Book Description
Showing the Sign and Signification of the Several Forms and Shapes in the Creation; and what the Beginning, Ruin, and Cure of Everything is.It proceeds out of Eternity into Time, and again out of Time into Eternity, and Comprises all Mysteries.And other Writings Of the Supersensual Life or the Life which is Above Sense; The Way from Darkness to True Illumination; Discourse Between Two Souls. Contents:How that all whatever is spoken of God without the Knowledge of the Signature is dumb and without Understanding, and that in the Mind of Man the Signature lies very exactly composed, according to the Being of all Beings, Of the Opposition and Combat in the Essence of all Essences, whereby the Ground of the Sympathy and Antipathy in Nature may be seen, and also the Corruption and Cure of each Thing, Of the great Mystery of all Beings, Of the Birth of the four Elements and Stars, Of the Sulphurean Death, and how the dead Body is revived and replaced into its first Glory or Holiness, How a Water and Oil is generated, How Adam (while he was in Paradise) and also Lucifer were glorious Angels, Of the Sulphurean Sude, or Seething of the Earth, Of the Signature, showing how the inward signs the outward, Of the inward and outward Cure of Man, Of the Process of Christ in his Suffering, Dying, and Rising again, Of the Seventh Form in the Kingdom of the Mother, Of the Enmity of the Spirit and Body, and of their Cure and Restoration, Of the Wheel of Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt; of the Generation of Good and Evil:how the one is changed into the other, Of the Will of the great Mystery in Good and Evil;how a good and evil Will originally arises, and how the one introduces itself into the other, Of the Eternal Signature and Heavenly Joy; Things were brought into Evil and Good.; Of the Supersensual Life:Two Dialogues between a Scholar or Disciple and his Master; The Way from Darkness to True Illumination:A Discourse between a Soul Hungry and Thirsty and a Soul Enlightened. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Revealing
Boehme saw the relationship (Signature) between God and Man in all things. This relationship pertained to the outer (nature) as well as the inner (the eternal being). There is spiritual beauty within his writings and much to be gained from this Christian Mystic. ... Read more

Book Description
As a cobbler in Gorlitz, Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) came into contact with many great thinkers who sought refuge from the Roman Church and Reformation groups in post-Luther Germany. Gradually he became one of the most influential mystics of the Reformation era. This anthology provides an introduction to Boehme's wide-ranging thought and his wisdom grounded in revelation, as well as newly translated Boehme letters. ... Read more

Book Description
Argues that the discourse of Jacob Boehme represents the return of Gnostic thought in modernity after a thousand year hiatus. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Out-Boehming Boehme
O'Regan's second work in his projected seven-volume study gives him an opportunity to take the methodology outlined in Gnostic Return in Modernity and to apply it to Jacob Boehme, the father of the Gnostic Return in the post-Reformation West.

Boehme's works are fascinating but offputting, even in English translation. His Lutheran pietist style grates on the contemporary ear. And he is far indeed from clear. But O'Regan, whose prose sometimes makes Boehme seem lucid by contrast, tries to match the famous cobbler's mythopoetic theologizing with the "narrative grammar" of Valentianian Gnosticism.

This "narrative grammar" is at the heart of O'Regan's project of "Gnostic return in modernity". Unlike other academic students of Gnosticism (Michael Allen Williams and Karen King, for example) who are very text-centered, O'Regan cares less for the details of the materials than for how they exhibit a deeper and repetitive structure. And this structure, in his view, tells a story of God, man and the universe that uses the materials of the Bible but disassembles and then reassembles them into a mythic vision. This narrative is not just heretical but utterly disfiguring.

The familiar orthodox narrative is of a self-sufficent but communitarian Deity (Father, Son and Spirit) who creates a variegated universe out of love and whose special human creation freely turns on this love to choose wilful selfishness; the divine Son becomes incarnate and by his obedience andsacrificial death restores the possibility of original communion, through the community of the Church and with the communitarian Deity. The Valentinian narrative describes a self-sufficient communitarian divine world of many variegated characters, where one of them likewise chooses wilfulness for the sake of knowledge and thus falls from this communion into a space of alienation and ignorance, indirectly creating the universe of matter and psyche and entrapping parts of his/herself therein. An envoy from the divine world enters this universe to awaken the entrapped and fragmented divinities caught therein (humans) and this self-knowledge restores them to their original home. In the orthodox narrative, God becomes man out of love, so that men might become gods by grace. In the Gnostic narrative, God becomes man out of need, so that men might remember by grace that they are gods by nature. Salvation by grace, faith and works vs salvation by nature, knowledge and identity.

O'Regan sees this second narrative, using characters and material from the Bible, as a parasitic deformation, a spiritual pathology, where the proper estate of man as an ontologically inferior, morally weak and epistemically challenged creature is overblown into a self-aggrandizement based on special knowledge of the divine causes of the state of the universe.

Like his spiritual and intellectual ancestor, Irenaeus of Lyons, O'Regan performs the paradoxical service of explaining to Gnostics more about their own religious experience. His outline of the Valentinian narrative and its resurfacing in modern thought is, for this Gnostic, utterly illuminating. And O'Regan's politely but firmly stated negative judgment on Gnosticism is not, of course, convincing to one who has found it liberating.

However, he does pressgood questions for Gnostics who do not thereby wish to embrace nihilism. But I fear that the influence of Voegelin's undisciplined and overblown use of Gnosticism as the prime category of modern evil is too strong in O'Regan. Political utopianism -or utopianism of any kind- is (pace Voegelin) hardly a Gnostic temptation. It is much more likely to find fertile soil in the visions that have grown from the theocratic and nationalistic legalism of the Old Testament combined with the messianic universalism of the New. In a religion like Islam, for example, which is, I think, accurately described in the previous sentence.

One thing that O'Regan "gets" clearly about Gnosticism is that it is provoked by the question of theodicy: how can this world, which for all its beauty and order, is structured on suffering and death, be the creation of a God who is utterly wise, good and powerful? Gnostics are pretty clear on the answer: it can't.We search beyond the creator God of this world for the Deity beyond Him, and hidden in us. But O'Regan makes a powerful argument to the contrary. Orthodoxy cannot solve, that is, explain,the problem of evil. Evil must be recognized and confronted. But if you solve the problem of evil by successfully explaining it, justifying it for the sake of God (theo-dicy) as Gnostics try to do, then what have you actually done but validated it and removed the reason to confront it? A successful theodicy is self-defeating. Food for thought.

Jacob Boehme may appear to have gotten lost in this review. And he has. But unless you can absorb O'Regan's underlying, orverarching and penetrating hermeneutic project, you might find the Boehme book just mystifying.Once you grasp his plan -whether you agree with his evaluation or not-it is a rewarding experience to see him "explain" Boehme so clearly, if ponderously.

Speaking of ponderously. A final word about his style. He is a Hegel scholar, so perhaps he is beyond redemption. And his third volume will be on Hegel. I'm stockpiling Advil for that adventure. But he really needs to do something about his writing. O'Regan is prodigiously intelligent and massively well-read, an tribute to the impressive Hibernian and Catholic intellectual tradition. And I do not fault him for his grand reach and neologisms. A Gnostic could hardly complain about that. But his sentences and form of argument are so wearyingly complex, overly nuanced at every turn, and obsessively lawyerlike that it stresses the patience of even the well-read. (Gnostic writings are notoriously dense and ill-done; you'd think an anti-Gnostic would take a lesson.) He should be forced, for the sake of his own project,to swear a feudal oath of vassalage to his editor and simply obey. ... Read more

Book Description
Boehme was the son of a farmer who lived the first part of his life as a shepherd and later became a shoemaker. He claimed that his writings reflect only what he was taught through the direct experience of God.

A truly giant figure in the spiritual tradition, he has greatly influenced Angelus Silesius, William Blake, John Milton, Isaac Newton, William Law and many others.

As the editor of this volume, Peter Erb, says, "The Way to Christ provides the best introduction to his thought and spirituality. A collection of nine separate treatises, its parts were written late in his career and reflect his final theological position, a position established not aside from his earlier work, but on it...The book was intended to serve as a meditation guide. Boehme believed that his writing had come from the Spirit. It was intended to direct his fellow-believers back to the Spirit as he had been directed." ... Read more

Book Description
That is, the Day-Spring or Dawning of the Day in the Orient or Morning Redness in the Rising of the Sun.That is the Root or Mother of Philosophie, Astrologie and Theologie from the true Ground.Or a Description of Nature, I. How All was, and came to be in the Beginning.II. How Nature and the Elements are become Creaturely.III. Also of the Two Qualities Evil and Good.IV. From whence all things had their Original.V. And how all stand and work at present.VI. Also how all will be at the End of the Time.VII. Also what is the Condition of the Kingdom of God, and of the Kingdom of Hell.VIII.And how men work and act creaturely in Each of them.All this set down diligently from a true Ground in the Knowledge of the Spirit, and in the impulse of God. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A must for interested in Mysticism
The first important book of a Protestant Mystic (and heterodox thinker), I'd certainly prefer a smaller and/or more manegeable edition, yet the work is inspired, provocative and has been influential in the religious thought

Beautifully Written
Boehme was one of the most enlightened Christian mystics. All of his works take deep concentration but it enables one to discover the beautiful spiritual truths contained within. Aurora deals with nature and God.

Boehme's Aurora
It is very gratifying to see Sparrow's translation of Boehme's "Morgenrote am Aufgang" in print again. Jacob Boehme, the shoemaker from Gorlitz whose life was forever altered by a visionaryexperience, captured the imagination of Emerson and other Transcendentalistwriters. Boehme saw nature as a reflection/representation of God's plan, aconcept which American thinkers found congenial to their intrinsicallyoptimistic world-view. "Aurora" was most likely first introducedinto the U.S. by German Pietists. The original is enormously difficult totranslate (or even to comprehend) in German. Thus, the 19th century readerwas probably just as thrilled to find a translation as we are lucky to havea reprint of the Sparrow edition. ... Read more

Book Description
Threefold Life of Man and True Resignation. ... Read more

Book Description
This is a necessary and helpful companion in understanding the obscure writings of Jacob Boehme. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Extremely Helpful!
Boehme is so advanced in his esoteric thinking that he is not that easy to study without such a guide as this- so thankful to have found it. ... Read more

Book Description
Of True Repentance; of True Resignation; of Regeneration; of the Supersensual Life, Contents: The First Book:Of True Repentance; The Second Book:Of True Resignation; The Third Book:Of Regeneration, or the New Birth; The Fourth Book:A Dialog between a Scholar and his Master, concerning the Super-Sensual Life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Understanding the Fall...
Boehme lends new light to the study of sin and redemption and how man can find his way back to Christ indwelling.A powerful and inspirational read.

Inspirational!
Boehem was an enlightened mystic. This is a shorter collection of Boehme's writing's. It was his desire to bring others into a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ. The purification of the soul being the predominant underlying theme. A truly inspirational book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Infinitely simplistic view into the creation of heaven & hel
The aurora is a book of spirit not of understanding. The simplicity of the author is so profoundly penatrating that unless you have walked the tight-rope your self, the book will completely alude you. I believe thisbook is a major cornerstone for the student on the way to enlightenment.Boehme's presentation has been called clustered at best, but if ready, theword unfolds from within, and you will walk away a changed person. ... Read more

Product Description
This Elibron Classics edition is a facsimile reprint of a 1912 edition by John M. Watkins, London. ... Read more

Book Description
This book is acknowledged to be the definitive source work on Boehme and very essential for understanding his writings. Contents: Who was Jacob Boehme; Jacob Boehme's Writings; Why are Jacob Boehme's Writings Not Studied? Boehme and Swedenborg; Power of Imagination; Experiences in Open Vision; Emanations of the World-Soul; Communicating Spirits; World-Soul; Doctrine of vicarious Suffering; Deity Anterior to Creation; On Influx; Who are Our Spiritual Enemies? Natural Objects Existent; Second Advent; Uses of Pain and Evil; Martensen's "Jacob Boehme"; Duration of Evil; Reincarnation; Ready-Made Clothes; Eternal Bodies; Buried Treasures; Creation by the Word; Imagination and Fantasy; Alchymistical Philosophers; Boehme and the "Secret Doctrine"; Atmospheres; Jesus and the Christ; Unconscious Creation; Spiritual Evolution; Illusions in Life's Trance; Form; The Advantages of Christianity; Boehme and Rama Prasad; Planetary Influence; Resurrection Bodies; The Image. ... Read more