A mystical element runs through Stephen's meditations on the
"Ineluctable modality of the visible." Thinking "Signatures of
all things I am here to read," he recalls the De
Signatura Rerum ("On the Signatures of Things"),
published in 1622 by a Lutheran theologian named Jakob Böhme
(usually written Boehme in English).
Boehme had a number of mystical experiences as a young man,
including one in 1600 in which the sight of a sunbeam
reflected in a metal dish revealed to him the spiritual beauty
of the universe. Further visions included one in which he
walked out into the fields and saw there signs of the divine
creator visibly manifested in all created things. Stephen
aspires to "read" such divine signatures in
the sights he encounters on the seashore: "seaspawn
and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen,
bluesilver, rust: coloured signs."
The mystical burden of the Signatura appears in
Stephen's thoughts in the next paragraph, as he closes his
eyes and turns his attention to "the ineluctable modality of
the audible": "Am I walking into eternity along
Sandymount strand?" The answer, unfortunately, is
No. When he opens his eyes two paragraphs later the created
world has not "vanished," and he is not "for
ever in the black adiaphane".
The Signatura argues that direct apprehensions of
divine truth are a necessary complement to mere faith. Gifford
quotes from the beginning of the work: "All whatever is
spoken, written or taught of God, without the knowledge of the
signature is dumb and void of understanding; for it proceeds
only from an historical conjecture, from the mouth of another,
wherein the spirit without knowledge is dumb; but if the
spirit opens to him the signature, then he
understands the speech of another; and further, he understands
how the spirit has manifested and revealed itself . . ."
This argument falls within a long Christian tradition of
regarding the Book of Nature as a second source of divine
revelation, complementary to the Book of Scripture. But a
thread of Neoplatonism runs through Boehme's writings and,
like many mystics, he took some doctrinal positions that
violated orthodox theological teaching, arousing opposition
from Lutheran authorities.
In an endnote to his biography, Ellmann reproduces the
surviving part of an inventory that Joyce made of his books
before leaving Trieste (785-87). On the list is "Jacob Behmen,
The Signature of All Things." Apparently Joyce read
the work in this 17th century English translation by John
Sparrow, from which Gifford quotes.
