The Signature of All Things

"It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrow. There is no sorrowing. For sorrowing is a thing swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness." Of the great mystics of the Reformation era few are as difficult to understand as Jacob Boehme, the Cobbler of G?rlitz. Yet few can offer so much to the reader who is prepared to take the trouble to understand his message. It is in the Signatura Rerum The Signature of All Things that Boehme expounds the cosmology that lies at the heart of his whole mystical approach and experience. Although by no means his longest book, The Signature of All Things is the best starting place from which to gain an understanding of Boehme's mystical pantheism and his dialectical conception of God, in which good and evil are rooted in one and the same being. An important influence on later German Romanticism and Idealism, Boehme's endeavour to express a new sense of the human, divine and natural realms attains its apotheosis in his conception of the Ungrund, the uncertainty that precedes the divine will's arousing itself to self-awareness. Boehme's theosophy did not endear him to the guardians of religious orthodoxy of his own day or of later centuries, yet his legacy extended far beyond his native Germany, and his books were translated into many languages. In England his doctrines had a profound influence upon thinkers as diverse as George Fox, the Father of Quakerism, and the Cambridge Platonists, and were to find their most coherent expositor and interpreter in William Law. They informed the visions of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and in more recent times provided inspiration for such diverse cultural expressions as the psychology of Carl Jung and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. The Signature of All Things is a profound text, challenging and rewarding in equal measure, that fully deserves its status as a classic of late Reformation mystical thought. Translated into English and with a Preface by John Elliston, with later revisions to the translation by William Law.

Publisher -

Author(s) - Jacob ?Boehme

Paperback

Published Date -

ISBN - 9780718893446

Dimensions - 21.6 x 13.8 x 1.6 cm

Page Count - 302