Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2001) 307-308 [Access article in PDF] Mayer, Paola. Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy, Hagiography, Literature. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas, no. 25. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 242. Cloth, $65.00. Paolo Mayer sets out to revise the accepted image of the influence of Jakob Böhme, the sixteenth-century mystic and theosophist, on the romantic poets and philosophers who congregated at Jena in the years 1798-1803. She convincingly argues that, except for the philosophers and critics Friedrich Schlegel and F. W. J. Schelling, Böhme's direct influence was negligible, more a matter of the self-proclaimed new religion of romanticism making ideological use of a controversial, in some sense subversive, forerunner in German literary history. In the hands of Ludwig Tieck, for instance, or Novalis, Böhme becomes a symbol of the new religion of Poesie and the hostile reception afforded by the orthodox evangelical pastors of his time becomes an allegory for the hostility that the new, "let it all hang out" aesthetic of romanticism encountered in the more classical and form-loving members of the literary culture. In Mayer's terms, Böhme's reception among the poets was hagiographic; he was the romantics' poster child.Böhme lived from 1575 to 1624. The son of peasants, but by no means unlettered, the "mystic shoemaker of Görlitz" claimed the source of his teachings was direct divine revelation. He claimed to have visions in 1600 and 1610, whose content he translated into his unusually graphic writings, interspersed with Pietist attacks on reason and on outward religious observances. This unusual 'theology' blended themes that F. Schlegel and Schelling, at least, found attractive: (a) the idea of a self-generating or developmental God, (b) an approach to the problem of evil that logically seems to place responsibility on God, and (c) a large systematic role for desire and will, rather than reason, in the origin of the world and in human salvation. Notable also is the physicalism of Böhme's theology, and the assignment of a wrathful nature to God the Father. Böhme's reception in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, determined largely by a first biography written in 1652 by a disciple named von Furstenburg, was generally warm in pietist circles, cool in rationalist quarters, e.g., in that of Lessing and Leibniz.The established story is that all the major romantic writers, poets as well as philosophers, were influenced through a direct study of Böhme's texts. Mayer takes issue with that, especially in the case of the poets Tieck and Novalis and the scientists J. W. Ritter. Though each of them writes glowingly of Böhme as a poet—in fact a persecuted poet, a near-martyr for the religion of Poesie—Mayer finds no sound evidence for a direct transmission, either of ideas or of terminology, from Böhme to these figures. What other literary critics have advanced as evidence is, she argues, a body of ideas and vocabulary common to the Neoplatonic, mystic tradition and to Christian thinking in general. If a stricter standard of proving "reception" than mere similarity of language is adopted, it seems that Tieck, Novalis, and Ritter had a slim acquaintance with Böhme's writings, but nonetheless advanced a hagiographic view of the "folk poet." Others among the Jena circle—Schleiermacher, A. W. Schlegel, Dorothea and Caroline Schlegel—took a skeptical view of this propagandistic ploy. Only the more philosophical minds, F. Schlegel and Schelling, read Böhme in any depth or ventured elaborate appropriations. Mayer argues that both these figures went [End Page 307] through an initial phase of enthusiasm for Böhme, to be later followed by personal reservations about him and, eventually, by public criticism from a philosophical or orthodox theological stance. Mayer obviously relishes the irony, in this case, of an initial idolization of Böhme as a representative of the 'new religion...