A Little Bernard Gorceix Sampler – Part 1: Jacob Boehme and the concept of VIRIDITY

Professor Bernard Gorceix.

Picture by Vincent B. Gorceix,

via Wikimedia Commons

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA is the first of a planned sampler dedicated to the memory of professor Bernard Gorceix. After a biographical and bibliographical notice by Gonthier-Louis Fink in section 1, we share in section 2 an excerpt from the introduction of his French translation of Jacob Boehme’s complete ‘Theosophical Epistles‘ (Editions du Rocher, Paris, 1980). From page 79 to 84. From the same introduction Sampler Part 2 will follow soon with: ‘The Understanding of Parables‘. English translation by Via-Hygeia.

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Section 1.

In Memory of

Bernard Gorceix

(1937–1984)

‘On November 16, 1984, Bernard Gorceix, one of the most brilliant French Germanists of his generation, passed away, joining his wife Swantje in the after-life, who had been tragically taken from him shortly before due to a cerebral hemorrhage. Born in 1937 into a bourgeois family in Poitou, Bernard Gorceix began his studies at the university of his hometown before being admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in 1957. From 1958 to 1959, he served as a lecturer at the University of Göttingen and worked as a translator for ‘Emblemata’ (1), an excellent preparation for his later studies on the Baroque era. After passing the agrégation (1961), he taught German at the Military School of Autun and later at the Troyes high school before being appointed associate professor at the University of Mainz-Germersheim, a position he held from 1964 to 1973. In that year, he was appointed to the University of Lille-III, and from 1976 onward, he served as professor of German literature and civilization at the University of Paris-Nanterre.

A student of Eugène Susini, Gorceix dedicated his research primarily to the exploration of German theosophy and mysticism in the 17th century. After translating and annotating the three major Rosicrucian writings of Johann Valentin Andreae—’Fama Fraternitatis‘ (1614), ‘Confessio Fraternitatis’ (1615), and ‘Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosenkreutz’ (1616), collectively known as ‘The Bible of the Rosicrucians’ (2)—he examined, in his state thesis (defended in 1971), The Mysticism of Valentin Weigel (3). By situating the life of this Saxon pastor in its historical and geographical context, Gorceix demonstrated how Weigel opposed both the secular world and the dogmatism of Lutheran orthodoxy. He analyzed Weigel’s method, based on analogy and the principle of dual light—nature and grace—and explained the various aspects of the pastor’s mystical theology, which stood at the confluence of Rhenish-Flemish mysticism and the Paracelsian tradition (4). Unlike Paracelsus, who sought to explain the entirety of the visible and invisible world, Weigel emphasized the inner world as the receptacle of the divine Word, believing that true knowledge came not from the external world but from within. As Gorceix noted, this thought resonated deeply in Germany, influencing figures such as Johannes Arndt, Jacob Boehme, and even Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

After studying ‘the origins of German theosophy’, Gorceix turned his attention in 1975 to another representative of Baroque spirituality, the Bavarian Johann Georg Gichtel (5), who had studied theology and law at the University of Strasbourg before settling in Amsterdam in 1668, where he founded the Community of the Angelic Brothers. Gorceix traced Gichtel’s life, presented his ‘Theosophia Practica‘ and ‘A Brief Revelation and Instruction‘, and analyzed the ascetic doctrine of this ‘theosopher of Amsterdam’, who, like Weigel, focused on introspection rather than the external world, emphasizing the androgynous Adam and the divine Sophia as guarantors of regeneration—themes later revived by Novalis and Romantic philosophy. Gichtel also played a key role in German theosophy as the first editor of Jacob Boehme’s works.

In ‘Flambée et Agonie‘ (6)(1977), Gorceix offered a masterful synthesis of what he considered the third pinnacle of Germanic mysticism. The work examines six 17th-century mystical authors—Daniel Czepko von Reigersfeld, the long-overlooked Baroque poet; the Rhenish Jesuit Friedrich Spee; the Austrian Protestant poet Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg; the chiliastic poet Quirinus Kuhlmann; the Silesian poet Johannes Scheffler (better known as Angelus Silesius); and Johann Georg Gichtel. Gorceix analyzed the causes of the mystical resurgence of the 17th century, which drew inspiration from Weigel and Boehme while also reconnecting with Tauler, Suso, Meister Eckhart, and the Rhenish-Flemish tradition. In an empire ravaged by the Thirty Years’ War, mysticism provided refuge for these authors, who rejected ecclesiastical dogmatism and sought a personal, authentic relationship with God. Gorceix showed how this mysticism, though rooted in subjective experience, also redefined humanity’s relationship with nature, paving the way for Romanticism.

Gorceix also ventured further back in time, translating and annotating ‘The Book of Divine Works‘ by Hildegard of Bingen (7), the 12th-century Rhenish Benedictine visionary. In 1984, he published a study on the Friends of God in 14th-Century Germany(8), a lay group that, after 1350, dreamed of spiritual renewal under the guidance of a charismatic leader, the ‘Friend of God from the Oberland’. Unlike their predecessors, who followed Meister Eckhart, Tauler, and Suso, these later Friends of God, centered around the Strasbourg banker Rulman Merswin, claimed no need for clergy. Combining anti-papalism with anti-intellectualism, they believed God communicated His laws through dreams and visions. Gorceix highlighted their originality as lay spiritual reformers, filling a scholarly gap despite the abundance of historical documents about them.

By the age of 47, Gorceix had already produced a significant body of work, as noted in a 1979 retrospective by Antoine Faivre in the ‘Revue de l’Histoire des Religions‘ (9). In addition to his books, he published numerous articles on theosophical and mystical themes.

This little biographical and biblio-graphical hints at the loss suffered by German studies and religious history with the passing of this young scholar, collaborator, and friend, to whom our Magazine, ‘Recherches germaniques‘, pays tribute.

Gonthier-Louis Fink,

In: ‘Recherches germaniques‘, N°16, 1986. pp. 3-6.

Notes:

1. ‘Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts‘, ed. A. Henkel and A. Schöne, 1967.

2. ‘La Bible des Rose-Croix‘, translations and commentaries on the three foundational Rosicrucian texts, P.U.F., Paris, 1970.

3. ‘La mystique de Valentin Weigel (1533–1588) et les origines de la théosophie allemande‘, Lille, 1972.

4. Paracelsus, whose selected works Gorceix translated as ‘Œuvres médicales‘, P.U.F., Paris, 1968.

5. ‘J.G. Gichtel, Théosophe d’Amsterdam‘, L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1975.

6. ‘Flambée et Agonie, Mystiques du XVIIe siècle allemand‘, Présence, Sisteron, 1977.

7. ‘Le Livre des Œuvres divines‘, Spiritualités Vivantes series, Albin Michel, Paris, 1982.

8. ‘Les Amis de Dieu en Allemagne au siècle de Maître Eckhart‘, ibid., 1984.

9. A. Faivre,’Théosophie et mystique spéculative du siècle baroque en Allemagne. Note sur l’œuvre de Bernard Gorceix‘, in Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, 1979.

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Section 2.

Jacob Boehme 

and the concept of VIRIDITY

…If God’s life uncannily resembles a lot to man’s own, it is because both are as much spiritual than corporeal: in short, organic.

These lives, Jacob Boehme-who develops an extraordinary taste for detail-does not want to only perceive them at the chosen time of their fertilization and their parturition (the act or process of giving birth; childbirth). The sciences of the natures also study the growth, the intermediary and progressive growth of the creature. Now, God himself is also a creature-at least in relationship with the deity! Our letter writer is thus eager to describe what we call-to translate from the German-‘Wachstum‘, vegetation, more than growth; or this greening, this viridity that the German verb designate: Grünen. For Jacob Boehme, God greens alike a plant does. To believe, in fact, is not so much for our letter writer to agree to a truth of faith, it is first of all, to grow, to vegetate, in the first sense, to spring forth, to grow, to flourish, to blossom. The predominance of the botanical vocabulary-did not the Camisards themselves consider themselves ‘divine plants‘?- we find it also in polite formulas which, despite their originality, tend to become stereotyped. -‘Happy to see‘-he writes for instance to his friend Bernhart -‘how you have made of your life a plant within God‘, or ‘how you are greening within the body of Jesus-Christ‘. (4, 2)-rather more than the deepest elucidation of the life of the faith. Therefore, the letter-often quoted- number 46- comparing  terrestrial vegetation to mystical vegetation, ends up magnificently upon the daily greening of the day and the night:

‘the core of the soul is the divine field. If this field receives this divine solar ray, a divine vegetation growths forth as a result: this is the regeneration, Christ speaks of (John, 3,7)…And likewise the day greens from its night, likewise the divine day greens in us from our eternal night.’

As a matter of fact, we would need a whole book to seriously report this language of viridity. Throughout all of the allegories that the correspondence carries-plant, bough, rose, lily, seed-it is unmistakably the tree we ought to highlight. It is certainly useless-even though the parallel is obvious-to refer to the great symbolic of the tree that the traditions, of Gnosis and of Kabbalah, display. If Jacob Boehme would have known it as deep as some credit him, his exegesis would have been truly bountiful, the overflowing of the fantastic imagination more rich. Therefore, the Ancient testament and the Gospels were certainly more than enough for our theosophist. There is neither anything like in logion 19 of the Gospel of Thomas, the grandiose description of these five trees of Paradise, who are like, as Henry Charles Puech has demonstrated, ‘the archetypes of eternal nature‘, nor the frequent identification within rabbinical Judaism of the Sophia and the tree of Life-at least in our correspondence.

But a persistent comparison, ceaselessly put back on the loom of meditation, of the organic life of faith, of life and of the tree. We are in deed totally tree, a tree in God; we ought to green, fructify, if we want to not be cut off and finish in the porcelain stove. Our tree is fragile, at the beginning, and the storm will break a few branches (9, 6). But it will, one day, be as mighty as the oak or the cedar. The tree draws its sustenance from the inferior silt. Our plant knows ‘the eternal drawing of holy life from God’s plant!‘ (4, 14). Christ, as for him-and this is true for anybody partaking in Christ-appears as a new bough in the divine tree. The Word also penetrates us, so that we may engender a new bough, that will later become a branch, a trunk, a limb of Christ. (11, 33). To be a missionary, it is also to be a gardener: the Confraternity of Saint  Fiacre made it one of its statutory rule!

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And the fruits of the mystical vegetation have the taste of the roses of paradise:

‘This tree (that came out of the mustard seed, 11,44)…will carry the fruits of the Paradise, the soul eats them, when it wants to prophesize and talk of the Kingdom of Heaven, or when it contemplates the divine magic while talking of God’s marvels. God’s being is not subject to be compartmented, as if it would need a place or a space. In the spirit of intelligence, it glides, alike the splendor of the sun in the air (O Boehmian shamanism), fusing into the image alike a lightning that set ablaze and illuminates the totality of the body.’

Developing upon thematical  frequencies, mystery, center, body, reproduction and vegetation, being the second term of our analysis: ‘organicism‘, we have now crossed into the third term: ‘naturalism‘. This term, we of course do not use it in the modern acceptation, but in the ancient meaning, as highlighted by Émile Littré in his Dictionary: ‘the system of those who attribute everything to nature, as a first principle.’ To this abstract meaning, we add a linguistic one: criticizing the theosophist for the confusion he was entertaining between evangelical term, such as  God, Trinity, etc… and alchemical terms, such as Mercury, Salt, etc…, the chief pastor of Görlitz, Gregorius Richter, accused the dissident of a dangerous linguistic ‘naturalism‘. He would eventually write in his damning pamphlet: ‘A new way of speaking usually leads to new mistakes...’ But, for us, this new boehmian language, far from meaning its condemnation, on the contrary is one of the main gifts of his theosophy. The imaginal flows into it with a particular strength. From the metaphysic field, we now enter the field of poetry.

This Boehmian ‘naturalism‘ is grounded upon a fundamental intuition, which is-we out to highlight this-the intuition of the century Jacob Boehme is living in: Nature-by this we mean the universe of the created things- is the perfectly polished mirror of God, of the un-created. The best mean to access the knowledge of God is by starting from the knowledge of this very nature. In fact, the same laws and the sale energies, the same law and the same energy explain, literally, which means developing the physics and the metaphysics, the science of the finite and the science of the infinite; God and Nature are alike, they assemble, correspond, which will always be the case: to the mechanical nature echoes the craftsman God, to the relative nature corresponds also the relative God. The theosophist’s merit is not only to have proclaimed with a particular strength this great evidence of the history of the human spirit, but also to have tried to understand, the most naturally possible the nature of the eternal God, and to have studied in the greatest detail the relationship between these two natures.

To the elucidation of this reflexive knot, the great treatise, ‘De Signatura Rerum’ (written in 1622) is bound to. We should not forget the complete title: ‘Of the generation and signature of all beings’! To understand ‘the language of nature’, says our author in the first chapter (paragraph 16 and 17), it is not only to understand the external Man, the animals and the plants, but also-and especially-‘the being of all beings’. God reveals himself in nature, manifests himself entirely, totally. God does not escape the desire of each thing, the desire of expression, the desire of opening. And for that, the only and necessarily ‘mean’ at his disposal, is nature; natural, in deed, must be its eternal signature, if it wants be to effective and perceptible. From the seven forms and the seven planets of chapter 9 to the Christic signature of chapter 16, its last chapter, we discover the same story, the same natural history of an eternal God, and eternally natural. Divine nature, external nature, Christic nature are but the different (though identical) sections of a unique sphere that is eternally alive.

For Man, of course, for the seeker who yearns to know, to understand, this fact is priceless. To understand nature, is to understand the best signature of God: God himself, the living God. Nature in its best, is the best ‘receptacle of the Spirit’ (1, 4). There are no distinctions of essence between the natural sciences and the sciences of God. In this correspondence (the letters of Jacob Boehme), we do not meet the theoretical developments of the ‘De Signatura Rerum’, but we can gauge their direct application in the very descriptions of the life of faith.

This language of nature applied to the language of faith, we find it first, in the exuberance of the allegorical references: through it, the flora, the inanimate beings, but also the animate ones (the bestiary, especially in the evocation of the last days of the world), rare and precious objects are met in the abstract descriptions of ascesis, of union, of theogony and theodicy. The two discourses are not consecutive, on the contrary, they inter-penetrate themselves, they fuse. In the description of the bohemian organicism, we have already evoked the correspondences of the two ‘vegetations’, mystical and natural; furthermore, we find in letter 46, from 1623, the images of the sun and of the fire (under all of their aspects), the image of the flower that grows (if it is taken care of), those also of the wind, the drought, the botanical and meteorological ignite images, that all illustrate the progression of the spiritual tree. In four parts and in about ten paragraphs (42-50), Jacob Boehme respectively delineate the lethargy of conventional, non-essential faith- the smoldering fire, the wet pit that cannot be ignited-the slavery of the soul without God-the glowing wick, the sparkle that cannot come into being-the slow birth of the new plant under the gentle energy of the sun, and the final fructification-the generation of a new divine body, angelical in the deepness of the divine field, the field of the souls. The permanent threat of sin and evil resembles to the wind that breaks the branches, to the sun that dries out, the temptations to the sows that devour and trample the mature fruits.

The letters will also reveal to the fortunate reader other symbols, which were laid out first in the great treatises and repeatedly used in each of them. We will analyze only two: The pearl, which means at the same time the new birth-it translates the rarity and purity-but also, what allows this new birth, the passage from the darkness to the light, from death to life, in brief: ’God’s consort in his love’, Wisdom, Sophia (2,4): ‘Sophia, the Pearl, delights Man in his affliction and she generates him from the darkness towards the light’, ‘it throttles the anguish of hell.’

Sometimes, the image-symbol imposes itself so much to the imaginal level of our author, that is does exceed its reel properties and allows it to connect with other objects or with other images, thus revealing a dimension truly, and in the proper sense, ‘surrealistic’: Jacob Boehme evokes the sparkle that gushes out of the pearl, or the transformation of the pearl into a star, ‘into the clear star of dawn‘, and very often, this very strange pearl-tree that designate both, the disciple treading upon the good path, and also Christ, standing in the middle of divine Fire.

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We invite you to discover

also the ‘‘tree of Life parabola‘

Jacob Boehme wrote in his introduction to his ‘Aurora‘

(‘Morgenröte im Aufgang‘).

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And to be complete,

we invite you also to (re)discover

Thomas Vaughan describing

‘Thalia and Viridity‘.

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Source

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Coming soon:
A Little Bernard Gorceix Sampler – Part 2:

‘The Understanding of Parables’. 

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