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William Law, Behmenism, and Counter Enlightenment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

C. D. A. Leighton
C. D. A. Leighton
Affiliation:
Department of History, Bilkent University, Ankara
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Extract

The importance of William Law has never been in doubt. Scholars have regarded him as an extremely effective High Church apologist by virtue of his replies to Bishop Benjamin Hoadly on ecclesiology and eucharistic theology, and as an influential pastoral guide by virtue of the success of his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. He is also considered the most notable post-Reformation English mystic by virtue of his later works, written under the influence of the early seventeenth-century Silesian theosophist, Jacob Bohme. This Behmenism, however, has served to reduce the admiration expressed for him. Even sympathetic contemporaries regarded Law's enthusiasm for Böhme as certainly eccentric, and perhaps even more objectionable than that. Retrospection did not blunt eighteenth-century disapproval. Dean (later Bishop) George Home, who was an ardent admirer and indeed disciple of the pre-Behmenist Law, lamented the descent of “one of the brightest stars in the firmament of the church…into the sink and complication of Paganism, Quakerism, and Socinianism, mixed up with chemistry and astrology by a possessed cobbler.” The writers of the Romantic era were far more disposed to acknowledge the value of that from which the eighteenth-century had recoiled as “enthusiasm.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 91 , Issue 3 , July 1998 , pp. 301 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1998

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References

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