stage between the purely physical and the properly spiritual or
soul-phenomena. Therefore these astral activities will come into view
when the spirit or soul, which veils or conceals the natural basis
of our being, suspends its activity. In the dream-world we see the
simplest phenomena of this realm. The pictures which hover before us in
dreams, with their remarkably significant connection with occurrences
in our environment and with states of our inner nature, are products
of our natural basis or root-being, which are obscured by the brighter
light of the soul. For example, when a chair falls over beside my bed
and I dream a whole drama ending with a shot fired in a duel; or when I
have palpitation of the heart and dream of a boiling cauldron, we can
see that in these dreams natural operations come to light which are
full of sense and meaning, and disclose a life lying between the purely
organic functions and the concept-forming activity which is carried on
in the full, clear consciousness of the spirit. Connected with this
region are all the phenomena belonging to the domain of hypnotism and
suggestion; and in the latter are we not compelled to recognise an
interaction between human beings, which points to some connection or
relation between beings in Nature, which is normally hidden by the
higher activity of the mind? From this starting point we can reach an
understanding of what Paracelsus meant by the “astral” body. It is the
sum total of those natural operations under whose influence we stand,
or may in special circumstances come to stand, or which proceed from
us, without our souls or minds coming into consideration in connection
with them, but which yet cannot be included under the concept of purely
physical phenomena. The fact that Paracelsus reckons as truths in this
domain things which we doubt to-day, does not come into the question,
from the point of view which I have already described.
Starting from the basis of these views as to the nature of man,
Paracelsus divides him into seven factors or principles, which are the
same as those we also find in the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians,
among the Neoplatonists and in the Kabbalah. In the first place, man
is a physical-bodily being, and therefore subject to the same laws
as every other body. He is, in this respect, therefore, a purely
“elementary” body. The purely physical-bodily laws combine into an
organic life-process, and Paracelsus denotes this organic sequence of
law by the terms “_archæus_” or “_spiritus vitæ_.” Next, the organic
rises into a region of phenomena resembling the spiritual, but which
are not yet properly spiritual, and these he classifies as “astral”
phenomena. From amidst these astral phenomena, the functions of the
“animal soul” make their appearance. Man becomes a being of the senses.
Then he connects together his sense impressions according to their
nature, by his understanding or mind, and the “human soul” or
“reasoning soul” becomes alive in him. He sinks himself deep into his
own mental productions, and learns to recognise “spirit” as such, and
thus he has risen at length to the level of the “spiritual soul.”
Finally, he must come to recognise that in this spiritual soul he is
experiencing the ultimate basis of universal being; the spiritual soul
ceases to be individual, to be separated. Then arises the knowledge
of which Eckhart spoke when he felt no longer that _he_ was speaking
within himself, but that in him the Root-Being was uttering Itself.
The condition has come about in which the All-Spirit in man beholds
Itself. Paracelsus has stamped the feeling of this condition with the
simple words: “And that is a great thing whereon to dwell: there is
naught in heaven or upon earth that is not in Man. And God who dwelleth
in Heaven, He also is in Man.”
With these seven principles of human nature, Paracelsus aims at
expressing nothing else than the facts of inner and outer experience.
The fact remains unquestioned that, what for human experience
subdivides itself into a multiplicity of seven factors, is in higher
reality a unity. But the higher insight exists just for the very
purpose of exhibiting the unity in all that appears as multiplicity
to man, owing to his bodily and spiritual organisation. On the level
of the highest insight, Paracelsus strives to the utmost to fuse the
unitary Root-Being of the world with his own spirit. But he knows that
man can only cognise Nature in its spirituality, when he enters into
immediate intercourse with that Nature. Man does not grasp Nature by
peopling it from within himself with arbitrarily assumed entities; but
by accepting and valuing it as it is, as Nature. Paracelsus therefore
does not seek for God or for spirit in Nature; but Nature, just as it
comes before his eyes, is for him wholly, immediately divine. Must one
then first ascribe to the plant a soul after the kind of a human soul,
in order to find the spiritual?
Hence Paracelsus explains to himself the development of things, so far
as that is possible with the scientific means of his age, altogether
in such wise that he conceives this development as a sensible-natural
process. He makes all things to proceed from the root-matter, the
root-water (Yliaster). And he regards as a further natural process the
separation of the root-matter (which he also calls the great Limbus)
into the four elements: Water, Earth, Fire and Air. When he says that
the “Divine Word” called forth the multiplicity of beings from the
root-matter, one must understand this also only in such wise as perhaps
in more recent natural science one must understand the relationship
of Force to Matter. A “Spirit,” in a matter-of-fact sense, is not yet
present at this stage. This “Spirit” is no matter-of-fact basis of the
natural process, but a matter-of-fact result of that process.
This Spirit does not create Nature, but develops itself out of Nature.
Not a few statements of Paracelsus might be interpreted in the opposite
sense. Thus when he says: “There is nothing which does not possess and
carry with it also a spirit hidden in it and that lives not withal.
Also, not only has _that_ life, which stirs itself and moves, as men,
animals, the worms in the earth, the birds in the sky and the fishes in
water, but all bodily and actual things as well.”
But in such sayings Paracelsus only aims at warning us against that
superficial contemplation of Nature which fancies it can exhaust the
being of a thing with a couple of “stuck-up” concepts, according to
Goethe’s apt expression. He aims not at putting into things some
imaginary being, but at setting in motion all the powers of man to
bring out that which in actual fact lies in the thing.
What matters is not to let oneself be misled by the fact that
Paracelsus expresses himself in the spirit of his time. It is far more
important to recognise what things really hovered before his mind when,
looking upon Nature, he expresses his ideas in the forms of expression
proper to his age. He ascribes to man, for instance, a dual flesh, that
is, a dual bodily constitution. “The flesh must also be understood,
that it is of two kinds, namely the flesh that comes from Adam and the
flesh which is not from Adam. The flesh from Adam is a gross flesh,
for it is earthly and nothing besides flesh, that can be bound and
grasped like wood and stone. The other flesh is not from Adam, it is
a subtle flesh and cannot be bound or grasped, for it is not made of
earth.” What is the flesh that is from Adam? It is everything that man
has received through natural development, everything, therefore, that
has passed on to him by heredity. To that is added, whatever man has
acquired for himself in his intercourse with the world around him in
the course of time.
The modern scientific conceptions of inherited characteristics and
those acquired by adaptation easily emerge from the above-cited thought
of Paracelsus. The “more subtle flesh” that makes man capable of his
intellectual activities, has not existed from the beginning in man.
Man was “gross flesh” like the animal, a flesh that “can be bound and
grasped like wood and stone.” In a scientific sense, therefore, the
soul is also an acquired characteristic of the “gross flesh.” What
the scientist of the nineteenth century has in his mind’s eye when he
speaks of the factors inherited from the animal world, is just what
Paracelsus has in view when he uses the expression, “the flesh that
comes from Adam.”
Naturally I have not the least intention of blurring the difference
that exists between a scientist of the sixteenth and one of the
nineteenth century. It was, indeed, this latter century which for
the first time was able to see, in the full scientific sense, the
phenomena of living beings in such a connection that their natural
relationship and actual descent, right up to man, stood out clearly
before one’s eyes. Science sees only a natural process where Linnæus
in the eighteenth century saw a spiritual process and characterised it
in the words: “There are counted as many species of living beings, as
there were created different forms in the beginning.” While thus in
Linnæus’s time, the Spirit had still to be transferred into the spacial
world and have assigned to it the task of spiritually generating
the forms of life, or “creating” them: the natural science of the
nineteenth century could give to Nature what belonged to Nature, and
to Spirit what belonged to Spirit. To Nature is even assigned the task
of explaining her own creations; and the Spirit can plunge into itself
there, where alone it is to be found, in the inner being of man.
But although in a certain sense Paracelsus thinks according to the
spirit of his age, yet he has grasped the relationship of man to Nature
in a profound manner, especially in relation to the idea of Evolution,
of Becoming. He did not see in the Root-Being of the universe something
which in any sense is there as a finished thing, but he grasped the
Divine in the process of Becoming. Thereby he was enabled truly to
ascribe to man a self-creative activity. For if the divine root of
being is, as it were, given once for all, then there can be no question
of any truly creative activity in man. It is not man, living in time,
who then creates, but it is God, who is from Eternity, that creates.
But for Paracelsus there is no such God from Eternity. For him there
is only an eternal happening, and man is one link in this eternal
happening. What man forms, was previously in no sense existent. What
man creates, is, as he creates it, a new, original creation. If it is
to be called divine, it can only be so-called in the sense in which it
is a human creation. Therefore Paracelsus can assign to man a rôle in
the building of the universe, which makes him a co-architect in its
creation. The divine root of being is _without_ man, not that which it
is _with_ man.
“For nature brings nothing to light, which as such is perfect, but
man must make it perfect.” This self-creative activity of man in the
building of the universe is what Paracelsus calls Alchemy. “This
perfecting is Alchemy. Thus the Alchemist is the baker, when he bakes
bread, the vintager, when he makes wine, the weaver, when he makes
cloth.” Paracelsus aims at being an Alchemist in his own domain as a
Physician. “Therefore I may well write so much here about Alchemy, that
ye may well understand it, and experience that which it is and how
it is to be understood; and not find a stumbling-block therein that
neither Gold nor Silver shall come to thee therefrom. But have regard
thereunto, that the Arcana [curative means] be revealed unto thee....
The third pillar of medicine is Alchemy, for the preparation of the
medicines cannot come to pass without it, because Nature cannot be made
use of without Art.”
In the strictest sense, therefore, the eyes of Paracelsus are directed
to Nature, in order to overhear from herself what she has to say about
that which she brings forth. He seeks to explore the laws of chemistry,
so that, in his sense, he may work as an Alchemist. He pictures
to himself all bodies as compounded out of three root-substances:
Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury. What he thus names, naturally does not
coincide with that which later chemistry solely and strictly calls
by these names; just as little as that which Paracelsus conceives of
as the root-substance is such in the sense of our later chemistry.
Different things are called by the same names at different times.
What the ancients called the four elements: Earth, Water, Air, and
Fire, we still have to-day. But we call these four “elements” no
longer “elements,” but states of aggregation and have for them the
designations: solid, liquid, gaseous and etheric. The Earth, for
instance, was for the ancients not earth, but the “solid.”
Again, we can clearly recognise the three root-substances of Paracelsus
in contemporary conceptions, though not in present names of like sound.
For Paracelsus, dissolution in a liquid and burning are the two most
important chemical processes which he utilises. If a body be dissolved
or burnt, it breaks up into its parts. Something remains behind as
insoluble; something dissolves, or is burnt. What is left behind is
to him of the nature of Salt; the soluble (liquid) of the nature of
Mercury; while he terms Sulphur-like the part that can be burnt.
All this, taken as relating to material things, may leave the man cold
who cannot look out beyond such natural processes; whoever seeks at all
costs to grasp the spirit with his senses, will people these processes
with all sorts of ensouling beings. He, however, who like Paracelsus
knows how to regard them in connection with the whole, which permits
its secret to become revealed in man’s inner being,--he accepts them,
as the senses offer them; he does not first re-interpret them; for just
as the occurrences of Nature lie before us in their sensible reality,
so too do they, in their own way, reveal to us the riddle of existence.
That which through their sensible reality they have to unveil from
within the soul of man, stands, for him who strives after the light of
higher knowledge, far higher than all supernatural wonders that man
can invent or get revealed to him about their suppositious “spirit.”
There is no “Spirit of Nature,” capable of uttering loftier truths
than the mighty works of Nature herself, when our soul links itself
in friendship with that Nature and listens to the revelations of her
secrets in intimate and tender intercourse. Such friendship with Nature
was what Paracelsus sought.
VALENTINE WEIGEL AND JACOB BOEHME
In the view of Paracelsus, what mattered most was to acquire ideas
about Nature which should breathe the spirit of the higher insight
that he represented. A thinker related to him, who applied the same
mode of conceiving things to his own nature especially, is VALENTINE
WEIGEL (1533-1588). He grew up out of Protestant theology in a like
sense to that in which Eckhart, Tauler, and Suso grew up out of Roman
Catholic theology. He has predecessors in Sebastian Frank and Caspar
Schwenckfeldt. These two, as contrasted with the orthodox Churchmen
clinging to external profession, pointed downwards to the deepening of
the inner life. For them it is not that Jesus whom the Gospels preach
who is of value, but the Christ who can be born in every man as his
deeper nature, and become for him the Saviour from the lower life and
the guide to ideal uplifting.
Weigel performed silently and humbly the duties of his office as
clergyman in Zschopau. It was only from the writings he left behind,
printed first in the seventeenth century, that the world learned
anything of the significant ideas which had come to him about the
nature of man.[15]
[15] The following, from among his writings, may be named: _Der
güldene Griff, das ist alle Ding ohne Irrthumb zu erkennen, vielen
Hochgelehrten unbekandt, und doch allen Menschen nothwendig zu
wissen; Erkenne dich selbst; Vom Ort der Welt._
Weigel feels himself driven to gain a clear understanding of his
relation to the teaching of the Church; and that leads him on further
to investigate the basic foundations of all knowledge. Whether man can
know anything through a confession of faith, is a question as to which
he can only give himself an account when he knows _how_ man knows.
Weigel starts from the lowest kind of knowing. He asks himself: How do
I know a sensible object, when it presents itself before me? Thence he
hopes to be able to mount upwards to a point of view whence he can give
himself an account of the highest knowledge.
In cognition through the senses, the instrument (the sense-organ) and
the object, the “counterpart” (_Gegenwurf_) stand opposed. “Since
in natural perception there must be two things, as the object or
‘counterpart,’ which is to be known and seen by the eye; and the eye,
or the perceiver, which sees or knows the object, so do thou hold
over against each other: whether the knowledge comes forth from the
object to the eye; or whether the judgment, or the cognition, flows out
from the eye into the object.”[16] Weigel now says to himself: If the
cognition (or knowledge) flowed from the “counterpart” (or thing) into
the eye, then of necessity from one and the same thing a similar and
perfect cognition must come to all eyes. But that is not the case, for
each man sees according to the measure of his own eyes. Only the eyes,
not the “counterpart” (or object) can be in fault, in that various and
different conceptions are possible of one and the same thing. To clear
up the matter, Weigel compares seeing with reading. If the book were
not there, I naturally could not read it; but it might still be there,
and yet I could read nothing in it, if I did not understand the art of
reading. The book therefore must be there; but, from itself it can give
me not the smallest thing; I must draw forth everything I read from
within myself. That is also the nature of sensible perception. Colour
is there as the “counterpart,” but it can give the eye nothing from out
of itself. The eye must recognise, from out of itself, what colour is.
As little as the content of the book is in the reader, just so little
is colour in the eye. If the content of the book were in the reader, he
would not need to read it. Yet in reading, this content does not flow
out from the book, but from the reader. So is it also with the sensible
object. What the sensible thing before him is; that does not flow from
outside into the man, but from within outwards.
[16] _Der güldene Griff_, p. 26 et seq.
Starting from these thoughts, one might say: If all knowledge flows
out from man into the object, then one does not know what is in the
object, but only what is in man. The detailed working out of this line
of thought, brought about the view of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).[17]
[17] The error in this line of thought will be found explained in my
book, _The Philosophy of Freedom_, Berlin, 1894. Here I must limit
myself to mentioning that Valentine Weigel, with his simple, robust
way of conceiving things, stands far higher than Kant.
Weigel says to himself: Even if the knowledge flows out from man, it
is still only the being of the “counterpart” (or object) which comes
to light in this indirect way through man. As I learn the content of
the book by reading it, and not by my own content, so also I learn
the colour of the “counterpart” through the eye, not any colour to
be found in the eye, or in myself. (Thus Weigel arrives by a road of
his own at a result that we have already encountered in Nicholas of
Cusa. Cp. pages 151-160). In this way Weigel attained to clearness as
to the nature of sense-perception. He arrived at the conviction that
everything which external things have to tell us can only flow forth
from our own inner nature itself. Man cannot remain passive when he
tries to know sensible objects and seeks merely to allow them to act
upon him; but he must assume an active attitude, and bring forth the
knowledge from within himself. The counterpart (or object) merely
awakens the knowledge in the spirit. Man rises to higher knowledge when
his spirit becomes its own “counterpart.” One can see from sensible
cognition that no cognition can flow into man from outside. Therefore
there can be no such thing as an external revelation, but only an inner
awakening.
As now the external counterpart waits till there comes into its
presence man, in whom it can express its being, so too must man wait,
when he seeks to be his own “counterpart” (or object) until the
knowledge of his own being shall be awakened in him. If, in cognition
through the senses, man must assume an active attitude in order that
he may bring to meet the “counterpart” its own being, so in the higher
knowing, man must hold himself passive, because he is himself now the
“counterpart.” He must admit its being into himself. Therefore the
cognition of the spirit appears to him as enlightenment from above. In
contrast to cognition through the senses, Weigel therefore terms the
higher cognition the “Light of Mercy” This “Light of Mercy” is, in
reality, nothing other than the self-knowledge of the spirit in man, or
the re-birth of knowledge on the higher level of beholding.
Now just as Nicholas of Cusa, in following up his road from knowing to
beholding, does not really bring about the re-birth of the knowledge
he has gained, on the higher level, but only the faith of the Church
in which he was brought up appears deceptively before him as such a
re-birth, so is it also the case with Weigel. He guides himself to the
right road, but loses it again in the very moment in which he steps
upon it. He who will travel the road that Weigel points out, can regard
the latter as his guide only as far as the starting-point.
* * * * *
What rings out to meet us from the works of the Master-Shoemaker of
Görlitz, JACOB BOEHME (1575-1624), sounds like the joyous outburst of
Nature admiring her own being upon the summit of her evolution. A man
appears before us whose words have wings, woven out of the inspiring
feeling of having seen knowledge shining within him as Higher Wisdom.
Jacob Boehme describes his own state as Piety which strives only to be
Wisdom, and as a Wisdom that seeks to live only in Piety: “As I was
wrestling and fighting in God’s behalf, behold a wondrous light shone
into my soul, such as was quite foreign to savage nature; therein I
first knew what God and man were, and what God had to do with men.”
Jacob Boehme no longer feels himself as a separated being expressing
its insights; he feels himself as an organ of the great All-Spirit,
speaking in him. The limits of his personality do not appear to him as
the limits of the Spirit that speaks from within him. This Spirit is
for him present everywhere. He knows that “the Sophist will blame him”
when he speaks of the beginning of the world and its creation: “the
while I was not thereby and did not myself see it. To him be it said
that in the essence of my soul and body, when I was not yet the ‘I,’
but when I was still Adam’s essence, I was there present and myself
squandered away my glory in Adam.”
Only in external similes is Boehme able to indicate how the light broke
forth in his inner being. When once as a boy he finds himself on the
top of a mountain, he sees above him a place where large red stones
seem to shut up the mountain; the entrance is open and in its depth he
sees a vessel full of gold. A shudder runs through him; and he goes on
his way without touching the treasure. Later on he is apprenticed to
a shoemaker in Görlitz. A stranger steps into the shop and demands a
pair of shoes. Boehme is not allowed to sell them in the absence of his
master. The stranger departs, but after a while calls the apprentice
out of the shop and says to him: “Jacob, thou art little, but thou wilt
some day become quite another man, over whom the world will break out
into wonder.” In riper years, Jacob Boehme sees the reflection of the
bright sun in a tin vessel: the view that thus presents itself to him
seems to him to unveil a profound secret. Even after the impression of
this appearance, he believes himself to be in possession of the key to
the riddles of Nature.
He lives as a spiritual anchorite, humbly earning his living by his
trade, and between whiles, as though for his own recollection, he notes
down the harmonies which resound in his inner being when he feels the
Spirit in himself. The zealotry of priestly fervour makes life hard
for the man; he, who desires naught but to read the Scripture which
the light of his inner nature illuminates for him, is persecuted and
tortured by those to whom only the external writ, the rigid, dogmatic
confession of faith, is accessible.