soul, driving him on to knowledge. He believes himself to be in his
spirit enfolded in a divine harmony; but when he looks around him, he
sees discord everywhere in the divine workings. To man belongs the
light of Wisdom; and yet he is exposed to error; in him lives the
impulse to the good, and yet the discord of evil sounds throughout
the whole of human development. Nature is governed by its own great
laws; yet its harmony is disturbed by happenings of no purport, and
the warfare of the elements. How is this discord in the harmonious
world-whole to be understood? This question tortures Jacob Boehme. It
strides into the centre of the world of his thought. He strives to gain
a view of the world as a whole, which shall include the discordant.
For how can a conception which leaves the actual present discord
unexplained explain the world? The discord must be explained out of the
harmony, the evil out of the good itself. Let us restrict ourselves,
in speaking of these things, to the good and the evil, wherein the
lack of harmony in the narrower sense finds its expression. For,
fundamentally, Jacob Boehme also restricts himself to this. He can do
so, for Nature and man appear to him as a single entity. He sees in
both similar laws and processes. The purposeless seems to him an evil
something in Nature, just as evil seems to him something purposeless in
man. Similar fundamental forces rule both here and there. To one who
has known the origin of evil in man, the source of evil in Nature also
lies open and clear.
Now, how can the evil as well as the good flow forth from the very
same Root-Being? Speaking in Jacob Boehme’s sense, one would give
the following answer. The Root-Being does not live out its existence
in itself. The multiplicity of the world shares in this existence.
As the human body lives its life, not as a single member, but as a
multiplicity of members, so also the Root-Being. And as human life is
poured out into this multiplicity of members, so too the Root-Being
is poured out into the manifoldness of the things of this world. As
true as it is that the entire man has only one life, so true is it
that every member has its own life. And as little as it contradicts
the whole harmonious life of a man, that his hand should turn itself
against his own body and wound it, so little is it impossible that the
things of the world, which live the life of the Root-Being in their own
way, should turn themselves against each other. Thus the Root-Being, in
dividing itself among different lives, confers upon each such life the
capacity to turn itself against the whole.
It is not from the good that evil streams forth, but from the way in
which the good lives. As the light is only able to shine when it
pierces the darkness, so the good can bring itself to life only when it
permeates its opposite. From out of the “fathomless abyss” of darkness
there streams forth the light; from the “groundlessness” of the
indifferent there is brought to birth the Good. And as in the shadow
only the brightening demands a pointing to the light; but the darkness,
as a matter of course, is felt as that which weakens the light; so too
in the world, it is only the law-abiding character that is sought for
in all things; and the evil, the purposeless, is accepted as a matter
of course, intelligible in itself. Thus, in spite of the fact that for
Jacob Boehme the Root-Being is the All, still nothing in the world can
be understood, unless one has an eye both to the Root-Being and its
opposite at once. “The good has swallowed up into itself the evil or
the hideous.... Every being has in itself good and evil, and in its
unfoldment, as it passes over into division, it becomes a contradiction
of qualities, as one seeks to overcome the other.”
Hence it is altogether in accordance with Jacob Boehme’s view to see
in everything, and in every process of the world, both good and evil;
but it is not in accord with his meaning, without more ado to seek
the Root-Being in the mingling of good and evil. The Root-Being must
swallow up the evil; but the evil is not a part of the Root-Being.
Jacob Boehme seeks the Root-Being of the world; but the world itself
has sprung forth from the “fathomless abyss” through the Root-Being.
“The external world is not God, and eternally will not be called God,
but only a being wherein God manifests Himself.... When one says: God
is all, God is heaven and earth, and also the outer world, so is that
true: for from him and in him all stands originally rooted. But what am
I to do with such a saying, which is no religion?”
With such a view in the background, Jacob Boehme’s conceptions as
to the being of the whole world built themselves up in his mind, so
that he makes the orderly world emerge in a series of steps from the
“fathomless abyss.” This world builds itself up in seven natural forms.
In dark astringency the Root-Being receives form, dumbly shut up within
itself and motionless. This astringency Boehme grasps under the symbol
of Salt. In employing such designations he leans upon Paracelsus, who
had borrowed from chemical processes his names for the processes of
Nature. By swallowing up its opposite, the first nature-form passes
over into the form of the second; the astringent, the motionless, takes
on movement; Power and Life enter into it. Quicksilver (Mercury) is
the symbol for this second form. In the struggle of Rest and Motion,
of Death with Life, the third form of Nature unveils itself (Sulphur).
This Life battling within itself, becomes manifest to itself; it lives
thenceforward no longer an outer battle of its members; there quivers
through it as it were a unifying glowing flash, itself lighting up
its own being (Fire). This fourth form of Nature rises to the fifth,
the living battle of the parts resting in themselves (Water). On this
level, as upon the first, there is present an inner astringency and
dumbness; only it is not an absolute rest, a silence of the inner
opposites, but an interior movement of the opposites. It is not the
motionless resting in itself, but the moved, that which has been
kindled by the fire-flash of the fourth stage. Upon the sixth level,
the Root-Being itself becomes aware of itself as such inner life.
Living beings endowed with senses represent this form of Nature.
Jacob Boehme calls it the “Clang” or Call, and in so doing adopts
the sense-perception of sound as the symbol for sense-perception in
general. The seventh form of Nature is the Spirit, raising itself on
the basis of its sense-perceptions (Wisdom). He finds himself again as
himself, as the Root-Being, within the world that has grown up out of
the “fathomless abyss,” shaping itself out of the harmonious and the
discordant. “The Holy Ghost brings the Glory of this Majesty into the
being, wherein the Godhead stands revealed.”
It is with such views that Jacob Boehme seeks to fathom that world
which for him, according to the knowledge of his time, was reckoned as
the actual world of fact. For him all is fact which is so regarded by
the natural science of his time and by the Bible. His way of conceiving
things is one thing, his world of facts quite another. One can imagine
the former applied to a totally different knowledge of facts. And thus
there appears before our eyes a Jacob Boehme as he might stand at the
parting of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Such a one would
not saturate with his way of conceiving things the six days’ creation
work of the Bible and the fight of the angels and the devils, but
Lyell’s geological knowledge and the facts of Haeckel’s _The History
of Creation_. He who can penetrate into the spirit of Jacob Boehme’s
writings must arrive at this conviction.[18]
[18] We may here name the most important of Boehme’s writings: _Die
Morgenröthe im Aufgang_; _Die drei Prinzipien göttlichen Lebens
oder über das dreifache Leben des Menschen_; _Das umgewandte Auge_;
_“Signatura rerum” oder von der Geburt und Bezeichnung aller Wesen_;
_Das “Mysterium Magnum_.”
GIORDANO BRUNO AND ANGELUS SILESIUS
In the first decennium of the sixteenth century, the scientific
genius of Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) thinks out in the castle of
Heilsberg, in Prussia, an intellectual structure which compels the
men of subsequent epochs to look up to the starry heavens with other
conceptions than those which their forefathers in antiquity and the
Middle Ages had. To them the earth was their dwelling-place, at rest in
the centre of the Universe. The stars, however, were for them beings of
a perfect nature, whose motion took place in circles because the circle
is the representative of perfection.
In that which the stars showed to human senses they beheld something of
the nature of soul, something spiritual. It was one kind of speech that
the things and processes upon earth spoke to man; quite another, that
of the shining stars, beyond the moon in the pure æther, which seemed
like some spiritual nature filling space. Nicholas of Cusa had already
formed other ideas.
Through Copernicus, earth became for man a brother-being in face of the
other heavenly bodies, a star moving like others. All the difference
that earth has to show for man he could now reduce to this: that earth
is his dwelling-place. He was no longer forced to think differently
about the events of this earth and those of the rest of universal
space. The world of his senses had expanded itself into the most remote
spaces. He was compelled henceforth to allow that which penetrated his
eye from the æther to count as sense-world just as much as the things
of earth. He could no longer seek in the æther in sensuous fashion for
the Spirit.
Whoever, henceforth, strove after higher knowledge, must needs come to
an understanding with this expanded world of the senses. In earlier
centuries, the brooding mind of man stood before a world of facts. Now
he was confronted with a new task. No longer could the things of earth
only express this nature from within man’s inner being. This inner
nature of his was called on to embrace the spirit of a sense-world,
which fills the All of Space everywhere alike.
The thinker of Nola, PHILOTHEO GIORDANO BRUNO (1548-1600) found himself
faced by such a problem. The senses have conquered the universe of
space; henceforth the Spirit is no more to be found in space. Thus man
was guided from without to seek henceforward for the Spirit there alone
where from out of profound inner experiences those glorious thinkers
sought it, whose ranks our previous expositions have led before us.
These thinkers drew upon a view of the world to which, later on, the
advance of natural knowledge forces humanity. The sun of those ideas,
which later should shine upon a new view of Nature, with them still
stands below the horizon; but their light already appears as the early
dawn at a time when men’s thoughts of Nature itself still lay in the
darkness of night.
The sixteenth century gave the heavenly spaces to natural science
for the sense-world to which it rightfully belongs; by the end of
the nineteenth century, this science had advanced so far that, even
within the phenomena of plant, animal, and human life, it could assign
to the world of sensible facts that which belongs to it. Neither,
then, in the æther above, nor in the development of living creatures,
can this natural science henceforth seek for anything but sensible,
matter-of-fact processes. As the thinker in the sixteenth century
had to say: “The earth is a star among other stars, subject to the
same laws as other stars”; so must the thinker of the nineteenth
century say: “Man, whatever may be his origin and his future, is
for anthropology only a mammal, and further, that mammal whose
organisation, needs and diseases are the most complex, whose brain,
with its marvellous capacities, has reached the highest level of
development.”[19]
[19] Paul Topinard: _Anthropologie_, Leipzig, 1888, p. 528.
From such a standpoint, attained through natural science, there can
no longer occur any confusion between the spiritual and the sensible,
provided man understands himself rightly. Developed natural science
makes it impossible to seek in Nature for a Spirit conceived of after
the fashion of something material, just as healthy thinking makes
it impossible to seek for the reason of the forward movement of the
clock-hand, not in mechanical laws (the Spirit of inorganic Nature),
but in a special Daimon, supposed to bring about the movements of the
hands. Ernst Haeckel was quite right in rejecting, as a scientist, the
gross conception of a God conceived of in material fashion. “In the
higher and more abstract forms of religion, the bodily appearance is
abandoned and God is worshipped as pure Spirit, devoid of body. ‘God
is a Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and
in truth.’ But, nevertheless, the soul-activity of this pure Spirit
remains quite the same as that of the anthropomorphic personal God. In
reality, even this immaterial Spirit is not thought of as bodiless, but
as invisible, like a gas. We thus arrive at the paradoxical conception
of God as a gaseous vertebrate.”[20]
[20] Haeckel, _Riddle of the Universe_.
In reality, the matter-of-fact, sensible existence of something
spiritual may be assumed only when immediate sensible experience shows
something spiritual, and only such a degree of the spiritual may be
assumed as can be perceived in this manner. That first rate thinker, B.
Carneri, ventured to say (in his book: _Empfindung und Bewusstsein_,
p. 15): “The dictum: No spirit without matter, but also no matter
without spirit,--would entitle us to extend the question to the plant
also, nay, even to any block of stone taken at random, wherein there
seems very little to speak in favour of these correlative conceptions.”
Spiritual occurrences as matters of fact are the results of various
doings of an organism; the Spirit of the world is not present in the
world in a material sense, but precisely after a spiritual fashion.
Man’s soul is a sum of processes in which Spirit appears most
immediately as fact. In the form of such a soul, however, Spirit is
present in man only. And it implies that one misunderstands Spirit,
that one commits the worst sin against Spirit, to seek for Spirit in
the form of Soul elsewhere than in man, to imagine other beings thus
ensouled as man is. Whoever does this, only shows that he has not
experienced Spirit within himself; he has only experienced that outer
form of appearance of Spirit, the Soul, which reigns in him. But that
is just the same as though one regarded a circle drawn with a pencil as
the real, mathematically ideal circle. Whoever experiences in himself
nothing other than the soul-form of the Spirit, feels himself thereupon
driven to assume also such a soul-form in non-human things, in order
that thereby he may not need to remain rooted in the materiality of
the gross senses. Instead of thinking of the Root-Being of the world
as Spirit, he thinks of it as World-Soul, and postulates a general
ensoulment of Nature.
Giordano Bruno, upon whom the new Copernican view of Nature forced
itself, could grasp Spirit in the world, from which it had been
expelled in its old form, in no other manner than as World-Soul. On
plunging into Bruno’s writings (especially his deeply thoughtful book:
_De Rerum Principiis et Elementis et Causis_) one gets the impression
that he thought of things as ensouled, although in varying degree. He
has not, in reality, experienced in himself the Spirit, therefore he
conceives Spirit after the fashion of the human soul, wherein alone he
has encountered it. When he speaks of Spirit, he conceives of it in
the following way: “The universal reason is the inmost, most effective
and most special capacity, and a potential part of the World-Soul; it
is something one and identical, which fills the All, illuminates the
universe and instructs Nature how to bring forth her species as they
ought to be.” In these sentences Spirit, it is true, is not described
as a “gaseous vertebrate,” but it is described as a being that is like
to the human soul. “Let now a thing be as small and tiny as you please,
it yet has within it a portion of spiritual substance, which, when it
finds a substratum adapted thereto, reaches out to become a plant, an
animal, and organises itself to any body you choose that is ordinarily
called ensouled. For Spirit is to be found in all things, and there
does not exist even the tiniest little body which does not embrace in
itself such a share thereof as causes it to come to life.”
Because Giordano Bruno had not really experienced the Spirit, as
Spirit, in himself, he could therefore confuse the life of the Spirit
with the external mechanical processes, wherewith Raymond Lully
(1235-1315) wanted to unveil the secrets of the Spirit in his so-called
“Great Art” (_Ars Magna_). A recent philosopher, Franz Brentano,
describes this “Great Art” thus: “Concepts were to be inscribed upon
concentric, separately revolving discs, and then the most varied
combinations produced by turning them about.” Whatever chance brings
up in the turning of these discs, was shaped into a judgment about the
highest truths. And Giordano Bruno, in his manifold wanderings through
Europe, made his appearance at various seats of learning as a teacher
of this “Great Art.” He possessed the daring courage to think of the
stars as worlds, perfectly analogous to our earth; he widened the
outlook of scientific thinking beyond the confines of earth; he thought
of the heavenly bodies no longer as bodily spirits; but he still
thought of them as soul-like spirits. One must not be unjust towards
the man whom the Catholic Church caused to pay with death the penalty
for his advanced way of thinking. It required something gigantic to
harness the whole space of heaven in the same view of the universe
which hitherto had been applied only to things upon earth, even though
Bruno did still think of the sensible as soul-like.
* * * * *
In the seventeenth century there appeared Johann Scheffler, called
ANGELUS SILESIUS (1624-1677), a personality in whom there once
more shone forth, in mighty harmony of soul, what Tauler, Weigel,
Jacob Boehme, and others, had prepared. Gathered, as it were, into
a spiritual focus and shining with enhanced light-giving power,
the ideas of the thinkers named make their appearance in his book:
“Cherubinischer Wandersmann. Geistreiche Sinn- und Schlussreime.” And
everything that Angelus Silesius utters appears as such an immediate,
inevitable, natural revelation of his personality, that it is as though
this man had been called by a special providence to embody wisdom in
a personal form. The simple, matter-of-course way in which he lives
wisdom, attains its expression by being set forth in sayings which,
even in respect of their art and their form, are worthy of admiration.
He hovers like some spiritual being over all earthly existence; and
what he says is like the breath of another world, freed beforehand from
all that is gross and impure, wherefrom human wisdom generally only
toilsomely works itself free.
He only is truly a knower, in the sense of Angelus Silesius, who
brings the eye of the All to vision in himself; he alone sees his
action in the true light who feels that this action is wrought in
him by the hand of the All: “God is in me the fire, and I in him the
light; are we not in most intimate communion one with another?”--“I
am as rich as God; there can be no grain of dust that I--believe me,
man,--have not in common with Him.”--“God loves me above Himself; if
I love Him above myself: I so give Him as much as He gives me from
Himself.”--“The bird flies in the air, the stone rests on the earth;
in water lives the fish, my spirit in God’s own hand.”--“Art thou born
of God, then bloometh God in thee; and His Godhead is thy sap and thy
adornment.”--“Halt! whither runnest thou? Heaven is in thee: seekest
thou God otherwhere, thou missest Him ever and ever.”
For one who thus feels himself in the All, every separation ceases
between self and another being; he no longer feels himself as a single
individual; rather does he feel all that there is of him as a part of
the world, his own proper being, indeed, as that World-Whole itself.
“The world, it holds thee not; thou art thyself the world that holds
thee, in thee, with thee, so strongly captive bound.”--“Man has never
perfect bliss before that unity has swallowed up other-ness.”--“Man is
all things; if aught is lacking to him, then in truth he knoweth not
his own riches.”
As a sense-being, man is a thing among other things, and his
sense-organs bring to him, as a sensible individuality, sense-news of
the things in space and time outside of him; but when Spirit speaks in
man, then there remains no without and no within; nothing is here and
nothing is there that is spiritual; nothing is earlier and nothing
is later; space and time have vanished in the contemplation of the
All-Spirit. Only so long as man looks forth as an individual, is he
here and the thing there; and only so long as he looks forth as an
individual, is this earlier, and this later. “Man, if thou swingest
thy spirit over time and place, so each moment canst thou be in
eternity.”--“I am myself eternity when I leave time behind, and self in
God and God in self together grasp.”--“The rose that here thine outer
eye doth see, it so hath bloomed in God from all eternity.”--“In centre
set thyself, so see’st thou all at once: what then and now occurred,
here and in heaven’s realm.”--“So long for thee, my friend, in mind
lies place and time: so long graspest thou not what’s God, nor what
eternity.”--“When man from manifoldness withdraws, and inward turns
to God, so cometh he to unity.” The summit has thus been climbed,
whereon man steps forth beyond his individual “I” and abolishes every
opposition between the world and himself. A higher life begins for him.
The inner experience that comes over him appears to him as the death
of the old and a resurrection in a new life. “When thou dost raise
thyself above thyself and lettest God o’errule; then in thy spirit
happens ascension into heaven.”--“The body in the spirit must arise,
the spirit, too, in God: if thou in him, my man, will live for ever
blessed.”--“So much mine ‘I’ in me doth ’minish and decrease; so much
therefore to power cometh the Lord’s own ‘I.’”
From such a point of view, man recognises his meaning and the meaning
of all things in the realm of eternal necessity. The natural All
appears to him immediately as the Divine Spirit. The thought of a
divine All-Spirit, who could still have being and sub-existence over
and beside the things of the world, vanishes away as a superseded
conception. This All-Spirit appears so outpoured into things, so
becomes one in being with the things, that it could no longer be
thought at all, if even one single member were thought away from its
being. “Naught is but I and thou; and if we twain were not; then is
God no more God, and heaven falleth in.”--Man feels himself as a
necessary link in the world-chain. His doing has no longer aught of
arbitrariness or of individuality in it. What he does is necessary in
the whole, in the world-chain, which would fall to pieces if this his
doing were to fall out from it. “God may not make without me a single
little worm: if I with him uphold it not, straightway must it burst
asunder.”--“I know that without me God can no moment live: if I come to
naught, he needs must give up the ghost.”--Upon this height, man for
the first time sees things in their real being. He no longer needs to
ascribe from outside to the smallest thing, to the grossly sensible,
a spiritual entity. For just as this minutest thing is, in all its
smallness and gross sensibility, it is a link in the Whole. “No grain
of dust is so vile, no mote can be so small: the wise man seeth God
most gloriously therein.”--“In a mustard seed, if thou wilt understand
it, is the image of all things above and beneath.”
Man feels himself free upon this height. For constraint is there only
where a thing can constrain from without. But when all that is without
has flowed into the within, when the opposition between “I and world,”
“Without and Within,” “Nature and Spirit,” has disappeared, man then
feels all that impels him as his own impulse. “Shut me, as strongly
as thou wilt, in a thousand irons: I still will be quite free and
unfettered.”--“So far as my will is dead, so far must God do what I
will; I myself prescribe to him the pattern and the goal.”--At this
point cease all moral obligations, coming from without: man becomes to
himself measure and goal. He is subject to no law; for the law, too,
has become his being. “For the wicked is the law; were there no command
written, still would the pious love God and their neighbour.”