JAMES JOYCE AND JACOB BOEHME

Generose Gabel

Baker University

Baldwin City, Kansas

 

In the “Proteus” section of UIysses, there is a clear and precise reference to Jacob Boehme and to his book, The Signature of AII Things. Boehme’s name is still somewhat familiar to students of theology and philosophy. He is said to have influenced philosophers from Hegel to Heidegger and theologians down to Tillich, Berdyaev, and Marcel. But he has been better known in earlier ages than our own. For those who may not be familiar with Boehme, here is a brief life of this writer in whom Joyce was very interested, and to whom he therefore referred rather more widely in his writings than is generally realized.

Jacob Boehme was born near Görlitz in what is now East Germany in 1575,  and lived in that  town most  of  his life. He  was a shoemaker by trade, who later sold his shoemaking business to become a draper, and dealer in woolen articles.

Boehme was always very religious, and in his maturity he had two religious experiences which not only colored, but really shaped the rest of his life. Under the influence of these experiences, he felt compelled by God to write down what had been revealed to him, and he wrote so rapidly and compulsively that he has been considered by some critics the first of  the “automatic”  writers.

As an  untrained  theologian, however, Boehme got into a great deal of trouble with his pastor and other religious leaders, so eventually he wrote some of  his  works in the language of alchemy. As Evelyn Underhill puts it, some ancient religious writers used the language of alchemy to convey religious “secrets to the elect, whilst most certainly concealing them from the crowd.”1

It can already be seen, that Joyce would have found a writer like Boehme interesting because of his hermetic writings as well as his sometimes strange philosophy. Joyce would have seen similarities between Boehme and that old favorite of Joyce’s, Giordano Bruno. There were also aspects of Boehme’s life as religious rebel, and martyr of a kind, which must have attracted Joyce. So it is no wonder that we find Stephen musing upon Boehme as he says in “Proteus”, “Signatures of all things I am here to read... ”, and goes on to meditate on particular signs as he sees them along the strand.

Stephen’s reflections in this section mirror the thoughts of other philosophers besides Boehme. Aristotle is one ot these. It is not surprising that this is so, because Boehme’s philosophy in his Signature of All Things is very similar to Aristotle’s. The thinking in “Proteus” is united by many links of associative logic. As the section continues and we see Stephen meditating on Protects or a Protean God, we go even deeper into Boehme’s theories. For the most striking of all Boehme’s theories arid the one which most interests modern philosophers is that of the evolutionary nature of God.

Boehme actually taught that the Godhead evolved, and in fact, is eternally evolving. This theory seems to be evidenced in Stephen’s thinking in this section because no matter what trend his thoughts take, still, by associative logic, he keeps coming back to thoughts of the Godhead, which he thinks of as a kind of Proteus. He muses: “God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain.” (50: 13-14)

Stephen also refers to the Godhead as “Mananaan”, the old Irish sea god, and finally as the Demiurge. These references, too, are very much in line with the nature of Boehme’s version of God. Mananaan, like Proteus, is a changing God. The term “Demiurge” comes from Gnosticism, and this is related to Boehme because many or his doctrines reflect Gnostic doctrines, just as they do Cabalistic teachings.

There are other aspects of Boehme’s doctrines present in the “Proteus” section, such as his ideas of Adam Kadmon, or Lucifer, and so on. The more one knows or Boehme’s writings, the more one can see reflected in this episode. Some of these doctrines have implications which continue throughout Ulysses. It is, however, in Finnegans Wake that one finds the most frequent references to Jacob Boehme.

The Boehme allusions in Finnegans Wake are done somewhat in the same manner as Joyce’s many allusions to Giordano Bruno. The Boehme usages are part of intricate and amusing wordplays, yet often they are also thematically linked. For instance, one of the main ideas in Finnegans Wake is the fall of HCE or Finnegan, which has also been interpreted by many critics as Adam’s fall or the fall of Everyman. However, there have been some critics who have seen this as the fall of divinity itself. Atherton, for example, sees it thus.2 William York Tindall identifies HCE as the God of the Cabala.3

Now the idea of a God falling into nature is a Gnostic idea which looms large in the works of Boehme, which is very likely where Joyce met it. There was also a phase of Boehme’s development in which he was rather pantheistic. For him, nature was God’s body. So HCE’s body, scattered all over the landscape fits very well with this conception.

There are a number of symbols which Boehme uses in connection with God that are in turn used by Joyce in marvellous types of word play connected with HCE or with Shaun, HCE’s son who seems to supplant or become his own father in some sense, thus becoming God himself. These symbols are the rainbow, flowers, creative thunder, and the number “7”.

In Boehme’s symbology the rainbow was the throne of God as well as a part of his body. In the Wake, too, in the very first pages, we find the “regginbrow ringsome on the aquaface.” This is probably a rejection in water of the rainbow, or a rejection of the eyebrow of God, or a reflection of the eyebrow of HCE who is God. There are also the rainbow girls who surround Shatin as he grows in importance. Their presence seems to indicate his growing divinity.

The rainbow girls and Shaun also play the game of “Angels, Devils and Colours”. This is very significant because flowers were symbolic of angels in Boehme’s theology. Each color revealed the nature it signified. The rainbow girls in this chapter are both angels and flowers.

Boehme also used thunder as a creative symbol in his writings, and said, for instance, that it occurred when the Father first recognized Himself (during the evolutionary process) and then also when the Father recognized His Son. The thunderclap is, of course, also extremely significant in the Wake.

“Seven” is an old mystic number which Boehme uses frequently in regard to God, and he uses it in especially significant ways. One of these is the number of emanations in his evolutionary God. Joyce uses the number frequently when referring to HCE and also to Shaun as he seems to become HCE. In one place, HCE is attired in seven articles of clothing.4 In Chapter 13 Shaun also wears seven articles of clothing.5 These references all strengthen the claims to divinity of HCE and his son.

There are many other word clues that Joyce makes use of when he embellishes a Boehme theme and even employs in groups by themselves. Such words usually orcur within restricted passages or are scattered over no more than a page or two. The kinds of words are all associated with Boehme’s life or works. (Incidentally, these symbols can all be found neatly grouped in the Introduction to the Law edition of Boehme’s works which was published in England between 1764 and 1781, and which remains the most famous English edition of Boehme’s works.)

One of the most important of the symbols just mentioned is the lily. The lily above all is Boehme’s sign. Boehme compared union with the Divine to “the scent of the lily”, and “the blossoming of the lily”. He had a lily engraved on his own signet ring, and a lily also appeared on his grave marker.

Another clue word is ladder. Boehme spoke often of having climbed up a ladder in his soul to where he found his God. The Trinity, the word “three”, and even the word “four” are also associated with Boehme. The Trinity is used because Boehme wrote so much about the origins of God, and “four” is used because in his theologizing Boehme was said to have discovered a fourth person in God, a discovery which was always vehemently denied by Boehme. Wool, gloves, shoes, boots, hammering, etc., are all frequent clues, and obviously are all connected with Boehme's trades.

There are also a great many word plays on Boehme’s own name. The name is also correctly spelled “Böhme”, and in England it sometimes appears as “Boehm.” The name is also frequently mispronounced. Joyce naturally makes the most of this, making the name appear as “Bohemia”, “Beam”, “Bean”, and in many other variations. Thus, the words “Lily of Bohemey" which appear in the Wake (246:18) and have been taken to mean “The Bohemian Girl”, are also a reference to Boehme and his lily. Similar clues can be easily multiplied. These terms, or word clues, are usually employed when Boehme is tied to a theme. So with the HCE/God theme already described, many of these terms also occur.

There are several other themes in the Wake to which the Boehme word clues are tied, and other kinds of clues, such as Boehme’s given name, Jacob (which is also James and is therefore also Shem) which could be explored more fully.  One final point is still to be made. In pointing out Joyce’s frequent use of Jacob Boehme in his works, I do not wish to imply that Joyce subscribed to Boehme’s doctrines. In Joyce’s younger days, when he discovered some of his other favorites – Vico and Bruno, he may have come across Boehme also. At this stage of Joyce’s life, he may have been interested in the mystical aspects of Boehme’s writings. The young Stephen of Portrait exhibits a definite interest in mysticism, however much he may or may not mirror Joyce’s own early interests. As a mature adult, Joyce seems to have been interested in mysticism only in so far as he was interested in the arcane, hermetical, or the extremely unusual. Joyce was interested in Jacob Boehme. His interest, however, was as he himself said in regard to Vico, to “use him for all he was worth”. Such use, like so many other Joyce uses, has forever enriched Finnegans Wake as well as our enjoyment of it.

 

 

NOTES

 

1 - Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (New York: E. P, Dutton and Co.,  Inc.,  1961), p. 142.

 

2 - James Atherton,  Books  at  the  Wake  (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 31.

 

3 - William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), p. 174.

 

4 - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 30.

 

5 - Ibid., p. 404.

 

REFERÊNCIA

 

GABEL, Generose. JAMES JOYCE AND JACOB BOEHME. Disponível em: <http://images.library.wisc.edu/WI/EFacs/transactions/WT1981/reference/wi.wt1981.ggabel.pdf>. Acesso em: 16 jul. 2017.