the “false imagination.” I have used the older spelling of “phantasy” to highlight its continuity with the “phantasms” of the dark world (see Couliano, 1987, 1–84). 50 Here I am referring to Freud’s later structural model, which shows even closer conformity to Boehme than his earlier “topographical” model, implying that Freud’s resemblance to Boehme increased with his clinical experience.

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of Boehme’s light world, since it is the repository of virtue, represented by Freud as the “ideal self” with its moral norms and conscience.51 Importantly, however, for Freud these moral ideals are inculcated by parents and authority figures, whereas Jung posited an innate and archetypal conscience, which approximates to some degree the Boehmian and Augustinian view of eternal archetypal virtues. For Boehme, the transition from the twofold to the threefold soul begins with a process of confession, as the third soul-element turns inward and becomes dimly aware of the dark motives for its actions. It begins to realize that even (and perhaps especially) its best intentions and efforts can be fuelled, unconsciously, by darkness. Here confession is less about admitting known wrongs than about becoming aware of unknown dark motivations, and the ways they have unconsciously harmed others. The twofold soul’s self-image of “average goodness” begins to crumble as it becomes aware that, for example, even our most “charitable” acts can be fuelled by secret egoistic desires to appear virtuous before others, or to demonstrate our superiority to those in need.52 This process of becoming aware of the dark soul-element forms the core of traditional Freudian analysis, and in Jungian individuation it is represented by the initial stage of confrontation with the “shadow,” a series of figures who appear in dreams representing the hidden inferior aspects of the conscious personality. This process of coming to awareness of the soul’s inner darkness is by no means easy, and it is generally resisted both by egoistic hubris and by rationality itself. Reason (Vernunft) tends to fear the dark world because the syllogistic logic of time and space can neither comprehend nor control the imagistic logic of the inner eternal world. In excluding awareness of the dark fire, the soul also excludes its most irrational dark emotions by fleeing to the sanctuary of reason. But this attempt usually proves futile, since the reason-bound soul feels increasingly persecuted, often by invisible or invented enemies in the outer world, which appear as projections of the inner dark world. The soul’s inner dark face thus appears in the face of the other, and the ego’s supposedly neutral and objective rationality tends to become the plaything of hidden emotional undercurrents. Thus when Boehme describes the transition from the twofold 51 Strachey’s English translation changed Freud’s simple German words into their Latin cognates for emphasis, but in the original German “ego” is simply “I,” “Id” is simply “It,” and “super-ego” is simply “over-I.” I will use Strachey’s now accepted terms. 52 Boehme was well aware that the worst evils are often cloaked in virtue. For example, he was deeply troubled that, in his own day, defending religious doctrine had become a pretext for mass murder.

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to the threefold soul as a “releasement” (Gelassenheit), he is talking about a general surrender of the ego’s hubris, its self-image of “average goodness,” and its attempt to control and dominate both the outer world and itself through a reason (Vernunft) that excludes Wisdom or understanding (Verstand). In terms of biblical imagery, Boehme describes this process of confession, releasement, and increased conscious awareness in fairly typical Lutheran and Pauline terms as a “dying and rising with Christ” (Incarnation 1.12.4/1764, 1.12.18). And yet the imagery here is crucial, since the process itself is thoroughly imaginative: “No one can go into the light world except through a dying. In this dying the imagination must first lead the way” (Incarnation 2.4.15/1764, 2.4.70). We will trace this imaginative journey and its major imagistic sign-posts in chapter 7, but here we can note that, in general, the growing awareness of the inner dark world sparks a dim awareness of and a desire for the light world of Wisdom. Confession and releasement are met by grace and forgiveness, and grace appears as the greater or superordinate category, just as the full spectrum of Sophia’s seven qualities is superordinate to the dark world of the first three qualities. At this point the world within, as it surfaces mainly in dreams and spontaneous creative imagination, no longer appears as simple darkness but as a collision of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum)—darkness and light—as we see in Boehme’s fourth quality, where the “lightening flash” (Blitz) both divides and transforms one into the other. Here the morning light dawns and breaks forth in the soul, although darkness still remains, in keeping with the Lutheran doctrine of simul iustus et peccator. And yet in relation to the darkness, the light of Wisdom reveals itself as the whole in relation to the part. Freud offers more than a hint of this emergence of light from darkness, particularly in his concept of sublimation, which became increasingly important in his later work. In a typical Freudian analysis, the growing awareness of the Id and its dark desires is generally accompanied by a similar awareness of the superego’s moral norms, which are generally inculcated in childhood. In this process the ego is generally prompted to take responsibility, both for its own dark desires, and for the parental norms it has thus far blindly accepted (whether it obeyed them or not). Thus the ego that previously projected its dark desires on others, and felt oppressed by an external superego of judgmental moralism, begins to see both the darkness and the light within, and generally feels less constrained in the process. This does not necessarily mean that moral norms are weakened, but they generally appear less oppressive because they are no longer seen simply as the product of external authorities. In turn, in a successful analysis, the ego’s increased conscious awareness tends to free up more (sublimated) libido for the outer world. In short, and in Lutheran and Boehmian terms, life is increasingly experienced in terms of grace rather than

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law, and play rather than work; or rather grace infuses law as play infuses work. Moral norms feel less oppressive as the harsh critic ceases, and increased energy brings joy to daily life. Here Freudian sublimation seems very close to Boehmian transformation. But importantly, for Freudian theory, the process ends here in a mixed world of darkness and light, with sublimation generally as the goal or terminus. And in therapeutic practice, of course, the realization of this process is by no means easy, as there really is no “typical” analysis. Rather than productive sublimation, the libido can easily become lost and stuck in various other defences and fixations. Jung goes further. After the confrontation with the shadow, the unconscious begins to appear in dreams in typical Boehmian form as a coincidentia oppositorum—darkness and light. And the centre-point of these polar opposites indicates a new centre for the personality—a centre outside the ego, and around which the ego now begins to circle, so to speak. This centre and the ultimate circumference of its circle are what Jung calls the Self archetype, represented in dreams by symbols of “unity and totality” (1951a, CW9ii: 31), since it represents the totality of the psyche rather than the ego’s limited perspective. For Jung, the Self archetype is the imago Dei in the soul, and “the approximation of the ego to the self  … must be a never-ending process” (1951a, CW9ii: 23). For Jung this centre is marked in Christian imagery by the cross of Christ, where darkness is transformed into light. And the emergence of this new centre in the psyche is often marked by the dream motif of birth—the birth of a special or divine child—corresponding to Boehmian “rebirth” (Wiedergeburt). But for Jung, while this new centre of the imago Dei is hinted at in dreams at this point, it can only be consciously integrated as the ego enters into relationship with another dream figure: the “anima” (generally in men) or “animus” (generally in women).53 Whereas the shadow represents the personal unconscious, the anima and animus open the door to Jung’s collective unconscious and its universal archetypes. The ego’s marriage with the anima/animus in 53

Despite the gendered nature of these terms, Jung was not a “gender essentialist,” although some have attempted to read (and dismiss) him this way. On this issue see Susan Rowland, Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002). Unlike Rowland I do not see two viable readings of Jung (essentialist and non-essentialist). I think Jung is not a gender essentialist for two reasons: 1) He consistently defines archetypes as “purely formal,” meaning that they are empty forms, the content of which is provided by the cultural context. Konrad Lorenz, for example, provided himself as the content of the mother archetype for a group of baby geese in his famous imprinting experiments. 2) The fact that every individual contains within them both “masculine” and “feminine” archetypes tends to relativize the meaning of these gendered terms, and possibly to subordinate them to some more fundamental dualism, such as, for example, the yin and yang of Taoism.

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Jungian theory generally corresponds to Boehme’s marriage with the Virgin Sophia—the attendant phenomena of this marriage being virtually identical.54 Importantly, for both Boehme and Jung, this marriage is realized in conversation with dreams and/or waking creative imagination. The “imagination” of Boehme’s (and Jung’s) threefold soul, in contrast to the “phantasy” of Boehme’s (and Freud’s) twofold soul, represents a higher reality and awareness (both ontologically and epistemologically) than normal waking life. In turn this higher reality gradually begins to inform and structure waking life as the ego finds its bearings in relation to eternal archetypal realities and a morally ordered cosmos. We will explore the imaginative symbolism of this developmental process in chapter 7, after we first explore Boehme’s general theory of dreams. To summarize the differences between Freud and Jung on this point, note simply that, for Freud, the Id is not capable of significant change. The ego can become aware of it, and some sublimation is possible, but the Id remains quite static. For Jung and Boehme, the dark aspects of the soul (including shadow and anima/animus) are capable of significant transformation and rebirth, the resulting effects being quite radical alteration of one’s perception of reality—alterations that, for lack of a better term, we call mystical. 54

The process is much more complex than this statement suggests. In terms of “heterosexual eros,” Jung notes four general stages in the development of the anima, personified as (1) Eve (of Genesis 2); (2) Helen of Troy; (3) the Virgin Mary; and (4) Sophia, who seems to recapitulate in her being the three preceding figures and stages, and who Jung identifies as “Sapientia” and as “parallel to the Shulamite of the Song of Songs” (Jung 1946, CW16: 173–4). Jung was much more hesitant about stages of animus development, because the diversity of symbolism defied categorization. And yet his followers have posited the following: (1) an athlete or thug embodying physical power; (2) a man of initiative and planned action who inspires independence and career ambitions; (3) the inspiring “word” personified, for example, as a professor or spiritual leader; and (4) spiritual meaning personified, for example, by Hermes as psychopomp—guide to the unconscious (see Sharp 1991). For sexual and gender minority individuals (lgbtq+), this developmental process is more difficult to generalize, and it is just beginning to be described, albeit inconsistently, in the literature. For more on this see chapter 8.2.

Chapter 6

Boehme’s Theory of Dreams: Building the Body of Light This chapter explores Boehme’s theory of dreams as a specific aspect of his theory of the imaginal realm—that mesocosm of symbols that joins eternal ideas to corporeal bodies, and eternal mind to temporal matter. Augustine described this realm in terms of visio spiritualis, and Boehme describes it in terms of Wisdom as the “divine imagination” in which the human imagination can participate (Clavis 19). Let me quote Boehme at length to orient us: Holy scripture says: Wisdom is the breathing of divine power, a ray or breath of the Almighty (Wisdom 7.25). Again, God made all things through his Wisdom (Ps. 104.24). This is to be understood thus: Wisdom is the emanated Word of divine power … a medium or object of the infinite (ungründlichen) One in existence/being (Wesen), in which the Holy Spirit works, forms, moulds. Understand, the Spirit forms and moulds the divine understanding (Verständniss) in Wisdom, for Wisdom is the passive one, and the Spirit of God in her is the active … in her the powers, colours, and virtues are manifest/revealed (offenbar). In her is the multiplicity of the power, that is, the understanding (Verstand): she is herself the divine understanding (Verstand), or the divine contemplation/tranquillity (Beschauligkeit), in which the One is manifest/revealed (offenbar). She is  … a divine imagination (Imaginatio) in which the ideas (Ideen) of angels and souls are seen from eternity as divine images (Göttlicher Ebenbildness)—not as creatures, but as a reflection, as one sees oneself in a mirror. (Clavis 17–19) Imagination (Einbildung, Imaginatio) is one of Boehme’s most important concepts because, as we see in this quotation, at times he uses it almost synonymously with both Wisdom/Sophia and understanding (Verstand). Usually it denotes the image-based cognition of the human soul that is capable of both perceiving and participating in divine Wisdom.1 Imagination is like a mental mirror in the soul, which becomes clear in stillness and contemplation, in 1 See Mysterium 1.1–6, and Martensen ([1882] 1949, 42–43), Koyré ([1929] 1968, 213–214), Brinton (1930, 112); Berdyaev (1937, 184); and Weeks (1991, 149–153).

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which Sophia’s playful images can be reflected, just as Sophia is herself a mirror of the Trinity where the unity of God is reflected in the harmonious multiplicity of created being. As we saw in chapter 3, Boehme was instrumental in reviving the concept of imagination in the West, as a locus of spiritual growth and illumination. For Boehme, imagination includes image-based cognition in both dreams and the waking state, although at times he deals specifically with the topic of dreams, as we will see below. Further, as mentioned above, Boehme distinguishes between the “phantasy” of the two-fold soul, which is false but nonetheless revelatory in that it reveals the dark desires beneath the whims and wishes of “I-ness,” and the “imagination” of the three-fold soul, which presents objects that are ontologically superior to the objects of temporal reality, and truths that are higher than those of temporal language-based reason (Vernunft). As Blake said, “A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that mortal and perishing nature can produce” (1988, 541). The fact that both dreams and waking imagination grant access to the imaginal realm led some of Boehme’s later followers to assume that both proceed from a common “faculty” in the soul.2 While Boehme never speaks of such a faculty, he does suggest that the hidden desire of the dark soul-element creates images continuously, and that these spontaneous images are eclipsed by the outward rational soul-element (Vernunft) when it is driven by ego or “I-ness” (Ichheit) (e.g. Six Theosophic Pts 7.3, 7.13–22, 7.30). This explains why, when the “I-ness” and the outward soul-element are stilled either in contemplation or in sleep, these spontaneous images begin to emerge freely into consciousness.3 In short, it seems that for Boehme there is a kind of dreaming or spontaneous imagination that operates continuously in the soul and that can only be

2 Faivre gives a good summary of Boehme’s “theosophical” successors on this point: “man possesses in himself a generally dormant but always potential faculty to connect with directly, or to ‘plug into,’ the divine world or that of superior beings. This faculty is due to the existence of a special organ within us, a kind of intellectus, which is none other than our imagination—in the most positive and creative sense of that term” (1996, 8). We saw above that Augustine was often likewise misinterpreted as advocating a faculty psychology. 3 Boehme speaks of the abyss of the first soul-element, when it is redeemed, as both still and radically free. The “contemplation” he encourages in his readers seems to be a kind of “stillness” in cognition that initially forms a mirror in which the imagination can express itself freely, and that ultimately leads to pure silence (e.g. Forty Questions 1.6/1764, 1.9; see Pektas 2006, 103).

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perceived when “I-ness” is stilled. This idea later became an important aspect of Jung’s dream theory.4 Many of Boehme’s “theosophical” followers emphasized accessing this spontaneous creative imagination in the waking state, through “active imagination.”5 But Boehme himself, drawing on biblical precedent, seems to place the emphasis more on dreams, which allow a regular nightly immersion in the imaginal.6 In general, Boehme’s dream theory has been overlooked not only by his “theosophical” followers but by scholars, likely because his most sustained treatment of the topic is given in the Mysterium Magnum, which as noted above is his longest, most comprehensive, and least studied work. As Boehme’s English translator John Sparrow notes, in the original German edition, the third and final part of the Mysterium (chapters 64.6–78) was published separately under the title Josephus Redivivus ([1654] 1965, 617). And here Boehme pictures Joseph, the famous biblical dreamer and dream interpreter, as the ideal Christian and the archetypal “new human”—a type of Christ. We will explore this final section of the Mysterium in a moment after a brief comparison of the dream theories of Boehme and Augustine. 6.1

Ecstasy, Magia, and Dream Deception

Like Augustine, Boehme sees the biblical account of Adam’s sleep and the creation of Eve as a crucial precedent for understanding the nature and function of dreams. We saw above that for Augustine, and Tertullian before him, the word “ekstasis” used in the Septuagint translation of this passage (Gen. 2.21) helped define dreams as a common or everyday form of “ecstasy,” where the active eternal soul “stands out” from the sleeping temporal body. For Boehme it is not ecstasy but “magia” that sleep grants us, although the two concepts are related. We saw above that Boehme uses “magia” as a general descriptor of the imaginal realm, but one that emphasizes its ability to “create where nothing is” (Forty Questions 13.5/1764, 13.9) through spontaneous symbolic images. For Boehme, “all dreams are magical, therefore the soul without a body stands

4 Here Jung is following C.G. Carus ([1846] 1970) and other followers of Schelling. 5 Faivre calls active imagination “the essential component of Esotericism” (Faivre 1994, 21). Jung’s concept of active imagination, though slightly different, seems to originate with Boehme and his followers (Faivre 1996, 109). 6 Some of Boehme’s later followers in the Romantic period also emphasized dreams, including G.H. von Schubert in his influential Die Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (The Nocturnal Side of Natural Science, 1808) and Die Symbolik des Traumes (The Symbolism of Dreams, 1814).

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in the magia of God” (Forty Questions 26.17/1764, 26.20). Similarly, in Boehme’s reading of the Genesis text, Adam fell into a sleep, that is, into the magia: it was as if he were not in this world; for all his senses ceased  … he knew nothing of his body  … and he stood magically with his mind (Gemüthe) like a mirror on which the Spirit of the Great World [i.e. the World Soul] gazes and conveys whatever it sees  … which are dreams and representations (Vorbildungen). (Incarnation 1.6.1) Here Boehme, like Augustine and Tertullian, sees dreaming as a process whereby the body and its senses become still while the soul remains active. But unlike his patristic forebears, Boehme is more specific about the actual activity within the dreaming soul: one aspect of the soul becomes a smooth “mirror,” and in this state it can receive and perceive images that originate from beyond it. Boehme’s mind mirror is part of the divine image in humans, since God also creates by means of the “mirror” of Wisdom.7 We also see here that dream images are received primarily from the astral realm of the World Soul.8 In a moment we will see that dreams can also reflect the eternal archetypes of the seven qualities of Wisdom/Sophia, which can guide the soul on a specific transformative journey. What is clear is that dreams and magia are virtually synonymous in the above quotations, and for Boehme, magia is also “the best theology, for in it true faith is both founded and discovered” (Six Mystical Pts 5:23). We hear more than an echo of Tertullian’s assertion that “the greater part of humanity get their knowledge of God from dreams” (De Anima 47). Adam’s dream magia is also important because during it, in the biblical account, the sexes were divided, and for Boehme this division is a kind of prefiguration of the Fall. In this division Adam “lost the heavenly wit or understanding (Verstand)” (Incarnation 1.6.7/1764, 1.6.40). Like Augustine’s figural reading of this passage as a division between female knowledge (scientia) and male Wisdom (sapientia), Boehme reads it as a division between female spirit and male soul: Eve represents “spirit” (Geist), in that she embodies the spiritual 7 E.g. Incarnation 1.5.2, 1.10.5, 1.11.10, 1.14.7/1764, 1.5.5, 1.10.20, 1.11.61, 1.14.30. This is a biblical motif: “she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness” (Wisdom 7.26). On Boehme’s use of this motif see Faivre (1996, 137–142). Similarly, on a lower level, Boehme calls the World Soul a mirror of Wisdom (Incarnation 1.11.3/1764, 1.11.20). 8 Boehme states this elsewhere in several places, e.g. “the starry heaven models to humans a figure in sleep in their mind” (Incarnation 1.10.5/1764, 1.10.19; see also Three Principles 12.24, 13.27/1764, 12.23, 13.27; Mysterium 67.5).

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water of the light soul-element, and Adam represents “soul” (Seele) in that he embodies the fiery desire of the dark soul-element (e.g. Incarnation 1.2.14/1764, 1.2.61; Mysterium 19.16–17). Importantly, just as we saw with Augustine, this is a figural and not a literal reading, meaning that in reality both sexes retain all three soul-elements. But for Boehme, this figural reading does impact the literal reality of heterosexual love, in which each sex tends to project part of its psyche onto the opposite sex (Incarnation 1.6.11/1764, 1.6.52). In the phenomenon known as “falling” in love, men project their inner female on women, and women project their inner male on men, a motif that Jung will later appropriate.9 “And so,” says Boehme, “the vehement imagination of man and wife begins, so that the one desires to mix with the other” (Incarnation 1.6.10/ 1764, 1.6.48). The result is desire, pain, and hierarchy between the sexes, characteristics that the biblical account sees as “curses” of the Fall (Gen. 3.14–19). Another possibility emerges if the projections are withdrawn: reciprocity, self-awareness, and true sexual union, both within the individual and between partners. Ultimately, Boehme believes that both sexes are searching for the full spectrum of Wisdom in their partner (Three Principles 13.39). And thus erotic love and relationship becomes a psychotherapeutic process of unmasking projections and discovering one’s own inner world, which is first seen in the face of the beloved (Incarnation 1.12.3/1764, 1.12.11–12).10 The same process can also be seen in homosexual love and relationship, where projections are just as common.11 The spiritual goal of this process is symbolized in the “making together of a child”—the birth of the divine child in the womb of the Virgin Sophia (Incarnation 1.6.11, 1.12.3/1764, 1.6.52, 1.12.8). And the painfulness of this process is figured in certain biblical consequences of the Fall, which include the toil of work and the pain of childbirth (Gen. 3.16–19). This psychotherapeutic view of the division and union of the sexes was appropriated by Jung, in his concepts of anima and animus, and his observation of the birth of the divine child in the dreams of his patients. Similarly, Freud’s concept of original bisexuality likely has a Boehmian pedigree, possibly via Gustav Fechner. Because this figural division of the sexes—between the dark world of soul and the light world of spirit—occurred during the first dream magia, dreams 9 Interestingly, Boehme seems to assign the more positive qualities of the light world to women, whereas Augustine’s figural reading was more typically misogynistic. But for both thinkers it seems that misogyny itself (and misandry) result from projecting one’s own worst qualities on the opposite sex. 10 Dante’s Beatrice can be understood in these terms, as the source and goal of the entire journey. 11 I am drawing here on my experience as a psychotherapist.

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also play an important role in charting the figural reunion of the sexes, as we will see in the next chapter. For Boehme, the division of the sexes also prefigures the eating of the fruit of the dualistic Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This eating symbolizes Adam becoming “captivated in his imagination” with the astral-elemental kingdom of earth rather than the eternal kingdom of heaven. In the biblical account, the consequence of this eating is death, but Boehme reads this “death” back into the earlier account of the division of the sexes: Adam’s “sleep signifies death,” in which the “earthly kingdom overcame him and ruled over him … Therefore Adam was drawn, and rightly tempted, to see whether he could be a Lord and King over the stars and elements” and he “lost his heavenly eyes” (Incarnation 1.5.7–9/1764, 1.5.40–48). Just as the dream magia of sleep is the portal into the temporal realm for the primordial human, it is potentially also the door that reopens us to the eternal realm of Wisdom, as we will see. In summary, both Boehme and Augustine read the account of the Fall as a figural description of division in the trinitarian soul, which in turn causes a truncation of human perception and awareness. For Boehme the division between the eternal dark and light soul-elements, between soul and spirit, figured by Adam and Eve respectively, causes a fall into the astral-element realm and the outward temporal soul-element. We lose our ability to perceive the eternal realm of Wisdom that speaks in the depths of our own soul and shines in the world around us. Likewise, the soul’s healing is figured in the reunion of the sexes, which was a common alchemical and kabbalistic motif of the time (see figure 5), and which we will see in the transformative journey of dream symbolism in the next chapter. According to the biblical account, for the sexes to once again become “one flesh,” importantly, they must first leave father and mother, a motif that became very important for both Freud and Jung. And we will see the importance of freeing oneself from these early family bonds again in the story of Joseph below. The fact that the explicit goal here, in withdrawing projections and incorporating internal opposite-sex archetypes, is a return to the original androgenous human of Genesis 1, may have important implications for our symbolic and theological understanding of sexual and gender minority attractions and identities today (lgbtq+).12 Although Boehme of course did not address these issues explicitly, there is evidence of

12 The non-binary “androgyne” was a common alchemical figure representing the goal of the work, and may have been derived from kabbalistic figures like Adam Kadmon. For a good summary of recent scholarship on queer theory and alchemy see Nummedal (2021). For a summary of queer theory in relation to Kabbalah see Michaelson (2012).

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interesting reformations of gender concepts and roles in some of his followers (see Gibbons 1996; Martin 2020). We noted above that Augustine explicitly mitigated the fear of demonic deception in dreams. For while visio spiritualis can be deceived by clever demons posing as angels of light, visio intellectualis, and thus the interpretation of dreams, cannot be deceived. Interpretations can be true or false, but their truth or falsity soon becomes self-evident, and a false interpretation does no harm to the soul, which can simply continue searching for a true interpretation. We also noted above that Augustine’s openness to dreams and visions was gradually overruled in the medieval period by the fear of demonic trickery, a fear that was aided and abetted by the prohibition against “observet somnia” (observing dreams), a mistranslation that Jerome introduced into the Latin Vulgate, which was then quoted liberally by Gregory the Great, whose more negative view of dreams seemed to win the day, particularly in medieval monasteries. We also noted that in the visionary explosion of the thirteenth century, dreams and visions proliferated amid deep suspicion in the burgeoning discourse on discernment of spirits, which again tended to dismiss dreams as possible demonic trickery—even those dreams that seemed to contain self-evident truth. With Boehme we see an interesting historical retrieval of the Augustinian view on this point. To begin this discussion, we need to be aware that, for Boehme, dreams can be influenced not only by angels and demons, but by the souls of deceased humans: Good souls appear to people magically in sleep, and show them good ways, and many times reveal arts which lie in secret (Arcano), in the abyss (Abgrunde) of the soul … Thus know that no soul separated from the body enters into any wicked matter unless it be a damned soul, which indeed enters in magically and takes joy therein, and teaches great masterpieces of wickedness in dreams, for it is a servant of the devil. And whatever a wicked person desires, that the devil readily helps him to. (Forty Questions 26.16–19/1764, 26.19–22) Here the discussion of deceased human souls generally follows the medieval discussion of angelic and demonic influences in dreams. Presumably, angels and demons can reveal similar benefic and malefic visions, but as far as I can tell Boehme says nothing about individual angels and demons planting helpful or deceptive images into the sleeping mind. This is likely because, for Boehme, the dark and light realms of the human soul actually participate in the angelic and demonic “kingdoms” of heaven and hell. And thus the lack of discussion

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Marriage of sun and moon from Splendor Solis, Salomon Trismosin (ca. 1582)

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about the occasional influence of particular angels and demons reflects the fact that the entire realms of the angelic and demonic worlds have now become permanent aspects of the individual soul, in Boehme’s view. And these worlds, as a whole, operate according to the seven archetypal qualities of Wisdom. Thus the nature of demonic deception and angelic blessing is best understood according to these seven qualities themselves, and their particular characteristics and dynamics. In general we can say that, following the Renaissance trajectory, we are beginning to see angelic and demonic forces integrating themselves into the individual soul. And this tendency will continue into the modern period, as angels and demons were gradually evicted from their respective celestial and sublunary spheres, only to take up residence in the individual psyche. As the pre-modern practice of demonic exorcism was gradually replaced by the psychological and “scientific” techniques of mesmerism and hypnotism,13 angels and demons began to lose their ontological status, while increasing their psychological status as mysterious, autonomous aspects of the individual human psyche.14 In terms of the demonic deception motif, because Boehme spends so much time describing the qualities of the dark demonic world and their influence on the soul, he leaves little room for the clever deceits of individual demons. And because this dark demonic world has begun to move within the soul’s own precincts, for Boehme the real source of deception is not so much fallen angels but the fallen soul itself, and its “I-ness,” which tends to see itself as better than it actually is, and which tends to project its own evil onto outside entities, whether these entities are demons, other people (including, notably, romantic partners), or the followers of other creeds, both within and outside Christianity. The Boehmian soul, as a microcosm, has enlarged to encompass, at least via analogy, the whole universe. And the corollary is that any disharmony in the soul is not so easily blamed on outside forces. The soul as microcosm must now begin to take responsibility for its own functioning. Thus, like Augustine, Boehme mitigates the fear of deceptive demons and invests the individual soul with both the onus and capacity for discerning truth, with God’s help.15 The fact that the angelic and demonic realms are becoming integrated within 13

See Ellenberger’s discussion of the famous confrontation between Franz Anton Mesmer and Father Johann Joseoph Gassner (1970, 53). 14 Pierre Janet eventually described them as autonomous subconscious “idée fixe,” a concept that was the precursor to Jung’s “complexes.” See Monahan (2009). 15 E.g. Boehme: “We have the two mysteries—the divine and the devilish—in us, of the two eternal worlds, and also of the outer world. What we make of ourselves, that we are” (Six Theosophic Pts 8.31).

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the soul will have profound consequences: we will soon see that Freud’s seminal dreambook, one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, begins with an epigraph signalling nothing less than a journey into the dark world of hell. 6.2

Becoming Joseph: Dreaming the New Human

The third and final part of the Mysterium Magnum (chapters 64.6–78) is entitled “The Most Excellent History of Joseph, who is the clearest figure of the New Human regenerated out of the earthly Old Adam, and is a mirror in which all may try, examine, and discern which spirit’s child they are.”16 Here Boehme attempts not merely to describe a transformation in the soul, but actually to effect it in the reader, whom he presumes “also intends to become a Joseph” (Mysterium 64.14). And just as dreams figure prominently in the biblical story of Joseph, likewise this final part of Boehme’s magnum opus contains his most sustained theoretical discussion of dreams. As we will see, like Augustine, Boehme gives his dream theory a thoroughly exegetical basis, and here his mode of exegesis is mainly “literal” rather than “spiritual” or figural, at least as these words were understood at the time. For Boehme, “we see very obviously that the Spirit of God manifested itself in Joseph … so that he could understand dreams and visions. In the same way that the prophets in the Spirit of Christ saw visions and could expound them, so also Joseph” (Mysterium 64.19). As we saw with Augustine, for Boehme it is not just the ability to experience dreams and visions, but more importantly the ability to understand and interpret them that is the true prophetic gift. We will explore dream interpretation in more detail in the next chapter, in relation to the archetypes of Wisdom, after a general overview of what Boehme means by “becoming Joseph.” In typical Augustinian fashion, for Boehme the way of Joseph begins with a simple attempt to love both God and neighbour, an attempt that involves 16 This title is given in Sparrow’s English edition (1654), and it appears to come from the German original. Sparrow notes that “The Third Part of the Mysterium Magnum was published in Germany as a Complete Treatise of itself, under the Name of Josephus Redivivus. But when the whole Book came to be printed together, there was only the First Part, and the Second Part, which comprehended the Third Part also as one with the Second. Yet because the History of Joseph, being an Exposition of the last 14 chapters of Genesis, is so excellent and entire a piece, it may well go as a Third Part of the Mysterium Magnum” (1654, 617). The Robinson edition (1762) likewise keeps Sparrow’s division of the text into three parts, with the same titles, while the German facsimile edition (FE) does not divide the text into parts, and thus omits the titles.

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both compassion and confession: “beginners in Christianity … must turn their heart to God their Father, and learn to love him heartily” and must “bring before God all their own miseries, and the miseries and sins of all that belong to them, and indeed of the whole of Christendom … in hearty compassion” (Mysterium 64.37). In and through this earnest attempt both the heart and mind of the seeker are opened, and divine Wisdom is revealed in the imaginal realm of dreams: “the heart becomes very simple, honest, and upright” and the mind becomes altogether simple and desires no kind of deceit … then Joseph is born, as God his Father clothes his soul with the many coloured coat, that is with divine power. And the Spirit of God immediately starts to work playfully in his soul, as he did with Joseph, for the Spirit of God sees through the soul, and with the soul. Just as Joseph in the vision of dreams saw future things in figures, as the Spirit worked playfully in his soul, likewise the Spirit of God immediately starts to work playfully with the soul of a new Joseph, that is with the inward spiritual world, so that the soul understands the divine mysteries, and sees into the eternal life, and knows the hidden world. (Mysterium 64.38–39) Note the playfulness that Boehme ascribes both to the work of the Spirit and to the symbolism of dreams, which as we saw above is a characteristic of the inner eternal light-world of Wisdom. This playfulness is best appreciated by a childlike or “simple” soul, like the “tender young lad Joseph” (64.38). Note also that the realm of Wisdom grants enhanced awareness and perception, as the Spirit “sees through the soul, and with the soul.” As we saw with Augustine, this enhanced perception is a repairing of the truncated perception that began with the Fall of Adam: We see how the outward human only seeks the kingdom of this world [i.e. the astral-elemental kingdom], which was even the bane and undoing of Adam, in that he abandoned the inward and sought after the outward. Joseph’s many coloured coat, which his father made, signifies how the inward power of God is again revealed through the outward human, whereby human nature becomes variously coloured (that is, mixed with God) as the inward spiritual kingdom is expressed through the outward. (Mysterium 64.34–35) Here the many coloured coat becomes the perfect figure of the inner eternal worlds of the Boehmian soul: Wisdom’s spectrum of seven colours. And the goal of the soul’s rebirth is again described in terms of the harmonious

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functioning of all three soul-elements, as inner understanding (Verstand) from the eternal dark and light worlds infuses outer temporal reason (Vernunft). In short, as the soul chooses the simple path of love, compassion, and confession, the Spirit opens the playful world of eternal Wisdom in the imaginal realm, and the soul is clothed with a growing awareness of the “inward spiritual kingdom  … for [Joseph’s] coat of many colours was a figure of the inward” (Mysterium 64.35–36). So far Boehme has given us a general summary of what it means to “become Joseph,” but now he goes into much more detail through a close reading of the biblical text. The Joseph cycle in Genesis (chapters 37–50) revolves around three key pairs of dreams. Not only do these dreams provide the driving force of the narrative, but their profound symbolism summarizes and encapsulates the entire plot.17 For Boehme, each pair of dreams marks a crucial stage in the soul’s developing awareness. The first pair is composed of Joseph’s own dreams, which describe his place within his own family matrix, while also describing his particular personality type within the astral-elemental realm. The second pair of dreams come from Pharaoh’s two servants, the baker and the cupbearer. Joseph, having realized the subjective perspective of his own astral-elemental personality type, is now in a position to interpret the dreams of others. These two dreams of Pharoah’s servants again describe the astral-elemental realm, and particularly its character as a seemingly capricious amalgam reflecting the dark and light worlds of Wisdom. What these dreams actually reveal is the dark and light aspects of Pharaoh’s own soul, and his capricious authority over his subjects: Pharaoh restores the cupbearer to his former position, and executes the baker, just as Joseph predicted. The final pair of dreams come from Pharaoh himself, and in distinction to the previous dreams, for Boehme these do not describe the outer astral-elemental realm, but the inner eternal realm of Wisdom/Sophia herself, and particularly how her realm both transcends and transforms the seemingly capricious amalgam of darkness and light in the temporal order. These final dreams ultimately reveal Wisdom’s desire and power to transform darkness into light in the temporal realm, and they show how this transformation can actually be effected, with God’s help, through the interpretation of dreams. We will explore these three pairs of dreams in turn. For Boehme, the first pair of dreams describe a kind of initiation process that sets Joseph on the inward path: 17

For a review of the scholarly literature on the importance of these dreams in the story see Grossman (2016). Some scholars even claim that these dreams recapitulate large swaths of the biblical narrative outside the Joseph cycle, from Abimelech to Saul, and from Saul to Solomon (Hilbert 2011).

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When Joseph had the two dreams, the one of his sheaf standing upright, before which the sheaves of his brothers bowed, the other of the sun, moon, and eleven stars, which had done obeisance to Joseph, envy immediately arose among his brothers, for they supposed that he would be their lord. And because they were older they desired to rule over him. Here we see how the outward human only seeks the kingdom of this world. (Mysterium 64.33–34) Joseph’s dreams turn him inward, putting him at odds with the outward mentality of his brothers, a mentality firmly rooted in the outward astral-elemental realm with its human dominance hierarchies and power structures. This dream and its aftermath reveal how these power structures are first manifest, sometimes in very brutal forms, within the family unit itself—a point that Freud will later emphasize. While these initial dreams set Joseph on the inward path, this path begins by revealing the fundamental nature of the outward astral-elemental realm in both the soul and the cosmos. And the initiatory content of these two dreams provides a remarkable encapsulation and summary, first of the character of the elemental world, and then of the astral world: The sheaves of grain in the first dream depict both the elemental realm and the soul’s elemental desires, which as we saw above are based on immediate survival needs, like the need for food. Indeed grain, as the domesticated plant that helped give birth to sedentary civilization in the fertile crescent, has the remarkable ability to transform the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire (i.e. sunlight) into food. In the elemental soul this struggle for immediate survival manifests as a basic desire for power, dominance, and control,18 a desire about which the young Joseph seems quite naïve, given that he freely relates his dream without anticipating the reaction of his brothers. That is, Joseph is still living in the illusion of totally benign and loving family relationships, but he will soon be initiated into the brutality of elemental family power struggles. The second dream recapitulates the first, but this time the figures of wheat are transposed into the very obvious astral figures of sun, moon, and eleven stars. The fact that these two dreams convey the same plot using different symbolism fits Boehme’s schema perfectly, in that the elemental realm is ultimately the “servant and dwelling house” of the astral realm, which governs and structures it (Mysterium 11.23). The second dream thus depicts the higher astral 18

Gilbert even claims that the text’s depiction of Joseph’s wheat sheaf as “standing upright” alludes to a male erection, which again speaks to the elemental character of the dream (1990, 45).

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dynamics operative in the first dream. Interestingly, the biblical text takes it for granted that readers will already know the symbolic meaning of these astral bodies—the sun as the astral or archetypal “father,” the moon as the astral or archetypal “mother,” and each child as a particular star or constellation (Gen. 37.10). Modern biblical scholars likewise note the important astrological resonances in this story, including the fact that the eleven stars in the second dream, plus Joseph, likely represent the twelve constellations of the zodiac.19 Indeed, Jacob’s prophetic blessing on each of his sons in Genesis 49 describes the character of the twelve zodiacal constellations quite well, and forms the culmination of the narrative. Boehme takes a very similar approach based on the science of his day: he sees the sun as a kind of “nature god” (e.g. Mysterium 13.16), and the moon as a “nature goddess” (e.g. Aurora 21.4)—meaning that they have a relative and subsidiary authority, under God, as astral influences on the elemental world. Sun and moon are also “man and wife” (Mysterium 11.31), which was a common alchemical and kabbalistic motif of the time (see figure 5), and which we will see again in the next chapter. And Boehme likewise views the stars in this dream as the respective “constellations” influencing Joseph’s brothers (Mysterium 67.3). What the dream depicts then is the character of the key entities in the astral realm, as this character is instantiated in the particular members of Joseph’s family. For Boehme these dream symbols reveal the astral forces that govern all family relations, and indeed all relations in the natural world, at least according to the relative logic or reason (Vernunft) of the World Soul in the astral-elemental realm. Joseph is not yet able to grasp the full meaning of these dreams, but he seems to sense their import. And as the story continues he will be initiated into a full experiential understanding of how divine Wisdom works through the astral-elemental realm, guiding the lives of both families and nations. Importantly, for Boehme, this second dream describes particularly how Joseph must become aware of his own individual “constellation”—or personality type—by seeing how it relates to the other “constellations” represented by his brothers. For Boehme this awareness is necessary for any true understanding of the psychology of other people, and any accurate interpretation of their dreams, since it grants an awareness of the subjective element in one’s own perspective and interpretation (Mysterium 67.1–4). The understanding of these personality types likewise seems important in the biblical story, which ends by describing the twelve “constellations” in Jacob’s blessing of his sons—the 19

This was first pointed out by Alfred Jeremias, and later by Gunkel and von Rad. See Heck (1990, 23) and Grossman (2016, 720).

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twelve houses of Israel.20 We will also see that Jung’s second major project, Psychological Types, was a personality typology, which he undertook for precisely the same reason. It is not necessary to believe in astrology to believe in the viability of a personality typology, since an array of inner personality types can easily be projected on the signs of the zodiac. “Becoming Joseph” is not without its difficulties, and these dreams seem to initiate a significant period of suffering for our hero—suffering that for Boehme is a necessary aspect of Joseph’s growing awareness, as the inner eternal world is opened to him. We will soon see that both Freud and Jung also experienced periods of suffering when they first confronted the dark world of the soul—a depression in the case of Freud, and something like a psychotic break in the case of Jung—for which Ellenberger later coined the term “creative illness” (1970, 447–48, 672–73, 889–91). These dark periods became the basis for the very fruitful and prolific creative output that followed. Note also that in the Joseph story, suffering is precisely the opposite of what a divinatory reading of his dreams would predict. It is true that Joseph will eventually “rule over” his brothers, and his dreams will be fulfilled, but only after he has experienced precisely the opposite dynamic in the brutal tyranny of his brothers. In general Boehme shows little interest in the divinatory possibilities of dreams,21 and here he follows the biblical view of prophecy, where a prophet is not primarily a diviner or fortune-teller, but one who is given a divine or transcendent view of temporal affairs. This transcendent view might of course have a bearing on future events, but its main purpose is not to predict, and for Boehme its outlook is never fatalistic. Boehme places great stress on human free will (contra Calvinistic excesses of the time), and he believes that the prophetic call for change presumes that change is possible—that the future is not written in stone. We see this in the text when Joseph’s interpretation of Pharoah’s dream ultimately intervenes to change the course of history—averting a famine, saving two nations, and revealing God’s desire to transform darkness into light in the temporal realm. For Boehme, the transcendent and transformative divine view offered by dreams applies not just to the outworking of history, but also to the individual human soul, where dreams reveal the larger forces at work in the soul’s struggle, including both 20

21

Boehme was no doubt aware that Jacob’s sons—the twelve houses of Israel—are recapitulated in the twelve apostles, which are in turn represented by the twelve precious stones that adorn the walls of the New Jerusalem in the final vision of Rev. 21.14–21. These twelve types thus run through the entire biblical narrative. This also distances Boehme from Paracelsus, and Renaissance magic in general. The divinatory view of dreams was common in the ancient world and throughout the middle ages, instantiated in popular “dreambooks” like Artimedorus’ Onierocritica.

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the archetypes of the astral-elemental realm and their greater counterparts in the eternal realm. For Boehme, Joseph’s initiatory suffering includes three major trials that the soul can expect to face as it begins to access the realm of Wisdom/Sophia: First, a relativizing of self-willed reason (Vernunft); second, an uncovering of the (hidden) dark world that drives the soul; and third, a scapegoating of the person who becomes aware of this dark world. These three trials are often intertwined and contemporaneous, and their inward aspects are often mirrored in outward manifestations, as we see in biblical story. Joseph, after his two initiatory dreams, is sent wandering in the wilderness to find his brothers. The text even emphasizes this task when an unidentified man asks Joseph “What are you seeking?” And Joseph replies, “I am seeking my brothers” (Gen. 37.15–16). This underlines what for Boehme is the main task initiated by the first pair of dreams: Joseph must come to understand the personality “constellations” of his brothers in order to see his own subjective perspective and personality in relation to the whole. For Boehme, the wilderness wandering represents the process by which “reason beholds itself” and becomes “confounded,” because divine Wisdom initially appears to it as foolishness (1 Cor. 1.18–25).22 “Reason must become a fool” and “go wandering in great sorrow and desertion with Joseph in the wilderness” (Mysterium 64.41–44). This is also a wandering away from the comforts of hearth and home, where reason received its initial imprint. In many cases this is also a wandering away from the illusion of the “happy family,” and Joseph will soon discover that his greatest enemies are among his own kin, a motif that will also become important for Freud. Here Boehme describes the process by which temporal reason, in the astral-elemental soul-element, begins to recognize the dark world that drives it. When reason sees that it is not neutral, but fuelled by selfish desires, it can then be relativized and dethroned as the soul’s central authority. This sacrificium intellectus already involves the second trial, where the soul begins to see the dark motivations for so much of human behaviour, in both itself and others. This involves both a personal process of confession, and a growing awareness that the many social relations and power hierarchies that configure society are based largely on (hidden) selfish motives.23 That is, confession 22 23

This is a central biblical passage for Boehme as it was for Luther. Boehme also uses it as the keynote in the opening pages of the Clavis. Boehme devotes a good deal of space (most of chapter 66) to describing these hierarchies in his own context, including those rulers who “govern Christendom” in “village, city, country, principality, kingdom, and empire” (Mysterium 66.10). Like Augustine, Boehme ultimately sees private property in the face of poverty as sinful and seems to espouse some form of Christian socialism.

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here is about becoming aware of previously unknown (unconscious) darkness, in both oneself and society. And for Boehme this involves a growing awareness that even the most sacred social institutions are tainted by radical evil, and often in direct proportion to their attempts to portray themselves as good. This motif is well attested in the Gospels, where Jesus’ polemic with the religious authorities of his day reflects precisely this unmasking of the “blindness” of those who “claim to see” (e.g. Jn. 9.1–41). In the third trial, the soul that becomes aware of the dark world within begins to attract projections from the dark world of others, as we see in the brilliantly evocative words of the biblical text, when Joseph’s wilderness wanderings come to an end and his brothers see him approaching in the distance: “They said to one another, ‘Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him’” (Gen. 37.19–20). It is precisely Joseph’s growing awareness of the inner world of dreams that makes him a target. As Boehme notes, this scapegoat mechanism is a result of the fact that “the world” and its power brokers have a strong resistance to the insights that Joseph has discovered in his wilderness wanderings. The world and its supposedly neutral reason resists seeing itself as beholden to selfish desires. And thus the collective reason of the outer world is used to marginalize the person who has discovered the wisdom of the inner imaginal world: Now when this man begins to speak of divine things and visions, of the hidden world’s divine mysteries and the wonders of God, and when his brothers, who are the children of the outward world in whom the hidden spiritual world is not yet manifest, hear about it, they see it a mere fable and a melancholy chimera and whimsy, and esteem him foolish … they account it some astral instigation or false enthusiasm, or the like. (Mysterium 64.40) There is more than a hint of Boehme’s own experience in these words. And if the worldly rationalists do not dismiss the inner imaginal world, they are just as likely to misinterpret it and make personal attacks against the person describing it: “That is to say, they deprive and bereave him of his honour and good name by their slander, and take his words and doctrine, and make false constructions and conclusions from it” (Mysterium 64.49). Such misinterpretations are figured by the brothers’ stealing and bloodying of Joseph’s many-coloured coat, representing inner divine Wisdom. Boehme was certainly well acquainted with insults and misinterpretations from the ecclesial hierarchs of his day (not to mention those of later scholars). And likewise, when Freud and Jung emerged from their own wilderness wanderings and began to

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describe the inner world they had encountered, they were often surprised by the misunderstandings and personal attacks that ensued from both scholarly and popular circles—attacks that seemed far beyond what would be expected from supposedly neutral rational debate. Boehme describes the learned discourse of the ecclesial-scholastic ivory tower of his day using two evocative and similar biblical words: “Babel” and “Babylon.” The former connotes the rationalism and detachment used as a defence against the latter, which connotes the dark world of the soul: “the Babylonish tower of the high schools and universities is built; and from thence come the confused languages, so that Christ is not understood in his children” (Mysterium 64.24). Their “distinguished speech,” says Boehme, is a product of “the height of their tower … a height that signifies the pride of self-love … so that they do not understand the power of God … in the simplicity of Joseph, but call him a dreamer, a diviner, a man of phantasies (Schwärmer), an enthusiast, and a fool” (Mysterium 64.25). Clearly Boehme’s own experience of censure by the Görlitz magistracy is evident here,24 and it would be easy to see these words as nothing more than petty resentment for Boehme’s own mistreatment. But there is more going on here. For Boehme, the height of the ecclesial-academic tower is a metaphor for its rationalistic detachment from the quiet promptings of the inner world of images. Words lose their meaning without some primary reference to the Word, which for Boehme speaks continually in and through the inner realm of Wisdom. Language itself has its source in this inner imaginal realm.25 And only a theology that was thoroughly detached from this realm could so lose the meaning of words, and so twist the words of scripture, that it could be used as a pretext for violence and war. Only a profound rationalistic detachment could so deform the Word as to make the Crucified appear as a murderer. The bloody evidence of a theology alienated from imaginal Wisdom was 24 Boehme’s own experience is especially evident as this passage continues: “What, shall this fellow reprove us? He has not come from the universities, and yet he thinks he can teach and reprove us … What is he? He is but a layman … Moreover, he is not called and it is not his vocation; he puts himself forward only to draw attention to himself, and to get some name and fame among the people. But we will so silence him that he shall be the fool of all the world … so he may learn to stay at home and attend to his worldly vocation, and leave it to us to judge of divine matters, who are appointed and authorised by the magistrate, and have studied in the universities, and there have learned such things” (Mysterium 64.45). According to Franckenberg, the magistracy arrested Boehme, confiscated his writings, called him an idiot, and told him to stop writing books that “did not belong to his profession and condition” ([1651] 1780, 8–9). 25 Boehme had a theory of a primordial universal “nature-language” (Natursprache), the language of Adam and Eve, before Babel (see Weeks 1991, 4, 34; Popper 1958).

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everywhere in Boehme’s day: “As Joseph was hated by his brothers because he had visions (Gesichte), so nowadays is the divine Wisdom (which reveals itself in God’s children) vilified and hated by the natural Adam,” including “the stone-churches and their ministers” in “Christendom” (Mysterium 64.23). Note that Boehme is not attacking the true church that manifests in the inner soul, but only the outward ecclesial structures, which are taken as holy based on mere appearances.26 All three of these trials—the dethroning of reason, the confrontation with the inner darkness, and the scapegoating that results—are summed up in one biblical figure: “thus poor Joseph is thrown down into the desolate pit in the wilderness and lies in misery” (Mysterium 64.50). As the text implies, this pit represents nothing less than Sheol, the realm of the dead (Gen. 37.35). Boehme sees this suffering as a necessary step on the path of Wisdom: “If he shall attain to the contemplation of the divine mysteries, then he must first be judged, and come under the censure and judgment of the world; that they may judge his inbred sins, and sacrifice them before God … and come to the divine vision within himself” (Mysterium 64.51). For Boehme this suffering bears fruit in a decentring of the ego or Ichheit, as the soul expands to encompass and perceive a much larger swath of reality. That is, “the pit” is a cruciform figure representing “the death of [Joseph’s] natural will” (Mysterium 66.7),27 followed by “resurrection from the dead,” meaning that “the divine power rules him; and now he attains divine understanding (Verstand) and Wisdom” (Mysterium 66.8). The experience of suffering, which fosters “releasement” (Gelassenheit) of the ego, eventually allows Joseph “to rule and govern in divine knowledge over God’s wonderful works, as Joseph did over the land of Egypt, and in which type and figure this pen is likewise born … which yet is hidden unto reason” (Mysterium 64.13). With this last sentence Boehme seems strangely confident that, in spite of his persecutors, the Wisdom of his writings will one day bear fruit, find recognition, and be vindicated, like Joseph.

26

Augustine likewise distinguished between “tares and wheat” in the earthly church (City of God 20.9). 27 Joseph’s experience of the pit is not a singular event. In the biblical account it is quickly repeated in another form, as if the narrative were circling closer to the archetypal kernel of the experience. As the story continues, Potiphar’s wife attempts and fails to seduce Joseph, then falsely accuses him, which lands him in prison. Here Boehme sees a purer form of the type of Babel and Babylon: Potiphar’s wife represents the “great whore of Babylon” from Revelation, the “habitation of all devils and unclean spirits (Rev. 18.2),” who is an anti-type to the Virgin Sophia, and who is eventually “for ever sealed up in the abyss” (Mysterium 66.44).

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Dreaming from Darkness to Light

Joseph’s initiatory dreams of his family introduce him to the character of the elemental and astral worlds, including what Boehme calls the “constellation” or astral influence on Joseph’s own soul, and how this “constellation” or personality type relates to those of his brothers. “For each person bears the image (Bilde) of his constellation (Constellation)” (Mysterium 67.3). The awareness of one’s “constellation” is important for dream interpretation, as it seems to grant both an awareness of the subjective element in one’s own perspective, as well as an awareness of how astral forces will be “framed” according to the personality types of other souls: For to explain (zu erklären) dreams is nothing else but to see and understand (verstehen) the figure (Figure), that is, how the Spiritus Mundi frames ( fasse) itself into a figure in the constellation of a person  … to interpret (zu deuten) dreams is nothing else but to understand (verstehen) a magic image (Bilde) of the astrum in the human character (Eigenschaft). (Mysterium 67.1–2) We will soon see that the images of dreams speak not just of the astral realm, but also of the eternal realm of Wisdom and her seven qualities. But the above quote refers to the next twist in the Joseph story, where our protagonist finds himself in prison faced with a second pair of dreams, this time from Pharaoh’s cupbearer and baker respectively. Boehme sees these dreams as revelatory of the astral realm as it forms “figures” or “images” in the souls of Pharaoh’s two servants.28 For Boehme, Joseph’s interpretation of this second pair of dreams shows his understanding, with God’s help, of the astral-elemental realm and its influences—an understanding that Joseph only attained through a period of suffering and introspection. And this second pair of dreams also reveals the divided and dualistic character of this outward realm: Joseph’s interpretations indicate that Pharaoh will release the cupbearer from prison and restore him to his former life in the royal court, while on the other hand the same Pharaoh 28

For Boehme, one’s “constellation” can also be understood “by the diligent consideration of astronomy according to astrology” (Mysterium 67.1). But Boehme, in accord with biblical teaching, sees these divinatory arts as unreliable and ill-advised, both because the astral realm is a complex and unpredictable congruence of forces, and because it is subject to the higher influence of the eternal realm of Wisdom, and the providential ordering of the created realm. Thus Boehme follows the biblical text in noting that Joseph’s interpretations were not given through divination, but through “the Spirit of God” who “explained the dream through the spirit of Joseph” (Mysterium 67.2).

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will send the baker to his untimely death. The biblical text gives no rationale for Pharaoh’s actions, leaving us with the impression of a capricious and tyrannical ruler. For Boehme, the astral-elemental realm itself represents this strange congruence of life and death—light and darkness—in a seemingly capricious amalgam, in both nature and the human soul. But it is important to remember that in this case the capricious life and death judgements did not come from God or the cosmos, but from the soul of Pharaoh himself. As the story continues we will see an explicit contrast between Pharaoh’s flawed attempts to rule, and the graceful influence of a divine Ruler who speaks through Joseph. In other words, if the astral-elemental realm is an unpredictable amalgam of darkness and light, the question then becomes whether and how we might go about transforming darkness into light, which is precisely the question that the next pair of dreams answers, as Joseph is released from prison to interpret the dreams of Pharaoh himself (Gen. 41.15–24). In the first dream, Pharaoh sees seven “sleek and fat” cows rise out of the Nile and proceed to go feed in the meadow. He then sees seven “ugly and thin” cows rise from the Nile and devour the seven fat cows. In the second dream seven “plump and good” ears of grain grow out of a stalk, and then seven “thin and blighted” ears grow out of a second stalk and devour the first seven ears. Pharaoh awakes troubled and calls for his magicians to interpret the dream, which they cannot. He then sends for Joseph, who explains that the dreams portend seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of famine in Egypt. To save his kingdom, Joseph advises Pharaoh to store up grain during the seven prosperous years in order to survive the lean years. Boehme first offers a fairly literal reading of these events, and then a more spiritual reading that specifically describes dreams and their interpretation, but both are related. The literal reading focusses on the nature of prophecy, and Joseph’s prophetic gift of interpreting dreams: Every prophet expressed a purpose, wherein a time is included or an age comprehended; and he is the mouth of that kingdom or dominion … the mouth of the inward ground, which declares and expresses both the vanity in the chaos (Turba) and also the grace of God that has taken compassion on human misery and opposed the wrath of the chaos (Turba) … [the prophet] reproves that kingdom for their vanity and idolatry and comforts them with the introverted (eingewandten) grace again. For his spirit stands in the figure (Figur), in the eternal speaking Word of God. (Mysterium 67.9) Here we see that the prophet is one who rises above an astral-elemental understanding by fixing his spirit in the “eternal speaking Word of God,” which for

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Boehme speaks continually through scripture, nature, and the soul. We will explore the importance of scripture for dream interpretation further in a moment. Here we also see that the prophetic gift puts a choice before the people of a given age—who must choose to follow either chaos and death, or grace and life (c.f. Deut. 30.15–20). Here the prophetic gift of interpretation is firmly separated from dream divination of the astral-elemental realm and its implied fatalism. The prophet emphasizes the disjunction between light and darkness, and thus raises the stakes for human choice and free will, whereas the diviner emphasizes the determinism of outward astral-elemental forces.29 This point is further emphasized in Boehme’s exegetical distinction between “natural” magic, operating in the temporal astral-elemental realm, and “divine” magic, operating in the eternal realm of Wisdom and her seven qualities. Pharaoh’s wise men, who could not interpret these dreams, represent the “natural magus” who “only has power in nature, only in that which nature frames in its working; he cannot apprehend, nor advise in that which the Word of God models and frames. But a prophet has power to interpret that, for he is a divine magus, as here Joseph” (Mysterium 68.2).30 For Boehme, Pharaoh’s dreams “had their origin in the Eternal Nature”—that is, in the realm of eternal Wisdom—which is why Pharaoh’s natural magicians could not understand them. For Boehme these dreams reveal Wisdom’s seven qualities, and here all seven qualities exist either in darkness or light: “the seven fat cows in the pasture signify … the seven properties of the Eternal Nature in the holy, good substance or essence, that is, in the kingdom of heaven … And the seven lean, ill-favoured, meagre cows signify … the seven properties of the Eternal Nature in the wrath of God” (Mysterium 68.11). That is, the dream reveals Wisdom in both its fallen aspect, and in its original or redeemed goodness. Thus, according to a literal interpretation, the story of Joseph describes the nature of prophecy and prophetic inspiration in relation to dream interpretation. And according to a more figural interpretation, the story reveals how dreams speak of different levels of reality and different aspects of the soul, ultimately leading to a revelation of the seven archetypal qualities of Wisdom. In this figural reading the three pairs of dreams become paradigmatic stages on the soul’s journey of spiritual awakening: The initial pair describe Joseph’s 29 Again, this tends to separate Boehme from Paracelsus and other Renaissance magi. 30 Boehme notes that “the natural magia was suppressed among the Christians, which in the beginning was well that it was supressed” (68.3). That is, paganism was suppressed by early Christianity. But in an interesting aside Boehme also notes that, in his day, natural magic has re-emerged in “the sects of Christendom, which they set up for gods, instead of the images of heathen idols” (Mysterium 68.4).

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relationship to his family matrix, or what Freud and Jung will later call the matrix of “endogamous libido,” including the archetypal “imagos” of the of sun, moon, and stars in relation to father, mother, and siblings. These dreams also describe the nature of the elemental and astral realms, respectively, which Joseph comes to understand experientially through his cruciform journey. The conscious realization of these first dreams then allows Joseph to interpret the dreams of others, including the second pair of dreams, which again describe the astral-elemental realm with its seemingly capricious and fatalistic mixture of darkness and light, a mixture that actually reflects the soul of a capricious ruler. Crucially, the third pair of dreams moves beyond fatalism to true prophecy, revealing the eternal realm of Wisdom herself and her continued creative activity in the temporal realm. Here, at the conclusion of the story, we see not only how God’s eternal Word and Wisdom can speak directly through dreams and their interpretation, but we also see the graceful character of Wisdom whose nature it is to bring light out of darkness. Joseph’s initial dream is fully realized as he forgives his brothers in the final scene: “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today” (Gen. 50.20). Eternal divine Wisdom supersedes and yet includes the astral-elemental realm in an inclusive hierarchy, and the revelation of her seven transforming qualities mitigates the catastrophe of a famine in the astral-elemental realm. In the next chapter we will see the symbology of this transformative process in more detail, as it applies specifically to human psychospiritual development. 6.4

The Great Code of Dream Interpretation

A final word is in order about the scriptural context of Boehme’s theory of dream interpretation. Not only does his dream theory derive from the paradigmatic biblical story of Joseph, but his entire hermeneutical approach to dream interpretation is grounded in the Bible as a kind of symbolic lexicon. That is, Boehme’s imagination is a thoroughly biblical one, a fact that has been underemphasized by scholars, likely because Boehme, in typical Lutheran fashion, assumes a high degree of biblical literacy in his readers and is often not explicit about how the Bible infuses his corpus. We saw above that, for Augustine, outer knowledge (scientia) should be infused by inner Wisdom (sapientia) if it is to function harmoniously. And likewise, for Boehme, outer reason (Vernunft) needs to be grounded in inner understanding (Verstand). This means generally that all logos should be structured by biblical mythos, and all conceptual theology should be grounded in the biblical

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narrative, an idea that has found something of a renaissance in contemporary theology. Also, like Augustine, Boehme sees the archetypal days of Genesis 1 as a deeper biblical mythos—the eternal creation of Wisdom—which is a fundamental mythical structure for both human history and human development. But Boehme takes this deeper mythical thinking much further than Augustine. In the seven qualities of Wisdom Boehme has drilled down to a biblical-mythical bedrock, and these images then structure all of his thinking. For example, when Boehme compares the lust-desire of the dark soul-element to the love-desire of the light soul-element, what he is primarily comparing are the images of fire and light, respectively. Like fire, the lust-desire has a dangerous, unpredictable, and consuming character. Like light, the love-desire warms, illumines, and promotes growth. And of course fire produces light, just as the dark world is the motive force for the light world. The rational concepts here proceed directly from the polyvalent nature of the symbolic images. And often in his writing it seems that Boehme would rather just use the symbolic images as a kind of short-hand to summarize the many rational concepts they embody. But importantly, the fire and light of these qualities are also a distillation of a host of biblical images, from the light of the first day of creation (Gen. 1.2; Jn. 1.5), which is a central Boehmian motif, to the famous Mosaic theophany of a bush that was “blazing” but notably “not consumed” (Exod. 3.2), to the “tongues of fire” that danced on the heads of the apostles (Acts 2.3) and subsequently produced “tongues of speech” that seemed to heal the divisions of language (Acts 2.4–12)—the babble of misunderstanding that emerged from the famous tower (Gen. 11.1–9), to the fiery Apocalypse that is presaged in the Synoptic Gospels (Mt. 24–25; Mk. 13; Lk. 21) and explicit in the book of Revelation.31 When we look more carefully at these passages we notice that the pentecostal flames, like the Mosaic burning bush, did not burn or consume but illuminated. And in both cases the pictorial image of fire preceded the communication of illuminating discourse. In the Pentecost passage the pictorial image of “tongues” (glōssai) precedes, and forms the basis of the linguistic “tongues” (glōssai) that represent a universal language, heard by those in the crowd “each of us, in our own native tongue” (dialéctō). That is, the outpouring of the Spirit 31

For a comparable summary of biblical fire imagery as a basis of revelation see Balthasar Theo-Drama 4: 59–63. Balthasar’s final sentence here could not be more Boehmian: “this is not the kind of light to which one can become accustomed, but one which illuminates by an ever-new blinding. Revelation can never pass over into ‘enlightenment.’ But the depths of this abyss of light are only revealed when the light shines in the darkness that cannot overcome it (Jn. 1.5), when the blind see and those who see are made blind (Jn. 9.39)” (63).

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moves from image, to universal language, to various dialects. The image is primary. And this is reinforced in the subsequent verses where Peter quotes the prophet Joel’s description of the outpouring of the Spirit: “your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” (Acts 2.17). All of this biblical imagery is presupposed in Boehme’s fourth Sophianic quality of fire and light, but he never sees a need to unpack it explicitly. In sum, Boehme’s seven qualities reveal the deepest mythical structure of scripture, nature, and the human soul, and they reveal how the Word of God is continually operative in all three contexts. This fact has a corollary for dreams and their interpretation: True dreams arise when a person’s will rests in God and then God’s will is manifest/revealed in the human will, and the soul sees with God’s eyes from its most inward ground, where it stands in the Word of God … And then the Word of God, that is, the ground of the soul, expresses the figure in the soul so that the soul understands it, as Joseph and also Daniel expressed and expounded … for thus also are the magic visions of all the prophets. (Mysterium 67.8) For Boehme the Word of God speaks primarily in images and figures. And we come to know and understand these images in three primary contexts: scripture, nature, and the soul’s imagination, including dreams. Following Boehme, Blake will later call the Bible the “Great Code of Art,”32 meaning that it is the symbolic lexicon of the imagination, including dreams. 32

This appears in Blake’s engraving of the Laocoön (1998, 273).

Chapter 7

Boehme’s Theory of Dream Interpretation: Seven Steps to Heaven Having explored Boehme’s map of the soul and his general theory of dreams we can now look more specifically at his hermeneutical framework of dream interpretation, which reveals the soul’s journey of development and transformation. Boehme’s seven qualities of Wisdom/Sophia describe not only the phenomenological structure of the soul, as we saw in chapter 5, but also the process of the soul’s development and transformation, which we will explore here.1 Because this process is driven by Wisdom/Sophia, it naturally appears in the human imagination, including dreams. For Boehme, as dreams move us toward expanded consciousness, certain recurring dream symbols function like signposts marking the soul’s path of development, rebirth, and illumination. I am calling these symbolic signposts Boehme’s “hermeneutical framework.” Both Freud and Jung are well known for their respective theories of the soul’s development, which were based primarily on the dream symbolism they observed in their patients. Freud’s theory of psychosexual development and Jung’s theory of individuation, I will argue, can both be situated within the larger boundary of the Boehmian symbolism of Wisdom/Sophia. I will refer to the Freudian and Jungian theories here in broad strokes before summarizing them in the next chapter. In chapter 5 we saw the seven qualities or drives of fallen Wisdom, or “Eternal Nature,” as they manifest in the fallen soul. And here each quality appeared as a single abstract idea or drive. But the precise character and developmental function of these abstract qualities is illumined immensely when they are resituated in the concrete exegetical context of Genesis 1, where they appear in their original unfallen state, and where each “day” of creation involves a cluster of related symbols. Genesis 1 (the Hexameron) is Boehme’s primary exegetical context for the seven qualities of Wisdom/Sophia,2 a context he 1 As Weeks notes, it is particularly in Boehme’s second work, The Three Principles of Divine Essence, where “the correspondences of microcosm and macrocosm” become “focused in their shared patterns of birth and development” (1991, 112). And in his third work, The Threefold Life of Man, “the sevenfold pattern is articulated more finely to convey the emergence of life and consciousness” (1991, 145). These themes remain central in Boehme’s later works. 2 E.g. “By the working days [of creation] Moses means the creation or manifestation of the seven properties” (Clavis 84). “In the origin (Urstand) of Eternal Nature, which is an eternal © Glenn J. McCullough, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004680296_009

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first explores in his earliest work, the Aurora (chapters 18–26), and which he later modifies and extends in both the Mysterium Magnum (chapters 2–17) and the Clavis (sections 83–95). The discussion below depends mainly on the latter two works.3 By pairing Boehme’s abstract qualities of Wisdom in the fallen soul, with the original eternal days of Wisdom in the creation story of Genesis 1, Boehme’s hermeneutical framework of development and transformation comes into focus.4 While Boehme does not offer a comprehensive theory of interpretation for all possible dream symbols, which would be impossible given that dream experience is every bit as complex and diverse as waking experience, his hermeneutical framework allows an understanding of some of the most important dream symbols, which mark discrete stages on the path of development and transformation.5 For Boehme, Wisdom’s seven qualities also have a teleological urgency in that the symbols themselves provide the energy or motive force to help negotiate and realize various developmental transitions. Wisdom’s qualities are not just sign posts but drivers of transformation. Here again, in general terms, Boehme is following the Augustinian tradition. We saw in chapter 2.4.3 that, for Augustine, the realm of eternal Wisdom is defined by the seven eternal days of creation in Genesis 1, and that these archetypal days structure the unfolding of both history and the human soul. Each day can thus be interpreted figurally as an age of the world and a stage of human development. Boehme follows this general pattern, but his figural readings of the seven days are more elaborate. And while at times he interprets the

origin, the manifestation (Offenbarung) of the six days’ work is very clearly to be found” (Mysterium 12.32). Boehme’s seven qualities are a distillation of both the seven days of Genesis and the seven spirits of Revelation, the latter forming a rather complex anti-type to the seven days. Boehme also claims that the character of the seven qualities was revealed in his illumination experience. 3 Again, the Mysterium Magnum is Boehme’s magnum opus—his most mature, comprehensive, but least studied work. The Clavis, which Boehme calls a “short summary” or “key to my writings” (Clavis 6), was supposed to be published alongside the Mysterium in 1624 (Letters 57), but was not actually published until 1647. 4 This pairing might seem like an extrapolation from Boehme’s work, since he does not describe it in the distinct categories I will use below. But Boehme is clear that, in Genesis 1, “the days’ works have a far more subtle meaning: for the seven properties [or qualities] are also understood therein” (Mysterium 12.2). Boehme says that this pairing reveals the “divine magic,” which is “veiled” in the Genesis account, to protect it from those who might misuse it (Mysterium 11.1–12). 5 It might help to think of these stages and transitions in terms of rite de passage, as understood in cultural anthropology, which often involve rituals derived from both dream symbolism and sacred stories.

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seven qualities and days in terms of archetypal ages of the world,6 it is fair to say that he is generally more concerned with their manifestation in the developing soul. Yet this relationship between micro- and macrocosm is still important, because as the soul is reborn it begins to work in concert with the redemptive archetypal forces of Wisdom in the outer world. The soul establishes a kind of resonance or harmony with the cosmos, such that it partners with the forces transmuting darkness into light in the outside world, both through direct linear causal mechanisms and through acausal, non-linear correspondences, or what Jung later called “synchronicity.”7 That is, the soul’s transformation participates in and influences cosmic transformation in a complex correspondence between subjective and objective reality that involves both the soul’s expanded consciousness and its cosmic resonance.8 Boehme’s figural reading of Genesis 1 thus includes a complex understanding of both the cosmos and the soul, which encompasses, but does not always differentiate between, past development, present structure, and ongoing transformation. And Boehme’s way of including this panoramic complexity is by dealing primarily in symbols. He alludes to, but does not always spell out, the many symbolic resonances and implications involved. Rather, as usual, he tries to draw his readers away from more rationalistic thinking and into his own more fluid psycho-mythical and associative thinking, where each symbol 6 See Pältz (1980). Ages of the World is the title of Schelling’s major unfinished work, which clearly bears the Boehmian imprint, and which has a sophisticated, Boehme-inspired theory of dreams (see McGrath 2012, 112–115). 7 Jung developed the idea of “synchronicity” in conversation with physicist Wolfgang Pauli to denote a meaningful and statistically improbable experience of coincidence between psychological processes and natural processes—mind and matter. 8 The redeemed soul’s non-local and acausal redemptive influence on the cosmos is a theme in many religious traditions (e.g. the Jewish kabbalistic concept of “tikkun olam,” or “repairing creation”). In Christianity it is particularly evident in Eastern Orthodox spirituality, for example, in Dostoevsky’s description of Alyosha’s ecstatic conversion experience in chapter 4 of The Brothers Karamazov, “Cana of Galilee”: “The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars … Alyosha stood, gazed, and suddenly threw himself down on the earth. He did not know why he embraced it. He could not have told why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss it all. But he kissed it weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and vowed passionately to love it, to love it for ever and ever. ‘Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears,’ echoed in his soul. What was he weeping over? Oh! in his rapture he was weeping even over those stars, which were shining to him from the abyss of space, and ‘he was not ashamed of that ecstasy.’ There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of God, linking his soul to them, and it was trembling all over ‘in contact with other worlds.’ He longed to forgive everyone and for everything, and to beg forgiveness. Oh, not for himself, but for all people, for all and for everything” (1991, 362).

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explodes with polyvalent meaning. Readers are then encouraged to take the work further with their own associations. Especially in these exegetical passages on the seven days of creation, Boehme’s readers do need to digest his work slowly. A cursory reading will not only miss a great deal, but will find itself overwhelmed by the dizzying possibilities of symbolic resonance.9 What follows then is really a selective reading of Boehme’s exegesis of Genesis 1, which unpacks in a more discursive mode only some of the symbolic possibilities of meaning. I will concentrate mainly on how this symbolism applies to the soul rather than to the cosmos, but readers should keep in mind that microcosmic changes also resonate in the macrocosm. Boehme always repays his patient readers, and in this case what he offers us is immensely valuable: nothing less than a symbolic key or lexicon for the imaginal universe—a key that connects mind to body, spirit to materiality, and the soul to the cosmos, in a grand process of both integration and renewal. Boehme’s symbolic key helps us decipher the major dream symbols that reveal how the soul’s structure is mobilized and modified on a journey of psychospiritual transformation that resonates throughout the cosmos. This symbolic framework can then be used to help decipher at least some of the immense variety of dream phenomena that we observe today, especially in therapeutic contexts. Importantly, the discussion below distinguishes between the soul’s initial development and its later transformation. The initial developmental path from infancy to adulthood is revisited and recapitulated on the later transformative path, which reconfigures earlier developmental stages—a process of “regression in the service of transcendence.”10 Thus it is important to remember that each day of creation is cumulative, presupposing and building upon the symbols and events that precede it. In the discussion below, as we move chronologically through the Genesis 1 account, our discussion of the first four days will distinguish between 1) the initial path of childhood development, and 2) the later path of transformation, usually beginning in adulthood, which revisits the earlier childhood developmental stages. Because the symbols of the first four days are implicated in both of these paths, the discussion might at times 9 McGinn, for example, calls Boehme’s exposition of the seven days in the Aurora “meandering,” and suggests that his later expositions in the Mysterium and the Clavis add nothing in terms of either content or clarity (2016, 177). This strikes me as both uncharitable and incorrect. 10 Michael Washburn uses this helpful phrase in his excellent “transpersonal” synthesis of Freud and Jung (1995, 171–202).

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appear non-linear as it moves between past, present, and future states. For this reason, in the first paragraph of each section I will summarize how the key symbols of each day of creation refer to the distinct paths of development and transformation. Table 1 provides a summary of these two distinct paths. And here it is important to understand that, for Boehme, the developmental path of childhood involves an “existential Fall,” a motif we saw above with Augustine (chapter 2.4.2).11 That is, it seems that the infant in the womb has some perception of eternity, and is born “trailing clouds of glory,” as Wordsworth said, “From God, who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” (“Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” stanza 5). For Boehme, this eternal reception and perception of Wisdom is gradually truncated in the developing infant, following the symbolic narrative of Genesis 2, as the infant first develops a bodily and perceptual “I-ness” (Ichheit) or ego, to which is later added cognitive reasoning, as the “I-ness” eats the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. The fruit of reason (Vernunft), divided from Wisdom or understanding (Verstand), introduces a great many cognitive and logical dualities into perception, even as the human body itself becomes divided by the shame surrounding the sexual instinct. Thus the existential Fall eventually produces a great divide between the Garden of innocence and the Wilderness of experience, a Boehmian theme illustrated so well in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1988, 7–32). The path of development, from infancy to adulthood, is a path of symbolically leaving the Garden, or being thrown out of it, and entering the Wilderness. After the developing “I-ness” has experienced the existential Fall with its cognitive binaries, mind-body dualism, and loss of innocence, the journey of transformation and rebirth can begin. This journey tends to begin in adulthood, in the Wilderness, as the adult “I-ness” begins to feel alienated in its dualistic, language-based reason (Vernunft), and begins to attend to the image-based understanding (Verstand) of the imagination, including its nocturnal revelations. This is the first step in a “regression in the service of transcendence,” as we 11 As noted above (chapter 2.4.2), Augustine’s most well-known theory of original sin involves its inheritance from parent to child, and the immediate appearance of both sin and guilt in the infant. It may be that his theory in The Trinity, which describes a truncation of perception (from Wisdom to knowledge), following the symbolism of Genesis 2, is a distinct theory of original sin, conceived as an existential Fall repeated in each child and occurring gradually with childhood development. These two theories appear to contradict each other, which is not surprising given that Augustine is not always systematic in his thinking. The existential Fall theory, if it is distinct, seems more in line with both Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Islamic teaching.

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begin to revisit or recover memories of life in the Garden, to sense the needs of our inner child (or children),12 and to revisit earlier developmental stages and traumas, not to become puerile or childish, but to rediscover the wonder, joy, and playfulness of fully embodied existence. The journey of transformation thus involves a recovered awareness of bodily instincts and related traumas, including our childhood sexuality, which is often repressed. Opening to the body and processing past traumas in turn leads to a greater perception of eternal Wisdom, not only in dreams and imagination, but in the world around us, where objects become charged with personal symbolic meaning via “deep feeling” or empathy (Einfühlung). Finally, for Boehme, the regression leads back to a rebirth (Wiedergeburt), where light is born in the darkness, recapitulating the initial intrauterine phase of development. This is often accompanied, as Jung noted, by dreams or imaginative visions of the birth of a divine child. The regression into darkness kindles a fire that marks a restructuring of the soul—a transition from Boehme’s twofold soul, which is generally Freudian, to his threefold soul, which is generally Jungian (as mentioned in chapter 5.5). This fiery transition point occurs on day four, representing a recapitulation and healing of the earlier stages. From here the process of transformation continues on days five, six, and seven, charting a path of increased conscious awareness of Wisdom’s seven archetypes; increased empathic love for, and symbolic resonance with, all created being; and the marriage of the soul with Wisdom/Sophia, which finally finds fruition in the divine body of light. As depicted in table 1, this path of development and transformation thus involves a zigzag pattern: Development from infancy to adulthood moves forward from day one to day four, accompanied by the existential Fall. The path of transformation then reverses direction, revisiting and recapitulating all four days in the reverse direction, before moving forward again toward day seven.

12 Richard Schwartz (2021) has recently confirmed a Jungian view of the unconscious as a collection of split-off complexes. Many of these complexes appear as children, either in dreams or waking imagination. They were often split-off from consciousness because of childhood traumas, but they are still present to the imagination and are capable of re-integration to the great benefit of the core self. Schwartz does not detail the ways that his theory recapitulates Jungian thought, likely because his theoretical base is primarily in Family Systems Theory.

Light (in Darkness): Life-energy

Firmament: Eternity vs. Time

Dry Land Vegetation “Fruit Trees”

Sun – Day Moon – Night Stars

Living Creatures in Air, Water (B. adds Earth, Fire)

Primordial Human (Microcosm)

Sabbath Rest Blessing

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Day 6

Day 7

“I-ness” identifies with language-based reason (Vernunft), eats forbidden fruit

“I-ness” emerges, identifies with body, desires temporal objects, “naked and unashamed”

Postpartum

Intrauterine

“Jonah complex”: journey to the edge of the water; Reborn soul: Self archetype

Phallic, Latency, and Genital stages; Parental imagos, Oedipal shame

Acknowledgement of image-based understanding (Verstand), in dreams and imagination

Body of Light

Marriage of Sun and Moon, Bridegroom and Bride; Expression of Wisdom

?

Marriage of consciousness with the unconscious

Integration of inner Anima/Animus archetypes; Integration and expansion of four functions

“Jonah complex”: board boat/vessel on trip to edge of the known world

Body ego; Anal stage

Recovery of awareness of bodily instincts, traumas; Releasement (Gelassenheit) of “I-ness”

Expanding conscious awareness of four elemental creatures through “love-desire”; Perception of Wisdom

“Jonah complex”: boat/ vessel on the ocean and descent below

“Jonah complex”: the pearl in the belly of the fish

Jungian transformation

Oral stage

Intrautrine “oceanic feeling”

Freudian development

Recovery of eternal Wisdom in perception through deep feeling

Rebirth: light born in darkness

Boehmian transformation

Verbum Fiat command

Genesis 1

Boehmian development

The seven days of creation: development and transformation

Table 1

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Day One: Darkness, Light, and Primordial Life-Energy

To summarize, the symbolism of day one describes a primordial light that emerges in the midst of a dark, watery, chaotic void (Gen. 1.1–5). Boehme interprets this light as a life-force energy that stands at the root of the soul— a concept strikingly similar to the psychodynamic “libido.” In terms of the soul’s development, the symbolism of day one corresponds to the initial, intrauterine phase of infancy. And in terms of the soul’s transformation, this symbolism corresponds to the climax of the process of rebirth—the nadir of the descent into the inner world, when light is born at the point of deepest darkness. Jung placed great emphasis on the idea of rebirth through regression to the intrauterine phase and its secret memories of eternity, whereas Freud merely hints at this possibility in his concept of the “oceanic feeling of eternity,” which we will explore more fully on day two. We saw in chapter 5 that in the fallen Boehmian soul, the first quality, associated with Saturn (♄), is a dark abyss of Nothingness, like a vacuum suction or a black hole. But when we bring this abstract quality back into the concrete exegetical context of Genesis 1, we see it in its original goodness. And here, within the dark Nothing a spiritual light is born13—the first creative act of the first day in the biblical account: “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep … Then God said, ‘Let there be light’” (Gen. 1.2–3). For Boehme this light is not the light of the sun that will be created on day four, but is rather a spiritual energy or life-force from which both the universe and the soul originally emerged, and which the reborn soul recovers in its spiritual body of light. For Boehme the six “let there be” commands of Genesis 1, which he calls the “Verbum Fiat” commands, are creative expressions of the Word or Logos of John 1, which became flesh in Jesus Christ. Each of the six Verbum Fiat commands are thus aspects of the Logos, imprinted in Wisdom, that remain eternally active, holding creation and the soul in existence at every moment. However, in the fallen world and the fallen soul, these commands are weakened or disfigured in various ways through the continued action of the fallen angels. The key description of the Johannine Logos that Boehme reads back into the Verbum Fiat of day one is this: “in him was life,14 and the life was the 13

14

Boehme refers to this as “a mystery … in the center of the astringent quality [i.e. the dark Nothing] the light grows clear and bright. From the middle [i.e. the fourth quality], where the heat gives birth to the light, shooting toward midnight into the astringent quality. That is where the light grows bright” (Aurora 11.43/1764, 11.79–81). The Greek ζωὴ (zōē) was translated by Luther as “Leben.”

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light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend/overcome15 it” (Jn. 1.4–5). Here, as in Genesis 1, the primordial light shines within the darkness, establishing an original contrarium or resonance that structures the soul’s ongoing development, just as it runs through all the days of creation in the daily reverberation between night and day or “evening and morning.” In John 1, this light is explicitly identified as the life-energy of “all people,” and Boehme extends this to the cosmos as a whole, where the light is a “light of nature” that is a “working/acting life” (wirckend Leben) (Mysterium 12.14–16). Not surprisingly, Boehme also notes that this primordial light is the wellspring of the human imagination.16 Conceptually, this light seems to be the historical precursor to the psychodynamic concept of “libido,” in that it is a singular force or energy that stands at the root of all living things and all psychological development and expression, although Freud and Jung based their respective concepts mainly in Darwinian evolution,17 and they differed somewhat in their respective definitions of libido, as we will see.18 In defining this life-energy, the distinction between the original and the fallen soul is important. We saw above that in the fallen Boehmian soul, a sexually-charged “lust-desire” emerges in the second quality, in opposition to the hungry abyss of the first quality. And in the third quality, this lust-desire takes on an anguished-angry tone as a result of the tension. These aspects of Boehme’s fallen soul generally resonate with the Freudian unconscious. But in the original soul, defined by the Genesis 1 account, a primordial life-energy exists in the first quality or day, prior to acquiring any sexual or aggressive tendencies, and Boehme defines this primordial light as “the joy (Freude) of the creation or creature” (Mysterium 12.18). For Boehme this light “withdraws” from the soul after the Fall, although “it does not totally depart, but it is nothing compared with what it was before the sin … of Adam” (Mysterium 12.16)

15

The Greek κατέλαβεν (katelaben) can mean either. Luther’s Bible has “ergriffen” meaning “grasp” or “comprehend.” For Boehme this connotes especially the rational mind’s lack of understanding (Verstand) when it is dissociated from the light of Wisdom. 16 E.g. Boehme: “consider … your life light (deines Lebens Licht), whereby you can … look with your imagination without the light of the sun into a vast large space to which the eyes of your body cannot reach” (Three Principles 4.23/1764, 4.24). 17 On proto-evolutionary concepts in Boehme see especially Walsh (1983) and Nicolescu (2013). 18 Boehme’s description of this light and the spiritual body it eventually furnishes also go well beyond psychodynamic “libido,” providing a remarkable synthetic locus for discussions of comparative spirituality and mysticism, for example, in relation to the light body of Sufism (Corbin 1958/1969, 8–9, 20–23, 28, 49, 69, 190–91, 310), the prana of Hindu yoga, or the chi/qi of Chinese medicine and spirituality.

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and it is likewise recovered when the soul is reborn.19 In Boehme we thus see an aspect of life energy that precedes its sexually-charged expression, and it is precisely this aspect that is lost in the Fall and recovered in the soul’s rebirth. Freud later defined “libido” primarily as sexual energy, whereas Jung defined it as a more general “life energy” that precedes sexuality, and their differences here became a flashpoint of controversy.20 Boehme could be used to support either view, which again positions him as the broader framework in which to situate both Freud and Jung. This primordial light and life energy is a source of joy in the reborn soul because, in the first quality, the light illumines the hungry void of the Nothing in such a way that the second quality does not need to flee from the Nothing in “lust-desire,” but instead flows peacefully from the light, which in turn causes the third quality to manifest in an “I-ness” grounded in the calm strength of “releasement” (Gelassenheit) rather than in the anguished tension between lust and death characteristic of the fallen soul. I am describing these qualities in their forward sequence here, but in the actual process of transformation and rebirth, as depicted in dream symbolism, they tend to move in the opposite direction, so to speak. That is, the process begins with the alienated “I-ness” of the third and fourth qualities as it embraces a posture of “releasement,” which allows it to regress back into its fundamental constituents in the second and first qualities as it moves deeper into the inner dark world. That is, “I-ness” begins to sense the extent to which its actions are driven by both an underlying lust and a fear of Nothing/death, as it realizes that it has no firm foundation for its own existence.21 This releasement and confrontation with the dark world within can literally feel like a death for the “I-ness.”22 But this death eventually 19

One is reminded here of Nietzsche’s poem in Zarathustra, which may have a Boehmian pedigree via Schopenhauer and Schelling: “O man! Take heed!/ What saith deep midnight, indeed?/ “I lay asleep, asleep—/ I waked from my deep dream./ The world is deep,/ And deeper than even day may dream./ Deep is its woe—/ Joy—deeper yet than woe is she:/ Saith woe: ‘Hence! Go!’/ Yet joy would have eternity,/—Profound, profound eternity!” ([1871] 1905, 79.12). 20 Interestingly, Freud and Jung reconciled to some degree in their later work (without admitting it), both defining libido as akin to Platonic eros. Jung used Plato’s concept from the outset, so this would appear to be an unspoken Freudian capitulation. 21 If space permitted, it would be interesting to discuss this in relation to Cartesian foundationalism, which was inspired by some remarkable dreams that Descartes took very seriously, and which could be interpreted according to Boehme’s framework (see von Franz 1968, 55–147). 22 There is some evidence to suggest that, for Boehme, one way to approach this process is through a form of contemplation defined by deep stillness and silence, as the soul confronts and enters the Nothing (see e.g. Pektas 2006, 103). This form of contemplation

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gives way to resurrection. And the encounter with the first quality is the nadir and turning point of the process: light is born in the darkness, the fear of death is replaced by an underlying, non-egoic, joyful life-energy flowing up from the depths, and the ego’s anxious lust is replaced by a more free and peaceful love (see table 1). Boehme also reads Genesis 1 in concert with Revelation 12, which describes a war in heaven, where the archangel Michael and his angels defeat “the dragon” and his angels: “the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him” (Rev. 12.9). For Boehme, this event occurs before creation, and it explains why, in Genesis 1, before any divine action, we find the earth “formless and void” with “darkness upon the face of the deep.” It also explains why we find a serpent lurking in the centre of Paradise. For Boehme this pre-existent dark void is the hell that was created for Satan when he was expelled from heaven: “for hell was prepared for him and he fell into it, that is, into the great darkness of the first principle, where he now lives” (Mysterium 12.11). The light that emerges on the first day thus symbolizes the primordial defeat of this “dragon.” Jung will later use this same mytheme or folklore motif to describe the heroic process of recovering libido from the protective dragon of the unconscious.23 Thus in terms of the soul’s development, day one describes the initial intrauterine stage of life. And indeed, the symbolism here corresponds quite well to the infant in the womb, where a primordial life-energy infuses a growing embryo within a dark watery cavern. The oceanic symbolism of the womb will reappear again on day two. In terms of the soul’s transformation, the symbolism of day one describes a courageous confrontation with the Nothing—the climax of the process of rebirth—through the Logos who was “glorified” precisely in the act of dying (particularly in the Johannine account), and then raised from the dead with a spiritual body. As we will see, the “I-ness” of the third and fourth quality must follow this same cruciform path toward rebirth, and its confrontation with the abyss is symbolized by the dark tomb and the descent into hell on Holy Saturday. Dream symbolism suggests that this tomb is a recapitulation of secret memories of the intrauterine state. And thus Jung coined the term “Jonah-and-the whale complex” to describe this dream shows strong similarities with some forms of Eastern meditation, although with important differences. 23 Jung noted the prominence and dispersion of this motif in the West, for example, in the many dragon-slaying knights of medieval folklore, who were often granted gold or a beloved bride for their efforts, as in the story of St. George and the dragon.

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motif of descent into the water and the “belly of Sheol” (Jon. 2.2), noting that Jesus described his own crucifixion and resurrection as the “sign of Jonah.”24 Following Holy Saturday, the light born on Easter Sunday illumines the resurrected body of light, and thus for Boehme “Sunday … is the true paradisical day” because it participates in the first eternal day of creation, which was recapitulated on Easter Sunday (Mysterium 12.7).25 7.2

Day Two: Time, Eternity, and the Oceanic Feeling

To summarize, the symbolism of day two describes a firmament or dome that separates the primordial ocean into heavenly “waters above” and earthly “waters below” (Gen. 1.6–8). For Boehme the waters above symbolize “eternity,” the waters below symbolize “time,” and the eternal waters above can only be perceived in the temporal realm through a sense of deep “feeling.” Boehme’s interpretation of this symbolism shows remarkable affinities with Freud’s concept of an “oceanic feeling of eternity” which in turn relates to Jung’s “Jonahand-the-whale complex” mentioned above. In terms of the soul’s development, the firmament symbolizes the postpartum state after the infant has left the womb and entered the world of time. The eternal “waters above” represent the intrauterine state, which is remembered and partially recovered in postpartum bonding with the mother, particularly during breast feeding (Freud’s oral stage) and sleep. Developmentally, this postpartum stage precedes the emergence of an independent ego on day three. In terms of the soul’s transformation, a

24

25

Jung was fond of the Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, which says that Jonah found “one pearl … suspended inside the belly of the fish and it gave illumination to Jonah, like this sun which shines with all its might at noon; and it showed to Jonah all that was in the sea and in the depths” (Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 1916, 69–70; see Jung [1911–12] 1952, CW5: 330, 419). Boehme also speaks often of the “pearl” as the great mystery representing the Kingdom of God in the soul (Mt. 13.46; e.g. Forty Questions 16.5, 37.1/1764, 16.6, 37.1–2; Mysterium 70: 6–7). In the preceding chapter of Matthew, when Jesus is asked to perform a miracle, he famously says that he would give only one sign, “the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth” (Mt. 12.39–40). McGrath agrees with Dourley (2008, 86) that “the direction of Boehme’s mysticism … is exitus, that is, away from the non-dual toward differentiation, personalization, history and mediation,” in contrast to Eckhart’s “reditus, a return into the non-dual, unmediated point of origin of being.” Eckhart is “introverted,” and Boehme “extroverted” (2012, 60). In my reading Boehmian transformation involves both vectors: a return to the inner origin point in order to grant renewed outer expression.

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regression to this stage allows one to recover the perception of eternal meaning in the temporal realm through deep feeling or empathy (Einfühlung). We saw in chapter 5 that in the fallen Boehmian soul, the second quality, associated with Mercury (☿), is a sexually-charged desire that emerges in opposition to the dark Nothing of the first quality. This “lust-desire” then becomes the driving force of the soul’s ongoing development, cognition, and behaviour. And, like Augustinian concupiscence, it remains insatiably hungry for finite objects but can only find true fulfilment in eternal Wisdom. Desire’s quest for eternity becomes very important in the present discussion. When we bring Boehme’s abstract “lust-desire” back into the concrete exegetical context of Genesis 1, we see it in its original goodness. On day two God’s Verbum Fiat is, “‘Let there be a dome [or firmament] in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome” (Gen. 1.6–7). In Boehme’s figural reading, this firmament symbolizes “the gulf between time and eternity” (Mysterium 12.23, 26). The waters above the firmament symbolize an internal and eternal “spiritual water” or “holy element,” which is the “essence of the seven properties” of Wisdom, whereas the waters below the firmament represent “external material water” (Mysterium 12.24, 30). For Boehme, because the “waters above” are eternal, they can actually be present anywhere and everywhere, whereas the “waters below” are confined to time and space. Thus “heaven is in the world, but the world is not in heaven,” and “the outward water is the instrument of the inward”—an inclusive hierarchy (Mysterium 12.23, 27). In the soul’s original goodness, this heavenly water allowed the perception of eternal Wisdom throughout the whole of temporal reality. In Blake’s memorable words, it allowed the soul “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an Hour.”26 We referred to this earlier in terms of eternal understanding (Verstand) permeating and structuring temporal reason (Vernunft), although in terms of the soul’s development, temporal reason will not appear until day four. For Boehme, this eternal perception was lost in the Fall, such that “earthly humans are not able to understand anything” because their “understanding (Verstand) is barely in the power of the water above the firmament, that is, in the heaven.” But if “they are awakened in the water above the firmament, which disappeared in Adam, as to this life they see through all; otherwise there is no understanding (Verstand) here and all is dumb” (Mysterium 12.28). 26 From “Auguries of Innocence” (1988, 490).

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Boehme also notes that the main way of recovering this eternal vision is not through rational cognition, but through a kind of deep emotional sensing, or “feeling-into” (Einfühlung)27 the objects of perception: “the powers of eternity work through the powers of time as the sun illumines the water, and the water comprehends it not, but feels ( fühlet) it only” (Mysterium 12.29). But we are again seeing this process of transformation in the wrong direction, so to speak, since we have not yet encountered the “I-ness” that will appear developmentally in the terra firma of day three, and the rational cognition of day four. The ability to “feel into” the eternal realm of understanding and Wisdom involves a “releasement” (Gelassenheit) of both “I-ness” and its detached reason (Vernunft)—an opening to the eternal “waters above,” which allows them to permeate the temporal “waters below,” so that “one water is not without the other” (Mysterium 12.25). For Boehme the key event that describes this renewed perception is the sacrament of baptism: I see with the external eyes of this world only the water under the firmament: but the water above the firmament is that which God hath appointed in Christ to the Baptism of Regeneration, after the Word of the divine power had moved therein … the outward water is the instrument of the inward.” (Mysterium 12.25–30)28 Similarly, for Boehme, Jesus speaks of this spiritual water both in his diurnal conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well (Jn. 4.10–14; Mysterium 4.15, 10.57), and in his nocturnal conversation about rebirth with Nicodemus, where Jesus says “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again/from above.”29 Here Nicodemus’ response is important, hinting at how developmental stages can be revisited in the transformational process: “How can anyone 27

The German word “Einfühlung” can be translated as “empathy,” “deep feeling,” or “feeling into.” It was a very important word for the German Romantics and early psychotherapy (see Ellenberger 1970, 200). The importance of this word may owe something to Boehme. 28 See also Mysterium 41.13–20. This quotation also offers a snapshot of Boehme’s understanding of the sacraments, which is basically Lutheran in that the sacraments are effective through faith. But Boehme’s logic is symbolic rather than rationalistic. That is, the efficacy of sacraments, and the comprehensibility of all dogma in general, only makes sense with primary reference to the imaginal realm—the realm in which Christ is both simultaneously eternally crucified and eternally resurrected, and the realm in which faith is founded, for “magia is the best theology. In it true faith is both founded and discovered” (Six Mystical Pts 5: 23). 29 The Greek ἄνωθεν (anōthen) can mean either.

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be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus’ answer rephrases his original statement, this time adding the two most primordial biblical symbols, symbols that precede creation, and from which all creation emerges in Genesis 1: “no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit” (Jn. 3.3–5). In Boehme’s reading, Jesus is attempting to replace Nicodemus’ “fleshly” or literal understanding of a “return to the womb,” with a symbolic or spiritual understanding. And Boehme is well aware that this spiritual understanding and its potent symbols can involve a recovery of the hidden memories and emotional experiences of earlier developmental stages (e.g. Mysterium 30.8).30 Thus to be born “again/from above … of water and Spirit,” is to recover the eternal spiritual water above the firmament—the perception of eternity—which begins to recede after the child leaves the womb. It is important to note that Boehme sees the symbols of the second day as distinctly feminine and maternal for various reasons. He notes that the second day is Monday, which was ruled by the moon in the science of his day (Mysterium 12.19), and the moon in turn was thought to rule not only the night but also the ocean tides and the female fertility cycle,31 waxing and waning like the womb. The womb itself contains the oceanic waters of amniotic fluid that surround the gestating child, who is born in the midst of these waters, like the cosmos itself in the biblical account. The moon and the ocean waters were thus considered female in contrast to the fiery male sun and its life energy. For Boehme, the sun as a “nature god” eventually manifests on day four out of the spiritual light of day one (Mysterium 12.13), and the moon as a “nature goddess” manifests on day four out of the firmament of day two (Mysterium 12.30). Thus, developmentally, these parental planetary forces are imprinted very early in the developing soul, and their duality and polarity will become palpable when they appear on day four. In terms of the soul’s development, as noted above, Boehme interprets the firmament of day two as a “gulf between time and eternity.” While it is hard to know what intrauterine and postpartum experience is like for an infant, it is reasonable to think that a fulsome experience of temporality and temporal sequence only begins when the infant exits the womb. It is also reasonable to think that birth posits a significant barrier or “firmament” between intrauterine experience, with its warm, dark, quiet, floating, protected containment, and postpartum experience, where the buzzing, blooming world of temporal 30 Jung will later emphasize this nocturnal conversation with Nicodemus ([1911–12] 1952, CW5: 224–227). 31 The moon cycle and the average female fertility cycle are both 28 days.

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sequence fills the infant’s senses. Like the firmament or dome in the biblical account, which creates an atmosphere of breathable air between the primordial waters, the postpartum infant takes her first breath in a new world of time-bound sensations and sequences. The infant then experiences a regular, periodic recovery of something like the intrauterine experience in the protected solace of breast feeding, which often leads to sleep. Thus mother and breast come to represent a recovery of the “oceanic feeling” of the womb, though not a full recovery.32 Freud later spoke of this “oceanic feeling” as a “feeling of the eternal … of something limitless, unbounded,” and he believed that it was based in the early bond with the mother, before the child’s ego had developed a subject-object divide. In this state, “originally the ego includes everything” (1930, SE21: 64, 68). The emergence of Freudian “libido” (Boehme’s “lust-desire”) and the Oedipal longing for the mother and the womb are thus partly an attempt to recover this “feeling of eternity,” which is often depicted in watery, oceanic dream symbolism. Jung, as we noted above, observed the same dream motif, which he called the “Jonah-and-the-whale” complex, thus giving Freud’s Oedipus complex a deeper mythical grounding, and positing an ultimately intrauterine source for the feeling of eternity. Jung noted that the appearance of this dream motif in an adult often signalled a period of introversion, as the libido turned inward seeking spiritual rebirth. Likewise, according to Boehme’s symbolic framework, day two includes Freud’s “oral” phase, since for Boehme the primordial Nothing of day one is experienced mainly as a “hunger,” and on day two the attempt to fill this inner void with eternal spiritual water suggests the phenomenological experience of breast feeding and its recapitulation of atemporal intrauterine comfort. In terms of the soul’s transformation, the cruciform surrender of the “I-ness” of the third and fourth qualities leads back to the symbolism of day two, which plunges the soul into the eternal baptismal waters of rebirth. Importantly, the firmament of day two runs through the whole Bible as a symbol that both reveals and conceals eternity.33 In the Markan account, the firmament or heavens are “torn open” at Jesus’ baptism as the Spirit descends like a dove (Mk. 1.9), and when Jesus breathes his last at the crucifixion, the temple curtain is “torn 32 We might speak here, with D.W. Winnicott (1971) of a “good enough” recovery, which stands behind the “good enough” mother. Children who continue to palpably mourn the loss of the intrauterine state may develop a sense of melancholy in relation to the mother (see e.g. Capps 1997; 2002). 33 E.g. on the one hand, “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament declares his handiwork” (Ps. 19.1); on the other hand, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” (Isa. 64.1).

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in two” (Mk. 15.38). The temple was constructed as an analogue of the cosmos, with the curtain as the firmament dividing time from eternity.34 Both of these texts use the same Greek word (σχιζο; schizo), and both presuppose the cosmic symbolism of day two. The connection between them is why the apostle Paul can speak of “baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6.4). In Boehme’s symbolic reading of the soul’s transformation, the cruciform surrender of “I-ness” baptises the soul with a renewed perception of eternity. And this baptism allows temporal objects to speak symbolically and poetically, while also stimulating the production of imaginative symbols in the soul, as eternal meaning shines through finite objects. This recovery of eternal perception in turn leads back to the hidden light in the dark centre of day one, where the soul is reborn within the dark womb and tomb. As mentioned, for Boehme as for Augustine, a kind of existential Fall is repeated in every child in the form of a truncation of perception. This suggests that, for Boehme, the infant originally exists in a bond of “love-desire” with the nourishing mother, who offers not just physical but spiritual nourishment in the form of an oceanic feeling of eternal oneness with all things. But this infant-mother matrix begins to divide as the infant’s cries produce the nourishing breast with varying degrees of success, and the infant slowly realizes that mother is “not me.” Here lie the roots of “I-ness,” just as Boehme’s framework predicts. As this subject-object differentiation proceeds, the oceanic feeling of eternal oneness recedes (and yet remains forever in unconscious memory). The infant-mother matrix of undifferentiated comfort and abundance is then increasingly replaced by an anxious desire to control and possess mother and breast as objects, and the egoic identification of these objects itself causes a tear in eternal oneness, creating a perceptual firmament dividing time from eternity. Like Augustinian concupiscence, the “lust-desire” that emerges remains forever unsatisfied by finite objects, becoming increasingly anxious in its objectification and consumption of them. As Blake later said, “More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul; less than All cannot satisfy Man.”35 Thus the symbolic depth of day two and its firmament encompass many interrelated psychological dualities, which are mapped onto each other in complex ways: infant/mother, subject/object, time/eternity, hunger/fullness, lust/love, death/life, etc. In the developmental stages that follow, we will 34 See e.g. Levenson 1984; 2014. Josephus notes that the temple curtain displayed a “panorama of the heavens” (in Levinson 1984, 284). 35 From There is No Natural Religion (1988, 2).

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continue to see further aspects of this existential Fall, and interestingly they seem to generally follow the narrative of Genesis 2, while presupposing the symbolic framework of Genesis 1. That is, Genesis 2 provides a symbolic account of the existential Fall—the loss of innocence, and the movement from the Garden to the Wilderness—which recurs in every developing child, and the symbols and narrative of this existential Fall presuppose the symbolism of Genesis 1. 7.3

Day Three: Dry Land, Vegetation, and the Terra Firma of “I-ness”

To summarize, the symbolism of day three describes dry land emerging out of the “waters below,” and then trees and vegetation growing on the land (Gen. 1.9–13). In terms of the soul’s development, for Boehme this symbolizes the emergence of the terra firma of “I-ness” (Ichheit) in the soul, and the growing ability of “I-ness” to bend the temporal world to its “own will” (eigene Wille). Here the existential Fall continues as “I-ness” identifies itself with the temporal body, and eternity further recedes. In terms of the soul’s transformation, for Boehme, the “I-ness” that initially differentiates itself from the “waters below” and their connection to the “waters above,” can later be baptised in those waters through a “releasement” (Gelassenheit), as noted above. We saw in chapter 5 that in the fallen Boehmian soul, the third quality, associated with Mars (♂), is an anxious-anguished rage that emerges from the tension between the previous two qualities, and from which “I-ness” or ego is born. The previous two qualities continue to work in and through this third, and thus the sexually-charged “lust-desire” of the second quality, itself a response to the “Nothing-desire” of the first, continues to move outward with its grasping, controlling gaze. But now it is increasingly channelled through the “I-ness” of the third quality, which expands or inflates accordingly. Importantly, the “I-ness” is born surrounded by the anxious tension of the previous two qualities, a fact that Freud noted in his later structural theory. When we bring this abstract conceptualization back into the concrete exegetical context of Genesis 1, we see it in its original goodness. To illustrate the difference, Boehme notes that day three is Tuesday, which according to the science of the day was ruled by the planet Mars, “wrathful and fiery” in its fallen state (Mysterium 12.37). But in its original goodness the third quality is pervaded both by the primordial light of the first day, and the eternal water of the second day, which promotes a peaceful and joyful, rather than a wrathful and fiery “I-ness” (Mysterium 12.35). Or, as Boehme says with typically allusive brilliance, “all growth consists in the light and water … then Mars springs up

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for great joy” (Mysterium 12.38). On day three God’s Verbum Fiat has two parts: First, “‘Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas.” And second, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it” (Gen. 1.9–11). In terms of the soul’s development, on day two we saw the undifferentiated infant-mother matrix beginning to split into subject and object, and yet the subject, such as it was, remained in a watery, inchoate state.36 Here on day three the dry land, according to Boehme’s schema, symbolizes the standpoint of “I-ness.” And the emergence of the dry land symbolizes the emergence of bodily awareness out of the inchoate watery fusion between body and environment typical of day two. In the developing child, the identification of “I-ness” with the body emerges in concert with wilful control of the body, as the infant learns, for example, to use her hands and fingers to grasp and consume desired objects. Thus the “I-ness” initially identifies with the body and the body’s spatial boundaries, or as Freud later said, “the conscious ego … is first and foremost a body-ego” (1923b, 31). In Boehme’s reading of the biblical text this is symbolized by the dry land emerging from the temporal waters below as distinct from the eternal waters above. That is, the “I-ness” sees itself as firmly planted in time and space because the body itself exists within these parameters and must function according to them.37 Thus following the existential Fall of day two, where eternity is increasingly divided from time, on day three both “I-ness” and its body are increasingly subsumed within and subject 36

37

In many ways, it seems that the subject in this state defines itself by the gaze of its object, or as Hegel later contended (in a Boehme-inspired insight), “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (1807, 111). From this social and reflexive self-consciousness Hegel’s notion of Spirit emerges as an intersubjective property, and Hegel bequeathed these ideas to a vast swath of modern and “postmodern” continental thinkers, such that the “gaze of the other” is now a popular category in the humanities and social sciences. Freud and Jung certainly agree that the ego is significantly defined by the gaze of parents, authority figures, and love-interests. But for Boehme, Freud, and Jung, the subject is not wholly socially determined. The relationship between subject and object is reciprocal. Balthasar will later say that “the little child awakens to self-consciousness through being addressed by the love of his mother” (1993, 15). Note the amount of time that young children spend playing with the parameters of time and space, with total focus—beginnings, endings, repetitions, and insides and outsides in relation to various spaces and objects. Piaget’s “object permanence” gets at some of this. Initially, our minds seem remarkably unaware of space-time, especially given our evolutionary history. Each child seems to learn it anew. This may even provide evidence for the hypothesis that an immortal soul incarnates into a body.

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to space-time categories and constraints. Genesis 2 describes the “formation” of this earthly temporal body: “the LORD God formed man (Adam) from the dust of the ground (Adamah)” (Gen. 2.7), and according to Boehme’s reading, the existential Fall of day three repeats Adam’s initial Fall into temporality and the temporal body.38 Further, as vegetation grows on the earth, the biblical text highlights the many categories and “kinds” of plants and trees, as well as the “fruit” that each one produces (Gen. 1.11–12). This symbolizes the ability of “I-ness” to categorize objects of perception and construct a “mental map,” so to speak, which is both constructed and perceived according to the desires of “I-ness.” That is, fallen “I-ness” perceives and categorizes the world and its objects in terms of temporal “lust-desire,” and thus in terms of how objects can serve “I-ness.” Fruit is likely the best example of a natural object that is perfectly tuned to the self-interested perception and bodily awareness of “I-ness,” since it is brightly coloured, sweet tasting, and perfectly sized for primate and human hands to grasp and dissemble.39 This is hinted at in the biblical account of the forbidden fruit in Genesis 3, where, after the serpent tells Eve that the fruit will open her eyes, she immediately “sees” two things, first “that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes” (Gen. 3.6). The real eye opener comes in the next verse after Adam and Eve actually eat the fruit. And for Boehme this eating of “knowledge of good and evil” symbolizes the decisive Fall of day four, when eternal Wisdom or understanding (Verstand) is cut off from temporal reason (Vernunft). Here on day three we are still dealing with an “I-ness” where perception is determined by its desires; on day four we will see the desires of “I-ness” drive the development of more abstract cognition and language, as the sun, moon, and stars emerge in the sky-world of thought. Importantly, while the “I-ness” of day three identifies with the body, its “individual will” (eigene Wille) can only control certain aspects of the body, leaving other aspects beyond conscious control and therefore unconscious, including the autonomic nervous system and its various functions (e.g. breathing, circulation, digestion, endocrine regulation, etc.). Boehme, of course, does not mention this latter point, but it will become important in the discussion below. It means that, according to biblical symbolism, the distinction between land 38 For Boehme, the fleshly body was originally perfectly united to the spiritual body, but after the Fall the spiritual body is to some degree lost (see e.g. Mysterium 15.10–15; 16.1–10; 18.1–10). 39 That is, fruit co-evolved with larger mammals, including primates, offering nutritional benefits to them, while itself benefitting from their spreading of its genetic material—seeds carried and planted in excrement.

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and water, or “I-ness” and the unconscious, runs right through the body itself, somewhat ambiguously, as “I-ness” gradually learns to control various bodily functions: first the ability to grasp and consume objects, then the ability to crawl and walk, and later the regulation of excretion. All of this is a progressive emergence of the terra firma of bodily “I-ness” and its individual will out of the waters below, and each stage of increased control is significant. The biblical symbolism of day three also generally corresponds to Freud’s anal and phallic stages, during which the Freudian ego develops out of the Id, although the phallic stage is especially evident on day four with the development of language-based reason (Vernunft) and its relationship to parental authorities. The creation of excrement or “earth” out of the body, and the wilful control of that creation, is precisely what fascinates the toddler in the anal stage,40 and in the biblical text the emergence of earth is quickly followed by the growth of phallic trees on the egoic landscape.41 Likewise, if we read the sequence of Genesis 1 with Genesis 2, here the developing child is still “naked and unashamed” (Gen. 2.25), consistent with Freud’s phallic stage. But after the decisive existential Fall of day four the shame of nakedness will set it (Gen. 3.7), consistent with Freud’s latency stage. In terms of the soul’s transformation, it will be helpful to begin here with dream symbolism itself. Jung noticed that dreams dealing with the conscious outer world of the ego and its challenges normally take place on land, whereas dreams describing the inner dynamics of the unconscious normally take place in watery landscapes. These symbolic landscapes were so distinct and so common that Jung, who eschewed most attempts to generalize with dream symbols, made an exception in this case: land generally symbolizes the conscious world and water the unconscious. And Jung noticed that when the libido of a patient turned inward, either because it was overwhelmed by outer events, or because it was searching for deeper meaning and significance in life, dreams would often depict a transition from land to water, often via some kind of boat or vessel.42 40 In fact, as Freud realized, the toilet-training infant acts like a little god, who, following the biblical account, takes pride in creating the “earth” of excrement ex nihilo. The godlike wilfulness of this stage can be seen in toddler tantrums, which are common in most Western cultures, and in anxiety-withdrawal, which is more common in certain Eastern cultures (LaFreniere et al. 2010). 41 If any of this seems speculative, consider whether any other day of creation has symbolism that better corresponds to Freud’s anal and phallic stages. 42 Construction of a vessel is very important for alchemical work, as the first stage, before any procedures can be conducted within the vessel. Jung, of course, saw the symbolism of alchemical texts largely as a projection of inner psychological work.

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In terms of the “Jonah-and-the-whale complex,” Jonah flees his calling to external world by boarding a ship bound for Tarshish, which in that context was at the edge of the known world. Now interestingly, as mentioned above, both Freud and Jung located the unconscious to a significant extent, in the body itself and the autonomic nervous system, or the “watery” aspects of the body that are not under conscious control. And both were surprised by the fact that unconscious memories and traumas seemed to be stored, so to speak, in the body, and often in its watery aspects.43 Thus the descent into the “waters below” tends to activate these unconscious memories, stirring up the waters. The mytheme of stormy seas fits here, not only as depicted in the Jonah story, but in the Gospel accounts of Jesus calming the storm, walking on water, and rescuing those who were afraid of sinking beneath it. Stirring up and processing these bodily memories can also be healing, and here the story of the healing pool of Bethesda is symbolically accurate (Jn. 5.1–9), with Jesus depicted as a substitute for the healing pool. The “waters below” are thus a symbol of the unknown aspects of the nervous system itself, and the ambiguous boundary where psyche meets soma. And according to Boehme’s interpretation of the biblical symbolism, the waters below were originally connected to the eternal realm of waters above. Thus as the “I-ness” releases itself and regresses to an earlier “watery” state of development, it becomes more aware of the body and begins to sense the body’s elemental physicality more deeply. This in turn activates the eternal realm of archetypal images and symbols, which begin to populate the imagination, including the world of dreams. Jung was continually intrigued by the way that archetypes, which he deduced from his observation of recurring dream symbols, seemed to mirror biological instincts—a kind of resonance between the waters above and the waters below.44 That is, for Jung the unconscious has an upper and a lower register, above and below ego consciousness: “The dynamism of instinct 43

44

Freud first noticed this in treating cases of “conversion hysteria,” where the bodily symptom might actually symbolize the traumatic memory. The recent renaissance in trauma theory is a recovery of Freud on this and many other points. See Herman (2015) and van der Kolk (2015). Ken Wilbur’s influential essay, “The Pre/Trans Fallacy” (1982), notes some of the difficulty here, in that regression can easily be confused with transcendence. I find Wilbur’s discussion of Jung slightly inaccurate, in that I think Jung avoids the pre/trans fallacy at least in his “Jonah-and-the-whale” formulation. As noted above, I much prefer Michael Washburn’s phrase “regression in the service of transcendence” (1995, 171–202). Washburn understands that regression into the body and its stored memories and traumas (the “waters below”) can activate the instinctive archetypes that light the path toward transcendence (the “waters above”) (1994; 1995).

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is lodged as it were in the infra-red part of the spectrum, whereas the instinctual image lies in the ultra-violet part” (1954a, CW8: 211). This accords quite well with Boehme, in that the waters below symbolize the elemental aspects of the body, and the waters above symbolize eternal Wisdom as the imagination of God. As the “I-ness” descends into the dynamism of the body, following the cruciform path mentioned above, it often encounters stormy seas and past traumas. But ultimately it can be baptised in the eternal spiritual water that connects below to above, and receive the gifts of light/life-energy born from the womb and tomb of the dark Nothing. 7.4

Day Four: Heavenly Bodies, Astral Reason, the Hidden Dark Mind, and the Transforming Centre

To summarize, the symbolism of day four describes the creation of the astral realm of sun, moon, and stars (Gen. 1.14–19). For Boehme, this represents the realm of abstract thought, including temporal language-based reason (Vernunft), or “astral reason” (see chapter 5.1), which can either be receptive to or dissociated from the eternal realm of image-based Wisdom or understanding (Verstand). The symbolism of day four thus involves all three soul-elements described in chapter 5: the inner eternal dark element, the inner eternal light element, and the outward temporal element (see figures 2, 3, and 4). In terms of the soul’s development, in summary, day four corresponds to the acquisition of language in the growing child, which continues the existential Fall described above. Here language is used just as the body was used on day three: to grasp and manipulate reality to furnish the desires of “I-ness.”45 Here the decisive break is made with the eternal realm, as “I-ness” identifies itself with temporal language-based reason (Vernunft), which it also chooses to seize as its own possession. This is the eating of the forbidden fruit that gives “knowledge of good and evil,” dividing the three elements of the trinitarian soul, and relegating “I-ness” to the outward temporal element. “I-ness” in this state becomes puffed up with outer temporal knowledge, as it loses the ability to perceive inner eternal Wisdom. As we saw above, this distinction between knowledge and Wisdom was the linchpin of Augustinian orthodoxy, which had a profound influence on the West (see chapter 2.4.2). Here the developing child also experiences a great amnesia (Freud’s “infantile amnesia”), as “I-ness” forgets its pre-linguistic development, and forgets 45

For a summary of this function of language with neuroscientific insights see McGilchrist (2019, 113–115).

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that it emerged from the light of eternity and the undivided primordial waters. As “I-ness” identifies with language-based reason and its dualistic tendencies (good/evil, subject/object, mine/yours, etc.) the eternal dark and light soul-elements are divided both conceptually and practically. As “I-ness,” like the rebel angels, seizes the fruits of Wisdom for its own ends, it loses the inner eternal light soul-element, which can never be possessed by force, and finds itself driven by the eternal dark soul-element. That is, “I-ness” finds itself perched on a shaky foundation of Nothing-desire, lust-desire, and anxiety-anguish. These three fearful dark qualities, which cannot be comprehended by language-based reason (Vernunft), recede into the unconscious where they continue their hidden influence on the soul, appearing occasionally in dreams and nightmares. In terms of the soul’s transformation, in summary, as “I-ness” finds itself isolated and alienated in the outward temporal soul-element, on day four the cross appears as the transforming centre that can reunite the three soul-elements in trinitarian harmony. Here the cross is a type of the Tree of Life, reopening access to eternal Wisdom. The cruciform path involves not only the “releasement” (Gelassenheit) of the bodily “I-ness,” which emerged on day three, but also of the rationalistic “I-ness.” Reason must admit its limitations, surrender, and be recentred by eternal image-based Wisdom. Logos for Boehme must be recentred in biblical mythos and its symbols. In this process the soul’s inner eternal dark world is recognized, confessed, and transformed into light. To unpack these summaries in more detail, we saw in chapter 5 that in the fallen Boehmian soul, the fourth quality, associated with the Sun (☉), is the point “where the sentient ( fühlende) and intellective (verständige) life first arises” (Mysterium 3.18). Here a great “lightening flash” (Blitz) or “fright” (Schrack) divides the eternal dark fire world from the eternal holy light world. And this flash also represents the creation of a hidden dark mind in the soul. As Boehme says: in this fright (Schrack) the astringent harsh darkness, which is cold, becomes frightened before the light  … and becomes in itself a fear of death (ein Schrack des Todes), where the wrathful and cold property retires back inside and closes itself up like a death. For in this fright (Schrack) the dark mind ( finstere Gemüth) becomes its own essence (wessentlich); it preserves itself in itself as a separate being (Eigenes), as a great fear (Furcht) before the light, or an enemy of the light. (Mysterium 3.26) Here what Freud and Jung will call the “unconscious mind” emerges decisively, with a hidden will of its own, as an entity separate from the conscious linguistic-rationalistic ego. In terms of the development of the fallen soul,

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as mentioned, in the fourth quality the soul splits apart, and the previous three qualities withdraw into unconscious darkness precisely as “intellective” (verständige) life is born in the soul. Here the “I-ness” that appeared in the anxiety-anger of the third quality attempts to hide from the inner darkness that birthed it by identifying with outer temporal language-based reason (Vernunft), by which it attempts to control and dominate the outer world. This marks the decisive division or enmity between light and darkness, sun and moon, day and night, eternity and time, and understanding (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft). The previous three qualities withdraw from “I-ness” and its inflated reason, and “I-ness” now experiences them as a dark void and a “fear of death” (Freud’s death drive), over which “I-ness” remains suspended, and from which it continually attempts to protects itself (Freud’s defence mechanisms). When we bring this abstract fourth quality back into the concrete exegetical context of Genesis 1, we see it in its original goodness, before the Fall. On day four God creates the sun, moon, and stars, which for Boehme are the archetypal heavenly bodies that allow the seven qualities of eternal Wisdom/Sophia to flow down into time, and to stamp their character on the temporal world and on temporal reason (Vernunft). As Boehme says, “here we understand very fully and exactly the ground of the manifestation of the inward nature into the external” (Mysterium 13.1). God’s Verbum Fiat says: “Let there be lights in the dome [or firmament] of the heaven to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years.” The next phrase in the text seems almost superfluous, except to underline how these heavenly bodies imprint their heavenly influence on the earth below: “… and let them be lights in the dome of the heaven to give light upon the earth” (Gen. 1.14–15). For Boehme this “astrum,” in its original goodness, existed in harmony with eternal Wisdom. The astrum was Sophia’s primary medium of expression in the temporal world. And likewise astral reason (Vernunft) was originally the temporal medium that expressed eternal understanding (Verstand), for “the whole astrum is a pronounced voice of the powers, an expressed Word … It is an echo … out of the dark-and-light world” (Mysterium 13.10). These allusions to speech, language, and expression will become important below. For Boehme, in the macrocosm, the sun, moon, and stars, which together comprise the “astrum,” represent “the soul of the outer world [or World Soul], as a constantly enduring mind (Gemüthe),” and likewise these symbols play an important role in the mind of the microcosm. For Boehme, “God has awakened a king … with six councillors, which are his assistants: that is, the sun, with the other six planetic stars, which were spoken forth out of the seven properties [of Wisdom]” (Mysterium 13.16). If the sun is king, then the moon is queen (see figure 5), and each rules its respective domain, as the biblical text says:

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“God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars” (Gen. 1.14–15). We will see below that the symbols of sun and moon are important “rulers” in the microcosm of the soul, and the marriage of sun and moon will be an important symbolic motif in Boehme’s reading of the days that follow. Again, the original goodness of day four as described in the biblical account, where eternal Wisdom fully infuses the temporal realm, is the goal of the fallen soul’s transformation. To describe the fallen soul’s development in more detail, again, the “I-ness” that identified with the temporal body on day three now identifies with temporal or “astral” reason (Vernunft), which it uses to navigate and dominate the external temporal world. The emergence of temporal reason is generally concomitant with the emergence of language, as children learn both to speak and to think in linguistic categories. Indeed Boehme’s description of day four is replete with linguistic allusions, as “the speaking word diffuses itself” in the temporal realm (Mysterium 13.6). Day four is Wednesday, which Boehme notes, following the science of his day, is associated with the “quick perceptive Mercurius” (Mysterium 13.1), a planet and metal associated with “eloquence, intelligence, and expression” (Weeks 2013, 29). This development of language-based reason (Vernunft), as mentioned, seems to further the existential Fall noted above. We saw above that infants emerge from the watery womb with a memory of the “oceanic feeling” of eternity, a memory they retain even as the waters divide on day two and “I-ness” emerges on day three. The attempt to recover this sense of eternity prompts a mistaken “lust-desire” for temporal objects, beginning with the mother, in terms of which “I-ness” begins to construct a mental map of reality. The emergence of language is the next logical step in constructing this mental map, and it is alluded to in Genesis 2 as Adam “gives names” to “every living creature.” Naming, especially in the ancient world, was a means of exerting control. Importantly, it is Adam’s loneliness that prompts this naming, as he searches for “a helper as his partner,” and the final name he gives is to the helper created from his own body: “woman” (Gen. 2.18–23). None of this was lost on Boehme. Again, Genesis 2 provides a symbolic description of the existential Fall in the developing child, in conversation with the symbolism of Genesis 1. According to Boehme’s developmental schema, the “lust-desire” of “I-ness” continues to seek the eternal in temporal objects, first through perception and bodily manipulation of objects, and now through language-based reason (Vernunft), which constructs a mental map of desired objects. According to Genesis 2, the culmination of this search is “woman,” or in a more gender-neutral sense, a romantic love interest. But for Boehme, we ultimately “fall” in love precisely because we seek eternal Wisdom and understanding (Verstand) in the

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face of the beloved. And again, as Genesis 2 notes, in order to “cling to” this beloved, we must first “leave father and mother” (Gen. 2.24). The deep psychological connection between these two forms of love—child-parent, and lover-beloved—will later become crucial for Freud and Jung. For Boehme, all of these dynamics take place according to the symbolism of day four, where the sun and moon appear as the archetypes of both the parents and the sexes in the temporal realm.46 Again, as we would expect, this stage of development corresponds to the emergence of Freudian Oedipal dynamics, which begin in intra-familial or endogamous relationships and later affect extra-familial or exogamous relationships. For Freud, the Oedipus complex begins in the phallic stage, along with language development, and it then produces the great amnesia of the latency stage, when “primary process” thinking with its Oedipal proclivities is largely repressed, as language-based, rationalistic, “secondary process” thinking comes to the fore, just as Boehme’s schema would predict. For Boehme, the final and decisive Fall, to which all the other existential precursors have merely been pointing, is the eating of the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good an Evil,” which also takes place according to the symbolism of day four. This eating represents not merely the development of language-based reason (Vernunft), but the decision of “I-ness” to see this reason as its own possession, rather than as the expression (or Word) of eternal Wisdom. Thus “I-ness” identifies with its own language-based cognition of outward reality, without remainder, and comes to see itself as the centre of its linguistically constructed universe. In this identification it is fully cut-off from eternal Wisdom. In Boehme’s reading, the two trees at the centre of the Garden are really “only one, but manifest in two kingdoms” (Mysterium 17.11). The Tree of Life represents the eternal realm of Wisdom, where darkness is fully sublated into light, and where reason (Vernunft) remains open to understanding (Verstand); the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil represents the division between darkness and light, which also causes a division between temporal reason and eternal understanding. The soul that tries to possess Wisdom actually causes this division in itself, losing its eternal perception and becoming trapped in the divided world of temporal reason. In terms of the symbolism of day four, the Tree of Life represents unity and harmony between sun and moon, light and darkness, and eternity and time, whereas the Tree of Knowledge represents their division and enmity.47 Thus, before the Fall, according to Boehme, Adam did not sleep, and “the night was 46 47

Above we saw the parental sun and moon symbolism in the dream of Joseph. Here we could also speak of “complementary dualism,” which is a facet of both alchemy and so many indigenous worldviews, as opposed to “conflict dualism,” which is an aspect

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as the day, for he saw with pure eyes” (Mysterium 18.13). After the Fall, night becomes the realm of sleep and concealment, where the eternal dark world remains hidden, although it is partially revealed in the image-based thinking of dreams. Likewise, waking language-based reason (Vernunft) can no longer perceive its eternal source, although the light of Wisdom can be partially revealed in waking imagination. In the picture Boehme paints of this Fall, it is as if “I-ness” tries to hide from its own inner source—the dark world of the first three qualities. This hiding is symbolized in Genesis 2 by Adam and Eve hiding part of themselves, their “nakedness,” including the “lust-desire” that they now identify with their sexual organs. In the text immediately following this episode the first couple also hide themselves “from the presence of God,” symbolizing reason hiding from its source in divine Wisdom. Thus, for Boehme, “I-ness” flees further from both God and the inner world of the soul by losing itself in external things, and in doing so it becomes neurotic, especially in relation to sexuality and the body.48 To describe the fallen soul’s transformation in more detail, day four represents a healing and reconciliation of all three soul-elements under the sign of the cross, which is also a marriage of sun and moon, bridegroom and bride—a marriage that will continue as a central motif in Boehme’s reading of the next two days. Indeed, the Lukan account of Jesus’ crucifixion notes that “the sun was eclipsed” at the same time as “the curtain of the temple was torn in two”—a solar eclipse being a conjunction or marriage of sun and moon, and the temple curtain being the barrier between time and eternity (Lk. 23.45).49 Importantly, for Boehme, day four is actually the beginning of the process of transformation—the initial stage of the “releasement” of the prideful rationalism of “I-ness,” which initiates the journey into the inner world. As every therapist knows, distressed clients usually arrive with excellent reasons why their neurotic thinking and lifestyle cannot be other than it is. And as Freud and Jung discovered very early on, exploring the symbolic data emerging from a client’s dreams at this stage often provokes the strongest defences from the rationalistic ego. But if the ego can release these defences, dream life usually becomes activated as waking rationality begins to explore the strange new

of the kind of Christianity that colonized so many indigenous cultures in the sixteenth century. See e.g. Ken Derry (2019). 48 The parable of the prodigal son (Lk 15.11–32) offers a good illustration of “I-ness” losing itself in external things, before returning to the home it originally knew. 49 The other synoptic gospels also note that darkness came over the land beginning at noon (Mk. 15.33; Mt. 27.45). Renaissance painters sometimes depicted the crucifix with sun and moon in the upper quadrants e.g. Raphael’s Mond Crucifixion, 1502–3.

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image-based thinking of the night world. The day-day world of knowledge opens to the night-world of Wisdom. Here, in this initial stage, dreams tend to speak of all the personal dynamics that make relations with parents, families, and lovers so universally fraught. These are the endless dreams of what Jung called the “personal unconscious,” and many of them speak of what Jung called the “shadow,” which is initially projected onto other people, since we tend to see our own worst qualities in others first. The shadow is assimilated through a process of confession and greater self-awareness. Dreams at this stage are also full of wishful phantasies of escaping life’s conflicts, a fact that Freud noted in his theory of “wish fulfilment,” and that Boehme notes in the phantasies of the “twofold” soul. But as these dreams continue, they usually point to general patterns of relationship established in the initial bond with the parents, including Freud’s Oedipal dynamics, which as Freud noted in his later work can take myriad forms of both love and hatred for either parent. (1923b, SE19: 33–34). This dream regression to the initial bonds with father and mother tends to produce symbols of what Freud called parental “imagos,” and Jung called parental “archetypes”—Boehme’s sun and moon. And the unique character of these two archetypes in each individual soul exerts a profound and continued structural influence—a gravitational pull—on all of the ego’s thought, perception, and love. Joseph, as we saw in chapter 6.2, had this realm revealed to him in his initial two dreams, the second of which depicted his family unit in terms of sun, moon, and stars, representing father, mother, and children respectively. Jung used the terms “anima” and “animus” to describe these moon and sun archetypes respectively, which are initially projected onto the parents. As one “leaves” the realm of father and mother in a psychological sense, the anima or animus is then projected onto a romantic love interest, still bearing the original imprint of father or mother. Jung spoke of this in terms of endogamous or intra-familial libido transforming into exogamous or extra-familial libido during adolescence. Freud spoke of this in terms of the Oedipal dynamics of the family in the phallic stage being recapitulated in the genital stage of adolescence and beyond. For Jung, as romantic relationships continue, the initial projections of anima/animus that caused us to “fall” in love are withdrawn as we realize that our “perfect” romantic partner is not exactly as they first appeared. They have faults and shortcomings that were made invisible by our initial projections. At this point, after the projections from the family unit and the personal unconscious have been worked with and worked through, often in relation to a love-interest, the anima or animus then appears as an inner figure, representing the collective unconscious (see e.g. Jung 1936a, CW12: 73). A dialogue

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can then begin with our dreams, as the ego enters into a relationship with the inner “other.” Often this dialogue and marriage take place via imaginative artistic and literary productions, like Dante’s Divine Comedy, inspired by the inner figure of Beatrice. The ultimate goal here is a union or marriage with the inner anima/animus, representing a marriage of consciousness with the unconscious—Boehme’s marriage of sun and moon. Thus the initial “releasement” of the rationalistic “I-ness” leads into the inner dark world of the body and its instincts, on the cruciform path that we described in the first three days above. In this regression the archetypes of mother and father, lover and beloved, are recapitulated in other symbolic polarities including night and day, unconscious and conscious, earth and heaven, and finally, regressing back to the first day of creation, water and Spirit, through which the soul is reborn. Dream symbolism, as Jung noted, depicts the ultimate goal of this path as a marriage between sun and moon—between consciousness and the unconscious, or the ego and the anima/animus. The first step on the path to marriage is announced in dreams by the birth of a special or divine child, representing both the centre and circumference of the whole psyche, a motif Jung referred to as the Self—the “imago Dei” or Atman—often depicted in dreams as a cross with four quadrants (1951a, CW9ii: 30–1).50 This new centre is the energetic midpoint of all the polarities noted above. It is the midpoint between the ego and the anima/animus, around which the reborn ego now begins to circle. As Boehme notes, this new centre is born in the fourth quality, but it “shoots back” to transform all of the previous dark qualities and their respective developmental stages: Behold I will tell you a mystery. The time has come for the bridegroom to crown his bride.51 Guess, friend, where the crown lies? Towards midnight. For in the centre of the astringent quality [i.e. the first quality] the light grows clear and bright. Whence comes the bridegroom? From the middle [i.e. the fourth quality] where the heat gives birth to the light, shooting toward midnight into the astringent quality. (Aurora 11.43/1764, 11.79–81)

50

Jung wanted to encompass both Eastern and Western ideas of the whole psyche (beyond the ego) in his concept of the Self. He thus mentions both the imago Dei of the Abrahamic traditions (though less emphasized in Islam), and the Atman of Hindu Vedanta, which relates specifically to a verse from the Mandukya Upanişad: “Brahman is this Self (Ātman); that [Brahman] is this Self (Ātman) consisting of four quarters” (Olivelle 1998, 475). 51 This is an allusion to sexual intercourse. See Wolfson (2018, 43) for a comparison with Kabbalah.

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As the light “shoots back” from the fourth quality to the first, earlier developmental stages are recapitulated and transformed, a regression in the service of transcendence. In summary then, in terms of the soul’s transformation, day four is like a central fulcrum marking the transition from the “two-fold” to the “three-fold” soul mentioned in chapter 5.5. In Boehme’s two-fold soul the inner dark world is hidden behind a greedy, grasping, rationalistic, outer “I-ness.” The picture here is very much like the Freudian unconscious secretly driving an ego that remains oblivious to its influence. The process of transformation to the three-fold soul begins by becoming aware of the inner dark world through its nocturnal productions. The “I-ness” begins to realize that its supposedly neutral language-based reason, with which it is fully identified, is in fact driven by the anxious lust-desire of the dark world, which is itself a response to the fear of death/Nothing. As reason is dethroned and “I-ness” is surrendered, the realm of understanding (Verstand) and its image-based thought increasingly comes to the fore in dreams and imagination. In terms of biblical symbolism, it is notable that language itself can become fallen and fragmented. At the Tower of Babel language loses its universal referents precisely as it attempts to ascend to heaven in self-will (Gen. 11.1–9). This linguistic Fall is redeemed at Pentecost, where an outpouring of the Holy Spirit allows language to be understood by all. And in Peter’s explanation of this Pentecostal outpouring, he notes the coming of the Holy Spirit in the reactivation of image-based (nocturnal) dreams and (diurnal) visions (Acts 2.1–17, Joel 2.28). As “I-ness” is dethroned and image-based Wisdom begins to speak, it leads the soul back toward the dark cave of the first day, recapitulating previous developmental stages. Often this involves recovering memories of prelinguistic stages, infantile sexuality, and various associated traumas, including the shock of leaving the Garden of innocence. Finally, as day two is recapitulated, the earliest memories of maternal love and comfort emerge, along with the “oceanic feeling” of eternity and oneness, when “originally the ego includes everything” (Freud 1930, SE21: 64, 68). Here all being becomes lit by the pure light of the eternal—the oceans above—as the ego is baptised and reborn by water and Spirit. 7.5

Day Five: Elemental Creatures, Expanding Awareness, and the Harmonious Soul

The final three days of creation are easier to describe because there is no distinction here between the fallen and the reborn state of the soul—between

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initial development and later transformation. There is no backward recapitulation, only forward transformation. The soul has already been reborn and recentred on day four, and the final three days describe the ongoing stages of transformation toward the spiritual ideal of the full and complete marriage of bridegroom and bride on day six, representing the full union of consciousness and the unconscious, or of day and night, sun and moon, earth and heaven, time and eternity—which is ultimately expressed in the fully incarnate spiritual or light body of day seven (Mysterium 15.28–31). To summarize, the symbolism of day five describes the exuberant creation of living creatures in the air and water (Gen. 1.20–23), and to this Boehme adds the creation of land creatures (which in the Genesis account are created on day six), and fire spirits (which are not mentioned in the Genesis account). In dream symbolism such creatures generally represent inner concepts and affects that appear independently in the soul, sometimes bearing traumas, which have not yet been assimilated to conscious awareness. Thus, in terms of the soul’s ongoing transformation, day five symbolizes the growing perception of Wisdom through expanding “love-desire,” which involves an expanding awareness of the many exotic creatures that populate the inner world: including the sky-world of thought, the oceans of feeling, the land-world of outer sensation, and the fire-world of spiritual intuition. This expanding awareness also establishes harmony and balance in the soul’s inner cosmos through the new centre established on day four, and the assimilation of these many creatures leads to the “full humanity”—the human microcosm—of day six. We saw in chapter 5 that Boehme’s fifth quality, associated with Venus (♀), is a gentle, joyful, playful “love-desire” (Liebe-Begierde) that allows the soul to perceive Wisdom in all things. And we also saw that the sixth quality allows the soul to express Wisdom, which we will pick up in a moment. This follows from the fourth quality, where the dark fire was transformed into holy light through the cruciform centre, and within this transformation the “lust-desire” of anxious “I-ness” was transmuted into the “love-desire” of free and surrendered “I-ness.” The fifth quality now reveals this “love-desire” in its fullness, as a vehicle that facilitates an expanded range of perception through a state of contemplative receptivity based in divine grace. In “love-desire” we see the eternal shining through both the inner and outer world, and we experience the empathic bond of love that joins all things. When we bring this abstract fifth quality back into the concrete exegetical context of Genesis 1, we see this joyful love-desire giving birth to a vast throng of living creatures. No other day conveys such a playful exuberance of fecundity. Boehme notes that the fifth day is Thursday, ruled by Jupiter in the science of the day, whose jovial and playful aspects fit well here. On the fifth

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day God’s Verbum Fiat says, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky” (Gen. 1.20). God then blesses these creatures and tells them to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1.22). Interestingly, Boehme’s exegesis of this passage alters and expands upon the biblical text: he takes the “cattle and creeping things” created on day six and moves them to day five. While we cannot know his motives for doing so, given his thorough biblical knowledge it is doubtful that this was simply an oversight. My guess is that he wanted to reserve day six for the creation of the primordial human as a perfect microcosm, recapitulating the entire creation. He thus makes day five about the creation of “all creatures, except humans” (Mysterium 14.4). On day five he also ascribes the creation of animals to the four elements, and their respective astral influences, and thus he naturally includes the land animals within this schema: creatures were produced in all the four elements; in each astrum according to its property: as birds in the astrum of the air; fishes in the astrum of the water; cattle and four-footed beasts out of the astrum of the earth … likewise spirits in the fire-astrum, which also is in the other elements. (Mysterium 14.2) The inclusion of “spirits in the fire-astrum” is another Boehmian midrash that is absent from the biblical text.52 These alterations, however, make Boehme’s intentions clearer. He wants to highlight that the astrum of day four impresses itself on each of the four elements, and that each element then gives birth to a type of living creature. This emphasizes the balanced harmony of the architecture of Wisdom in both the micro- and macrocosm. But more importantly, in the microcosm, each class of elemental creature symbolizes an aspect of the soul’s perception. We already saw above that for Boehme the earth symbolizes the realm of “I-ness” and its outward sense-based perception, the air represents the realm of more abstract thought and “intellective” life, and water represents the realm of deep feeling. To this we add the fire world, which seems to indicate a kind of spiritual intuition that, as Boehme notes above, includes the other three perceptual realms. Together these four realms symbolize four organs of perception, 52

Space does not permit a full discussion of Boehme’s doctrine of Scripture, but suffice it to say that for Boehme the Bible invites and demands an imaginative response, which is not to say that every imaginative response is equally valid. Boehme’s alteration of the biblical text here is based partially on his own imaginative experience of Wisdom’s seven qualities.

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which, when harmonized, allow the perception of Wisdom in all its fullness. As Boehme says: The birds were created in … the air, therefore they fly in their mother; also the fishes in … the water; and the worms in … the earth. Thus each thing lives in its mother from which it was taken in the beginning … And the essence and life of this time is nothing else but the contemplation of the inward spiritual world; and the possibilities that eternity has within it, and what kind of spiritual play is in the being of the inward spiritual world. (Mysterium 14.11–12, my emphasis) The inward spiritual world, for Boehme, is what stands at the root of both creation and the soul. In the soul, through contemplation, we can sense that these four classes of creatures represent four ways of perceiving spiritual realities. For Boehme, the microcosm of the soul contains this teeming throng of creatures, which can be perceived through a contemplative awareness that presupposes the releasement of “I-ness.” Anyone who has observed their dreams for any length of time will notice the remarkable number of animals that populate the inner world. In general, these dream creatures represent thoughts, affects, sensations, and intuitions that exist within the inner world, but which remain unacknowledged or underappreciated because they are (at least partially) outside conscious awareness. That is, they appear as individual creatures because they have a degree of autonomy outside the will and perception of “I-ness.” They can even have a degree of influence and control over “I-ness,” commensurate with their size and strength. And thus the biblical text notes, rather ominously, that “the great sea monsters” were also created on day five.53 Taken together, this inner world of living creatures as it appears in dreams represents unlived life within the soul—life that the ego’s narrow reality tunnel has neglected, and thus failed to assimilate into consciousness. These creatures also represent untapped abilities of perception—perception that registers in the unconscious, but not in the conscious mind, unless and until the conscious mind expands its perception through contemplation and the releasement of “I-ness.” 53

Because of this, in the Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, which, as mentioned above, influenced Jung’s formulation of his “Jonah-and-the-whale” complex, a midrash on the Jonah story is given within the description of the fifth day of creation (1916, 60–73). It might be that this “great fish,” which for Jung ultimately represents an unconscious memory of the intrauterine state, also includes the repressed trauma of birth itself. The concept of birth trauma and its symbolism was first discussed by Freud’s student Otto Rank (1929).

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Jung later described these four elemental worlds of perception in his influential Psychological Types: earth as outward “sensation,” air as “thinking,” water as “feeling,” and fire as “intuition.”54 This schema is basically identical to Boehme’s. Jung’s formulation was influenced by his observation of dream symbolism, as he noted that clients tend to have one highly developed perceptual function that guides consciousness, and one highly undeveloped perceptual function that remains in the unconscious, and is usually associated with the anima or animus. The other two functions are usually partially developed and partially accessible to consciousness (see e.g. Jung 1936a, CW12: 106–7). In dreams the undeveloped function comes to the fore, and dream symbolism itself encourages the ego to engage with it and recover it. It seems that Jung had no awareness that he was recapitulating Boehme on this point, although he was aware of correspondences between his four types and the four ancient elements. The goal then, for both Jung and Boehme, is a balanced harmony of all four perceptual functions, representing the fullness of Wisdom. The Gospel accounts of Jesus granting his disciples a miraculous catch of fish could be situated according to this dream motif (Lk. 5.1–11; Jn. 21.1–14),55 along with the story of Elijah receiving bread from the ravens (1 Kgs. 17.6). The four living creatures surrounding the throne of God, described in Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4 with some variations, can also be correlated with these four perceptual organs.56 7.6

Day Six: the Microcosm, or Humanity in Full

To summarize, the symbolism of day six describes the creation of a human being as the image of God (Gen. 1.26–29). For Boehme, this symbolism depicts the human being as a cosmos in miniature, who reflects and expresses all aspects of divine Wisdom, and who is thus capable of rejuvenating and healing the outer cosmos. We saw in chapter 5 that Boehme’s sixth quality, 54

These four have now been popularized in the Myers-Briggs personality test, which tends to oversimplify Jung’s original ideas, but is nonetheless quite illuminating. 55 Peter’s response to this catch, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man” (Lk. 5.8), makes more sense if we see these fish as repressed affects. 56 Mounce (1997, 308n26) notes that the four living creatures (ox, lion, human, and eagle) have been seen as correspond to the four fixed signs of the zodiac: Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius, which in turn correspond to the four elements: earth, fire, water, and air, respectively. This accords with Boehme’s idea that the astrum imprints its influence on the elements. Mounce says, “just how Aquarius become an eagle in John’s account has never been satisfactorily explained!” which shows his lack of acquaintance with astrology, and the correspondence Aquarius—air.

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corresponding to Jupiter (♃), is a voice, sound, speech, or “melodious song,” representing the expression of Wisdom in the soul and the cosmos. This follows the fifth quality, where “love-desire” allowed the perception of Wisdom, and the fifth day, where the soul opened itself in “love-desire” to take in the many and varied creatures of the inner world, and their perceptual capabilities. The natural result on day six is the joyous expression of this creative life that now flows out through the soul. On day six God’s Verbum Fiat says: “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” And Boehme interprets this as follows: “out of the mixture of all essences, out of the property of all powers and constellations, the love-desire desired a form out of all essences for a living image” (Mysterium 15.6). The biblical text continues, granting this primordial human “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the bids of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth” (Gen. 1.26). In Boehme’s reading, this “dominion” is not the anxious controlling dominance of the fallen “I-ness,” but the gracious and ever-expanding openness of the surrendered and reborn soul. As Boehme describes it, the key result of opening to the full panorama of inner and outer cosmic being is the firing of the “strong ardent imagination” (Mysterium 15.3). Boehme describes each of the four elements that give rise to each class of creature on day five as a “fountain of an astral property … from a particular heaven” (Mysterium 15.2). And as the soul drinks from these astral fountains of eternal Wisdom, its imagination is inspired with the same abundant creativity. This imaginative impulse, by its very nature, seeks to join all of these energies into a single form. As Boehme says, because this love-desire flowed out of all the properties of nature and the heavens … in which all creatures lay from eternity in a mystery, and because it was poured into a spectrum of separation, into various distinct degrees, therefore now this love-desire longs to be an image of all degrees and properties: a living, reasoning (vernünftiges), and understanding (verständiges) image. (Mysterium 15.5) The single form that the love-fuelled imagination seeks is the image of God seen most fully in Jesus Christ.57 For Boehme, the soul that is united with Christ can receive Wisdom and expanded perception through divine grace, which then allows it to express Wisdom in a playful and healing way:

57 C.f. Balthasar’s reflections on “seeing the form” in The Glory of the Lord.

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As God plays with the time of this outward world, so likewise the inward divine human should play with the outward world in the manifested wonders of God, and open the divine Wisdom in all creatures, each according to its property; so likewise in the earth, in stones and metals. (Mysterium 16.10) Boehme’s vision of full humanity is one of playful, inspired creativity that elevates and heals the world around it, by first perceiving and then “opening” the Wisdom that lies hidden in all creatures, including “stones and metals.” The human as a fully aware microcosm is a co-creative consciousness, who creates in the image of the Creator. For Boehme, importantly, the image of God created on this sixth day is the androgynous (though not hermaphroditic)58 Adam, who symbolizes the ultimate union of the sexes, which in turn symbolizes the dark fire fully sublated into holy light in the eternal realm of Wisdom (on the horizontal plane), and eternal understanding (Verstand) married to temporal reason (Vernunft) on the vertical plane. In his exegesis Boehme mentions that this “spiritual human” is created “out of all the three principles, that is, according to the inward divine world, both according to the fiery and light world, and the outward world” (Mysterium 15.10). This integration and marriage of moon and sun, night and day, darkness and light, reason and understanding, is what Jung refers to as the marriage of consciousness with the unconscious, a marriage that allows the full human to emerge. 7.7

Day Seven: Sabbath, Shalom, and Silence

We saw in chapter 5 that Boehme’s seventh quality, corresponding to both Saturn (♄) and Luna (☽), is a spiritual body of light that houses the other six qualities. Likewise, Boehme calls the seventh day a “rest or mansion of the other six days works, wherein they work as a spirit in the body” (Mysterium 17.18). In the end is the beginning, for “the seventh day and the first belong mutually to one another as one … out of the seventh day the first day has taken its original and beginning (Mysterium 16.16).59 The restfulness of this final day recapitulates the dark Saturnian stasis that preceded the first creative act, although with a crucial difference: this final rest has wholeness and therefore blessing; 58 The hermaphrodite is an alchemical and kabbalistic symbol that Boehme chose not to appropriate (Weeks 1991, 115). 59 This is a Kabbalistic motif. The first sephirot (Ein sof ) is in the last sephirot (Malkhut).

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“God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it” (Gen. 2.3). This sabbath rest represents the beginning of Paradise, which is symbolized by the garden of Genesis 2, and for Boehme this garden itself symbolizes the spiritual body. Here it is worth remembering that in the Johannine account of Jesus’ resurrection, his resurrected spiritual body is first seen by Mary Magdalene, who supposes him “to be the gardener” (Jn. 20.15). Likewise, this beginning is also the eschatological end, for the seventh day is also “the transparent glassy sea before the throne of the Ancient in the Revelation of St. John” (Mysterium 16.27). This spiritual human of day six is clothed with a “spiritual body  … the heavenly holy corporeality of the inward holy love-desire … and the outward love-desire of the earth, elements, and visible constellations of the third principle” (Mysterium 15.11). In summary, as the soul in love-desire opens spiritually to the whole cosmos, both outside and within, the “fire and light” of the imagination “open the lustre and beauty of the colours, wonders, and virtues of the divine Wisdom” (Mysterium 15.30). The spiritual body of light—a “heavenly holy corporeality”—which was lost in the Fall, is the natural fruition of this fully embodied, inspired, playful, and imaginative existence. In terms of the soul’s journey of transformation, there is some evidence that here Boehme goes beyond Jung, and beyond the realm of dreams and spontaneous imagination, into a final state of mystic silence.60 We saw above that Boehme’s original Nothing can be defined as an abyss of “eternal silence/ stillness without essence” (Forty Questions 1.6/1764 1.9), and there is some evidence that he encouraged this contemplative state as a spiritual goal (see Pektas 2006, 103). Here on day seven Boehme urges us to “dwell in this Sabbath,” a “rest” he defines as a “divine kingdom of joy” (Mysterium 16.24). This rest is also symbolized by the “transparent glassy sea” of Revelation—a state of pure stillness. The question is whether and to what extent this eschatological sabbath telos of the soul can be realized in earthly life and the present moment. But if Boehme’s account of his own ecstatic experience is any indication, it can only be realized in the present moment, where stillness is both empty and whole, Nothing and All. 60

Interestingly sleep itself, at its deepest points, seems to go beyond dreaming into a space of pure silence, which some sleep researchers, following Indian contemplative traditions, describe as “objectless awareness” (Gillespie 2002), “witnessing sleep,” or “lucid dreamless sleep” (Windt et al. 2016). See especially, “Awareness in the Void” (Alcaraz-Sanchez 2023).

Chapter 8

Freud, Jung, and the Psychodynamic Rebirth of Dreams Readers familiar with Freud and Jung will have already noted the striking resonances with Boehme in the discussion above. This chapter is simply meant to summarize those resonances, and to foreground how the work of both Freud and Jung fits within the larger boundary provided by Boehme, demonstrating my claim that Boehme is the larger continent within which the smaller, sometimes warring countries of Freudian and Jungian theory can be mapped. Here I can only provide the briefest sketch of the theories of Freud and Jung, as they relate to Boehme, and in so doing I will highlight areas that are generally accepted by their respective followers, including the vast number of post-Freudian thinkers, and the various schools of Jungian thought. I will also highlight points of continuity, rather than conflict, in the belief that many of the polemics between Freudians and Jungians are unnecessary.1 The discussion is structured according to the same three themes noted throughout the book: (1) Freud’s and Jung’s respective maps of the soul, (2) their respective theories of dreams, and (3) their respective hermeneutics of dream interpretation, which describe various stages of psychosexual (Freud) and psychospiritual (Jung) development. In chapter 5 I described Boehme’s “two-fold” soul as roughly Freudian, and his “threefold” soul as roughly Jungian. This generalization also included their respective dream theories, since Boehme’s twofold soul gives rise to “phantasies” that have much in common with Freudian “wish-fulfilments,” while Boehme’s three-fold soul grants access to the revelatory lineaments of imagination (Einbildung/Imaginatio), characterized by understanding (Verstand) and Wisdom (Weisheit), which accords well with Jung’s “compensatory” theory 1 My sense is that the renowned split between Freud and Jung inaugurated an unnecessary rift between their followers, which continues today, often based more on idiosyncratic jargon than on substance. Freudians/post-Freudians and Jungians are often saying very similar things using different language. We have already seen that Freud’s parental “imagos” are very close to Jung’s parental “archetypes.” Likewise, in his later structural theory, Freud redefined libido, eschewing its narrowly sexual definition for a more general Platonic “Eros,” thus bringing it in line with Jung’s earlier concept. And near the end of his career, Freud also discussed a “phylogenetic … archaic inheritance” in the unconscious, thus moving closer to Jung’s phylogenetic “collective unconscious.” I will document these points in the footnotes below.

© Glenn J. McCullough, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004680296_010

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of dreams, and Jung’s teleological claim that dreams offer guidance on a psychospiritual path of development. I also said in chapter 5 that I would later elaborate on these generalizations, which I will undertake below. 8.1

Freud’s Map of the Soul: Raising Hell

The Freudian soul is roughly “twofold” in Boehme’s sense, in that the Freudian unconscious, which Freud defined by the Id in his later structural theory, corresponds to Boehme’s hidden inner dark soul-element, while Freud’s ego and its conscious world correspond to Boehme’s outer temporal soul-element (see figure 4). For Boehme, the inner dark soul-element literally participates in the realm of hell, complete with all the fiery demons that so fascinated and terrified the pre-modern imagination. As we saw in the introduction, Freud was well aware that his landmark Traumdeutung was attempting to transport this fiery underworld into the precincts of modern science, and to “raise hell,” as the book’s famous epigraph notes.2 Freud was not exaggerating when he described the book to his friend Fliess as “an intellectual hell, layer upon layer of it, with everything fitfully gleaming and pulsating; and the outline of Lucifer-Amor coming into sight at the darkest centre” (July 10, 1900; in 1954, 323).3 In a very real sense Freud’s dream-book was meant to reveal the hidden demons in all of us. At times he even allied his theories with the pre-modern exorcists4 against the materialistic medical scientists of his day: The demonological theory of those dark times has won in the end against all the somatic views of the period of “exact” science … In our eyes, the 2 The epigraph is from Virgil’s Aeneid, and roughly translates “if I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.” Freud quotes it again in a key passage in the last chapter of the Traumdeutung: “In waking life the suppressed material in the mind is prevented from finding expression and is cut off from internal perception owing to the fact that the contradictions present in it are eliminated—one side being disposed of in favour of the other; but during the night, under the sway of an impetus towards the construction of compromises, this suppressed material finds methods and means of forcing its way into consciousness. Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (1900, SE5: 608). 3 For more on Freud’s view of the devil, and its influence on his work, see Bakan (1975, 187–237) who draws out striking resonances between Freud and traditional Kabbalistic teaching. 4 Ellenberger notes that psychiatry in many ways emerged out of the practice of exorcism, and he stresses the fateful meeting between Gassner and Mesmer, when Mesmerism or hypnosis succeeded in “explaining,” according to the science of the day, the phenomenon of demon possession (1970, 53–69).

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demons are bad and reprehensible wishes, derivatives of instinctual impulses that have been repudiated and repressed. We merely eliminate the projection of these mental entities into the external world which the middle ages carried out; instead, we regard them as having arisen in the patient’s internal life, where they have their abode. (1923a, SE19: 72)5 In moving hell within the bounds of modern science, Freud was also moving it within the bounds of the human soul—a move that Boehme had begun three centuries earlier.6 In terms of Boehme’s distinction between the inner eternal dark and light soul-elements, and the outer temporal soul-element, we see something very similar in Freud, although expressed in terms of Kantian philosophy: As a result of certain psycho-analytic discoveries, we are today in a position to embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are “necessary forms of thought.” We have learnt that unconscious mental processes are in themselves “timeless.” This means in the first place that they are not ordered temporally, that time does not change them in any way and that the idea of time cannot be applied to them. These are negative characteristics which can only be clearly understood if a comparison is made with conscious mental processes. (1920, SE18: 28) While Freud, given his scientific orientation, prefers the negation “timelessness” to the metaphysical connotation of “eternal,” the resonance with Boehme is clear. Freud’s most striking theoretical similarities with Boehme are in the actual details of the Id, which are virtually homologous with those of Boehme’s hidden eternal dark soul-element. The fact that Freud came to his structural theory of the Id and its instincts later in his career (1923b) also means that his similarities with Boehme increased with his clinical experience and theoretical 5 Freud also notes the role of libido in creating this inner hell: “The desire for pleasure—the ‘libido’, as we call it—chooses its objects without inhibition, and by preference, indeed, the forbidden ones: not only other men’s wives, but above all incestuous objects, objects sanctified by the common agreement of mankind, a man’s mother and sister, a woman’s father and brother … Hatred, too, rages without restraint. Wishes for revenge and death directed against those who are nearest and dearest in waking life, against the dreamer’s parents, brothers and sisters, husband or wife, and his own children are nothing unusual. These censored wishes appear to rise up out of a positive Hell” (1915–1916, SE15: 143). 6 E.g. Boehme: “external reason supposes that hell is far from us. But it is near us. Everyone carries it in themselves” (Six Theosophic Pts 9.32).

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sophistication, a fact we will revisit below. We saw above that Boehme’s dark soul-element is defined by a “Nothing-desire” for death and a countervailing “lust-desire” for life. The tension between these two in turn creates a third element of angst that includes both anxiety and aggression. Freud’s Id is likewise defined both by a life-drive (“Eros”)7 and a countervailing death-drive (called “Thanatos” by Freud’s followers), while the tension between them likewise creates angst or anxiety.8 The slight difference here is that, for Freud, aggression proceeds not from angst but from the death-drive being “turned outwards” (1933, SE22: 107). The polarity between Eros and Thanatos was a significant modification of Freud’s earlier instinct theory, but even at this later stage of his career Freud was still using dreams as his primary data set. He notes that his death-drive concept emerged from two specific kinds of dreams that could not be accounted for by the wish phantasies of a life-drive: repetitive anxiety dreams, and punishment dreams (1920, SE18: 32). Like Boehme, Freud also grants the death-drive a certain priority, noting that the life-drive emerges out of the inanimate silence of inorganic matter, and eventually sinks back into it.9 We also saw above that Boehme’s “I-ness” emerges in tandem with the angst of the third quality of the dark world, and this angst prompts “I-ness” to attempt to control the outer time-space world for its own benefit and security. Similarly, as Freud’s later structural theory granted anxiety precedence over repression in the psychic economy (1923b, SE19: 57; 1926, SE20: 140, 161), the ego became “the sole seat of anxiety,” and anxiety became both the ego’s primary defence against the Id, and its impetus for separating itself from the Id in the first place (while always maintaining a nebulous border with the Id) (1933, SE22: 85ff.; see also Meissner 2000, 143–50). In the structural theory, anxiety in many ways defines the borders of the ego, as the ego tries to protect itself both from the internal tension of life and death drives in the Id, and from other external threats, both real and imagined, known and unknown. Anxiety becomes the 7 As mentioned, Freud initially defined libido in terms of the sexual instinct, and in his later theory he broadened this definition to “coincide with the Eros of the poets and philosophers” (1920, SE18: 50–53), thus bringing it into conformity with Jung’s earlier theory (see Jung [1911–12/1952] 1956, CW5: 132–41; [1917] 1943, CW7: 28), while still feigning disagreement. 8 Freud is aware that his Eros-Thanatos polarity is not original: “You may perhaps shrug your shoulders and say: ‘That isn’t natural science, it’s Schopenhauer’s philosophy!’ But, Ladies and Gentlemen, why should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is afterwards confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed research? Moreover, there is nothing that has not been said already” (1933, SE22: 107). Boehme’s influence on Schopenhauer is well known today (e.g. Hanegraaff 2006, 186). 9 Freud sometimes defined the death drive according to this silence, calling it the “Nirvana principle,” following Barbara Low (1920, SE18: 56; 1924, SE19: 159).

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primary experience that mobilizes all of the ego’s “defence mechanisms,” and repression is demoted to just one among several such mechanisms. In short, in Freud’s later theory, anxiety defines the ego’s borders, and remains as its first line of defence. The similarities with Boehme are again obvious. While the relations between the Freudian Id and ego correspond remarkably well to Boehme’s twofold soul of the hidden inner dark soul-element and the outer temporal soul-element, a hint of Boehme’s eternal light world is also evident in Freud’s superego. The superego is the repository of cultural morality, which is basically inculcated by parents (especially the father, at least in Freud’s context) and other authority figures, and through introjection becomes the inner voice of conscience and the standard of the “ideal self.” Likewise, Boehme’s eternal light soul-element includes the “virtues” of his oft-repeated triumvirate of Wisdom’s “powers, colours, and virtues.” To my knowledge, Boehme never unpacks or enumerates these virtues, but he is clear that they are not cultural products. Freud’s superego is partly unconscious, in that he believed that we have limited conscious control over our moral ideals, our ideal self, and our sense of guilt when they are not achieved. (Jung differed on this point, seeing conscience as a basically innate though not static trait.) But because the superego is partly unconscious for Freud, it is partly “timeless” or “eternal” in the Kantian sense noted above. The main difference here is that the virtues of Boehme’s eternal light soul-element are fuelled by a “love-desire” sublated from “lust-desire,” whereas for Freud morality is mainly the product of cultural constraint on libidinal desires, a compromise between personal pleasure and social propriety, although Freud’s later emphasis on sublimation moves in very a Boehmian direction. In summary, while both Boehme and Freud described the character of the soul’s inner demons in very similar terms, only Boehme believed that these demons could be truly redeemed, their “lust-desire” sublated into the “love-desire” of the eternal light world. Freud saw very little possibility for transforming the dark unconscious Id. It tends to remain fairly immovable in his formulation. And thus Freud’s soul remains, in Boehme’s language, primarily “twofold.” Yet the process of sublimation, which assumed greater importance in Freud’s later structural theory as an explicit “desexualisation” of libido (1923b, SE19: 30, 46, 54), and the crucial role of the superego and its conscience within this process, do point to a capacity for modification and growth in the Freudian soul.10 But it is really in Jung that we get a fuller picture of Boehmian transformation. 10 This emphasis on sublimation and transformation has been taken further by some of Freud’s heirs, including especially the wonderful Hans Loewald (1978), who takes Freud’s later theories in a very Jungian direction.

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Jung’s Map of the Soul: Collision of Opposites

Jung’s map of the soul is roughly “threefold” in Boehme’s sense, in that the Jungian unconscious includes Boehme’s eternal dark and light soul-elements as a coincidentia oppositorum, a coincidence or collision of opposites. Freud’s later structural theory also moves into closer alignment with Jung’s map of the soul, a fact obscured by the idiosyncratic terminology used by these rival theorists (and their followers). In what follows I will note both how Jung’s theory overlaps with and extends Freud’s later structural theory, and how it fits within Boehme’s larger framework. Boehme’s outer temporal soul-element generally corresponds to the Jungian ego as the “centre of the field of consciousness” (1959, CW9ii: 3). But the Jungian ego is further differentiated into an outer “persona” and an inner “shadow.” The “persona” is the mask or role that the ego assumes in order to manage various social spheres in the outer world. It includes the mask of “professionalism” worn in the sphere of work, and the mask of the good child, the good parent, or the good spouse in the family sphere. As such the persona is based largely on collective social norms, and to the extent that the ego identifies with these norms, its true individual thoughts, reactions, and inclinations fall into the unconscious. The persona is thus compensated in dreams by figures of its “other” or opposite: first the “shadow,” and then the “anima” (generally in men) or the “animus” (generally in women). For Jung, the shadow represents the personal unconscious, usually personified in dreams by figures of the same sex as the ego, while the anima or animus represent the collective or phylogenetic unconscious, usually personified by opposite-sex figures in dreams.11 While the shadow, anima, and animus are unique to the dreams of each individual, generalizations are also possible. The shadow contains all of the personal traits that are repressed to allow the ego to conform to the collective ideals of the persona. In Freudian terminology, the shadow corresponds to the nebulous region where the ego emerges from the Id, representing the unconscious instinctual desires and wishes of the ego itself, many of which are actively repressed. But for Jung the shadow is not simply negative, and here we begin to see how the Jungian unconscious contains 11

Contrary to popular belief, both Freud and Jung posited the existence of a phylogenetic layer of the unconscious. Jung of course called this the “collective unconscious,” and Freud called it a “phylogenetic … archaic heritage,” among the contents of which he included the Oedipus complex and the killing of the primal father. Freud’s only real discussion of this phylogenetic layer comes in Moses and Monotheism (1939, SE23: 98–102, 132). And while Freud’s concept is certainly more tentative than Jung’s, I see this as another instance where Freud’s later theories find silent rapprochement with Jung, unbeknownst to most of his followers. This phylogenetic layer is helpful for understanding the phenomenon of inherited or inter-generational trauma.

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both dark and light aspects. While the shadow generally contains tendencies that are infantile, morally suspect, and “uncivilized,” it also often contains many positive traits, like energy, courage, intuition, imagination, and latent creative potential. The assimilation of the shadow into consciousness takes considerable and sustained moral effort generally corresponding to the spiritual practice of confession. Effort is necessary because the most obstinate aspects of the shadow always appear in projection, with the unshakable certainty that the fault or inferiority lies in some “other” in the outside world. Here the brilliance of Jesus’ New Testament aphorism becomes clear: we see the speck in our neighbour’s eye in order to avoid looking at the beam in our own (Mt. 1.1–5; Lk. 6.37–42). And just as the visual metaphor in these words suggests, as the persona and shadow are gradually reconciled, perception expands and the eye becomes clear and single (Mt. 6.22). The ego becomes more integrated and coherent in its thought and behaviour, and this ego integration leads to true integrity, which is not mere adherence to collective social mores or tables of the law, but rather is signalled by the appearance of an inner guiding sense, traditionally called conscience, which keeps the ego on track toward its unique telos and vocation. Here Jung sides with Boehme against Freud in seeing conscience as an innate inner factor in the soul, which goes beyond mere adherence to parental and social authorities. With the integration of the shadow, the figure of the anima or animus begins to appear more frequently in dreams, representing the gateway to, and mediator of, the collective or phylogenetic unconscious. Here the ego, in its newfound wholeness, confronts an “other” much more formidable than the shadow, whose appearance in dreams is likewise accompanied by a more formidable sense of numinous awe.12 We are moving here into the deep interior of the soul—into Boehme’s eternal dark and light worlds—which Jung, like Freud, defines in Kantian philosophical terms. Jung’s archetypes are “eternal” in the Kantian sense, in that they originate in the noumenal realm and form a bridge into the phenomenal time-space realm.13 Jung also defined archetypes 12 13

Jung follows Kant as well as Lutheran theologian Rudolph Otto’s Idea of the Holy (1917) in defining the “numinous” (e.g. 1934b, CW8: 104). Kant famously limited reason to the phenomenal realm in the epistemology of his first Critique (1787), in order both to secure a place for modern science, and to make room for the noumenal realm of “God, freedom, and immortality” in the ethics of the second Critique (1788) and the aesthetics of the third (1790). In the latter Critique of Judgment, we find Kant describing the artist’s ability to incarnate the noumenal, through the imagination, which has access to ineffable “aesthetic ideas” or “archetypes:” “The aesthetic idea (archetype, prototype [Urbild]) is fundamental for both [sculpture and painting]

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as “purely formal,” meaning that their actual content is imprinted through experience and cultural context, analogous to the way that Conrad Lorenz famously imprinted himself as “mother” with a group of young geese. The geese then situated and perceived Lorenz himself as content within the much more powerful form of the mother archetype, and behaved accordingly.14 Jung was aware that his generalized definitions of the anima and animus were framed according to “heterosexual eros” and the sexual tropes of his time (1946, CW16: 173–4), and today Jungian theory had broadened to include the dream experiences and anima/animus dynamics of sexual and gender minority persons (lgbtq+). In heterosexual men, the anima is the archetype of Woman, and eventually the woman with whom he falls in love; similarly, in heterosexual women the animus is the archetype of Man, and eventually the man. These, in Freud’s terms, “object cathexes,” include the many and varied patterns of libido that these archetypes serve to channel and delineate. Thus the images of father and mother, respectively, tend to impose themselves via projection on later love interests, causing all kinds of expectations and misunderstandings that couples therapists know well. It is almost a cliché that people fall in love with those who resemble, or oppose, one of their parents, and later fall out of love when these projections fall away. In terms of sexual and gender minority persons (lgbtq+), the data of anima and animus dynamics is still being collected,

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grounded in the imagination; the shape, however, which constitutes its expression (ectype, afterimage [Nachbild]) is given either in its corporeal extension (as the object itself exists) or in accordance with the way in which the latter is depicted in the eye (in accordance with its appearance on a plane)” (1790, 199). Kant further notes how aesthetic ideas function in poetry: “The poet ventures to make sensible rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation, etc., as well as to make that of which there are examples in experience, e.g., death, envy, and all sorts of vices, as well as love, fame, etc., sensible beyond the limits of experience, with a completeness that goes beyond anything of which there is an example in nature, by means of an imagination that emulates the precedent of reason in attaining to a maximum; and it is really the art of poetry in which the faculty of aesthetic ideas can reveal itself in its full measure” (1790, 192–3). As noted above, the dream-visions and theories of Emanuel Swedenborg had a significant influence on the formulation of Kant’s whole critical edifice (see Magee 2003). And Kant’s concept of the “archetype” or “aesthetic idea” had a significant influence on Jung’s view of dream archetypes. On how Kant’s view influenced the Romantic idea of imagination generally, see Kearney (1988). From a theological perspective, all of this has intriguing resonances with Karl Barth’s basically Kantian view of biblical revelation. In contrast to Freud, Jung’s allegiance to Kant was apparent from the beginning and was quite sophisticated. Jung’s Kantianism produced a phenomenological approach, whereas Freud tended toward a scientific positivism. Jung thus defines archetypes as “patterns of instinctive behaviour,” and as “images of the instincts,” attempting to eschew any metaphysical basis for them (1936b, CW9i: 44).

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and no clear consensus has emerged among Jungian therapists. In my limited experience, I have noted that the anima/animus as inner “other” tends to compensate sexual and gender minority ego states. Thus gay and lesbian persons frequently experience heterosexual anima/animus dream figures; trans, non-binary, and gender fluid persons frequently experience very gendered anima/animus figures; and asexual persons frequently evince highly sexual anima/animus figures.15 Again, this is based on a very small sample size. One should remember that, as a syzygy, anima and animus are mutually dependent, and they sometimes coalesce in androgynous and bisexual characters, a concept that informed Boehme via biblical and alchemical sources, and later informed Freud and Jung, possibly via Gustav Fechner.16 One should also remember that anima/animus ultimately intend to lead us outside the realm of sexuality toward much broader vistas of conscious awareness. The first imprints, instantiations, or ectypes of the anima/animus archetypes are the parents, meaning that the parents become the first bearers of these numinous projections, which account for the powerful Oedipal dynamics between parents and children described by Freud. For Jung, in “normal” development, the libido that is initially directed within the family unit (endogamous libido) eventually transitions to the outer world (exogamous libido) during adolescence, and thus the anima/animus projections eventually fall 15 Likewise, in cis-gender and heterosexual clients, anima and animus appear, not infrequently, as somewhere on the lgbtq+ spectrum. Anima/animus can only be integrated to a limited degree, and this integration does not imply that the ego will adopt their sexuality or gender. In gay clients who are in the process of admitting their own sexuality to themselves, it is normally same-sex gay shadow figures who appear in dreams, and in this case the integration does include adoption (or realization) of the shadow sexual orientation. The process is more difficult with gender identity, since when a trans or non-binary figure appears in a dream, it can be difficult to tell if it is a shadow, anima/animus, or some other complex, and where it fits in the psychic economy. This latter question is always the most difficult, because there is no “general” case. Today in Western countries it is becoming less common to see clients who have repressed their lgbtq+ identity, and thus unconscious compensations often lead in other directions—not toward embracing a repressed identity, but toward what lies behind the extreme focus on ego identity itself. 16 For more on lgbtq+ gender and sexuality in relation to anima and animus see especially TePaske (2017) who rightly notes “Jungians’ weary legacy of using the term animus so pejoratively in our own male enactment of it!” TePaske claims that “the archetypal feminine generally presides over gender … Goddess cults are generally associated with polytheism, and accordingly validate and celebrate the body and its sensuality as religiously significant in itself” (319). On queer theory in relation to anima/animus, see Perrin (2021). The fact that a less repressive society has caused a sharp increase in overt lgbtq+ identities generally supports both Freud’s and Jung’s contention that sexuality and gender are based on much more than biology, and are mediated by complex inner archetypal images and forces.

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on outer love interests. Or rather the ego, again caught in the thrall of these anima/animus projections, falls in love. While lovers always feel that the fire of their initial attraction (and later differentiation) is truly unique, any neutral observer can see that this feeling of uniqueness is itself an aspect of the eternal archetype. The language and behaviour of erotic love, in both agony and ecstasy, are the same the world over. For Jung, this universal and collective character is attributable to the influence of the archetype. Corresponding to Boehme’s inner eternal dark and light soul-elements, both anima and animus contain positive and negative valences, and at times they embody both at the same time as a coincidentia oppositorum. In Boehme’s terms one could speak of these valences in terms of Adam and Eve as primordial humans in their original and fallen aspects, according to the biblical account. For Jung, all of our earliest and most moving experiences of parental love, solace, protection, and understanding are included in the positive valences. The negative valences include fierce wrath and cunning parental control. Both valences are often crystalized in the tropes of folklore, fairy tale, and sacred myth.17 Importantly, Jung calls the anima and animus “projection-making factors,” which means that their positive and negative valences also colour our perceptions of the outer world. All of the “facts” of our human experience are value-laden, and the value, meaning, and feeling-tones of our experience are largely determined by projections from the anima/animus archetypes. The anima/animus archetypes pull us into life, and as Jung says, “not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another” (1951a, CW9ii: 13). The power of their projections is evident in the deep and enduring emotional conflicts that characterize relationships between parents and children, and between romantic partners, which together account for a good deal of the subject matter brought into the therapist’s office. But these archetypal conflicts also colour our perceptions of the whole of reality, and help explain why, for example, some see Father God and Mother Church in terms of solace and security, while others see them in terms of pernicious control and abuse. For Jung it is precisely in the tension of such conflicts that the potential exists to withdraw the projections and open the inner world. Instead of perceiving our loved ones and indeed the whole of reality through an archetypal filter, we can return these archetypes to their rightful place in the inner world of the soul, where they tend to open the 17

And yet for Jung this does not mean that these tropes in sacred myths are simply reducible to the anima and animus archetypes. Jung is, in this sense, less of a “reductionist” than Freud.

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vast nocturnal realm of dreams and imagination, revealing the soul’s eternal dimensions and even its participation in the Divine. Jung calls the deepest layer of the soul the “Self,” which appears in dreams in various symbols of “unity and totality” that “can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei” (1951a, CW9ii: 31). The Self represents the wholeness of the psyche, and this wholeness is born from the original conflict and duality between the diurnal conscious world of the ego, and the nocturnal unconscious world populated by shadow, anima, and animus figures. One powerful symbol of the Self, which tends to appear in dreams at a momentous time, is the birth of the “divine child,” who emerges as an unexpected third—a “tertium quid”—which acts as both a centre and mediator between consciousness and the unconscious. The Self can thus act as a “transcendent function,” regulating between various psychological polarities, such as consciousness vs. the unconscious, ego vs. anima/animus, eternity vs. time, day vs. night, fact vs. value, thinking vs. feeling, Logos vs. Eros, sensuality vs. spirituality, etc. In Boehme’s language, this is the point at which the dark and light eternal worlds move from a state of division to a state of sublation and continuity, where light is born in the darkness, and Christ is born in the soul. When Jung notes that the tension of polarity leads to the birth of the Self, he does so in language that echoes Boehme in certain respects: “The stirring up of conflict is a Luciferian virtue in the true sense of the word. Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light” (1964, CW9i: 96).18 With the Self a new centre is born in the soul, an imago Dei or Atman,19 which includes a circumference of wholeness, balance, integration, and reconciliation. At one point Jung identifies a generalized progression of anima and animus figures, according to four broad stages, although one should note that this progression is a collective and Western-oriented sketch that is not repeated in each individual. Anima/animus dynamics are quite individually unique and context dependent. Jung’s collective anima progression charts the stages of eros or “erotic phenomenology,” as personified in the figures of Eve, Helen of Troy, the Virgin Mary, and Sophia: (1) Eve as original earth mother and fertile 18 Jung: “The self is made manifest in the opposites and in the conflict between them; it is a coincidentia oppositorum. Hence the way to the self begins with conflict” (1936a, CW12: 186). 19 Jung may have taken the term “Self” from a translation of the word “Atman” in Hindu Vedanta. The Atman is described in terms of four quadrants of wholeness in the Mandukya Upanişad: “Brahman is this Self (Ātman); that [Brahman] is this Self (Ātman) consisting of four quarters” (Olivelle 1998, 475). In Boehme’s map of the soul, the four quadrants of wholeness are the three soul-elements united to God.

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garden is usually projected on the personal mother in childhood, including both her positive and negative aspects; (2) Helen of Troy, representing the collective ideal image of beauty and sensuality is usually projected on a romantic interest in adolescence (according to heterosexual eros); (3) the Virgin Mary, representing the birth of the light world and the divine child in the soul, raises eros “to the heights of spiritual devotion,” which brings with it bonds of spiritual community and civic duty in adulthood; and finally (4) Sophia, who recapitulates the previous three and acts as a guide to the inner world, where she grants Wisdom, wholeness, and the full spectrum of conscious awareness, including a harmonious relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. Here, with the integration of Sophia, one rises to the status of elder or spiritual leader, usually in the second half of life (1946, CW16: 173–4). The resonances with Boehme are obvious here. Jung was more hesitant in describing collective stages of animus progression, since animus figures are much more variable and multiform. He also did not identify collective personifications of animus figures, but simply a description of the four stages: (1) Initially the animus appears as a primordial embodiment of physical power and strength, usually projected on the personal father in childhood, including both positive and negative aspects (e.g. protection and punishment); (2) romantic interests in adolescence usually attract projections of not merely physical but intellectual superiority, and Jung notes that men who attract these projections often pose as misunderstood geniuses with a “vast and windy vocabulary” (1928, CW7: 208); (3) adult animus projections involve spiritual meaning, including what Jung calls the “logos spermatikos” or creative word, often represented in dreams by an inspiring teacher or spiritual leader; and finally (4) a figure who recapitulates the previous three as a guide to the inner world, and here Jung mentions the animus as “psychopomp,” a guide to the afterlife, or “mediator between the conscious and the unconscious” (1951a, CW9ii: 16). Again, in practice, in observing the dreams of any particular individual, anima and animus can take innumerable forms. These schemas are just a collective sketch. What is important for our purposes is that, through dreams, these anima/animus figures lead the ego on a developmental path of expanded awareness that includes (1) Oedipal dynamics, (2) romantic love and sensuality, (3) spirituality, and eventually (4) an awareness of the inner world of the soul that grants Wisdom. In relation to Boehme’s map of the soul, note that anima and animus contain both dark and light elements as a coincidentia oppositorum, and that by coming to terms with the darkness within, the light world of Wisdom is opened as the soul is reborn. For Jung, as for Boehme, in the reborn soul darkness is no longer an enemy of the light. Rather, the darkness is transformed and

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harmonized, providing the energy and motive force for the fully-embodied light world of Wisdom.20 8.3

Freud’s Theory of Dreams: Word and Image

We saw above that, even in the sweeping theoretical revisions that gave rise to Freud’s later structural theory of the soul, dreams remained his primary data set. From first to last, Freud’s dream theory was the bedrock for his theoretical constructions. Late in his career, when he published his New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933), which were a supplement to his original and popular Introductory Lectures  … (1916–17), he published within them a lecture on the “Revision of the Theory of Dreams,” wherein he could still say that his dream theory “has remained what is most characteristic” of his “young science.” It was the “shibboleth” that sifted the “true followers of psychoanalysis,” and for Freud personally it was a “sheet-anchor” that stabilized his theoretical landscape: “Whenever I began to have doubts of the correctness of my wavering conclusions, the successful transformation of a senseless and muddled dream into a logical and intelligible mental process in the dreamer would renew my confidence of being on the right track.” The “revision” of his dream theory that this lecture promises thus “amounts to very little” (1933, SE22: 7, 22). Strictly speaking, Freud’s landmark Traumdeutung presents two dream theories, and the difference between them became a fault-line in the early Freudian movement, which had much to do with Freud’s expulsion of both Jung and Wilhelm Stekel from its ranks. Freud presents these two theories again, unchanged, in the 1933 “Revision.” The first theory describes the well-known distinction between latent dream-thoughts and manifest dream-images. Here language-based “dream-thoughts” represent the foundation of meaning in the dream, and through the “dream-work” of “displacement” and “condensation” these thoughts eventually manifest as images: “The latent dream-thoughts are thus transformed into a collection of sensory images and visual scenes” (1933, SE22: 20). This dream-work is the result of a “censor,” which Freud in his later structural theory identifies with the superego, whose task it is to obscure the dark forbidden wish at the heart of the dream and thus to preserve sleep. The 20

For the sake of simplicity, I have intentionally left out the final two archetypes that would create a quaternity with ego, shadow, and anima/animus. These final two are the wise old man (generally in men), and the chthonic mother or great mother (generally in women). For more on this schema see McCullough (2023a).

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task of the analyst is then to translate the dream images back into their underlying language-based thoughts and to uncover the hidden wish that the dream fulfils. This is accomplished via Freud’s famous method of “free association,” where the dreamer, in a relaxed reclining position, says whatever comes to mind in relation to each dream image. For Freud, the difference between latent thoughts and manifest images indicates that the dream is “a compromise-structure. It has a double function; on the one hand it is ego-syntonic [ego-affirming] … on the other hand it allows a repressed instinctual impulse to obtain the satisfaction that is possible in these circumstances, in the form of the hallucinated fulfilment of a wish” (1933, SE22: 19). The latent thoughts are instinctive, representing the hidden wish, and the manifest images fulfil the wish, while keeping it hidden from the ego. This resonates with Boehme’s “phantasies” of the twofold soul, which represent a compromise between the hidden inner dark soul-element and the outer temporal soul-element. These phantasies reflect the attempts of “I-ness” to navigate the outer world, but fuelling them are the hidden desires of the dark world, most notably the lust-desire of the second quality that flees from the dark Nothing first, and a desire for power and control that attempts to mitigate the angst and anguish of the third quality. Boehme notes that these dream phantasies of the twofold soul can be false and deceptive, reflecting the “false light” of demons, who “practice foolery with shows and tricks, and metamorphose themselves  … elevating themselves  … above the angelic hierarchies of God … to make ostentation in the pompous might of the fire” (Election of Grace 4.30/1781, 4.74). Here we see the familiar theme of demonic dream deception, where “even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11.14). Freud’s theory contains a variation on this theme, since we saw above that for Freud “the demons are bad and reprehensible wishes,” which are transformed by the dream-work of the superego into a morally palatable, ego-affirming form. Both Freud and Boehme believed that these dark wishes should be unveiled and made conscious, and much of Freud’s theory of interpretation is about just such an unveiling. For Boehme, this unveiling follows the traditional path of confession, for it is only by revealing the truth of the dark world, and its possible “false light,” that we can be transformed into the form of true light. Freud’s second theory of dreams in the Traumdeutung was limited to a few pages in the first edition, and he calls it, “strictly speaking, a second and auxiliary method of dream-interpretation” (1900, SE4: 241). But by the fourth edition (1914) this “auxiliary method” had expanded into its own section on “Symbolism,” and the editor James Strachey notes that this section represents “by far the greater number of additions” to the book “dealing with any single

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subject” (1900, SE4: xii). According to this second theory, certain dream-images elicit no associations from the dreamer, and thus it is difficult to detect any latent dream-thoughts. Freud notes further that this tends to occur in relation to the same images, and in his 1925 revision of the Traumdeutung, he notes that certain people, including his student Wilhelm Stekel, have an intuitive knack for interpreting these images as symbols “with a permanently fixed meaning.” He further notes that those experiencing psychosis (which might be an allusion to the unmentioned Jung) often have a talent for “direct understanding” of the fixed meaning of this symbolism. Freud then offers several examples: The Emperor and Empress (or King and Queen) as a rule really represent the dreamer’s parents; and a Prince or Princess represents the dreamer himself or herself … All elongated objects, such as sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas  … may stand for the male organ—as well as all long, sharp weapons, such as knives, daggers and pikes … Boxes, cases, chests, cupboards and ovens represent the uterus, and also hollow objects, ships, and vessels of all kinds. Rooms in dreams are usually women  … if the various ways in and out of them are represented, this interpretation is scarcely open to doubt. (1900, SE5: 353–4) While in his examples Freud treats these symbols univocally (x = y), and posits a “permanently fixed meaning,” he also notes that they “frequently have more than one or even several meanings” within the context of the dream. He also notes that these images can retain both their literal and symbolic meaning simultaneously. Importantly, he hypothesizes (along with Stekel and Jung) that such symbols arise from an earlier phylogenetic layer of the unconscious—from “prehistoric times” when language was image-based, hieroglyphic, or pictographic—and that this archaic level of the psyche is reactivated in both dreams and psychotic states. Let me emphasize, if these images precede the development of language as we know it, they cannot simply be translated back into latent, language-based “dream-thoughts,” as with the first theory of dreams. They are primarily and irreducibly images.21

21 Freud is aware that this second theory of dreams connects him to “the followers of Schelling”—a group from whom he tried to separate himself in the introduction of the Traumdeutung (1900, SE4: 5). In discussing the second theory he credits G.H. von Schubert (1814), a follower of Schelling, with the insight that dream-images connect us to an archaic form of hieroglyphic, pictographic, or image-based thinking. Schubert (and Schelling) likely learned this from Boehme.

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While Freud expanded the Traumdeutung significantly to incorporate this second theory, he remained uneasy about it for various reasons. First because, as he says, by following it “we shall feel tempted to draw up a new ‘dreambook’” in the genre of Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica, a genre of speculative divination popular since ancient times, which Freud’s “young science” had chiefly defined itself against (1900, SE5: 351; 1933, SE22: 7). Freud was also likely uneasy because this second theory runs counter to the whole trajectory of the first, in that it emphasizes the manifest content of the dream and has no need for the vagaries of dream distortion, and the dream-work of a censor. It views the dream-image as primary, rather than as a mere cover for underlying language-based dream-thoughts. Stekel continued and expanded this emphasis on the manifest image in his 1911 The Language of Dreams,22 which was likely the main reason he was marginalized from the Freudian movement. In his 1914 revision of the Traumdeutung, Freud refers to Stekel as someone who “has perhaps damaged psycho-analysis as much as he has benefited it,” through “reckless interpretations,” and a “method which must be rejected as scientifically untrustworthy” (1900, SE5: 350).23 Jung similarly emphasized both the manifest image and its archaic nature in his 1911–1912 Symbols of Transformation, which led to his split with Freud. In his 1914 revision of the Traumdeutung, Freud also notes that there are “numerous, and to a large extent still unsolved, problems attaching to the concept of a symbol” and that these problems have been mainly explored by “Bleuler and his Zürich pupils,” whose names he lists, with the conspicuous omission of Jung (1900, SE5: 351). Like Stekel, Jung followed the trajectory of Freud’s second theory, where dream-images are more primary than the language used to interpret them, and where manifest images thus cannot be reduced to latent language-based dream-thoughts.24 In fact, Jung was already pursuing this line of thought before he knew of Freud’s work, as he attempted to understand the phantasy images of patients with schizophrenia and psychosis at the famous Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zürich, under Eugen Bleuler.25 My suggestion here is that the differences 22 23

Partially translated into English as Sex and Dreams (1922). Stekel disputes the characterization of his method as unscientific and continues his emphasis on the manifest content of the dream in a later works (1943, 1–6). 24 For resonances on this point among three of Freud’s star pupils, see Rudnytsky (2006) “Rescuing Psychoanalysis from Freud: The Common Project of Stekel, Jung, and Ferenczi.” Ferenczi’s relationship with Freud was tumultuous, but he survived the total marginalization that befell Stekel and Jung, until about 1927, when Ferenczi slowly withdrew from Freud. 25 In his later years, Jung noted that he was among the first to find meaning and therapeutic significance in psychotic fantasies, and he lamented that his “investigations of that time

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between neurosis and psychosis likely have much to do with the differences between the two dreams theories enumerated by Freud, and the fact that Jung followed, or anticipated, the second theory. That is, dream-images that censor and conceal dark desires are much more characteristic of neurotic disturbances, like anxiety and depression, where the ego often remains unaware of, or refuses to accept, the underlying desires at the root of the disturbance.26 Likewise, dream-images and waking fantasies that reflect an earlier phylogenetic form of image-based cognition are much more characteristic of psychosis, and also of non-pathological visions, a point we will revisit below. We have already seen that, for Boehme, the phantasies of the twofold soul are driven by the hidden desires of the dark world, which can produce demonic deceptions, whereas in the threefold soul the image-based Wisdom or understanding of Verstand is more primary than the language-based reason of Vernunft. Thus both of Freud’s theories, and the Jungian trajectory of the second theory, can be situated within the larger Boehmian framework. Interestingly, while Freud’s first theory emphasizes the latent thoughts of the dream, and while Stekel and Jung were expelled partly for emphasizing the manifest images of the second theory, it did not take long for some of Freud’s more cautious and orthodox followers to also focus on the manifest content. Paul Federn seems to have inaugurated this trend by suggesting that the manifest content revealed ego feelings, both bodily and mental, with the former being especially significant (1914). Federn later integrated this idea into Freud’s structural theory (1932, 1934). With the development of Ego Psychology by Freud’s daughter Anna and others, which systematized the structural theory and emphasized the ego’s precarious role between the opposing forces of Id and superego, the manifest dream content again gained importance as revelatory of the ego’s plight. By the time Erik Erikson’s landmark paper “The Dream Specimen of Psychotherapy” appeared in 1954, Erikson could say not only that “the art and ritual of ‘exhaustive’ dream analysis” had all but “vanished” from are almost forgotten today” (1963, 127). R.D. Laing was among the first to resurrect Jung’s research in this area, and he notes that “Jung broke the ground here but few have followed him” (1967, 116). For a history of psychotherapy demonstrating that much of Jung’s theoretical edifice was developed independently of Freud, see Shamdasani’s important Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology (2003). On the important revival of the attempt to find meaning in psychotic fantasies by Anton Boisen and the Clinical Pastoral Education movement, see McCullough (2023b). 26 In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud mainly ascribes the ego-syntonic manifest content of the dream to the ego’s desire to preserve the state of sleep. But in the “Fliess Papers” (1892–9, SE1: 258, 276, 336) Freud connects the manifest content and its censorship of hidden desires to the general character of neuroses.

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psychoanalytic practice, but also that its importance remained undiminished (1954, 5–6). In this landmark paper Erikson re-examines Freud’s own seminal dream of “Irma,” which inaugurated his first theory of dreams and the distinction between latent and manifest content. But Erikson now emphasizes the manifest content of the Irma dream, and specifically how it reveals the state of Freud’s own ego at the time. Erikson moves systematically through various perspectives on the manifest content (verbal, sensory, spatial, temporal, somatic, interpersonal, and affective) finding remarkable insights about the pressures and conflicts faced by Freud’s ego within his broad social context. For anyone with an interest in history it is immediately obvious that Erikson is moving decisively in the direction of Stekel and Jung, albeit with much more sophistication than Stekel, and more systematization than Jung. The resulting theory, however, is remarkably Jungian, without acknowledgement.27 Thus while the trajectory of Freud’s first theory was to look behind manifest images to find latent thoughts, not only did his second theory move against this current, but many of his own followers soon moved against it as well. Stekel and Jung faced expulsion for their disloyalty, but later neo-Freudians like Erikson, after the dust had settled, were able to safely concentrate on manifest content, thus opening new vistas for Freudian thought, and silently incorporating what was once deemed heretical. Likely the most enduring legacy of Freud’s Traumdeutung is the placement of dreaming within the category of “primary process” thinking, as distinct from the “secondary process” of conscious thought. As noted above, it is not clear precisely what is primary in the dream, whether it be latent thoughts or manifest images. But regardless, many later psychodynamic therapists, in practice, have simply treated dreams as primary, without dwelling on the vagaries and contradictions of the two dream theories enumerated by Freud. By “primary,” Freud means “not merely considerations of relative importance and efficiency,” but also of “chronological priority … the primary processes are present in the mental apparatus from the first, while it is only during the course of life that the secondary processes unfold, and come to inhibit and overlay the primary ones” (1900, SE5: 603). This generally accords with Boehme’s distinction 27

For example, these sentences from Erikson are an excellent summary of Jung’s approach to dreams: “one never knows whether to view the cast of puppets on the dreamer’s stage as a microcosmic reflection of his present or past social reality or as a ‘projection’ of different identity fragments of the dreamer himself, of different roles played by him at different times or in different situations” (1954, 31). I expect Erikson was aware that he was aligning himself with Jung here. But to admit it would have distracted from the substance of his paper, given the continued animosity toward Jung in the Freudian community.

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between image-based understanding (Verstand), and language-based reason (Vernunft).28 Developmentally, for Boehme, the imagination is there from the first, and its image-making creativity is such an obvious aspect of the child’s world. It is only later, with the development of I-ness (Ichheit) and language-based thinking, that reason partially occludes our imaginative processes, and relegates some of them to the night-world of dreams. 8.4

Jung’s Theory of Dreams: Opening the Inner World

After his famous split with Freud, rather than repudiating Freud’s theories, Jung attempted to incorporate them within a larger framework.29 And here he begins with the concept of causality: “it is advisable to bear in mind at least one of the classical distinctions, namely that between causa efficiens and causa finalis. In psychological matters, the question ‘Why does it happen?’ is not 28

As noted above (chapter 5.1), Iain McGilchrist’s (2019) distinction between the two hemispheres of the brain and their respective ways of attending to the world shows marked resonance with Boehme’s distinction between understanding (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft). McGilchrist further notes that “Freud may in fact have derived his distinction between the secondary (conscious) process and the primary (unconscious) process from Hughlings Jackson’s distinction between the verbal, propositional thought of the left hemisphere and the speechless, ‘lower levels of ideation’ associated with the right hemisphere. All of this is perhaps in keeping with evidence suggesting that during REM sleep and dreaming there is greatly increased blood flow in the right hemisphere, particularly the temporoparietal region. EEG coherence data also point to the predominance of the right hemisphere in dreaming. If what we mean by consciousness is the part of the mind that brings the world into focus, makes it explicit, allows it to be formulated in language, and is aware of its own awareness, it is reasonable to link the conscious mind to activity almost all of which lies ultimately in the left hemisphere” (2019, 188). 29 Jung’s broader framework was heavily influenced by what Ellenberger calls “the first dynamic psychotherapy (1775–1900),” where dreams were associated with the phenomena of hypnosis and “somnambulism,” in a fairly unified “paradigm of sleep” (see Tony James 1995, 5–9). In the first dynamic psychiatry the unconscious was pictured as a collection of “subpersonalities,” which can behave autonomously, and exhibit various “automatic” phenomena (e.g. sleep-walking, automatic writing, mediumistic phenomena). The creative and mythopoetic functions of the unconscious were also emphasized in this earlier constellation of theories (Ellenberger 1970, 111). Jung’s medical thesis was on the various subpersonalities exhibited in mediumistic trance by his cousin Hélène Preiswerk. The final representatives of this earlier tradition include Théodore Flournoy, Pierre Janet, and Frederic Myers. The eventual success of Freud’s theories, and Freud’s separation of dreams from hypnotic phenomena, marked the decline of this tradition. Jung’s attempts to bring this older tradition forward reveal both his erudition and his synthetic genius, whereas they reveal Freud as more of an innovator who appropriated selectively from the earlier tradition, often without acknowledging it (a point noted by Pierre Janet).

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necessarily more productive of results than the other question ‘To what purpose does it happen?’” (1948b, CW8: 281). Freud’s “causal” approach to dreams viewed them in terms of the dark instinctive wish that gave rise to them, and often traced their images back to childhood traumas. To this Jung added a “final” approach that viewed dreams in terms of “the immanent psychological striving for a goal,” or a “sense of purpose,” inherent in the dream narrative. For Jung, “all psychological phenomena have some such sense of purpose inherent in them” (1948a, CW8: 241). He was also aware that the “final” point of view aligned him with ancient and medieval forms of thought, since the “causal point of view is obviously more sympathetic to the scientific spirit of our time with its strictly causalistic reasoning” (1948a, CW8: 247). One of Jung’s case examples might help illustrate the point. He describes a young man who dreamed the following: “I was standing in a strange garden and picked an apple from a tree. I looked about cautiously, to make sure that no one saw me.” The dream contains a pronounced feeling of guilt, which the dreamer associates with an experience on the previous day, where he had met a young lady in the street—a casual acquaintance—and exchanged a few words with her. At that moment a gentleman passed whom he knew, whereupon he was suddenly seized with a curious feeling of embarrassment, as if he were doing something wrong. He associated the apple with the scene in the Garden of Eden, and also with the fact that he had never really understood why the eating of the forbidden fruit should have had such dire consequences for our first parents. (1948a, CW8: 242) The young man also confessed to Jung that “he had recently begun a love-affair with a housemaid but had not yet carried it through to its natural conclusion. On the evening of the dream he had had a rendezvous with her” (1948a, CW8: 242). Interestingly, and in contrast to the dream, the young man had no moral qualms about his affair with the servant girl, since “all his friends were acting in the same way” (1948a, CW8: 244). According to Freud’s “causal” view, the dream fulfils the wish to consummate the affair with the servant girl. And here the image of picking the apple is a concealment of the latent dream-thought of the act of sex. Jung does not disagree with this reading, but he notes that according to Freud’s causal understanding of symbols, the young man “could just as well have dreamt that he had to open a door with a key, that he was flying in an aeroplane, kissing his mother, etc. From this point of view all those things could have the same meaning” (1948a, CW8: 245). But according to Jung’s “final” view, dream

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symbols “have an intrinsic value of their own.”30 And in this case the dream serves the purpose of pricking the dreamer’s conscience: “it shows the young man the necessity of looking at his erotic conduct for once from the standpoint of morality.” It reveals that the dreamer, “hypnotized by his friends’ example, has somewhat thoughtlessly given way to his erotic desires, unmindful of the fact that he is a morally responsible being” (1948a, CW8: 244). Thus according to this “final” view, “the dream has more the value of a parable: it does not conceal, it teaches.” (1948a, CW8: 246). The dream moves the dreamer toward the goal of more thoughtful moral action. This is not to say that all dreams strike such a moralistic tone, since, as Jung notes, “the dreams of those persons whose actions are morally unassailable bring material to light that might well be described as ‘immoral,’ in the ordinary meaning of the term” (1948a, CW8: 245). That is, for those who see their actions as morally pure, dreams foreground the hidden dark motives behind them. And as Boehme noted, this is also meant to lead one toward confession, and a more honest self-image. Jung concludes that dreams represent “a compensating function of the unconscious whereby those thoughts, inclinations, and tendencies which in conscious life are too little valued come spontaneously into action during the sleeping state, when the conscious process is to a large extent eliminated” (1948a, CW8: 244). And thus if “we want to interpret a dream correctly, we need a thorough knowledge of the conscious situation at that moment, because the dream contains its unconscious complement, that is, the material which the conscious situation has constellated in the unconscious” (1948a, CW8: 248–9). He adds further that “religious compensations play a great role in dreams. That this is increasingly so in our time is a natural consequence of the prevailing materialism of our outlook” (1948a, CW8: 250). Jung was aware that this compensatory view of dreams was not new, and he notes the example of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (Dan. 16.19–16), where the dream attempts “to compensate the king’s megalomania, which, according to the story, developed into a real psychosis” (1948a, CW8: 251). In summarizing his theory, Jung ends on a note of restraint and humility: In putting forward a compensation theory I do not wish to assert that this is the only possible theory of dreams or that it completely explains all the 30 Jung’s view has important implications for hermeneutics: “The causal point of view tends by its very nature towards uniformity of meaning, that is, towards a fixed significance of symbols. The final point of view, on the other hand … recognizes no fixed meaning of symbols. From this standpoint, all the dream-images are important in themselves, each one having a special significance of its own” (1948a, CW8: 246).

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phenomena of dream-life. The dream is an extraordinarily complicated phenomenon, just as complicated and unfathomable as the phenomena of consciousness. It would be inappropriate to try to understand all conscious phenomena from the standpoint of the wish-fulfilment theory or the theory of instinct, and it is as little likely that dream-phenomena are susceptible of so simple an explanation. (1948a, CW8: 254) Jung did not want his compensation theory applied as a simple truism, which could detract from the unique and individual message of every dream. Rather, he hoped that careful attention to dream images would lead us into the inner world, where we might begin to sense its vast importance, as we see in the continuation of the above quotation: Nor should we regard dream-phenomena as merely compensatory and secondary to the contents of consciousness, even though it is commonly supposed that conscious life is of far greater significance for the individual than the unconscious … In my view, which is based on many years of experience and on extensive research, the significance of the unconscious in the total performance of the psyche is probably just as great as that of consciousness. (1948a, CW8: 254) Like Boehme, Jung’s primary goal was to open us to the inner world, which he saw as every bit as complex and important as the outer world. In keeping with Freud’s second theory of dreams, Jung asserts that “dream-thinking should be regarded as a phylogenetically older mode of thought,” an idea that he notes was “already put forward by Nietzsche” (1948a, CW8: 247). As a result, dreams do not express themselves in a “logical, abstract way but always in the language of parable or simile,” in “sensuous, concrete imagery,” which is “also a characteristic of primitive languages, whose flowery turns of phrase are very striking” (1948a, CW8: 248). For Jung, the meaning of each symbol can be discerned from the dreamer’s associations, but in distinction to Freud’s “free association,” where one thought can lead to another in a sequence that leads away from the original image, Jung’s “amplification” stays with the original image, believing that its polyvalent meanings are all directly related to and embodied by the image itself. All of this is quite similar to Boehme’s understanding and use of symbolic images. In summary, Freud’s “causal” view uncovers the hidden instinctive wishes that give rise to dreams, and these instinctive wishes accord very well with the desires of Boehme’s hidden dark world. To this unveiling of dark causal instincts Jung adds a “final” approach that looks at the purpose of dream

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images, as a compensation to the views of the conscious ego, with the ultimate goal of bringing the psyche into a state of balance, wholeness, and homeostasis. As noted above, for Jung, some of the most important dream images are characters representing autonomous sub-personalities in the unconscious, including the myriad representations of the shadow and the anima/animus. As the ego comes into conversation with these split-off sub-personalities, both their autonomous perspectives and the libido that animates them can gradually be assimilated to the ego with beneficial effects. Thus where the causa efficiens of dreams is based in hidden darkness, the causa finalis points toward the light. As the ego follows this teleological trajectory, and progressively integrates various dream figures, the darkness of these figures is likewise sublated and transformed into light, as the psyche finds balance and wholeness in a centre—an imago Dei—beyond the ego. 8.5

Freud’s Dream Hermeneutic and the Psychosexual Stages of Development

As with Boehme, while Freud and Jung do not offer a comprehensive hermeneutic for interpreting all dreams symbols, they both point to major symbols that help structure a developmental path. In chapter 7 we saw that, for Boehme, the seven days of creation structure stages of psychospiritual development, and I noted very generally how both Freudian psychosexual development and Jungian individuation fit within this Boehmian framework. Here I will simply summarize those findings while paying more attention to the details of Freudian and Jungian theory. Let me emphasize again that the developmental theories of both Freud and Jung emerged from the data of dreams. In Freud’s case, his theory of childhood psychosexual stages emerged primarily from observing the dreams of adult patients suffering from various neuroses. The dream symbols pointed to various fixations and distortions of libido, generally related to traumatic childhood events, which were now causing problems in the adult dreamer’s psyche. It is important to note this retrospective approach: because the psychosexual stages emerged mainly from the dreams of adult patients with neurotic symptoms, the actual experience of these stages in childhood may have been quite different from the adult’s retrospective memory of them.31 31

That is, according to Jung’s teleological view, dream symbolism of adult patients in mental distress is keyed not only to the past but also to the present and future. It is attempting to move the present psyche toward wholeness and healing, even if it is speaking of past

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Freud’s psychosexual stages were formulated gradually in his thinking, but they were already taking shape in the Traumdeutung.32 They are structured according to erogenous zones that form the primary loci of libidinal pleasure, and they are both overlapping and cumulative: the oral stage during breast feeding (from about 0–1 ½ years of age), the anal stage during toilet training (from about 1–3 years of age), and the phallic stage when genital arousal and masturbation increase along with the Oedipal constellation in the family unit (from about 3–6 years of age). With the onset of the latency stage (from about 6 years of age until puberty) the Oedipal conflict is usually resolved partly by becoming unconscious (“infantile amnesia”), and partly by the onset of the superego’s strong internal regulation of instinctual impulses. Finally, beginning with the intensification of libido in puberty, the genital stage foregrounds the fixations and distortions of all the previous stages as the libido now seeks exogamous, extra-familial love interests, always with the imprint of its previous experience. It should be noted that the approximate ages of these stages are flexible and culturally dependent. Further, Freud’s retrospective approach means that he was generally observing the earlier stages through the lens of the genital stage of his adult patients, meaning that adult genital conceptions of sexuality were likely projected back into the earlier stages to some extent. Freud’s psychosexual stages are of course well known and have entered popular consciousness. What is less known is that Freud placed much greater emphasis on the pre-Oedipal (or pre-phallic) stages of development in his later work, after he realized the importance of the “primary narcissism” of the undifferentiated infant-mother matrix. As I have done above, I will again emphasize Freud’s mature formulations.

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memories and traumas. These past memories are often coloured by present pathology, and thus it is easy to read the pathology back into childhood experience, even if it did not originally exist there. Jung felt that Freud’s penchant for locating the problem in the distant past sometimes left the present neurotic attitude untouched, and allowed it to continue. In discussing the dreams of children, Freud admits that they often show no dream-distortion: “the manifest and the latent dream coincide. Thus dream-distortion is not part of the essential nature of dreams” (1915–1916, SE15: 128, Freud’s emphasis). Freud also notes that censorship and dream-distortion are much stronger in the dreams of neurotic patients (1900, SE5: 374). This fact goes a long way toward explaining the divergence between the dream theories of Freud and Jung, given that they were generally developed in relation to neurotic and psychotic patients respectively. They are partially sketched in Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1910), and the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916–1917, SE16: 326–328), with the phallic stage being added in “The Infantile Genital Organization” (1923c), and the first systematic portrayal appearing in “An Autobiographical Study” (1925b).

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The oral phase coincides with primary narcissism and the slow, incomplete differentiation of ego from object. The infant’s first object is the mother, and more specifically her breast (or its substitute, a bottle), which come to be perceived as objects when the baby’s cries do not produce them with sufficient speed or regularity. Ego differentiation thus initially takes place alongside the polarity of hunger and satiety. But the child’s hunger is for much more than milk. Freud believed that breast-feeding was actually an attempt to return to the intrauterine state: “There is much more continuity between intra-uterine life and earliest infancy than the impressive caesura of the act of birth would have us believe. What happens is that the child’s biological situation as a foetus is replaced for it by a psychical object-relation to its mother” (1926, SE20: 138). And further, “there arises at birth an instinct to return to the intra-uterine life that has been abandoned—an instinct to sleep. Sleep is a return of this kind to the womb” (1940, SE23: 166). Breast-feeding, which facilitates sleep, thus involves a hunger to return to the womb and its “oceanic feeling of eternity,” where there is no subject-object split and “the ego includes everything.” Mother and breast as primary objects thus come to represent this return to eternal bliss. They are the gateway to it. We saw above that all of this coincides quite nicely with Boehme’s exegesis of the first two days of creation. Day one corresponds to the intrauterine state, where light is born in the midst of darkness. This light for Boehme is a life-force that stands at the root of the soul, akin to Freudian libido, and after the Fall this light is partially extinguished. On day two the firmament separates the eternal waters above from the temporal and spatial waters below, corresponding to the act of birth, as the infant leaves the darkness of the womb and enters a world of temporal sequence and spatial relations. For Boehme, in its original goodness, the soul could perceive eternity shining through the thin veil of time, but the fallen soul loses this ability. Thus the first quality of fallen Wisdom in the soul is a dark Nothing, defined primarily by hunger, and its second quality is a “lust-desire” that emerges from the insatiable vacuum of the first, in an attempt to recover eternal vision. Boehme’s symbolic exegesis paints the picture of an infant whose “lust-desire,” itself a response to an insatiably hungry Nothing, seeks eternity, and specifically the nourishing eternal water that Jesus speaks of in his conversation with the Samaritan woman: “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (Jn. 4.14). For Boehme, this is the water above the firmament that can pervade the waters of time, and symbolically it also represents the amniotic water from which the infant was born, and to which it seeks to return by drinking at the mother’s breast. Likewise for Freud the

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first object—which is breast, milk, mother, and intrauterine peace all wrapped together—becomes an object of both hunger and libidinal desire, a desire for a return to eternity and undifferentiated unity. Freud’s anal stage coincides with the emergence of the ego’s desire for mastery, and it is popularly recognized as the “terrible two” stage, although it usually emerges before age two and extends beyond it. The attempt for control and mastery of objects in the outer world coincides with the most distinctive area of inner bodily mastery: the control of excretory functions. Freud notes that this inner/outer mastery is fuelled by anger and hatred as primary affects, and thus he often uses the term “sadistic-anal” to describe this phase: At the higher stage of the pregenital sadistic-anal organization, the striving for the object appears in the form of an urge for mastery, to which injury or annihilation of the object is a matter of indifference. Love in this form and at this preliminary stage is hardly to be distinguished from hate in its attitude towards the object. (1915, SE14: 138–139) All of this aligns with Boehme’s third quality of angst and anger, from which “I-ness” emerges—angst being the affect that drives the desire for control, and anger being the affect that infuses that desire. In the symbolism of day three this corresponds to the terra firma or “standpoint” of “I-ness” emerging from the inchoate waters below, and this generally accords with the emergence of Freud’s “body ego.” For Freud, the child at this stage is driven to control her own body, in turn using this bodily mastery to control objects in the environment. In the later stages of this bodily control the child takes great pride in the pleasurable sensation33 and achievement of producing mud or earth (excrement) at will, somewhat like God on day three of the creation account (1916–17, SE16: 315).34 33

Freud emphasised the biological fact that defecation is pleasurable because the rectum has a mucous membrane and large numbers of nerve endings, somewhat like the vagina. 34 Freud’s retrospective approach is important here, because excrement is a very common dream symbol in adults with neurotic traits. This is likely because excrement is such an excellent symbol of a repressed/projected shadow, and the sense of moral and physical disgust with the other that it engenders. Children, of course, do not find their excrement dirty or disgusting. They are generally quite happy with it until they are taught otherwise. Yet the adult “civilized” world has designed a set of plumbing and sewage technologies at enormous expense so that we can minimize awareness of our own excrement. Thus the toilet is a highly ritualized object for a neurotic person. The projected shadow functions in a similar way, such that one’s own negative qualities are whisked away to the other, who then appears dirty and morally suspect. The other may in fact be morally suspect, because

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In Freud’s phallic stage the previous stages are integrated into genital sexuality. Here Oedipal desires and rivalries are constellated within the family unit as sexual differentiation and gender identity form in relation to the parents. Language and more abstract thought also develop substantially in this stage, as further tools of the ego’s attempt to control and master the outer world. In his early work Freud believed that here the ambivalent love-hate of the anal stage becomes differentiated into love for one parent and rivalry with the other, and that the parents thus take on great significance as an opposing polarity in the child’s affective world. Freud also had many elaborate theories about how the phallus functions as a central symbol in these Oedipal dynamics. But again, it is important to keep in mind that he was largely extrapolating from the dream symbolism of adult patients, where in its root meaning the phallus is usually a symbol of power and libidinal energy.35 Importantly, in his later work, Freud abandoned his initial “simple” formulation of the Oedipus complex, where a male child loves his mother and hates his father, and the reverse for a female. In “The Ego and the Id” he admits that “the simple Oedipus complex is by no means its commonest form,” and he posits instead an ambivalence toward both parents, which he ascribes either to the child’s introjection of both parents, or to the child’s bisexual attraction for both parents (1923b, SE9: 33). What is clear is that the parents, through libidinal bonds, become the primary partners in the child’s sexual differentiation (a point on which Jung would agree). As the phallic stage ends, and the child represses and forgets these Oedipal dynamics in the latency stage, the parents are introjected and internalized to form the superego. From here, in the genital stage of puberty, all of the Oedipal patterns and traumas of earlier stages are recapitulated in exogamous genital sexual attraction. Freud highlighted the importance of the parents in the phallic stage by using the term “imago,” which he notes was introduced by Jung (1912, SE12: 100). For Freud the parental “imagos” are internalized in the child’s psyche as a combination of both “innate (constitutional) factors” and “infantile impressions,” which results in the formation of a “stereotype plate” or a “prototype.” For Freud, this prototype becomes especially obvious in the transference, there is usually a hook for the projection, but one can only come to a neutral assessment of the other and one’s resemblance to them by withdrawing the projection. 35 Again, Freud’s retrospective approach is important here, because repressed sexuality, sexual conflict, and sexual trauma are such common aspects of adult anxiety and depression, and thus the phallus and vagina appear frequently in adult dreams, in all manner of scenarios involving love/hate and desire/fear. Karen Horney was right to point out, in “The Dread of Women” [(1932) 1999], that conscious hatred of women is frequently symbolized in dreams by fear of the vagina.

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where the image of the therapist “will attach itself to one of the stereotype plates” in the client (1912, SE12: 99–100). The innate aspect of these imagos is what Jung calls the parental “archetypes.” For Freud, the father is primarily an object of both fear and protection (1927, SE21: 17), and this father imago often becomes dominant in the superego, its ethical norms, and the religious father God that stands behind them, at least in Freud’s cultural context.36 In Freud’s later theory the mother imago, as noted above, became increasingly important as the source of the oceanic feeling of undifferentiated unity, eternity, peace, and oneness with all things. Both the father and mother imagos have positive and negative valences, as is evident in depictions of god and goddess figures around the world. All of this aligns with Boehme’s exegesis of day four, where the sun and moon are created as the two great archetypes ruling the day and night respectively. For Boehme this is when language-based reason (Vernunft) develops in the child, and sun and moon as parental “king” and “queen” rule this astral realm of the linguistic-rational mind in both its dark and light aspects. Boehme’s exegesis of Joseph’s dream also highlights the Freudian phallic nature of this stage, as Joseph dreams that the sun, moon, and stars—interpreted in the text as his father, mother, and siblings—will bow down to him. This dream causes both his father’s “rebuke” and his brothers’ “jealousy” (Gen. 37.2, 9–11). But for Boehme, the sun and moon are not just images of the parents. They are archetypes rooted in Wisdom that can thus mediate the eternal realm within the temporal, allowing eternal understanding (Verstand) to flow down and restructure temporal reason (Vernunft). They allow the reorientation of temporal logos according to sacred mythos. From this eternal realm, Boehme’s fourth quality of Wisdom can either divide darkness from light or, through the cross as a divine centre, it can sublate darkness into light, re-centring and reorienting the trinitarian soul. This happens as the “I-ness” in “releasement” (Gelassenheit) surrenders both the rationalistic ego of day four and the body ego of day three. “I-ness” releases its rationalism and control, becoming aware of an eternal soul that is more than linguistic reason, and more than the physical body. In this releasement the “I-ness” finds rebirth (Wiedergeburt) and access to Wisdom. And here we begin to see the motif of the marriage of sun and moon, which occupies the final three days in Boehme’s schema, and which we will revisit shortly in Jung.

36 In “The Ego and the Id” Freud clarifies that the superego arises from identification with the father in post-Oedipal (post-phallic) stages, and from identification with both parents in pre-Oedipal stages (1923b, SE19: 31n1).

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Returning to Freud’s parental imagos, importantly, in discussing the “oceanic feeling” of the mother, Freud said that he could no longer discern this feeling in himself, and that he had no desire to reclaim it (1930, SE21: 64). In fact, it was precisely Jung’s attempt to explore this oceanic feeling of the mother imago that prompted the split in 1913. In Freud’s later theory, the oceanic feeling is a characteristic of “primary narcissism,” and thus of a pre-Oedipal (pre-phallic) consciousness where subject and object are imperfectly differentiated. Even Freud’s term “narcissism” gives a negative connotation to these states of consciousness, states that are implicated in psychosis, with which Freud had little clinical experience. At the end of his discussion of the “oceanic feeling,” Freud also suggests that these states are implicated in “the practices of Yoga,” “the wisdom of mysticism,” and “trances and ecstasies,” a list to which he might have added “prayer.”37 But Freud concludes his discussion by admonishing readers with the words of Schiller’s diver: “Es freue sich, Wer da atmet im rosigten Licht” [“Let him rejoice who breathes here, in the roseate light!”]. In Schiller’s poem, these words are uttered after the diver, a young man, has completed an impossible quest by diving into an oceanic abyss to retrieve a golden cup. After his success, the king promises him his daughter and knighthood if he can retrieve the cup a second time, but this time the diver does not return. The implication is that those of us who have successfully escaped the pre-Oedipal stages of an undifferentiated ego should not seek to return to them, especially if these states are implicated in psychosis. The “roseate light” that Freud was now breathing was that of rational, differentiated consciousness, including the light of the scientific method he so valued, with its firm subject-object distinction. By contrast, Jung’s clinical experience with psychosis at the Burghölzli prompted him to search for a path that might guide Schiller’s lost diver back to the surface. It also gave Jung an awareness of certain pre-Oedipal states that were not pathological or narcissistic, but that were characterized by heightened imagination, creativity, and wholeness.38 These are precisely the themes he explored in Symbols of Transformation ([1911–12] 1952), which prompted the split with Freud. Here Jung charts a path that would have helped Schiller’s diver find both the treasure and his beloved—a path he calls the

37 Freud’s friend, the poet Romain Rolland, whose letter to Freud sparked these reflections and coined the term “oceanic feeling,” later produced book-length treatments of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. 38 See for example Jung’s Visions ([1930–34] 1997), where he explores the waking visions of a functional, intelligent, and highly adapted woman, Christiana Morgan.

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“Jonah-and-the-whale” complex, and which Jesus, referring to his crucifixion, called “the sign of Jonah” (Mt. 12.38–42; Mk. 8.12). 8.6

Jung’s Dream Hermeneutic and Individuation

Jung’s developmental journey basically begins where Freud’s ends, in the genital stage of puberty, when the libido begins to seek extra-familial (exogamous) love interests. In Jung’s language, the anima or animus that was initially projected on the parents, and usually also on siblings or cousins within the family circle in the initial developmental stages, is now projected on exogamous love interests. And if all goes well, young adults fall in love and leave the nest to begin a new family of their own.39 But, like Freud, Jung noted that this ideal process is almost never instantiated in practice. It is almost always disrupted by anima/animus dynamics. Thus, for example, because the experience of falling in love is due to anima/animus projections, and because these projections tend to dissolve with time, most lovers come to realize that their beloved is not who they first appeared to be. Romance fades and disappointment sets in. For Jung, the great opportunity presented by this disappointment is to look within, and come into relationship with the anima/animus as an inner figure. Thus begins the process of dialogue with the inner world, and the resulting expansion of conscious awareness. Jung also noticed that in many cases, even in those who succeed in leaving home both physically and psychologically and who become well-adapted to the outer world, certain obstacles from the inner world often still intrude in later life. Especially in mid-life, and even in highly successful individuals, a sense of meaninglessness can slowly blacken the life they worked so hard to build. Often a regression sets in, memories of childhood emerge, and the parental imagos are once again activated in the inner world of dreams. This “mid-life crisis” is so common that it has entered popular consciousness. The Freudian view would tend to see these parental dream symbols as indicative of issues in childhood involving the actual parents, but this does not explain why these symptoms took so long to manifest. For Jung, when these parental 39

This sentence indicates the Western bias of both Freud and Jung, which privileges separation from the parents and the establishment of a nuclear family unit. And yet, differentiation from the parents is important even in cultures where extended families cohabit. Here one still needs psychological differentiation even, and perhaps especially, when several generations live under the same roof or in close proximity. I recall speaking to a Cuban therapist who noted that most of her clients’ problems involved family conflict, largely due to enmeshment and insufficient differentiation.

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imagos are constellated in later life, they usually point beyond the actual parents to the parental archetypes—the anima and animus. And as noted above, by viewing these imagos as inner figures, the inner eternal world is opened for the purpose of spiritual rebirth. As the resulting series of dreams progresses, anima/animus take on their own personalities, distinct from the parents, and the resulting dialogue allows growth in self-awareness and spiritual depth. As noted, this journey normally begins by confronting the shadow—a dream figure representing the negative side of the ego and the personal unconscious—in a process that overlaps with Freudian theory. Shadow work corresponds to Boehme’s unveiling of the dark world of the twofold soul. And after this the anima or animus opens the door to the collective unconscious, corresponding to Boehme’s threefold soul. In Symbols of Transformation ([1912–13] 1952), which caused the split with Freud, Jung’s central thesis was that the Oedipal longing for the mother is not necessarily pathological in later life, and thus a regression should not be resisted in all cases, especially when the ego is differentiated and well-adapted to the outer world. In such cases, dream symbols of Oedipal longing often move beyond the typical incest motifs noted by Freud, and begin to speak of a return to the maternal womb.40 But for Jung it is not the personal mother who is represented here: The “mother,” as the first incarnation of the anima archetype, personifies in fact the whole unconscious. Hence the regression leads back only apparently to the mother; in reality she is the gateway into the unconscious  … For regression, if left undisturbed, does not stop short at the “mother” but goes back beyond her to the prenatal realm of the ‘Eternal Feminine,’ to the immemorial world of archetypal possibilities where, ‘thronged round with images of all creation,’ slumbers the ‘divine child,’ patiently awaiting his conscious realization. This son is the germ of wholeness, and he is characterized as such by his specific symbols. ([1911–12] 1952, CW5: 330) 40

The incest motif noted by Freud, when it involves an actual family member in a dream, is often indicative of a pathological regression, i.e. a regression that is not serving the interests of the dreamer. The ego generally finds this dream incest abhorrent, and when the ego understands the attitudes and actions symbolized by this motif, it is naturally moved to change them. That is, when the dream symbol is connected to the attitudes and actions it symbolizes, the symbol naturally has a certain power over them. But a motif such as entering a cave to find a treasure is one that a Freudian analyst might see as incestuous, even though it makes no mention of an actual mother. A Jungian interpretation of this motif would generally be more positive, if the quest for the treasure in the dream appears in a positive light.

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In this case Freud’s Oedipus complex becomes a “Jonah-and-the-whale complex.”41 And the “divine child” as the “germ of wholeness” is what Jung will later call the Self archetype. Jung finds the whole process encapsulated in Jesus’ nocturnal conversation about rebirth with Nicodemus in John 3. The Rabbi asks if he can literally “enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” and Jesus responds with the two primordial symbols of the first day of creation, which precede the birth of light: to be reborn is to be born “of water and Spirit.” The birth of the divine child in the soul is precisely what Boehme means by rebirth (Wiedergeburt), and for Boehme the process likewise begins by exploring the realm of the “moon,” the “queen” of the dark world, and through confession sublating her dark fire into the light world of the “sun.” This process likewise involves a birth of archetypal imagination in the soul, as the image-based Wisdom (Verstand) of dreams seeks a marriage with language-based reason (Vernunft). All of this takes place according to the symbolism of day four. For Jung, the birth of this divine child is only the beginning of the “marriage of sun and moon,” a longer process of “coniunctio” that is the focus of some of Jung’s latest and most involved works, including “The Psychology of the Transference” (1946) and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56). In general, when the anima or animus begins to appear in dreams, a symbol of the Self also appears indicating the midpoint of the marriage between the conscious ego and the unconscious anima/animus. And here Jung’s four functions become important: thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition (outlined in his second major work, Psychological Types, 1921). The conscious ego is defined by one of these functions, and the shadow is usually defined by a subsidiary function that assists the ego. But because it is so difficult for opposing functions to coexist, one of the functions necessarily falls into the unconscious, where it defines the anima/animus. Thus we can easily think of personality stereotypes, like rationalists who exclude their emotional life, or intuitive creative types who do not have enough empirical “sensing” skill to keep up with mundane everyday tasks.

41 Jung continues, giving the full meaning of the “Jonah-and-the-Whale” complex from Jewish sources: “When Jonah was swallowed by the whale, he was not simply imprisoned in the belly of the monster, but, as Paracelsus tells us, he saw ‘mighty mysteries’ there. This view probably derives from the Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, which says: ‘Jonah entered its mouth just as a man enters the great synagogue, and he stood there. The two eyes of the fish were like windows of glass giving light to Jonah. R. Meir said: One pearl was suspended inside the belly of the fish and it gave illumination to Jonah, like the sun which shines with all its might at noon; and it showed to Jonah all that was in the sea and in the depths’” ([1911–12] 1952, CW5: 330).

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The marriage of the conscious ego and the unconscious anima/animus is thus a sustained spiritual discipline of allowing previously excluded unconscious contents to emerge into conscious life, usually through dreams, and of valuing these excluded contents. The goal here is the development and eventual balance of all four functions, centred in the Self. We saw above that, for Boehme, day five represents the creation of four types of animal life, corresponding to the four elements, and these elements in turn correspond to Jung’s four functions. As a dream symbol, an animal represents an excluded thought or affect that is functioning autonomously and instinctively in the unconscious (as animals do). Once this “animal” is allowed into consciousness, it slowly becomes humanized under the control of the ego, and the personality expands accordingly. The final goal of assimilating these “animals,” and balancing the four functions in consciousness, is the goal of Boehme’s day six: the microcosm or the human in full as an imago Dei, depicted biblically in the first Adam and in Christ as the second Adam. The culmination of Boehme’s schema is the spiritual or light body of the seventh quality, which makes Wisdom complete and grants sabbath rest and blessing on day seven. Jung, who was always defending his scientific credentials and empirical method against the charge of “mysticism,” had no empirical evidence for such a spiritual body, and yet in his later work he hints at it in relation to various alchemical texts. He notes that the Self, as the imago Dei, “has its roots in the [physical] body,” and “coincides psychologically” with the “shining body” or “corpus astrale” of the alchemists (1942, CW13: 125, 152, 167; 1948c, CW13: 195). Jung does not identify this body as the culmination of his developmental process, but its correspondence with the Self archetype hints at this.

Chapter 9

Conclusion 9.1

The Question of Direct or Indirect Influence

How can we account for these strong theoretical continuities between Boehme, Freud, and Jung? The simplest explanation would be some form of direct influence. Did Freud and Jung read Boehme? In Freud’s case this seems very doubtful. I noted above (chapter 8.1) that in formulating his structural theory, Freud was aware of certain resonances with Schopenhauer.1 His discussion of this fact in the 1925 “Autobiographical Study,” provides a glimpse of what he calls his “constitutional incapacity” for philosophy: I should not like to create an impression that during this last period of my work I have turned my back upon patient observation and have abandoned myself entirely to speculation. I have on the contrary always remained in the closest touch with the analytic material and have never ceased working at detailed points of clinical or technical importance. Even when I have moved away from observation, I have carefully avoided any contact with philosophy proper. This avoidance has been greatly facilitated by constitutional incapacity. I was always open to the ideas of G.T. Fechner and have followed that thinker upon many important points. The large extent to which psycho-analysis coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer—not only did he assert the dominance of the emotions and the supreme importance of sexuality but he was even aware of the mechanism of repression—is not to be traced to my acquaintance with his teaching. I read Schopenhauer very late in my life. Nietzsche, another philosopher whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psycho-analysis, was for a long time avoided by me on that very account; I was less concerned with the question of priority than with keeping my mind unembarrassed. (1925b, SE20: 59–60) From quotations like this it seems very unlikely that Freud read Boehme directly. If his empirical and scientific mind found Schopenhauer and Nietzsche difficult, he would have found Boehme simply impossible. Further, in Freud’s day it 1 In “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis” Freud was already mentioning Schopenhauer’s importance as a “forerunner” of psychoanalysis (1917, SE17: 143–144). © Glenn J. McCullough, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004680296_011

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was not generally recognized that Boehme was a seminal influence on philosophers like Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. These philosophers simply did not credit Boehme’s influence explicitly in their work, and it was left to later scholars to uncover it, notably Ernst Benz (1983).2 But the aspects of Schopenhauer’s thought that Freud identifies above—the “dominance of the emotions,” “the supreme importance of sexuality,” and “the mechanism of repression”—were all lessons that Schopenhauer learned from Boehme. We also saw above (chapter 8.3) that Freud tried to separate himself from the “followers of Schelling” in the Traumdeutung (1900, SE4: 5), but that Freud’s second theory of dreams ironically brought him very close to Schelling. The second theory emphasized manifest content, and viewed dream-images as primary, rather than as a mere cover for latent, language-based dream-thoughts. In Freud’s second theory, dreams represent a form of image-based cognition that is phylogenetically earlier than language. And in the Traumdeutung Freud credits this view to a follower of Schelling, G.H. von Schubert, and his remarkable Die Symbolik des Traumes (1814) (Freud 1900, SE5: 352). Schubert and Schelling, of course, learned this idea from Boehme, for whom the image-based Wisdom or “understanding” of Verstand is more primary than the language-based “reason” of Vernunft. Thus we can conclude that, although it is very doubtful that Freud read Boehme directly, Boehme’s influence is discernible via philosophers like Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, who were “in the air” at the time Freud was formulating his theories. Freud recognized certain affinities with these philosophers, but denied any direct influence, and was very likely unaware of Boehme’s seminal influence on them. Above all, Freud wanted to protect his empirical deductions from the influence of philosophy. Jung did read Boehme directly,3 and a glance at the references to Boehme in Jung’s Collected Works reveals a fairly basic understanding of certain Boehmian concepts. Jung is mainly interested in Boehme’s earlier works, and specifically for the influence of alchemy upon them. Jung saw alchemy, especially in its later philosophical stage, as the key precursor to modern psychology, and he believed that Boehme’s “starting point was philosophical alchemy” (1955–1956, CW14: 341). His references to Boehme note this alchemical influence, often 2 Benz’s remarkable lectures on The Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy (1983) were originally given in French at the Collège de France in 1963. There he says that “The story of Jacob Boehme’s influence on European philosophy is one of the most exciting chapters in the history of European thought,” but that “this story has yet to be written” (1983, 10), although Benz sketches its basic outlines. 3 In contrast to Freud, Jung received a broad classical education that included a great deal of philosophy. Jung was also something of a child prodigy, in that he began difficult philosophical and religious texts from his father’s library as a young boy.

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assimilating Boehme’s concepts to larger alchemical trends, and to his own theories.4 Nowhere in these references does Jung note that Boehme’s eternal dark and light worlds resemble his or Freud’s view of the unconscious, or that Boehme’s seven stages of development anticipate Freud’s psychosexual stages, or his own stages of individuation. His observations are much more general. For example, he notes that in Boehme the virgin Sophia “has the character of an anima, for ‘she is given to be a companion to thee in thy soul,’ [Three Principles 17.81/1764, 17.78] and at the same time, as divine power and Wisdom, she is in heaven and in paradise [Three Principles 13.9]” (1955–1956, CW14: 404). Jung shows no understanding of Boehme’s seven qualities of Wisdom and their profound psychological significance, nor of the correspondence between Boehme’s concept of rebirth and his own “Jonah-and-the-whale” complex. There is no doubt that Jung saw resonances between his own work and Boehme’s, and he attributes these resonances to what we might call a common empirical “data set”: Boehme, “like the alchemists, was working on an empirical basis which has since been rediscovered by modern psychology. There are products of active imagination, and also dreams, which reproduce the same patterns and arrangements with a spontaneity that cannot be influenced” (1950a, CW9i: 332). The extent to which Boehme’s work is empirically based can be debated, but I have noted above the extent to which his empirical experiences were interpreted within the hermeneutical frame of both the Bible and the Lutheran theology of his day. But in general, Jung’s reading of Boehme is quite superficial. There is no attempt to understand or elucidate the meaning of Boehme’s corpus in any comprehensive way. Rather, Jung uses a few Boehmian 4 Jung generally assumed that alchemy was an anti-Christian, heterodox body of thought. Northrop Frye, in an early article on Jung called “Forming Fours” (1954), questions this assumption in a way that aligns with Boehme: “Alchemy, at least in its fully developed Christian form, was based on the idea of a correspondence between Scripture and Nature … Its religious basis is Biblical commentary (not the ‘Church,’ as Jung keeps saying) … the idea of alchemy was to repeat the original divine experiment of creation  … The philosopher’s stone itself was the chemical or demiurgical analogy (or perhaps rather aspect) of Christ, the elixir being to nature what his blood is to man … The associations of alchemy were apocalyptic and visionary, but not necessarily heretical, as Jung tends to think: the notion of a redeeming principle of nature as an aspect of Christ is a quite possible inference from the conception of substance which underlies the doctrine of transubstantiation … The essential point to remember is that when alchemy loses its chemical connections, it becomes purely a species of typology or allegorical commentary on the Bible” (1954, 617–19). Frye later fleshed out this alchemical aspect of the Bible, and its influence on literature, in Words with Power, Chapter 8: “Fourth Variation: The Furnace,” where Boehme figures prominently (1990, 272–313). In general Frye is following William Blake in this view of alchemy and the Bible. For more on this see McCullough (2023a).

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ideas quite selectively to show that the products of the unconscious, including dreams, are somewhat consistent from Boehme’s time to ours. Beyond the common empirical data set Jung shared with Boehme, there is also an intellectual genealogy that directly influenced Jung’s interpretation of this data. As noted in chapter 1.3, this lineage has been traced by S.J. McGrath, who notes Boehme’s profound influence on Schelling’s later work, and on the “Schelling school of Romantic psychiatry” (2012, 17), which included the Schellingian physician C.G. Carus.5 As Sonu Shamdasani notes, Against the Freudocentric reading of his work, Jung stated that his own conceptions were “much more like Carus than Freud” and that Kant, Schopenhauer, Carus, and von Hartmann had provided him with the “tools of thought” (Angulo 1952, 207). While Nietzsche and Burckhardt had influenced him, they were indirect “side influences”  … In his dissertation, Progoff had claimed that Jung had derived his concept of the unconscious from Freud. Jung denied this, adding, “I had these thoughts long before I came to Freud. Unconscious is an epistemological term deriving from von Hartmann” (208). In a similar vein, in his 1925 seminar, he recounted that his idea of the unconscious “first became enlightened through Schopenhauer and Hartmann” (1925, 5) … Jung claimed that Freud was uninfluenced by this philosophical background. (Shamdasani 2003, 164–5) In other places Jung traces the concept of the unconscious ultimately to “Leibniz, Kant, and Schelling,” but he never situates Boehme in this lineage, let alone as its originator, and he shows no awareness of Boehme’s influence on his own intellectual progenitors: Schelling, Schopenhauer, Carus, and von Hartmann. Again, this is likely because nineteenth century thinkers rarely acknowledged their intellectual debts, especially to a rather enigmatic mystical writer, and it was left to later scholars to uncover them.6 In summary, although this historical genealogy of ideas from Boehme to Freud and Jung exists, by itself it does not account for the striking structural congruities we have seen above. That is, Freud and Jung have much more in common with Boehme himself than with the thinkers Boehme influenced, like Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Fechner, Carus, von Hartmann, and Nietzsche. Thus the fact that Boehmian psychology re-emerged so forcefully in Freud and Jung is not entirely explained by historical genealogy. Further, 5 See especially Carus, Psyche: On the Development of Soul [(1846) 1970]. 6 See chapter 3.2 for scholarship on Boehme’s influence on nineteenth century Romanticism.

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Freud almost certainly did not read Boehme directly, Jung’s reading of Boehme is quite superficial, and neither Freud nor Jung show awareness of Boehme’s remarkable influence on Romantic philosophy. Thus I am left with the hypothesis that Freud and Jung were unknowingly rediscovering significant aspects of Boehme’s psychology, both because they were using a similar empirical data set (dreams) and a similar hermeneutical frame for interpreting the data (from a Romantic milieu heavily indebted to Boehme). Freud did not admit that the hermeneutical frame for his theories was influenced by the philosophy of his day (or indeed that he had a “hermeneutical frame” at all), but that can easily be disputed. Jung was generally aware of his indebtedness to Romantic philosophy and medicine, although he did not trace this lineage back to Boehme. Importantly for the thesis of this book, the result is that neither Freud nor Jung were aware that large swaths of their theories initially appeared within a theological matrix, and that they were instrumental in translating Boehme’s theological psychology into a scientific psychology. 9.2

Implications for Scholars and Therapists

Let me briefly mention some general implications of my thesis for (1) the theological field of spiritual and pastoral counselling, (2) the general field of psychotherapy and its attempts at spiritual integration, and (3) the broader scholarly discussion of the historical and conceptual roots of modernity. Just to reiterate, my general thesis is that psychodynamic therapy originated within a theological register with Boehme, and only later migrated into a scientific register with Freud and Jung. Included in this migration was the primary data set for these theorists: dreams as a subset of the imagination. In the course of this migration, the theological presuppositions that informed Boehme were not invalidated; they were simply ignored in the scientific register and therefore went underground, continuing to operate as a kind of hidden theological/religious foundation. In making this claim, I am not saying that psychodynamic therapy can only be justified or validated as a theological theory. Quite the opposite, I believe that psychodynamic approaches have been, and continue to be validated empirically, and I will soon point to the literature that supports this. What I am saying, and what is perhaps most interesting about psychodynamic therapy, is that it is comprehensible both within a purely theological frame, and within a purely empirical scientific frame, and thus it offers a kind of bridge between theology and science, and between early modern thought and modernity proper. Just to anticipate the argument below, the main implication of this thesis for current scholarship is that psychodynamic

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therapy continues to operate within the scientific milieu as a kind of hidden theological discipline. If my thesis is true, then academic fields that have presupposed a purely secular and scientific foundation for psychodynamic therapy will need to be reconfigured. 9.2.1 Spiritual and Pastoral Counselling The academic field of pastoral care and counselling emerged in the early twentieth century as a subdiscipline of Christian theology, which critically integrated theories from psychology, psychiatry, and social work, mainly for the training of clergy in seminaries and divinity schools. Many in this field served as chaplains in hospitals, prisons, and the military. More recently the field has expanded to include diverse religious and spiritual traditions, and diverse cultural contexts, often under the rubric of “spiritual counselling.” Today many spiritual and pastoral counsellors become credentialed psychotherapists serving a diverse spectrum of clients, both religious and non-religious. From its inception to the present, as we will see below, the field has struggled to define itself, and specifically it has struggled to find principled ways of integrating traditional theology with modern psychotherapy. As a “secular” discipline, psychotherapy has generally been viewed with suspicion by theological conservatives and broadly embraced by liberals, but rarely has psychotherapeutic theory been interwoven with traditional religious concepts and doctrinal loci in ways that are nuanced and intellectually satisfying. I will offer three emblematic examples of this methodological struggle in the field, while noting how the thesis of this book might reconfigure the discussion. First, Don Browning and Terry Cooper, in Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies (2004), note how the various schools of psychology and psychotherapy make use of ethical and metaphysical presuppositions, derived from religion, which strictly speaking fall outside the purview of a scientific discipline. They make the case that some of the “deep metaphors” and “principles of obligation” in psychotherapy are implicitly religious or metaphysical, and can thus be critiqued in terms of the “ethical and metaphysical resources of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions” (2004, xii). While I agree with Browning and Cooper that various modern psychotherapies contain vestigial theological concepts, we saw above that these vestiges go far beyond general ethical or metaphysical metaphors or principles. Theology informs the most basic theoretical structures of psychodynamic theory, including its conception of the unconscious mind. And rather than drawing a clear line of demarcation between what is theological and what is scientific in psychotherapy, we saw a rather large “grey area” of overlap, where psychological concepts derived from a theological frame in Boehme’s work were later

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validated empirically within a scientific frame in Freud and Jung’s work. Thus, in my view, and in relation to Browning and Cooper’s thesis, spiritual and pastoral counsellors can claim a much larger area of psychodynamic theory as falling under the purview of theology, far beyond the general ethical principles they note. This means that basic psychodynamic concepts—concepts that are often viewed as empirical and scientific—should be allowed entrance into discussions of theological anthropology, in keeping with their historical pedigree. And because so many basic psychodynamic concepts have informed later therapeutic modalities (concepts like repression, projection, transference, trauma, the unconscious, therapeutic alliance, etc.), it is possible to trace the theological pedigree of these ideas into a broad swath of current therapeutic practice. Second, taking an explicitly Christian approach, Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger in Theology and Pastoral Counseling: A New Interdisciplinary Approach (2005), uses protestant theologian Karl Barth’s Chalcedonian Christology as a pattern to structure interdisciplinary discussion. She first foregrounds the fundamental distinction between theological and psychotherapeutic concepts before describing how pastoral counsellors might use both fields “bilingually,” granting each its own integrity, while also granting theology an asymmetrical priority over psychology. According to Chalcedonian Christology, Christ exists in two natures, fully God and fully human (totus/totus), a formulation that defies rational understanding.7 And the relationship between these two natures, in Hunsinger’s reading of Karl Barth, defines the ideal relationship between theology and other academic disciplines. The two natures are related in “indissoluble differentiation” (meaning that the two disciplines are independent and should not be confused), “inseparable unity” (meaning that the two disciplines should not be separated or divided), and “asymmetry” (with theology having logical priority over the other discipline). As Hunsinger notes, this pattern itself can only be accepted in faith, but if accepted it avoids several pitfalls that have characterized attempts to relate theology and psychology in the past. Hunsinger offers three examples of these pitfalls. First, some theologians have claimed that theology has little need of psychology, since theology itself is capable of addressing all of the most pressing issues that fall within the purview of psychology. Hunsinger critiques Eduard Thurneysen, one of Barth’s colleagues, for precisely this approach: “He leaves virtually no room 7 In the early centuries of Christianity, theologians speculated about the nature of Jesus Christ, and whether a certain part of him was divine (e.g. a divine mind) while other parts were human. The council of Chalcedon (451 CE) reaffirmed the idea that Christ was both fully human and fully divine, and that these two natures were neither divided nor intermixed.

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for psychology to contribute its own unique resources toward the healing of the individual” (1995, 80). According to the Chalcedonian pattern, Thurneysen emphasizes the “indissoluble differentiation” between the two disciplines, but he neglects their “inseparable unity.” And his attempt to prioritize theology “asymmetrically” has the effect of denigrating and limiting the proper sphere of psychology. A second pitfall is a reductionism that frames all theological concepts within psychological categories. Theology is then translated into psychology without remainder. Hunsinger critiques one of Jung’s disciples, Edward Edinger, for this tendency (while also noting that Jung himself was less reductionistic). Edinger sees it as a mark of Jung’s genius that so much of traditional Christian theology can be translated into the categories of Jungian individuation.8 But of course, from the perspective of this book, this feat is not as impressive as it seems. The reason Jungian thought can so easily incorporate theological concepts is because it is so heavily indebted to them in the first place. Indeed what is more impressive is that this fact has gone unnoticed for so long, even by someone of the calibre of Edinger. For Hunsinger, “Edinger systematically collapses all meaningful distinctions between properly theological concepts and the language of depth psychology, interpreting the former by means of the latter” (1995, 83). According to the Chalcedonian pattern, Edinger emphasizes the “inseparable unity” between theology and psychology, but neglects their “indissoluble differentiation.” The third criterion of the Chalcedonian pattern, “asymmetry,” includes the prior two criteria but adds another element of complexity. As Hunsinger explains, “According to Barth, psychological concepts could not possibly exist on the same level as theological concepts because psychology by definition pertains only to a creaturely level of reality” (1995, 93). Here she critiques liberal theologian Paul Tillich “who typically posits a fundamental conjunction between God and the world at the point where Barth sees a fundamental disjunction” (1995, 91). Hunsinger defines this “asymmetry” in terms of both “logical precedence” and “conceptual independence,”9 and she concludes with a definition that includes all three criteria: “from a Barthian standpoint  … 8 Edinger: “In fact when the Christian myth is examined carefully in the light of analytical psychology, the conclusion is inescapable that the underlying meaning of Christianity is the quest for individuation” (1972, 131, quoted in Hunsinger 1995, 80). 9 “A conceptual account of X is an account of what we mean, understand, and intend ourselves to be talking about, when we talk or think about X. If X is not correctly thus accounted for in terms of Y, then X is conceptually independent of Y; if Y is accounted for in terms of X, where X is not in turn accounted for in terms of Y, then X is both conceptually prior to and independent of Y” (1995, 68).

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although psychological categories are both logically independent of and dependent on theological categories in different ways, theological categories are by definition both logically prior to and independent of psychological categories with respect to their significance” (1995, 69). From the perspective of this book, the two theologians we explored, Augustine and Boehme, likely would have accepted Barth’s definition of the Chalcedonian pattern and its implications. Both Augustine and Boehme define a realm of human psychology that is both independent of and dependent on theology in different ways. In the case of Boehme’s theories, the independence of his realm of psychology is attested by the fact that many aspects of it were later rediscovered and validated within an empirical frame by Freud and Jung, without any recourse to theology. And yet Boehme’s psychology is also clearly dependent on theological categories and is derived primarily from them, as we saw above. Similarly, for both Augustine and Boehme, theological categories are both logically prior to and independent of psychological categories. In Boehme’s case, we saw above that it was not necessary for God to create humanity or the universe, and after creation God continues to exist on Boehme’s first and second ontological levels independently from humanity, in a way that is not necessarily conditioned by humanity (see figure 2). Similar to Barth’s formulation, the God of both Augustine and Boehme exists in radical freedom, and in that freedom God chooses to be in relationship with humanity, in the continuing drama of covenant and redemption. For both Augustine and Boehme, theology is not conditioned by psychology, but psychology is conditioned by theology; theology cannot be accounted for in terms of psychology, but psychology can be accounted for in terms of theology. While it would seem that Augustine and Boehme generally conform to Hunsinger’s Barthian framework, there are also significant theological differences that distance them from Barth. One of the most salient differences is that Barth himself rarely mentions psychology, and when he does it is rarely in a positive light.10 While according to Barth’s framework one should be able to understand human psychology in theological terms, Barth does not offer any 10 Hunsinger notes that Barth “seldom engaged in extensive conversation with the psychologists of his day. Unlike some of his theological contemporaries, notably Paul Tillich, Barth seemed to have scant interest in depth psychology” (1995, 10). She further notes the relative neglect of Barth in the field of pastoral care and counselling and wonders about its causes: “Was it the unfortunate anti-psychological tone that has crept into the writings of some of his followers? Were Barth’s own polemics somehow responsible for alienating those with interests in depth psychology and other human sciences?” (1995, 11). These rhetorical questions can be answered in the affirmative.

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such understanding.11 Boehme and Augustine do, and indeed one of the central themes of their work is the soul’s experiential journey into God. Nonetheless, Barth’s Chalcedonian pattern is present in the work of both Augustine and Boehme, in their distinction between temporal knowledge (scientia, Vernunft) and eternal Wisdom (sapientia, Verstand). For both thinkers, temporal knowledge, even when it is logically and empirically valid, can be at odds with eternal Wisdom. But knowledge can also be caught up, transformed, and ultimately reconciled with eternal Wisdom. Wisdom is the superordinate category in which knowledge finds fulfilment. And for both thinkers, dream experiences play a crucial role in the ultimate marriage of knowledge with Wisdom. Barth, in his polemic with Schleiermacher and liberal theology, was hesitant to speak of the human experience of Wisdom, and yet his theological method leaves the door open for his followers to pursue this topic in more depth. The fact that Boehme’s distinction between Vernunft and Verstand conforms to Barth’s Chalcedonian pattern could make Boehme a helpful conversation partner for theologians interested in integrating psychology with Barth’s neo-orthodox approach. And because Boehme’s theoretical landscape overlaps in such fundamental ways with those of Freud and Jung, the door is left open for a robust theological understanding of psychodynamic theory, and a robust theological anthropology that includes a significant place for the unconscious mind, and its expression in dreams and imagination. A third methodological current in the field of pastoral counselling comes from the work of Donald Capps, who has been called “the most prolific writer in the history of the modern discipline of pastoral theology” (Dykstra and Carlin 2016, 577). While his theoretical palette is wonderfully diverse, Capps does make extensive use of psychanalytic concepts in ways that have permanently shaped the field. But interestingly, he does not offer a principled way of integrating psychoanalytic concepts with traditional theology. That is, Capps does not attempt to provide a comprehensive theological anthropology that would integrate the psychodynamic view of the soul with traditional theological doctrines. At one point Capps notes that this avoidance is deliberate—by refraining from offering theological grounds for his approach to pastoral counselling, he opens his work to a broader theological audience, 11

Barth significantly altered Calvin’s doctrine of sanctification. For Calvin justification is God’s “once for all” forgiveness of humanity, and sanctification is the individual’s gradual (“more and more”) appropriation of this gift, which implies some kind of psychological and behavioural change. Barth locates both in the person and work of Jesus Christ, meaning that sanctification is also a “once for all” gift, and its empirical instantiations in the individual may be more difficult to discern, more punctiliar, or even more ephemeral. This in part accounts for Barth’s neglect of psychology.

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including conservative, moderate, and liberal readers (2001, 6). My own sense is that Capps’ lack of theological grounding could be seen as problematic for theological conservatives. For theological moderates and liberals who are more likely to embrace his psychanalytic frame, the lack of theological grounding still inhibits them from connecting this frame to their faith tradition. I hope this book demonstrates that a robust integration of theology and psychodynamic theory is eminently possible. One might even say that this book unearths the hidden theological foundations of the psychoanalytic themes in Capps’ work, allowing readers to integrate his insights with traditional Christian doctrinal loci. Finally, as the field of pastoral counselling expands to embrace various faith traditions, I will simply note that this book allows for a historicization of Western psychotherapeutic concepts, which should be helpful to the discussion. Western psychotherapy has now been exported around the world, usually under the assumption that its precepts are scientific and thus culturally neutral. But the argument above attests to their theological and spiritual roots. Given that one of the main threads connecting Boehme, Freud, and Jung is their primary data set of dreams, it would be interesting to explore dreams as a locus of dialogue in the development of culturally sensitive and spiritually integrated forms of psychotherapy. Dreams, of course, play a prominent role in the vast majority of global spiritual traditions, where they also tend to carry cosmological weight as a realm of spirits and ancestors. One of the chief biases of Enlightenment science, in its colonial dealings with other cultures, was the denigration of this spirit world, and of the senses used to detect its existence. We have seen that Augustine and Boehme also assigned a robust ontological, epistemological, and cosmological status to the imaginal realm. Thus by historizing the spiritual inheritance of Freud and Jung, we can once again grant the dream world a measure of respect, and allow global cultures to speak of this world in ways that move beyond the scientific censure of an outmoded materialism. 9.2.2 Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy In regard to the implications of my thesis for the general field of psychotherapy, it is important to note first that psychodynamic therapy continues to be a prominent and effective modality for psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and other general therapists.12 Today one occasionally hears that psychodynamic 12 In psychiatry, the American Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requirements for psychiatric residents emphasize “competency in cognitive-behavioral therapy, psychodynamic therapy, and supportive treatments” (Feinstein, Heiman, and

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approaches are not “evidence-based,” and that Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is now the “gold standard” of therapeutic practice, but these statements are false and misleading. Even a casual review of the literature reveals that psychodynamic therapies have robust empirical support. In a summary of extant research, including several meta-analyses, Jonathan Shedler notes that effect sizes for psychodynamic therapy are as large as those reported for other therapies that have been actively promoted as “empirically supported” and “evidence-based.” In addition, patients who receive psychodynamic therapy maintain therapeutic gains and appear to continue to improve after treatment ends. Finally, nonpsychodynamic therapies may be effective in part because the more skilled practitioners utilize techniques that have long been central to psychodynamic theory. (2010, 98) As Shedler notes, the term “evidence-based therapy” has become “a marketing buzzword  … for manualized therapy—most often brief, one-size fits-all forms of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT),” including treatments that are often “standardized or scripted in ways that leave little room for addressing the needs of individual patients” (2020, 44). Manualized therapies are more amenable to controlled scientific experiments and the large data sets that are required today. But even by these standards, claims about the superiority of manualized CBT are vastly overstated, and Shedler notes the “yawning chasm between what we are told research shows and what research actually shows. Empirical research actually shows that ‘evidence-based’ [manualized] therapies are ineffective for most patients most of the time” (2020, 45).13 The false claims of CBT’s empirical superiority have at times led to “all-out attacks on traditional talk therapy—that is, therapy aimed at fostering self-examination and self-understanding in the context of an ongoing, meaningful therapy relationship” (2020, 44). This does not mean, however, that psychodynamic therapy is superior to other modalities, although some research suggests that its effects may have superior durability. Rather, it appears that the modality used in therapy only accounts for a small part of its success. Common factors research has looked

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Yager 2015, 180). Among clinical psychologists, in a recent survey 18 percent identified their approach as “psychodynamic,” 15 percent “behavioural,” 31 percent “cognitive,” and 22 percent “eclectic” (Prochaska and Norcross 2013). For another good summary see Wachtel, who notes that “the ‘empirically supported treatments’ movement has been characterized more by ideology and faulty assumptions than by good science” (2010, 251). He documents the many flaws in this research and its uses.

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at factors that produce benefits across all modalities, and here we see that the most important curative factors include empathy and therapeutic relationship (estimated at twenty to thirty percent), and the client’s hope or expectancy of improvement (estimated at fifteen percent). Theory-specific techniques are estimated to produce only about fifteen percent of beneficial effects.14 One should note, however, that many of the common factors identified in this research, such as empathy and therapeutic relationship, have been central to psychodynamic theory from its inception,15 whereas they are viewed as secondary in most forms of manualized CBT. For today’s psychodynamic therapists, the thesis of this book will likely come as a surprise, and perhaps not an entirely welcome one. Contemporary psychodynamic clinicians are used to defending their approach against charges of pseudoscience—charges that are often levelled by fellow clinicians with very little knowledge of current forms of psychodynamic practice. The critiques one hears today are often gross caricatures of Freud and Jung, with little awareness of historical context and the current state of psychodynamic research. Given the sheer volume of Freud’s and Jung’s writings, and their disciplinary breadth, not to mention the vast secondary literature and popular reception that have emerged over more than a century, it is not difficult to find material to construct unfavourable portraits. The dominant trend in the psychodynamic field today is to counter these caricatures, while explaining psychodynamic processes in clear, common-sense language, and grounding these processes in scientific research. Thus many therapists are eager to dispel the cloud of mysticism that continues to hover around the psychodynamic field. My thesis is not meant to undermine this trend toward common sense empirical validation. While I am arguing that the theories of Freud and Jung have deep religious and spiritual roots, this does not undermine the empirical validations that continue to emerge in contemporary literature, even stretching into the field of neuroscience.16 Again, what is most interesting here is that psychodynamic theories that emerged in a religious and theological context are continuing to find empirical validations, even using the latest techniques

14 On common factors research see Wampold and Imel (2015) and McClintock et al. (2017). 15 During their famous meeting in 1907, when Freud asked Jung about the transference, Jung apparently replied “with the deepest conviction that it was the alpha and omega of the analytic method.” Whereupon Freud apparently replied, “Then you have grasped the main thing” (Jung 1946, CW16: 168). 16 On the emerging sub-discipline of neuro-psychoanalysis, see Weigel and Scharbert (2016), and especially Jaak Panksepp (1998, 2007). It is unfortunate that this research is not more aware of Jung’s contributions.

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of neuroimaging. And hopefully this book will provide some explanation as to why psychodynamic theory continues to carry a spiritual and mystical aura. Moving to the sub-field of spiritually integrated psychotherapy, this sub-field has emerged from research in the general field of psychology that notes the strong physical and mental health benefits of religious belief and practice, as well as certain instances when religion may impair physical and mental health (see Koenig 1997, 2005, 2018). In general, this research overturns the long-held belief among therapists, derived primarily from Freud, that religion is detrimental to mental health. Buttressed by this research, the clinical field of spiritually integrated psychotherapy is now growing rapidly (see Pargament 2007; Pargament and Exline 2022). Given the strong potential therapeutic benefits of religion and spirituality, it seems obvious that clinicians should learn to speak openly and sensitively with clients about spiritual matters, and to determine when they might be causing harm or healing. Therapists’ traditional reticence in discussing religion and spirituality derives partly from the scientific ethos of neutrality and objectivity, but science itself is now pointing to the objective benefits of opening this discussion. Thus the bio-psycho-social model of psychology is expanding to include spirituality as a unique standalone category. The presumption in the current spiritual integration movement is that psychotherapy, as a neutral scientific endeavour, is now seeking to include clients’ experiences of religion and spirituality. But this book shows that psychotherapy itself emerged from a deeply religious matrix, and is now simply reconnecting, in part, to that matrix. In terms of the history of psychotherapy traced in this book, religion became science, and now science is again opening to religious viewpoints, although it is doing so firmly from within its own scientific methodology. One weakness of the spiritually integrated therapy movement is that it attempts to construct general categories of “religion” and/or “spirituality,” categories that attempt to include a vast variety of human religious and spiritual understanding and expression.17 This book might help foreground the distinctive Western religious doctrines and practices from which psychotherapy originally emerged, and thus help advance the discussion of how particular spiritual and religious traditions can be integrated, in unique ways, with Western psychotherapy. In general, I hope this book will help spiritually integrated therapists to see the natural historical connection between spirituality and therapy, and thus to affirm them in their work.

17 Pargament, for example, makes use of Mircea Eliade and others from the history of religions school to define his category of “the sacred” as a trans-religious and trans-cultural reality. He is aware of the difficulties here (2007, 32–52).

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Clinicians are also making increasing use of therapeutic methods derived from various religious traditions. For example, mindfulness, meditative, and contemplative practices, derived from both Eastern and Western traditions, are being introduced into all therapeutic modalities, and they are considered a hallmark of so-called “third wave” CBT modalities, like MindfulnessBased Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Likewise psychodynamic thought is entering into more detailed dialogue with particular religious traditions, like Hinduism (e.g. Vaidyanathan and Kripal 2002; Kakar 2003) and Buddhism (e.g. Cooper 2023). In 1968, as Eastern traditions were proliferating in the West, Alan Watts wrote, If we look deeply into such ways of life as Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta and Yoga, we do not find either philosophy or religion as these are understood in the West. We find something more nearly resembling psychotherapy. This may seem surprising, for we think of the latter as a form of science, somewhat practical and materialistic in attitude, and the former as extremely esoteric religions concerned with areas of the spirit almost entirely out of this world. (1968, 1) This book helps explain why Western psychotherapy seems to inhabit a niche occupied by religion and spirituality in many other cultures, and it helps to pinpoint the specific religious and spiritual currents from which Western psychotherapy emerged. I am hoping this will promote more precise and informed dialogue between contemporary psychotherapy and various religious traditions. 9.2.3 Scholarship on the Religious Roots of Modernity Finally, looking at implications for broader scholarly discussions, in recent decades a number of books have appeared that explore the religious roots of modernity. With the generally accepted collapse of foundationalism in modern philosophy, and the proliferation of so-called postmodern thought, many scholars are questioning the conceptual moorings of the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science. Part of the question here is whether modern science can account for its claim to be a privileged form of knowledge, and one that is generally impartial or value neutral. Noticeably, in much of this literature, modernity is equated with the Enlightenment, while the Romantic reaction against Enlightenment thinking—or rather the Romantic attempt to both overturn and complete the Enlightenment in a more holistic Aufhebung—is at

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best a minor consideration. A summary of a few different perspectives on this issue will help situate the thesis of this book in the contemporary discussion. A group of Christian philosophers and theologians became prominent around the turn of the millennium for arguing that modernity’s demise was due largely to the loss of its theological moorings. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in his influential After Virtue (1984), argued that modern ethical discourse had become lost in intractable debates largely because it had abandoned the medieval virtue tradition. Aligning with this trajectory, theologian John Milbank argued that modern social theory, including its various attempts to understand politics, economics, and religion, was itself heavily but secretly indebted to Christian theology: “all the most important governing assumptions of such theory are bound up with the modification or the rejection of orthodox Christian positions” (2000, 1). For Milbank, if the epistemological claims of modern rationality are no longer sustainable, and if the loss of modern rationality is causing significant problems for our current world, then the only way to recover what has been lost is to recover some of the (Christian) theological roots of modernity. The views of both MacIntyre and Milbank have been widely disseminated in a more popular form by prominent American theologian Stanley Hauerwas and his many students (e.g. 2010, 2018). Hauerwas points to the many ways that modern Enlightenment thought, and particularly liberal philosophies of autonomy and individual rights, have been parasitic upon and destructive to traditional religious narratives, thus producing the sense of meaninglessness and anomie characteristic of modern and postmodern cultures. As a Christian theologian, he has mainly criticised Christian communities for blindly accepting modern liberal narratives about the self and the world. In particular, for Hauerwas, the narrative of modern liberalism suggests that human beings are born without a narrative, and that we must choose and construct our own individual narratives. Religious traditions, by contrast, suggest that human beings are inescapably embedded in narratives from birth, and these traditions look to particular sacred narratives as the sustaining core of an historical community. All three of these thinkers advocate for a kind of traditionalism that would recover religion and its narrative basis. But what is neglected in their respective analyses is a clear understanding of the current multicultural and multireligious situation of liberal democracies, where various, often mutually exclusive religious and secular narratives vie for supremacy in our public political discourse. How do we prevent our democracies from fracturing into religious and cultural tribalism based on competing exclusivist claims? This issue comes to the fore in the work of philosopher Jeffrey Stout, who offers a critique of MacIntyre, Milbank, and Hauerwas, while attempting to preserve

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certain aspects of their critiques of liberalism (see e.g. 2004).18 Stout uses an epistemology derived from the tradition of American pragmatism to justify and strengthen liberal democratic reasoning and discourse in a multicultural world, while also pointing to the importance of religious narratives for sustaining communities of ethical practice. Likewise Stout attempts to recover his own pragmatic version of the tradition of virtue ethics, albeit with a certain metaphysical humility. From the perspective of this book, this debate is interesting because psychotherapy appears to be one aspect of the modern world that, although it originated from early modern theological traditions, has managed to sustain itself quite well in a secular scientific milieu. As a case study, the historical development of psychotherapy lends credibility both to the claim that modern practices and institutions have hidden theological roots, and to the claim that some modern practices and institutions can be sustained, and make sense, without their original theological underpinnings. In general this book supports Stout’s pragmatist epistemology, by noting that useful practices, like psychotherapy, can be justified in terms of a variety of narratives and discourses, including both religious and scientific discourses. But psychotherapy is also an aspect of modern thought and culture that has been deeply destructive to inherited religious narratives, even though it emerged from them, and thus it has contributed to the sense of individualism, anomie, and meaninglessness that thinkers like MacIntyre, Milbank, and Hauerwas rightly note (see e.g. Rieff 1987). Interestingly, Jung’s essay “Psychotherapists or the Clergy” (1932, CW11), was prescient in its suggestion that psychotherapy would increasingly replace the centuries old religious practice of pastoral counselling and the cura animarum, unless clergy increased their awareness of psychological realities. Hopefully this book demonstrates that such a replacement is not necessary, and that an integration of psychotherapy with various religious traditions is not only possible but desirable. Likewise Jung’s own existential crisis centred on his realization that his own life was devoid of any overarching mythology that would make it meaningful. His solution was to set about discovering his own myth, and to help others do the same through contact with their dreams (1963, 171). I hope this book demonstrates that the myth Jung discovered was far from simply individual. Rather, it was embedded in 18

Stout attempts to provide an alternative both to the liberalism of John Rawls and Richard Rorty, and to the traditionalism of Milbank, MacIntyre, and Hauerwas (2004, 183). And yet Stout inherits many aspects of Rorty’s pragmatism, and particularly its attempt to hold together analytic and continental philosophy, and ultimately to hold together the humanities and the sciences.

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a broad stream of theology stretching back to Augustine and beyond. If Jung discovered a personal myth, it was nonetheless deeply embedded in a Western cultural mythology that is indissolubly religious, spiritual, and theological. My research also suggests that the debate between MacIntyre, Milbank, Hauerwas, and Stout needs to be reconfigured by more recent scientific discoveries and the evolving scientific ethos. That is, psychotherapy is not only a scientific discourse with a deeply religious pedigree, but psychotherapy as a science is now beginning to validate certain aspects of religious discourses, and thus it is recovering some of the religious matrix from which it originally emerged. The spiritually integrated therapy movement, for example, while it does not validate the metaphysical claims of religious traditions, certainly validates the pragmatic benefits of religious and spiritual belief and practice, from within a scientific framework. Along with William James, Jung was among the first scientists to affirm the pragmatic mental health benefits of religious belief and practice, and today we have large data sets that support this claim.19 But the validation of certain ontological aspects of religious and spiritual worldviews is also happening in other areas of science, even if an older generation of scientists is slow to notice. The current ethos in certain scientific sub-fields rejects Enlightenment notions of mechanistic materialism in favour of Romanticist notions of vitalism and organicism.20 Both Freud and Jung, likely because their primary data sets included dreams and the unconscious mind, were also among the first scientists to publicly affirm the existence of these non-mechanistic phenomena, like telepathy (Freud’s “thought transference”) and synchronicity—phenomena that have since been validated scientifically not only by many experiments, but by meta-analyses of those experiments (see Radin 2006). The validation of these phenomena, which moves the scientific ethos outside the bounds of Enlightenment mechanistic materialism, also provides support for certain aspects of traditional religious and spiritual worldviews. The scientific ethos of today likewise includes generally accepted 19 Jung was already suggesting this at the time of his break with Freud, but he was more explicit in his later writings: “What are religions? Religions are psychotherapeutic systems. What are we doing, we psychotherapists? We are trying to heal the suffering of the human mind, of the human psyche or the human soul, and religions deal with the same problem” (1935, CW18: 162). 20 For a popular discussion of this see, for example, Rupert Sheldrake’s The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry (2013), the title of which offers a rejoinder to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2009). Sheldrake notes that the traditional scientific worldview of mechanistic materialism is outmoded, and remains simply as a dogma, unsupported by more recent evidence. He notes that, philosophically, more recent evidence supports the ideas of vitalism and organicism.

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theories, like quantum entanglement (Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”), that provide an ontological framework for non-mechanistic activity, non-local causality, and certain widely held spiritual and religious concepts. Our physicists certainly know that we are no longer living in Newton’s billiard ball world, and now other academic disciplines are slowly awakening to a new scientific reality that supports spirituality, rather than denigrating it (see e.g. Barad 2007, Kripal 2019). This marks a momentous shift. The individualistic liberalism that MacIntyre, Milbank, and Hauerwas have critiqued, itself an outgrowth of Enlightenment science, will need to shift accordingly. In this way, religious and spiritual perspectives might once again enter the public square under the blessing of a new scientific paradigm. And because science tends to operate according to the global language of mathematics, this new science might offer a more neutral and affirming public space for religious traditions to find both acceptance and common ground. Thus liberal political theory, once destructive to religious traditions, in a new and updated form, might begin to validate and support certain aspects of religious and spiritual narratives, while also providing a more accepting space to mediate between them. In short, one solution to the religious and secular tribalism that is fracturing our current democratic spaces might come from the global language of a spiritually integrated science. But this solution is possible if and only if current power brokers in the sciences and humanities, including journal editors and peer reviewers, can become aware of their current dogmatic materialistic and mechanistic tendencies, and move beyond them. Another interesting analysis of the theological roots of modernity can be found in the work of philosopher and political scientist Michael Allen Gillespie. In The Theological Origins of Modernity (2008), Gillespie argues that the salient questions of modernity have arisen from a core sense of nihilism, a sense that was clearly identified in the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger. But for Gillespie, the origins of this nihilistic abyss actually lie much further back, in late medieval theology, in the “nominalist revolution against scholasticism” that effectively reduced the medieval world to rubble (2008, 14). For Gillespie, the key thinker in this nominalist revolution was William of Ockham (c.1287–1347 CE), and the abyss opened by the thought of Ockham and his followers, which deeply influenced Luther’s Protestant Reformation, has remained as modernity’s core problem, to which numerous, sometimes contradictory answers have been offered. But for Gillispie, these modern answers have proven unsatisfactory, and the abyss has once again become visible in so-called postmodern thought. From the perspective of this book, Gillespie’s assessment is intriguing because Boehme (1575–1624 CE), in the early modern period, pointed decisively

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to the existence of this Nothing, and he did so as a contemporary of Descartes (1596–1650 CE), who offered the decisive and accepted account of modernity’s rational foundations. Boehme’s Nothing may have been influenced by the nominalist revolution, and it was certainly influenced by Luther, who plays a key role in Gillespie’s account. But Boehme’s Nothing, as we saw above, is ultimately not one but two (see figure 2). There is a Nothing at the bottom of the ontological order, so to speak, which generally corresponds to the abyss that was eventually described by Nietzsche and Heidegger—an abyss of angst, dread and meaninglessness. But for Boehme there is also a Nothing at the top of the ontological order, and for Boehme this Nothing is God, or rather the human perception of God. This Nothing remains inaccessible to reason, but it can be experienced in silence and in the releasement (Gelassenheit) of I-ness (Ichheit). And the experience of this Nothing is one of love rather than dread, of joy rather than angst. Boehme is not mentioned in Gillespie’s account, but Boehme does seem to anticipate the diagnosis of modernity offered by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and ultimately Gillespie. In fact, Boehme may be the hidden source of this diagnosis, which casts him not only as a figure of remarkable prescience, but as a figure whose solution remains timely in its attempt to escape a narrow rationalism and embrace a holistic and experiential spiritual Wisdom, a Wisdom that attempts to be inclusive of all human knowledge and experience. Boehme’s vision certainly inspired the Romantic counterpoint to the Enlightenment, and I suspect that it has much more to teach us today. What is noticeable in the contemporary literature about the religious roots of modernity is that psychotherapy is rarely mentioned, even though it occupies a pivotal place in this history. Hopefully this book will offer a foothold for future work in this area. One recent exception is Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), which contains a chapter on Freud. Storm rightly notes that Freud, who is often pictured as a scientific positivist, was in fact quite interested in the spiritualistic and occult phenomena of his time. He discussed these phenomena in private with friends, but refrained from publishing about them until, as noted above, his discussion of telepathy or “thought transference” appeared in the later part of his career with increasing conviction in a series of papers (1925a, SE19: 135–138; 1933, SE22: 31–56; [1941] 1921, SE18: 175).21 Intriguingly, 21

See also Kripal (2010, 14). William Stekel, who as noted above left Freud’s circle just before Jung, published a book on telepathic dreams in 1921. Freud was at first cautious about the topic, and when his friend Ferenczi tried to discuss research on telepathy at the Hamburg Congress of 1925, Freud advised against it: “By it you would be throwing a bomb into the psychanalytical house which would be certain to explode” (Jones 1957, 3: 380). But by that

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Storm notes that Freud was just one of many eminent Enlightenment scientists fascinated by spiritualism. In this regard, the common trope that the Age of Reason was an age of disenchantment is seriously overstated. But what Storm fails to account for in his otherwise excellent book is the stark division between scientific discourse and spiritualistic or occult discourse. Why could science be pursued in the public intellectual sphere, and be so openly lauded, while spiritualistic and mystical beliefs were often publicly denigrated and relegated to privacy and secrecy? What accounts for the cultural divide between public science and private séance? Recent work by psychiatrist and polymath Ian McGilchrist helps account for this cleavage by looking at the division between the two hemispheres of the brain, a topic that McGilchrist has singlehandedly rescued from popular pseudoscience. In The Master and His Emissary (2019), McGilchrist notes that, during certain historical periods, one hemisphere may come to dominate and thus destabilize the social order. And within any given period, the two hemispheres often stand behind quite different social movements. McGilchrist’s brilliant analysis helps account for the divide between the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement, even as Romanticism attempted to include Enlightenment notions within its broader picture. It also illumines in remarkable ways the general division between science and spirituality that has characterized modernity, and continues today. For McGilchrist, the two hemispheres represent two very different ways of attending to the world. The left hemisphere offers a simplistic, schematic, and rigid view that is actually less accurate than the living, nuanced, and holistic view of the right. But the left hemisphere is nonetheless prone to see its own view as the only correct one, and to insist on it with great hubris and false confidence. When functioning well, the left hemisphere serves as an “emissary” to the broader view of the right hemisphere “master.” Yet this emissary is continually tempted to usurp its master, and in those historical periods when it has succeeded in doing so, not merely in an individual but on a mass scale, the result was an extremely unbalanced social order. McGilchrist traces various cultural polarities and pendulum swings in a breathtaking sweep of Western

time Freud himself was also drafting essays on telepathy or “thought transference,” a sense he believed was mediated through the unconscious. Dreams continue to be an important locus of study for telepathic communication (see Ullman and Krippner 1989; Krippner and Fracasso 2011). Storm also notes Freud’s interest in German philosopher Carl du Prel (1839–1899 CE), whose name was added to the 1914 edition of the Traumdeutung, where Freud refers to him as a “brilliant mystic” who “suggests that the gateway to metaphysics … is not wakefulness, but dreams” (1900, SE5: 62n2).

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thought, ultimately revealing that the unbalanced, hyper-left hemisphere perspective is a key feature of our current predicament. At the risk of oversimplification, the respective right and left hemispheric modes of attending described by McGilchrist include attention to: the new vs. the known, possibility vs. predictability, integration vs. division, the whole vs. the part, context vs. abstraction, individuals vs. categories, and the personal vs. the impersonal. Further, the right hemisphere is heavily implicated in empathy, in the original sense of “feeling into” something (Einfühlung), as well as the perception and expression of a range of emotions, with the exception of anger which is left hemisphere dominant. The right with its holistic Gestalt is implicated in insight and the surprise of “aha!” moments, while it also offers a sense of true embodiment—of being a body rather than having a body (2019, 32–72). And further, the left tends to function according to the logical law of non-contradiction, whereas the right is able to conceive of paradox and coincidentia oppositorum. Even in this simplistic summary, it is remarkable that all of the above descriptors of right and left hemisphere attending correlate, respectively, with Boehme’s distinction between image-based “understanding” (Verstand) and language-based “reason” (Vernunft). Most notably in this regard, as McGilchrist says, “only the right hemisphere has the capacity to understand metaphor” and symbolism, and the “left hemisphere may be unable to conceive of meaning that is not conveyed in words.” (2019, 108, 115). Further, the psychodynamic distinction between consciousness and the unconscious correlates strongly with the left and right hemispheres respectively.22 And this accords “with evidence suggesting that during REM sleep and dreaming there is greatly increased blood flow in the right hemisphere, particularly the temporoparietal region. EEG coherence data also point to the predominance of the right hemisphere in dreaming” (2009, 188). Dreams, the unconscious mind, and Boehme’s image-based Verstand all correlate heavily with the right hemisphere. All of this adds to the thesis of this book by clarifying at least two things: First, it helps explain why Freud and Jung found their theories so difficult to communicate. Not only were they working at a time when scientific discourse was privileged, but they were attempting to convince colleagues immersed in that discourse about the realities of the unconscious mind, realities that are symbolic, metaphorical, implicit, and often ineffable. They were trying to explain right-hemisphere realities in a hyper left-hemisphere milieu. Second, it helps 22 As McGilchrist points out, this hypothesis goes back to Julian Jaynes’ classic work The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). But it has since been corroborated by many other theorists (2019, 187).

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explain why the religious roots of psychodynamic theory were lost, covered over, and even rejected in the case of Freud. As Freud and Jung attempted to convey their theories within the bounds of left-dominant scientific discourse, they both likely adopted some of its hubris, which tends to denigrate spiritual realities, and see itself as superior to them. Both thinkers, with their Romantic leanings, were partly aware of this scientific hubris. But neither thinker looked closely enough at the religious and theological history of the West to notice the degree to which their theories were anticipated by it. 9.3 Conclusion Returning to the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers, which I used as an introductory parable for this book, we can begin to see the outlines of a recurring historical pattern in the words: “here comes this dreamer … let us kill him” (Gen. 37.19–20). Dreams and their interpretation have suffered several deaths (or concealments) in the history of the West. The first was a slow and gradual death, beginning after the time of Augustine, as the fear of demonic deception slowly poisoned the well against all attempts at dream interpretation. And it was not only dreams that died, but the whole realm of visio spiritualis—the mesocosm connecting mind and body, God and nature, heaven and earth—as mystical theologians of various schools began limiting true experiences of God to the imageless ecstasy of visio intellectualis. But we also see evidence that the imaginal realm pushed back against these strictures, so to speak, in the deluge of dreams that began to pour forth in “the new mysticism” of the thirteenth century: “the flood of visionary narratives, especially by and about women … signal a new form of mystical consciousness … more direct, more excessive, more bodily in nature than older forms” (McGinn 1998, 25). Sophia would not be silenced. While the Reformation signalled a return of sacred significance to the everyday corporeal life of the laity, here again dreams and their excesses were soon marginalized as enthusiastic Schwärmerei. And along with this marginalization of the imaginal realm came a very corporeal and bodily violence in the bloody wars of religion, where the impasses of rationalistic theology soon became a pretext for political power games and bloodshed. It was in the midst of this violence that Boehme’s imaginal rebirth appeared, with the firm conviction that a key to this symbolic realm, a lexicon that could decipher its significance, might somehow stem the tide of blood, and reveal reason’s indebtedness to something much more fundamental. Boehme’s key was coded to Luther’s Bible, and it attempted to quell the Babel of confused tongues the had erupted after

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the printing press brought the Word to the laity in the vernacular. Boehme’s project mirrored Pentecost, where angelic tongues comprehensible to all were connected to the outpouring of the Spirit in inspired dreams and visions. But Boehme’s remarkable psycho-mythical approach to theology was itself quickly swept into the polemical fray and branded as simply one more heresy. It took time for his work to bear fruit. Where Boehme’s imaginal rebirth did take hold, for example, in several of the more radical strands of the English Revolution, its social utility was rather difficult to evaluate, although there is no question that it empowered the common folk in their quest for “the commons” and the common good. But in general, although historians debate this narrative, the solution to the unrest prompted by the Reformation and the wars of religion was only finally discovered in the Enlightenment, which echoed Luther’s original call to limit the imaginal excesses of the Schwärmer. Once again dreams were disciplined and driven underground. As the second wave of Boehme’s influence took hold among Romantic philosophers and poets at the end of the eighteenth century, dreams were once again resurrected in a valiant attempt to reconcile logos and mythos. At its best, the Romantic movement was not an attempt to overturn the Enlightenment, but rather to identify its appropriate place within a larger whole. This second wave of Boehme’s influence held sway until the mid-nineteenth century, when scientific positivism rose to ascendency in academic circles, and many aspects of Romantic spirituality descended into a more crude spiritualism and occultism in popular culture. Reason had once again been divided from the imaginal realm, and once again the authority of reason was wielded by the elite classes and used to subdue the dreams and visions of the masses. But here is where things get interesting, as Freud’s dreambook made its appearance in the heart of the positivistic milieu, attempting to bring dreams within the scientific purview. The success of Freud’s Traumdeutung, and the fact that dreams could once again be valued within scientific discourse, was rather like Joseph ascending to power in Egypt—the great dreamer was now recognized in a foreign land after being rejected by his own people. In other words, if Freud and Jung were as indebted to Boehme as I have argued above, then it would seem that Boehme’s resurrection of dreams, though largely rejected by theologians in his own day, was later vindicated by the scientific psychologists of Freud and Jung’s day. And this vindication has very intriguing implications both for their time and ours. At the end of the biblical account, Joseph famously reconciles with his brothers, saying “even though you intended to do evil to me, God intended it for good” (Gen. 50.20). And the good that God intended, according to the story, was the preservation of two nations: Egypt and Israel. In my figural reading

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of this story, the two “nations” that have been preserved are science and religion, and it is the broader realm of dreams that allowed them to be preserved. Historically, dreams have played a crucial and underexplored role in helping these warring nations both to define their own borders, and to understand the realm of the other. If my thesis is correct, and if dreams did help blaze the trail from Boehme’s theology to Freud and Jung’s psychology, then the imaginal world of dreams might also help us reconcile the fraught relationship between science and religion that continues to define our age. Time is running out, and the need for reconciliation has never been more urgent. Surprising as it may seem, the dreamworld might be the primary place where the mystic marriage of knowledge and Wisdom—science and Sophia—will be consummated.

Bibliography Bibliography entries are divided into primary and secondary sources. Primary sources include Augustine, Boehme, Freud, and Jung, and are listed with original language editions first, followed by English translations. When possible, primary sources are listed according to the original date of publication to indicate historical sequence. Dates for Augustine’s works are taken from Fitzgerald (1999, il) and are approximations, with single dates representing a terminus ad quem. Dates for Boehme’s works are taken from the Facsimile Edition (FE), dates for Freud’s works are taken from the Standard Edition (SE), and dates for Jung’s works are taken from the Collected Works (CW).



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Index of Subjects and Names Agrippa von Nettesheim, Cornelius 81, 84, 132n24 alchemy, astrology coniunctio 110n10, 125, 147–148, 156, 179–180, 199, 201–210, 239, 243–244, 254, 269 Jupiter 136, 139, 206, 209 See also Boehme: voice/sound (sixth quality) Luna. See moon marriage. See coniunctio Mars 131, 133, 191 See also Boehme: anxiety-anger (third quality) Mercury 131–132, 186 See also Boehme: lust-desire (second quality) moon 136, 139, 161–162, 171, 180, 188, 196, 198–205, 210, 239 See also Boehme: body (corpus) (seventh quality) salt 133 Saturn 131–132, 136, 139, 181, 210 See also Boehme: Nothing-desire (first quality) Sol. See sun sulphur 133 sun 127, 134, 162, 171, 180, 188, 196–203, 239, 243 Venus 82, 136, 139, 205 See also Boehme: love-desire (fifth quality) androgyn, androgynous 154n12, 210, 220 See also hermaphrodite; queer theory angels 78n17, 83–84, 106, 108n9, 110–115, 131, 136, 155, 157, 184 anima mundi (World Soul) See World Soul. See also Boehme: World Soul archetypes 14, 28, 30–31, 43–46, 59–71 See also Boehme: Sophia, seven qualities; Freud: parental imagos; Jung: archetypes Artemidorus 101, 227 See also Oneirocritica

astrology. See alchemy, astrology Augustine of Hippo anima 37 animus 37, 45 affect 40–41 Book of Nature 104, 138n39 Book of Scripture 92n56, 98, 101, 104 cognition 37, 40–42, 46, 64, 106, 125, 125n6 Confessions 27, 31, 33–35, 37n27, 39, 41, 43–44, 46n56, 61–63, 67–69, 104n2 developmental theory 67–70 dream interpretation 13, 31, 53–69 dream theory 13–15, 18, 20, 31, 46–60 ecstasy 47–50, 56, 58n86, 76 happiness, eudaimonia 33, 54 imagination. See Augustine: visio spiritualis integral vision 46, 50–60, 66–67, 71 knowledge (scientia) 11, 38–39, 45, 46n56, 64, 106, 125, 171, 254 love-of-God/other/self 40–41, 124, 137 love-of-self 40–42, 45n53, 124, 137 map of the soul 31, 35–46 memory, memoria 43–44, 60, 70, 121 mind, mens 37–38, 44n50, 45, 64 mysticism 31n2, 37 On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees (GRM) 68, 69 Sophia. See also Augustine: Wisdom bride, as 63–64 creation, and 67–69 eternal created 62–64 Hexameron 67–69, 174 mirror, as 62 spirit 50–51 The Literal Meaning of Genesis 27, 31, 47n58, 48, 57, 59, 67n111 The Trinity 27, 31, 33n9, 35–41, 44–45, 59n87, 62n98, 64–67, 104, 178n11 TLMG. See The Literal Meaning of Genesis trinitarian psychology 13, 35, 36n25, 49, 60, 64, 73n3 See also Augustine: map of the soul understanding 35, 38, 43–45

Index of Subjects and Names Augustine of Hippo (cont.) visio corporealis (corporeal vision) 50, 71 visio intellectualis (intellectual vision) 50, 52, 54, 57, 61, 67, 70–71 visio spiritualis (spiritual vision) 29, 50, 54, 57, 71 will/love 33n10, 35, 38, 39–45, 123–124 Wisdom (sapientia). See also Augustine: Sophia Christ, as 57, 62, 65–66 eternal begotten 38, 62–63, 64n100 soul, and the 64–67 Baader, Franz von 25, 78n16, 107n8, 142n45 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 32n7, 107n8, 108n9, 118n33, 119n37, 120n38, 172n31, 192n36, 209n57 Barker, Margaret 81n26, 122n41 Barth, Karl 32n7, 97n71, 108n8, 108n9, 113–114, 119n37, 120n38, 251–254 Bernanos, Georges 107n8 Bernard of Clairvaux 91–92, 98n73, 104n2 Bible, books of the Acts 49n66, 67, 100, 127n9, 172–173, 204 Ecclesiastes 55 Ecclesiasticus. See Sirach Genesis 43n48, 47, 59, 65–67, 70, 113, 126n7, 129n20, 135n35, 142, 151–154, 158n16, 160–194, 198–201, 205–206, 208–209, 211, 239 See also Creation (Genesis 1) Proverbs 48n64, 61n94, 62, 63, 89, 100, 122 Revelation 89, 100, 119n37, 122, 129n20, 142, 172, 175n2, 184, 208 Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 48n64, 55, 61n94, 62–63, 67n112 Wisdom (Wisdom of Solomon) 1, 41n39, 61n94, 62, 64n103, 99n79, 149, 152n7 Blake, William 42, 52n74, 60, 99n78, 112n15, 150, 173, 190, 247n4 Blanchot, Maurice 23 Boehme, Jacob abyss. See Boehme: Nothing; Nothingdesire (first quality) anima mundi. See Boehme: World Soul anxiety-anger (Angst-Zorn) (third quality) 75, 130–133, 143, 182–183, 191, 198, 215, 225, 237

303 astral body 127, 244 Aurora XII, 12n16, 72n2, 74, 80, 83n30, 84n40, 98–100, 102, 115n26, 117, 118n34, 120, 129n19, 135n35, 137, 138n40, 142n46, 162, 175, 177n9, 181n13, 203 being (Wesen) 105, 114, 124n4, 135n33, 149 body-soul nexus. See Boehme: soul-body nexus body (corpus) (seventh quality) 75, 136, 139, 244 See also Boehme: astral body; elemental body; light body; spiritual body Book of Nature 101, 104, 138n39 Book of Scripture 92n56, 98, 101, 104 Christocentrism 85n43, 134n31 Clavis 27, 72, 73n2, 76, 84, 98n77, 107n8, 108n9, 111n11, 115n25, 124n4, 125–126, 129n18, 175 dark soul-element 135, 138, 140n43, 144–145, 150, 213, 215 See also Boehme: Nothing-desire (first quality); lust-desire (second quality); anxiety-anger (third quality); fire-light (fourth quality) developmental theory 177–180, 199 dream theory 149–173 drives. See Boehme: Trieb, Trieben elemental body 127 fire-light (fourth quality) 75, 130, 134, 172 Gelassenheit (releasement) 83, 85, 114n17, 136, 146, 180, 187 ground (Grund) 123 See also Boheme: Nothing heterodoxy 18–19, 117 imagination (Einbildung, Imaginatio) 150, 212, 149–151 See also Boehme: Sophia; Verstand individual will (eigene Wille), independent will, own will 90n60, 131, 133, 136, 191–194 See also Boehme: I-ness (Ichheit) I-ness (Ichheit) 85, 131–136, 167, 191, 207, 230 libido 123, 131n21, 144, 146–147, 171, 181–184, 189 light 82, 85, 99, 109–115, 128, 130, 134, 172 light body 129n17, 130, 136, 179, 180–181, 185, 210, 211, 244 See also Boehme: spiritual body

304 Boehme, Jacob (cont.) lightening flash (Blitz, Schrack) 134, 146, 197 See also Boehme: fire-light (fourth quality) light soul-element 135–140 See also Boehme: fire-light (fourth quality); love-desire (fifth quality); voice-sound (sixth quality); body (corpus) (seventh quality) love-desire (Liebe-Begierde) (fifth quality) 75, 130–142, 172, 180, 205 lust-desire (second quality) 75, 130–144, 172 Lutheran, as 87–89, 97–102 macrocosm, microcosm 110, 114, 125–129, 176 magia 84–86, 151–154 magus, as 79–86 map of the soul 123–126 melancholy 98, 102, 132n24 method 103–106 Mysterium Magnum 72n2, 105n4, 117n33, 131n21, 151, 158, 175 mystic, as 86–96 Nothing (Abgrund, Nichts, Ungrund) 108n9, 112–115, 123–124 See also Boehme: Nothing-desire (first quality) Nothing-desire (first quality) 75, 129–133, 142n45 ontology 106–115, 124n4 “powers, colours, and virtues” 137–138 psycho-mythology 118 psychotherapist, as 103 reason. See Boehme: Vernunft (reason) rebirth (Wiedergeburt) 74, 77, 127, 243 seven forms (Gestalten). See under Boehme: Sophia seven properties (Eigenschaften). See under Boehme: Sophia seven qualities (Qualitäten). See under Boehme: Sophia seven source-spirits (Quellgeister). See under Boehme: Sophia Sophia divine contemplation/tranquility (Beschaulichkeit), as 125

Index of Subjects and Names divine imagination, as 76, 84, 125, 149, 196 mirror, as 1, 149–151 seven days 30, 75, 89, 100, 120n37, 122, 174–211, 234 See also Bible: Genesis seven qualities (Qualitäten), properties (Eigenschaften), forms (Gestalten) 30, 75n7, 85, 89, 103, 105, 108, 110–113, 120, 122, 128, 130–141 See also Boehme: Nothing-desire (first quality); lust-desire (second quality); anxiety-anger (third quality); fire-light (fourth quality); love-desire (fifth quality); voice/ sound (sixth quality); body (corpus) (seventh quality) seven source-spirits (Quellgeister) 75n7, 89, 100, 120n37, 122, 175n2 See also Bible: Revelation; Boehme: Nothing-desire (first quality); lust-desire (second quality); anxiety-anger (third quality); firelight (fourth quality); love-desire (fifth quality); voice/sound (sixth quality); body (corpus) (seventh quality) soul-body nexus 126–127 spiritual body 126–129, 136, 244 sublation 130, 135, 222 theologian, as 74, 116–118, 122 Trieb (drive), Trieben (driving) 25, 84n40, 129n19 See also Boehme: Sophia, seven qualities trinitarian soul. See Boehme: map of the soul understanding. See Boehme: Verstand (understanding) Vernunft (reason) 11, 82, 99, 106, 117, 120, 125–128, 130, 140–146, 160, 171, 178, 180, 186, 193–194, 196–201, 204, 210, 228, 230, 239, 243, 246, 254, 266 as language-based cognition XIII, 128, 136, 150, 178, 180, 194, 196–201, 204, 224–228, 230, 239, 243, 246, 266 Verstand (understanding) 11, 82, 85, 86, 99, 105n4, 106, 117, 120, 125–128, 130,

Index of Subjects and Names Boehme, Jacob (cont.) 135–141, 146, 149, 152, 160, 167, 171, 178, 180, 182n15, 186, 193, 196–200, 204, 210, 212, 228, 230, 239, 243, 246, 254, 266 as image-based cognition 126, 128, 136, 150, 171, 178, 180, 224–228, 246, 266 voice/sound (sixth quality) 136n7, 139, 205, 208–209 will. See Boehme: individual will (eigene Wille), independent will, own will Wisdom 75–76, 84, 135–140 See also Boehme: Sophia; Boehme: Verstand (understanding) World Soul (anima mundi) 82, 127–128, 134, 140, 152 Boisen, Anton 228n25 Bonaventure 75, 92 brain hemispheres 128n14, 230n28, 265–266 Browning, Don 250–251 Burdach, K.F. 24 Calcidius 14n19, 88n51 Calvin, John 97n71, 254n11 Capps, Donald 254–255 Carus, C.G. 22n35, 23–24, 78n16, 151n4, 248 Chalcedon, Council of 251n7 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christendom 12, 102, 159, 164n23, 167 Christianity 26, 87, 106n8, 111n12, 114–118, 122n41, 159, 170n30, 176n8, 178n11, 201n47, 251n7, 252n8 Cicero 14n19, 50n68 Clement of Alexandria 106n8 coincidentia oppositorum (collision of opposites) 115, 146–147, 217, 221–223, 266 collision of opposites. See coincidentia oppositorum (collision of opposites) commons, the 13, 76n12, 78n15, 268 Commonwealth 13 conscious, consciousness 22n35, 25, 35, 37, 44–45, 75n9, 99n78, 107n8, 126, 136, 140, 174n1, 192, 195, 203, 205, 208, 210 Copernicus 101, 138n39 Corpus Hermeticum 80n24, 86n44 Cousin, Victor 24 Creation (Genesis 1). See also Bible: Genesis day one 180–184, 188–190, 236 day two 180–181, 184, 185–192, 199, 204, 236

305 day three 180, 185, 187, 191–199, 237, 239 day four 179–181, 186–188, 193–194, 196–206, 239, 243 day five 180, 204–207 day six 180, 205–206, 208–209, 211, 244 day seven 179–180, 205, 210–211, 244 Daniel (biblical character) 52, 54, 57, 90, 173 demons, dream deception by 52–55, 71, 83, 155–157 Descartes, René 6–7, 9, 11–12, 183n21 developmental theory. See under Augustine; Boehme; Freud; Jung discernment of spirits (discretio spirituum)  53, 94 dream theory. See under Augustine; Boehme; Freud; Jung Eckhart, Meister 73n3, 79, 83n31, 86n, 112n16, 185n25 Ellenberger, Henri 22–23, 34n16, 78n17, 163, 187n27, 213n4, 230n29 empathy (Einfühlung) 179, 186–187, 266 English Dissenters 13, 77 English Revolution 12, 13n18, 77–78, 268 Enlightenment, the 188, 259, 264–265, 268 Erb, Peter 96n68, 97n69, 116n30 Erikson, Erik 97n72, 228–229 Esotericism, Western. See Western Esotericism experience, book of 92n56, 98, 101, 104 Faivre, Antoine 77n13, 79–81, 84n39, 86, 104n2, 117n32, 118n34, 120n39, 127n11, 129n17, 150n2, 151n5, 152n7 Fechner, Gustav 23–24, 78n16, 153, 220, 245, 248 Ficino, Marsilio 80–83 Foucault, Michel 10, 17, 28n48 Francis of Assisi 92–93 Franz, Marie-Louise von. See von Franz, Marie-Louise Freud, Sigmund developmental theory anal stage 180, 194, 235, 237–238 genital stage 202, 235, 238, 241 latency stage 194, 200, 235, 238 oral stage 180, 185, 235 phallic stage 194, 200, 202, 235, 238

306 Freud, Sigmund (cont.) dream theory 224–230 libido 33, 39n35, 41n43, 123, 131n21, 144–147, 171, 181–183, 189, 212n1, 214n5, 215n7, 216, 234–236 map of the soul 213 Oedipus complex 70, 74n5, 118, 129n15, 132n26, 139, 189, 200, 217n11, 238, 243 On the Interpretation of Dreams 10, 27, 228n26 parental imagos 180, 240 positivism 10, 16n24, 219n13 structural theory (Id, ego, superego) 26, 133n28, 144–148, 194, 213–217, 228, 239n36 sublimation 142n45, 146–148, 216 telepathy. See Freud: thought transference The Ego and the Id 22n35, 238, 239n36 thought transference 16, 18, 262, 264, 265n21 Traumdeutung. See On the Interpretation of Dreams gender identity. See queer theory Gillespie, Michael Allen 211n60, 263–264 gnostic, Gnosticism 106, 115, 135n34 Goethe, J.W. von XI, 23 Görlitz 73n2, 74n5, 82, 117, 138n39, 166 Gregory the Great 55, 99n77, 155 happiness 33, 54 Hartmann, Eduard von 22–23, 248 Hauerwas, Stanley 260–263 Hegel, G.W.F. XI, 10n14, 23, 27n45, 78n16, 106n7, 107n8, 124n4, 135, 142n45, 192n36, 246, 248 hermaphrodite 210n58 heterosexual love 153 Hexameron. See Creation (Genesis 1) Holy Spirit 35, 39, 82, 100, 108, 111, 115n25, 123, 125–127, 136, 140 homosexual love 153 See also queer theory Hugh of Saint Victor 75, 91, 92n57 imaginal realm 93, 95–96, 100–102, 149–151, 159–160, 166, 187n28, 255, 267–268 imagination (Imaginatio) 12, 125, 149, 212 indigenous spirituality 21n32

Index of Subjects and Names James, William 10n14, 54n75, 98n77, 262 Janet, Pierre 24, 157n14, 230n29 Jerome 55, 155 Jesus Christ 35, 38, 42n44, 57, 62, 65–66, 69, 71, 81, 85, 86, 94, 113, 119, 129n16, 134, 136, 181, 187n28, 190, 209, 222, 244, 247n4, 251, 254n11 Joachim of Fiore 89 John of the Cross 56, 60, 75 Joseph (biblical character) 6, 11, 30, 51, 151, 154, 158–171, 200n46, 202, 239, 267–268 Joseph’s brothers (biblical characters) 6, 11, 161–171, 239, 268 Judaism 12, 21n32, 111n12, 112n13, 118 See also Kabbalah Jung, Carl Gustav anima 14, 147–148, 153, 180, 202–203, 217–223, 241–244 four stages: Eve, Helen of Troy, Virgin Mary, Sophia 148n54, 222–223 animus 14, 147–148, 153, 180, 202–203, 217–223, 241–244 four stages: 148n54, 223 archetypes 202–203, 218–221, 147 defined as “purely formal” 147n53 developmental theory 148n54, 241–244 dream theory 230–234 gender essentialism 147n53 See also queer theory Jonah-and-the-whale complex VI, 129, 139, 180, 184–185, 189, 195, 207n53, 241, 243, 247 libido 33, 35, 123, 131n21, 145–147, 171, 181–183, 189, 194, 202, 212n1, 219–220, 234, 241 map of the soul 217–224 Self 14, 136, 147, 180, 203, 222, 243–244 shadow 14, 145, 147–148, 202, 217–218 Sophia 148, 222–223 Synchronicity 176, 262 Kabbalah 19n27, 24n40, 26, 75n6, 79, 81, 83, 84n39, 90n52, 97n70, 106n7, 110n10, 112n13, 118n33, 132n22, 154n12, 203n51 Kant, Immanuel 11, 22n35, 102n83, 136n36, 218n12, 248 Koyré, Alexandre 107n08, 116n30, 125n6, 149n1

307

Index of Subjects and Names left hemisphere. See brain hemispheres libido 33, 35, 131n21, 144–147, 181–184 See also under Boehme; Freud; Jung Loewald, Hans 216n10 Luther, Lutheranism 73n2, 76n12, 97, 101, 111n12, 112, 119n36 Bible, Luther’s translation of 106n6, 114n20 priesthood of all believers XIII, 13 simul iustus et peccator (both sinner and saint) 135n34, 146 theology of the cross 97n72 wonderful exchange 134n32 MacIntyre, Alasdair 260–263 Macrobius 14n19, 88n51, 101 Manichaeism 115, 135n34 map of the soul 13, 26, 29, 72, 74, 124–129 See also under Augustine; Boehme; Freud; Jung McGilchrist, Iain 128n14, 196n45, 230n28, 265–266 McGinn, Bernard 31n2, 32n7, 33n8, 33n12, 34n17, 36n25, 37, 42n44, 46n58, 48n65, 60n90, 73n3, 76, 79, 81n25, 87–100, 104n2, 104n3, 106n7, 112, 117n32, 118n34, 139n41, 177n9, 267 McGrath, Sean J. 23–27, 107n8, 141n45, 176n6, 185n25, 248 Melanchthon, Philip 101, 119n36 Memory 124, 190, 199, 207n53 See also under Augustine Milbank, John 19n26, 32n7, 260–263 modernity 3n2, 4, 7, 9–18, 81, 249, 259–265 See also Enlightenment Müntzer, Thomas 76n12

Paganism 12, 170n30 Paracelsus 26, 79, 81–84, 163n21, 170n29, 243n41 pastoral counselling 20, 249–255, 261 See also spiritual counselling Pauli, Wolfgang 16 Peter of Celle 91 Peucer, Caspar 101 Pharoah 160, 163 Phenomenology 10, 124n4, 222 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 80–83 Pietism 98 postmodernity 3n2, 5, 10, 124n4, 192n36, 259–260, 263 Protestantism. See Reformation psychodynamic therapy 3, 4n3, 13, 22, 29, 74, 249–250, 255–256 psycho-mythology. See under Boehme psychospiritual therapy. See spiritually integrated psychotherapy psychotherapy 3, 13–17, 20–23, 26, 32n5, 35, 76, 97n71, 103, 126, 187n27, 228n25, 230n29, 249–250, 255, 258–264 Quantum entanglement 128n11, 263 See also Jung: synchronicity queer theory 154n12, 220n16

Nature, Book of. See under Boehme neuro-psychoanalysis 257n16 neuroscience 257 Nicene Creed 76n10 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6, 11, 23, 29n48, 114n22, 115n24, 124n4, 233, 245–248, 263–264

Rahner, Karl 107–108, 117 Reformation, Protestant 12, 32, 39n34, 76–77, 79, 97, 263, 267–268 See also Luther, Lutheranism releasement. See Boehme: Gelassenheit (releasement) Reuchlin, Johannes 81, 84n35 Richard of Saint Victor 75 right hemisphere. See brain hemispheres Romanticism (nineteenth century) 15, 22–23, 78, 248n6, 265 Romantic medicine 22–24, 78n16, 151n4, 248 Rupert of Deutz 88 Ruysbroeck, John van 36n25

Oetinger, F.C. 77n13, 107n8 Oneirocritica 227 See also Artemidorus O’Regan, Cyril 86n45, 87n46, 107n8, 108n9, 116n29, 117n32

Schelling, F.W.J. von 78n16, 106n7, 107n8, 124n4, 141n45, 151n4, 176n6, 183n19, 226n21, 246, 248 Schopenhauer, Arthur 22–23, 29n48, 114n22, 124n4, 183n19, 215n8, 245–246, 248

308 Schubert, G.H. von 23–24, 26n42, 78n16, 151n6, 226n21, 246 sexual orientation. See homosexual love, queer theory Shedler, Jonathan 4n3, 256 Shelley, Mary 23 Solomon, King 99n79, 160n17 Sophia. See under Augustine; Boehme; Jung spiritual counselling 20n28, 250 See also pastoral counselling spiritually integrated psychotherapy  255–258 Splendor Solis 156 Stout, Jeffrey 260–262 Suso, Henry 36n25, 73n3, 79, 86n45 Swedenborg, Emanuel 7–9, 101n83, 219n13 Tauler, Johannes 24, 36n25, 73n3, 79, 86n45, 112n16 Teresa of Avila 56, 60, 75 Tertullian 12, 47–49, 52, 151–152 theodicy 98n74 Theologia Deutsche 86n45 theophanic nature mysticism 90–92, 99 theosophy 80, 84n39, 86n44, 104n2, 107n8, 118–119 Three Critiques 7–9, 218n13 threefold soul 142–148, 179, 212–213, 217, 228, 242 See also twofold soul Tillich, Paul 18n26, 27, 107n8, 120n38, 252, 253n10 Troxler, Ignaz 24 twofold soul 142–148, 179, 202, 212–213, 216, 225, 228, 242 See also threefold soul unconscious, unconscious mind 4n3, 11, 20, 22–26, 30, 35, 39–40, 43n47, 44–45, 74, 125, 131–133, 143–147, 148n54, 179n12, 180, 182, 193–195, 197–198, 202–205, 207–208, 212n1, 213, 216–218, 222–223, 230n29, 232–235, 242–244, 247–248, 250, 254, 262, 265n21, 266 understanding. See under Augustine

Index of Subjects and Names Valentinus 107n8 van Deusen Hunsinger, Deborah 97n71, 251–253 Voegelin, Eric 27n45, 107n8 von Balthasar, Hans Urs. See Balthasar, Hans Urs von von Franz, Marie-Louise 6n8, 21n34, 101n82, 183n21 von Hartmann. See Hartmann, Eduard von Vetus Latina 47n61, 67n110, 106n6, 114n20 Virgil 16, 213n2 Vulgate (Latin Bible) 47n61, 55, 106n6, 155 Wars of Religion 12, 267–268 Washburn, Michael 177n10, 195n44 Wesley, John 116n29 Western Esotericism 80–81, 83n32, 86 White, Victor 108n8 Whitman, Walt 99n78 Wiedergeburt. See rebirth will 22–23, 34n18, 35n22, 93n60, 99, 124, 197 dark will 124, 143 divine will 83n31, 85–86 free will 163, 170 individual will. See Boehme: individual will magical will 87 self-will 82–83, 85–86, 110, 137–139 twofold will 143 will/love. See under Augustine Wisdom. See Sophia Women 65n107, 76n11, 93–96, 147, 153, 217, 219, 224n20, 238n35, 267 Wordsworth, William 23, 78n16, 178 World Soul 64n101, 81–82, 127–128, 134, 140, 152 See also Boehme: World Soul Yates, Frances 79–83, 119n35