Lumen de Lumine

Questions for Study and Discussion

1. What difference does it make that the original is English but repeatedly embeds Latin, Greek and Hebrew? When does a second presentation of a passage add something?

2. How do Oxford as mother and the Bodleian as a heaven arrange relations between authors, books and readers?

3. What does the opening vision make the reader notice before offering an explanation?

4. Which elements of the emblem are explained by Vaughan himself? Which interpretations would require further evidence?

5. What counts as experience in the author’s argument? How does secrecy affect a reader’s ability to assess it?

6. Where does the book distinguish kinds of fire, spirit or water? What is lost if every occurrence is given one equivalent?

7. Why does Vaughan preserve both a Latin mountain letter and an English presentation? Compare one passage in both forms.

8. How does the text distinguish spiritual from bodily fermentation? What role does descent perform?

9. How does the final generating circle reverse the relations of father and son? What does its language leave unresolved?

10. Select an inward or ethical interpretation. Which exact words support it, and which historical claims remain outside it?

11. Does patience in the address function as an ethical commitment, a response to injury, a literary strategy or several at once?

12. How does the final glory to God affect the reading of the numerical and generative aphorisms that precede it?