«Aus Finster Licht». Note su luce e tenebra nella teosofia di Jakob Böhme

In this essay I try to inspect the interpretation of the light-darkness dialectic by Jakob Böhme (1575-1624): it is a fight, which involves every aspect of the theosophist's thought, from psychology to natural philosophy, from morality to gnoseology, from ontology to theology. Starting from the reference to Böhme’s famous vision of sunshine reflected by the dark surface of zinc, I try to characterize the experience of “seeing” as the cornerstone of a sensorial mystic, understood as an attempt to translate what “has been seen” in the inwardness. The analysis of Ungrund’s concept allows me to make explicit the co-essentiality of light and darkness: there is no reality other than the divine reality, which however has a rhythmic nature; and light and darkness are the phases of this rhythm.