Critique of the Teutonic Philosophy and Other Writings Against Jacob Böhme

The first volume of the series assembles More’s writings against the Christian mystic Jacob Böhme. More engaged critically with Böhme’s daring, yet exceptionally dark and elusive, writings for four decades. His principal work on the influential German author is his epistolary treatise Critique of the Teutonic Philosophy addressed to his “heroine pupil” Anne Conway. Not only does it provide a critical, albeit surprisingly sympathetic, account of the German mystic’s riveting vision of the cosmic drama of divine being and becoming, but More’s answers to the addressee’s five quaestiones or “queries” amount to a sustained Neoplatonist interpretation of Böhme’s theosophical cosmology as well. Alongside a first bilingual edition of the Critique of the Teutonic Philosophy, this volume contains all the Böhme-related chapters in More’s earlier poetry and prose. A substantial introduction places More’s important late work in the context of the contemporary English Behmenists’ editorial project of a complete translation of the Teutonic Philosopher’s Writings. This first volume of the Latin Works of Henry More makes accessible a particularly seminal work of the Cambridge Platonist which exerted massive influence upon G.W. Leibniz and the later Idealist and Romantic Böhme enthusiasts in Germany and beyond.