Jacob Böhme’s Ecological Esotericism & the New Speculative Realism
Joshua Levi Ian Gentzke
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated interconnected ecological and existential crises, revealing a broader crisis of relationality that interconnects environmental, economic, and social spheres. These “dark times” confront us with challenges so vast they defy conceptualization. While the fallout from the pandemic has necessitated the development of novel forms of technocratic control, it has also exposed deep injustices embedded in the ways we have structured and imagined our hyper-networked world. In this context, the task of exploring alternate ways of mapping our relationship with the other-than-human world has taken on a new urgency.
This paper examines the ecological implications of the early modern heterodox thinker Jacob Böhme’s apophatic esotericism and its structural resonance with contemporary speculative realism and ecocritical thought. By placing Böhme’s ontology of the Quellgeister (“source spirits”) in dialogue with Wendell Berry’s poetic call to “know the dark” and Timothy Morton’s concept of “dark ecology,” I highlight how the ethico-onto-epistemological image of darkness serves as a gateway for rethinking human entanglement with the more-than-human world. Equipped with the insights of contemporary ecocritical theory, I argue that Böhme’s synthesis of apophatic mysticism and Paracelsian speculative nature philosophy, most radically expressed through his ontology of the Quellgeister, offers valuable resources for radical ecocritical thought.
By tracing intersections between early modern esotericism, apophatic mysticism, and contemporary ecocritical theory, this paper invites readers to envision alternative ecological imaginaries capable of responding to the crises of our time. These imaginaries, grounded in modes of knowing that embrace the radical unquantifiability of the other-than-human world, provide potential resources for reimagining our relational entanglements in transformative ways.
Keywords
Jacob Böhme; ecology; Timothy Morton; Wendell Berry; apophaticism; Speculative Realism; darkness