Christian Dissent
Christian Dissent
The Protest Against Reason
This chapter considers those who lived and worked under the shadow of the Enlightenment, building a bridge between the visions of Catholic penitents and those who experienced visions in the height of the age of reason. It begins by interrogating E. P. Thompson's Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law in order to look at the antinomianism (“against the law”) of the late seventeenth century, a form of radical dissent that refused to accept conventional Christian ethics, including the rule of the father and the authority of the Church. The major focus, however, will be on Jacob Boehme, who, like his Catholic forbears, was a visionary and experienced a dark night of the soul and a spiritual awakening. In all of his writing, Boehme employed alchemical and occult thinking and reasoning that had considerable impact on English Behmenists, including Blake and, much later on, the philosophical and psychological treatises of Blavatsky and Jung.
Keywords: Enlightenment, E. P. Thompson, William Blake, antinomianism, Christian ethics, radical dissent, Jacob Boheme, Behmenists, Blavatsky, Jung
Columbia Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
