It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.Boehme was born a good fifty years into the Protestant Reformation and spent most of his efforts writing things that pissed off Catholics as well as his fellow Lutherans. For example, he questioned the idea of salvation through the grace of God (a core tenet of the Reformation) and believed not just that man lives in a state of fallen grace but must actively sin in order to then seek salvation through his own individual suffering, rather than riding Christ’s coattails into heaven.
Thus, Boehme is often called a Christian mystic or Gnostic because he posits faith in Christ alone is insufficient to restore man to grace, making Christ, and thus God, not all-powerful and ineffable but merely the most powerful and, therefore, in charge. Gnosticism, generally, presents evil as a real, incarnate, active force in the world—not just the absence of good, as generally taught by the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
It’s worth noting that if you were starting a church from scratch, you’d probably define evil as the absence of good yourself. It allows you to say God equals good and anything not of God must be evil. It also means that your followers are capable of committing sins of omission. Sin then becomes not just active participation in evil, but failure to do good, like—oh, I don’t know—provide offerings to the church or something.
The appeal of the Gnostic label is easy to see in Blood Meridian because, as the above quote illustrates, “death and dying are the very life of the darkness” and the very life of the narrative. Page after page contain tumultuous acts of obscene violence. If there is a God present in this world, it is one of discord, might, and death.
An early scene in the book places firebrand preacher Reverend Green opposite the Judge. Their conflict can be seen as an allegorical stand-off between two types of religious views. One, Green’s, is akin to the accepted view of grace, stating that Christ is “goin to be there with ye ever step of the way whether ye ask it or ye dont” (6). The other is the Judge—authority for its own sake, able to shape the truth of the world by his own whims.
At the end of their conflict, there is death but no sorrowing.
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