Kevin Killeen. The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023. x + 262pp. ISBN 9781503635395 cloth; ISBN 9781503635852 $90.00 hardback.

In The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable, Kevin Killeen probes into early modernity’s obsession with the unknowable, the inscrutability of the world endemic in theology and natural philosophy. The notions of deus absconditus or arcana naturae are hardly concepts particular to the seventeenth century. But, as Killeen argues and traces through a fascinating array of texts, early modern writers were obsessed with a “theopoetics” of what – through a brokenness of humanity’s fallen perception – cannot be said or understood. Drawing on traditions of mysticism and the opaqueness of scripture, the apophatic represented a philosophical position that theorized the borders of the knowable world as indicative of the edges of divine knowability. What one found or did not find in the written book of God corresponded to what was to be found or not found in what Thomas Browne described in Religio Medici (1642) as the “universal and public Manuscript”: Nature. Nescience – knowing only by negation – with its roots in the medieval and the classical was repeatedly subjected to creative recycling, as science and accompanying technologies such as the microscope and the telescope advanced the powers of human observation while at the same time undermining what had seemed to be stable perceptions.

Killeen’s argument unfolds over six chapters, beginning with a focus on the Book of Job. For the modern reader, the association most strongly held with Job is probably that of gross injustice, as a result of how God and Satan bet on Job’s integrity, stretching his pain and patience to the limits. But, as Killeen reminds us, early moderns “attuned to the fathomless ways of providence, did not presume to haul God to the bar” (27). Instead, they saw in Job – specifically in the final chapters of the Book where the mightiness of God and his inscrutable wisdom are demonstrated through his great works – the cacophony of creation, a quite different poetics than that of the musicality and grandeur of Genesis’s cosmology. In Job the sea and Leviathan become emblematic of obscure and unknown things. Jobean natural history, though, was not gospel. For evidence, Killeen cites an exchange between John Wilkins and Alexander Ross. Wilkins claimed that it was unlikely that Job “was acquainted with all those mysteries which later Ages have discovered,” a claim that to Ross appeared presumptuous: “indeed wee have but a glimmering insight in Natures work, a bare superficiall and conjecturall knowledge of natural causes” (42). “Glimmering,” “conjectural,” along with fleeting, hidden, inscrutable, ungraspable, unthinkable, unfathomable are just a few examples of the rich lexicon of the ineffable that early modernity had at its disposal.

The mysteries of Scripture might be expounded, but only in a language that in itself baffles. The wild, esoteric writings of the German shoemaker mystic Jacob Boehme are a case in point. Boehme’s writings, the subject of chapter two, were widely translated in England, and, as Nigel Smith demonstrates in Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion (Clarendon Press, 1989), influenced radical sectarian thought during the civil wars and Commonwealth. Smith places Boehme in the tradition of European Christian Kabbalah and sees his influence on the Antinomian radicals with their occult interests, notably John Pordage, John Everard, and Mary Pocock. Killeen’s focus is on Mysterium Magnum, Boehme’s exposition of Genesis, composed in 1623 and published in the English translation of John Sparrow and John Ellison in 1654. For Killeen this is the most synoptic of Boehme’s works, since Boehme addresses the unfathomability of creation and the eternity of God’s covenant with the patriarchs Noah, Abraham, and Issac. In his Preface, Sparrow recognized Boehme’s reputation for incomprehensibility: some have censured the work as “full of Nonsense” and others have found fault with “his hard words”. But, says Sparrow, hard words are used in the Bible. “Mysteries cannot be expressed in easie words” and indeed some things “cannot be uttered by any words”; better, he concludes, to utter things through hard words than not at all.¹

In referring biblical events back to a personal natural philosophy Mysterium Magnum is the most esoteric of texts. Killeen offers an exposition that is as accomplished as seems possible, seeing in Mysterium Magnum a monumental attempt to understand God’s impenetrable being in the bowels of eternity, and the nature of the world in the temporal. A crucial concept in Boehme’s theopeotics is the Ungrund: the Abyss. Expounding on the days of creation and the nature of the uncreated world, he sees God coming into being, emerging out of the nothing of the Ungrund. There is, as Killeen observes, something Blakean about Boehme as demonstrated, for example, in his commentary on the manifestation of God’s darkness and light and his essence as both love and wrath. Killeen points out that Boehme accepts the most essential of Protestant tenets – the foundational importance of the Bible – but he does so on the grounds that essence is entirely different from its manifestation, or outward form. As a text, the Bible resists the “cunning” and self-interest of those Boehme calls “wiselings” (84). The mechanics of the outward world – permeated by spiritual abyssal energy – remain opaque and mysterious.

Boehme’s rejection of the rational or the pedantic learning of the universities forms a link with the prophesying of Anna Trapnel − what Killeen labels an “aesthetics of incoherence” − the subject of chapter five. Giving vent to the fury of the divine and touching on the unfathomability of that wrath, seventeenth-century prophets such as Trapnel, in borrowing from their biblical forebears, are central to the apophatic tradition. In her unschooled biblical literacy (Killeen wonders whether Trapnel knew the Bible by heart) Trapnel, like Boehme, inhabited the scriptural, rejecting the specious chicanery of the learned, and was convinced as Killeen puts it “that the divine was bellowing through her body” (147). Over twelve days at Whitehall Anna Trapnel commanded an audience to believe what she was divinely instructed to declare. The Cry of a Stone published in 1654 from the text of a “relator” who took down Trapnel’s wild prophesying, forces the reader to accept the disorientating and fragmented prose, the singing, the generic shifts, as godly ventriloquism. Trapnel saw her prophesying, in its scorching political critique of Cromwell, as speaking truth to power. But in the process of directing the scriptures to discredit worldly self-interest, she disrupts, as Boehme had done, the parameters of language and coherence, insisting on an access to the mysterious.

Negative theology, with roots in mysticism and the self’s relationship to knowledge and God, might be said to run contrary to a Protestant insistence on scriptural exegesis of the Word. Killeen makes a useful distinction between a cast of the apophatic emphasizing the individual’s spiritual longing and an early modern epistemological apophatic that addresses the inscrutable in nature and what its partial glimpses may reveal. Far removed from the wild poetics of Trapnel, for example, are the quiet contemplations of Thomas Browne and the philosophical vitalism of Margaret Cavendish, the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society in the period. Chapters on Browne and the empiricism of the Royal Society shift the emphasis of The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought to natural science and a more directly philosophical purview of the apophatic. The world is there to teach us about the unspeakable nature of the divine: things of the world convey only obliquely any facet of God. Browne, in his repeated disavowals of knowledge, is in the cast of the apophatic. Killeen quotes Browne in Religio Medici alluding to the Divine attributes: “We behold him but asquint upon reflex or shadow; our understanding is dimmer than Moses eye, we are ignorant of the backparts, or lower side of his divinity” (91). Killeen might instead have quoted Browne’s more blunt declaration of nescience: “Since I was of understanding to know we knew nothing, my reason hath beene more pliable to the will of faith”.² If he had chosen to do so, though, he would have lost Browne’s wonderfully arresting metaphor (extracted from Exodus) that unlike Moses we cannot even perceive God’s “backparts”. Religio Medici is not, however, the focus of Killeen’s analysis but the much lesser known – outside Browne circles – The Garden of Cyrus or, The Quincunciall, Lozenge, or Net-work Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered (1658) which, Killeen muses, “might be the strangest text of the seventeenth century” (92). Browne’s discovery of “deep-set pattern and design in the world” (92) could make The Garden of Cyrus sound like the opposite of the apophatic. However, in Browne’s contemplation of the many mysteries and secrets accommodable within the quincunx, a geometric pattern of five points arranged in a cross, Killeen notes an agitated pulse to the text. The center point of the quincunx is never discoverable or stable and instances of order are represented in the midst of changeability. The mystical five that animates the garden and art might itself be arbitrary since even the eight-tentacled octopus is encompassed in the quincuncial pattern. Killeen comments that if Browne’s account of providence in nature is in ways “nearly mathematical” and his botany “meticulously observed,” his observations are nevertheless “scientific only in the most elusive of modes” (109).

Browne’s scrutiny of objects produced a kind of distortion that the era was becoming used to in the warp of the microscope. In chapter four, Killeen offers an intriguing account of early modern microscopy, whose epistemological corruption remained up for debate. Some believed that mechanical assistance would put an end to speculation and conjectures but, in fact, the microscope had the effect of making the ordinary superficial, producing a different sense of uneasy unknowingness. Taking away the privilege of the surface, microscopy suggested an elusive motion occurring below the apprehension of the senses. In Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666) Margaret Cavendish saw its technological limitations, arguing that the science was “not yet able to discover the interior natural motions of any part or creature” (133) and casting doubt on whether the microscope even represented exterior shapes as exactly as they are in nature. For Cavendish, with her vitalist principles of nature as self-moving, self-living, and self-knowing, the human condition was one of nescience and partiality, owning a technology that produced only “hermaphroditical knowledge”.

Killeen’s chapter on Milton and Paradise Lost is a tour de force not least because, in arguing that “there is not really any other work of seventeenth-century thought that trades so fully, so brazenly in the unknowable” (168), Killeen is forcefully working against the grain. While Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana gives eloquent expression to the unknowability of God, in Paradise Lost, on the face of it, as Killeen observes, very little is unknowable. The narrator inhabits the thoughts of God and the wiles of Satan. Milton as a thinker is hyperlogical, investing a great deal theologically in doctrine. Generations of students have been taught that Paradise Lost is an epic justifying the ways of God, who has given us free will and freedom to fall. Indeed, for many readers, as Killeen notes, heaven has proved insufficiently ineffable. However, if Paradise Lost is not ineffable in the strictly theological sense, in Killeen’s view the ineffable still permeates the poem’s every crevice. Setting his tale within eternity, Milton sends the reader into the unknown. Hell and chaos lie outside the universe and beyond any human capacity to imagine them, although it could be said that Milton does this and does it brilliantly. Beyond the immeasurable universe time and space are knotted and confused. In this respect Killeen sees Milton’s cosmopoetics as akin to Boehme’s sense of Eternity, even though in other respects the theologically dogmatic Milton would have had little interest in Boehme’s obscure hermeneutics and mysticism.

The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought is a stimulating and thought-provoking book that taps into a rich seam of early modern thought (and in fact, given the breadth of Killeen’s sources, the inclusion of a bibliography would have been an asset). Each chapter expands its nominal subject in a controlled discursiveness. Browne’s sacred five, for example, is shown to have a source in Plutarch’s The Ei at Delphi, a work that Killeen presents as a source of apophatic thought albeit articulated from the world of the pagan gods. Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura is also seen as offering a rhetorical toolkit for the subvisible. At points, Killeen seems to envisage readers singling out specific chapters and for that reason rehearses – somewhat repetitively − his central thesis, but to treat each chapter as a case study would be highly reductive. The book needs to be read as a whole to follow the tracings, recall, and appropriations of the apophatic in works that are so generically distant. Killeen employs his scholarship with élan.

Janet Clare

University of Bristol