JACOB BOEHME: HIS LIFE AND SPIRIT[1]
Few men have ever made greater claim to be the bearer of a new
revelation than did the humble shoemaker-prophet of Silesia, Jacob
Boehme. "I am," he wrote in his earliest book, "only a very little
spark of God's Light, but He is now pleased in this last time to reveal
through me what has been partly concealed from the beginning of the
World,"[2] and he admonished the reader, if he would understand what is
written, to let go opinion {152} and conceit and heathenish wisdom, and
read with the Light and Power of the Holy Spirit, "for this book comes
not forth from Reason, but by the impulse of the Spirit."[3] "I have
not dared," he wrote to a friend in 1620, "to write otherwise than was
given and indited to me. I have continually written as the Spirit
dictated and have not given place to Reason."[4] Again and again he
warns the reader to let his book alone unless he is ready for a new
dawning of divine Truth, for a fresh Light to break: "If thou art not a
spiritual overcomer, then let my book alone. Do not meddle with it,
but _stick to thy old matters_!"[5]
Before the Spirit came upon him, he felt himself to be a "little
stammering child," and he always declared that without this Spirit he
could not comprehend even his own writings--"when He parteth from me, I
know nothing but the elementary and earthly things of this
world"[6]--but with this divine Spirit unfolding within him "the
profoundest depth" of mysteries, he believed, though with much
simplicity and generally with humility, that the true ground of things
had "not been so fully revealed to any man from the beginning of the
world"--"but," he adds, "seeing God will have it so, I submit to His
will."[7] Nobody before him, he declares, no matter how learned he
was, "has had the ax by the handle," but, with a sudden change of
figure, he proclaims that now the Morning Glow is breaking and the Day
Dawn is rising.[8] In his _Epistles_ he says: "I am only a layman, I
have not studied, yet I bring to light things which all the High
Schools and Universities have been unable to do. . . . The language of
Nature is made known to me so that I can understand the greatest
mysteries, in my own mother-tongue. Though I cannot say I have
_learned_ or _comprehended_ these things, yet so long as the hand of
God stayeth upon me I understand."[9]
We shall be able to estimate the value of these lofty {153} claims
after we have gathered up the substance of his teaching, but it may be
well to say at the opening of this Study of Boehme that in my opinion
no more remarkable religious message has come in modern centuries from
an untrained and undisciplined mind than that which lies scattered
through the voluminous and somewhat chaotic writings of this
seventeenth-century prophet of the common people.[19]
He frequently speaks of himself as "unlearned," and in the technical
sense of the word he was unlearned. He had only a simple schooling,
but he possessed extraordinary native capacity and he was well and
widely read in the books which fitted the frame and temper of his mind,
and he had very unusual powers of meditation and recollection so that
he thought over and over again in his quiet hours of labour the ideas
which he seized upon in the books he read.
There are many strands of thought woven together in his writings, and
everything he dealt with is given a {154} new aspect through the vivid
insights which he always brings into play, the amazing visual power
which he displays, and his profoundly penetrating moral and
intellectual grasp. But, nevertheless, he plainly belongs in the
direct line of these spiritual reformers whom we have been studying.
He was deeply influenced, first of all, by Luther, especially in two
directions. He got primarily from the great reformer his transforming
insight of the immense importance of personal faith for salvation, and
secondly he was impressed--almost overwhelmingly impressed in his early
years--with the awful reality and range of the principle of positive
evil in the universe, upon which Luther had insisted with intensity of
emphasis. His feet, however, were set upon the track which seemed to
him to lead to light by the help which he got from the other line of
reformers. Schwenckfeld made him feel the impossibility of any scheme
of salvation that rested on transactions and operations external to the
human soul itself, and through that same noble Silesian reformer he
discovered the central significance of the new birth through a creative
work of Grace within. Sebastian Franck was clearly one of his
spiritual masters. From him, directly or indirectly, he learned that
the spirit must be freed from the letter, that external revelations are
symbols which remain dead and inert until they are vivified and
vitalized by the inwardly illuminated spirit. He was still more
directly influenced by Valentine Weigel, the pastor of Zschopau, who
united the spiritual-mystical views of Schwenckfeld, Franck, and the
other teachers of his type with a nature mysticism or theosophy which
had become, as we have seen, a powerful interest in the sixteenth
century when a real science was struggling to be born, but had not yet
seen the light. This nature mysticism came to him also in a crude and
indigestible form through the writings of Paracelsus. Through him
Boehme acquired a vocabulary of alchemistical terms which he was always
labouring to turn to spiritual meaning, but which always baffled him.
It has been customary to treat Boehme as a mystic, and he has not {155}
usually been brought into this line of spiritual development where I am
placing him, but his entire outlook and body of ideas are different
from those of the great Roman Catholic mystics. He has read neither
the classical nor the scholastic interpreters of mysticism. In so far
as he knows of historical mysticism he knows it through Franck and
Weigel and others, where it is profoundly transformed and subordinated
to other aspects of religion and thought. Unlike the great mystics, he
does not treat the visible and the finite as unreal and to be negated.
The world is a positive reality and a divine revelation. Nor, again,
are sin and evil negative in character for him. Evil is tremendously
real and positive, in grim conflict with the good and to be conquered
only through stern battle. A mystic, an illuminate, he undoubtedly was
in his first-hand experience, but his message of salvation and his
interpretation of life are of the wider, distinctively "spiritual" type.
Jacob Boehme[11] was born in November 1575 in the little market-town of
Alt Seidenberg, a few miles from Goerlitz. His father's name was Jacob
and his mother's Ursula, both persons of good old German peasant stock,
possessed of a strong strain of simple piety. The family religion was
Lutheran, and Jacob the son was brought up both at home and at church
in the Lutheran faith as it had shaped itself into definite form at the
end of the sixteenth century. His early education was very limited,
but he was possessed of unusual fundamental capacity and always
exhibited a native mental power of very high order. He was always a
keen observer; he looked through things, and whether he was in the
fields, where much of his early life was spent as a watcher of cattle,
or reading the Bible, which he knew as few persons have known it, he
saw everything with a vivid and quickened imagination. He plainly
began, while still very young, to revolt from the orthodox theology of
his time, and his {156} years of reading and of silent meditation and
reflection were the actual preparation for what seemed finally to come
to him like a sudden revelation or, to use his own common figure, as "a
flash."[12]
His external appearance has been quaintly portrayed by his admiring
friend and biographer, Abraham von Franckenberg, who, like a good
portrait-painter, strives to let the body reveal the soul. "The
external form of Jacob's body," he says, "was worn and very plain; his
stature was small, his forehead low, his temples broad and prominent,
his nose somewhat crooked, his eyes grey and rather of an azure-cast,
lighting up like the windows of Solomon's Temple; his beard was short
and thin; his voice was feeble, yet his conversation was mild and
pleasant. He was gentle in manner, modest in his words, humble in
conduct, patient in suffering and meek of heart. His spirit was highly
illuminated of God beyond anything Nature could produce."[13]
This youth, with "azure-grey eyes that lighted up like the windows of
Solomon's Temple," was from his childhood possessed of a most acutely
sensitive and suggestible psychical disposition. He always felt that
the real world was deeper than the one which he saw with his senses,
and he was frequently swept from within by mighty currents which he
could not trace to any well-mapped region of the domain of Nature. His
vivid and pictorial imagination, his consciousness of inrushes from the
unplumbed deeps within, and his inclination to solitude and meditation
are well in evidence at an early age, and we have no difficulty at all
in seeing that his psychological equilibrium was unstable, and that he
was capable of sudden shifts of inward level.
The first sign of his psychical peculiarity comes to light in an
incident of his early childhood. While he was tending cattle in the
fields one day he climbed alone a neighbouring {157} mountain-peak, and
on the summit he espied among the great red sandstones a kind of
aperture overgrown with bushes. Boy-like he entered the opening, and
there within, in a strange vault, he descried a large portable vessel
full of money. The sight of it made him shudder, and, without touching
the treasure, he made his way out to the world again. To his surprise
he was never able to find the aperture again, though, in company with
the other less imaginative cowboys, he often hunted for it. His
friend, von Franckenberg, who relates the story and says that he had it
from Boehme's mouth, thinks that the experience was "a sort of
emblematic omen or presage of his future spiritual admission to the
sight of the hidden treasury of the wisdom and mysteries of God and
Nature,"[14] but we are more interested in it as a revelation of the
extraordinary psychical nature of the boy, with his tendency to
hallucination.
When he was in his fourteenth year he was apprenticed to a shoemaker in
Seidenberg, and devoted himself diligently to the mastery of his trade.
It was during this period of apprenticeship, which lasted three years,
that there was granted to him "a kind of secret tinder and glimmer" of
coming fame. One day a stranger, plain and mean in dress, but
otherwise of good presence, came to the shop and asked to buy a pair of
shoes. As the master shoemaker was absent, the uninitiated
prentice-boy did not feel competent to sell the shoes, but the buyer
would not be put off. Thereupon young Jacob set an enormous price upon
them, hoping to stave off the trade. The man, however, without any
demur paid the price, took the shoes, and went out. Just outside the
door the stranger stopped, and in a serious tone called out, "Jacob,
come hither to me!" The man, with shining eyes looking him full in the
face, took his hand and said, "Jacob, thou art little but thou shalt
become great--a man very different from the common cast, so that thou
shalt be a wonder to the world. Be a good lad; fear God and reverence
His Word." With a little more counsel, the {158} stranger pressed his
hand and went his way, leaving the boy amazed.[15]
He had, his intimate biographer tells us, lived from his very youth up
in the fear of God, in all humility and simplicity, and had taken
peculiar pleasure in hearing sermons, but from the opening of his
apprenticeship he began to revolt from the endless controversies and
"scholastic wranglings about religion," and he withdrew into himself,
fervently and incessantly praying and seeking and knocking, until one
day "he was translated into the holy Sabbath and glorious Day of Rest
to the soul," and, according to his own words, was "enwrapt with the
Divine Light for the space of seven days and stood possessed of the
highest beatific wisdom of God, in the ecstatic joy of the
Kingdom."[16] Boehme looked upon this "Sabbatic" experience as his
spiritual call, and from this time on he increased his endeavours to
live a pure life of godliness and virtue, refusing to listen to
frivolous talk, reproving his fellows and even his shopmaster when they
indulged in light and wanton conversation, until finally the master
discharged him with the remark that he did not care to keep "a
house-prophet" any longer.[17] Hereupon he went forth as a travelling
cobbler, spending some years in his wanderings, discovering more and
more, as he passed from place to place, how religion was being lost in
the Babel of theological wrangling, and seeing, with those penetrating
eyes of his, deeper into the meaning of life and the world. Near the
end of the century--probably about 1599--he gave up his wanderings,
married Catherine Kunchman, "a young woman of virtuous disposition,"
and opened a shoemaker's shop for himself in the town of Goerlitz, where
he soon established a reputation for honest, faithful work, and where
he modestly prospered and was able to buy a home of his own, and where
he reared the four sons and two daughters who came to the happy home.
{159}
The supreme experience of his life--and one of the most remarkable
instances of "illumination" in the large literature of mystical
experiences--occurred when Boehme was twenty-five years of age, some
time in the year 1600. His eye fell by chance upon the surface of a
polished pewter dish which reflected the bright sunlight, when suddenly
he felt himself environed and penetrated by the Light of God, and
admitted into the innermost ground and centre of the universe. His
experience, instead of waning as he came back to normal consciousness,
on the contrary deepened. He went to the public green in Goerlitz, near
his house, and there it seemed to him that he could see into the very
heart and secret of Nature, and that he could behold the innermost
properties of things.[18] In his own account of his experience, Boehme
plainly indicates that he had been going through a long and earnest
travail of soul as a Seeker,[19] "striving to find the heart of Jesus
Christ and to be freed and delivered from everything that turned him
away from Christ." At last, he says, he resolved to "put his life to
the utmost hazard" rather than miss his life-quest, when suddenly the
"gate was opened." He continues his account as follows: "In one
quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years
together in a University. . . . I saw and knew the Being of Beings,
the Byss and Abyss, the eternal generation of the Trinity, the origin
and descent of this world, and of all creatures through Divine Wisdom.
I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds--(1) the Divine,
Angelical, or Paradisaical World; (2) the dark world, the origin of
fire; and (3) the external, visible world as an outbreathing or
expression of the internal and spiritual worlds. I saw, too, the
essential nature of evil and of good, and how the {160} pregnant
Mother--the eternal genetrix--brought them forth."[20]
He has also vividly told his experience in the _Aurora_: "While I was
in affliction and trouble, I elevated my spirit, and earnestly raised
it up unto God, as with a great stress and onset, lifting up my whole
heart and mind and will and resolution to wrestle with the love and
mercy of God and not to give over unless He blessed me--then the Spirit
did break through. When in my resolved zeal I made such an assault,
storm, and onset upon God, as if I had more reserves of virtue and
power ready, with a resolution to hazard my life upon it, suddenly my
spirit did break through the Gate, not without the assistance of the
Holy Spirit, and I reached to the innermost Birth of the Deity and
there I was embraced with love as a bridegroom embraces his bride. My
triumphing can be compared to nothing but the experience in which life
is generated in the midst of death or like the resurrection from the
dead. In this Light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in all
created things, even in herbs and grass, I knew God--who He is, how He
is, and what His will is--and suddenly in that Light my will was set
upon by a mighty impulse to describe the being of God."[21]
This experience was the momentous watershed of his life. He is
constantly referring to it either directly or indirectly. "I teach,
write, and speak," is his frequent testimony, "of what has been wrought
in me. I have not scraped my teaching together out of histories and so
made _opinions_. I have by God's grace obtained eyes of my own."[22]
"There come moments," he writes, "when the soul sees God as in a flash
of lightning,"[23] and he tells his readers that "when the Gate is
opened" to them, they also "will understand."[24] "In my own
faculties," he writes again, "I am as blind a man as {161} ever was,
but in the Spirit of God my spirit sees through all."[25]
During the ten quiet years which followed "the opening of the Gate" to
him, Boehme meditated on what he had seen, and, though he does not say
so, he almost certainly read much in the works of "the great masters,"
as he calls them, who were trying to tell, often in confused language,
the central secret of the universe. Instead of fading out, his "flash"
of insight grew steadily clearer to him as he read and pondered, and
little by little, as one comes to see in the dark, certain great ideas
became defined. With his third "flash,"[26] which came to him in 1610,
when he felt once more "overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and touched by
God,"[27] he was moved to write down for his own use what he had seen.
"It was," he says, "powerfully borne in upon my mind to write down
these things for a memorial, however difficult they might be of
apprehension to my outer self [intellect] and of expression through my
pen. I felt compelled to begin at once, like a child going to school,
to work upon this very great Mystery. Inwardly [in spirit] I saw it
all well enough, as in a great depth; for I looked through as into a
chaos where all things lie [undifferentiated] but the unravelling
thereof seemed impossible. From time to time an opening took place
within me, _as of a growth_.[28] I kept this to myself for twelve
years [1600-12], being full of it and I experienced a vehement impulse
before I could bring it out into expression; but at last it overwhelmed
me like a cloud-burst which hits whatever it lights upon. And so it
went with me: whatsoever I could grasp sufficiently to bring it out,
that I wrote down."[29]
This first book which thus grew out of his spiritual travails and
"openings" Boehme called _Morning Glow_, to which later, through the
suggestion of a friend, he gave {162} the title _Aurora_. It is a
strange _melange_ of chaos where all things lie undifferentiated and of
insight; dreary wastes of words that elude comprehension, with
beautiful patches of spiritual oasis. He himself always felt that the
book was dictated to him, and that he only passively held the pen which
wrote it. "Art," he says, speaking of his writing, "has not written
here, neither was there any time to consider how to set it down
punctually, according to the understanding of the letters, but all was
ordered according to the direction of the Spirit, which often went in
haste, so that in many words letters may be wanting, and in some places
a capital letter for a word; so that _the Penman's hand_, by reason
that he was not accustomed to it, did often shake. And though I could
have wrote in a more accurate, fair, and plain manner, yet the reason
was this, that the burning fire often forced forward with speed, and
the hand and pen must hasten directly after it; for it goes and comes
like a sudden shower."[30] This is obviously an inside account of the
production of inspirational script, amounting almost to automatic
impulsion. Throughout his voluminous writings he often speaks of "this
hand," or "this pen" as though they were owned and moved by a will far
deeper than his own individual consciousness,[31] and his writings
themselves frequently bear the marks of automatisms.
His manuscript copy of _Morning Glow_ was freely lent to readers and
circulated widely. Boehme himself kept no copy by him, but he tells us
that during its wanderings the manuscript was copied out in full four
times by strangers and brought to him.[32] One of the copies fell into
the hands of Gregorius Richter, pastor primarius of Goerlitz, a violent
guardian of orthodoxy and a man extremely jealous of any infringement
of the dignity of his official position. He proceeded at
once--"without sufficient examination or knowledge"--to {163} "vilify
and condemn" the writing, and in a sermon on "False Prophets" he
vigorously attacked the local prophet of Goerlitz, who meekly sat in
Church and listened to the "fulminations" against him.[33] After the
sermon, Boehme modestly asked the preacher to show him what was wrong
with his teaching, but the only answer he received was that if he did
not instantly leave the town the pastor would have him arrested; and
the following day Richter had Boehme summoned before the magistrates,
and succeeded by his influence and authority in overawing them so that
they ordered the harmless prophet to leave the town forthwith without
any time given him to see his family or to close up his affairs.
Boehme quietly replied, "Yes, dear Sirs, it shall be done; since it
cannot be otherwise I am content." The next day, however, the
magistrates of Goerlitz held a meeting and recalled the banished prophet
and offered him the privilege of remaining in his home and occupation
on condition that he would cease from writing on theological matters.
On this latter point we have Boehme's own testimony, though he does not
refer the condition to the magistrates. "When I appeared before him"
[Pastor Richter], Boehme says, "to defend myself and indicate my
standpoint, the Rev. Primarius [Richter] exacted from me a promise to
give up writing and to this I assented, since I did not then see
clearly the divine way, nor did I understand what God would later do
with me. . . . By his order I gave up for many years [1613-18] all
writing or speaking about my knowledge of divine things, hoping vainly
that the evil reports would at last come to an end, instead of which
they only grew worse and more malignant."[34]
Boehme's friend, Doctor Cornelius Weissner, in his account, which is
none too accurate, endeavours to find an explanation of Richter's
persistent hate and persecution {164} of the shoemaker-prophet in a
gentle reproof which the latter administered to the former for having
meanly treated a poor kinsman of Boehme in a small commercial
transaction, but it is by no means necessary to bring up incidents of
this sort to discover an adequate ground for Richter's fury. The
_Aurora_ itself furnishes plenty of passages which would, if read,
throw a jealous guardian of orthodoxy into fierce activity. One
passage in which Boehme boldly attacks the popular doctrine of
predestination and asserts that the writers and scribes who teach it
are "masterbuilders of Lies" will be sufficient illustration of the
theological provocation: "This present world doth dare to say that God
hath decreed or concluded it so in His predestinate purpose and counsel
that some men should be saved and some should be damned, as if hell and
malice and evil had been from eternity and that it was in God's
predestinate purpose that men should be and must be therein. Such
persons pull and hale the Scriptures to prove it, though, indeed, they
neither have the knowledge of the true God nor the understanding of
Scripture. These justifiers and disputers assist the Devil steadfastly
and pervert God's truth and change it into lies."[35] He closed his
book with these daring words: "Should Peter or Paul seem to have
written otherwise, then look to the essence, look to the heart [_i.e._
to interior meaning]. If you lay hold of the heart of God you have
ground enough."[36] His entire conception of salvation was, too, as we
shall see, vastly different from the prevailing orthodox conception,
and furthermore he was only a layman, innocent of the schools, and yet
he was claiming to speak as an almost infallible instrument of a fresh
revelation of God. Theologians of the type of the Primarius Richter
need no other provocation to account for their relentless pursuit of
local prophets that appear in the domain of their authority.
Meantime Boehme's fame was slowly spreading, and he was drawing into
sympathetic fellowship with himself a number of high-minded and serious
men who were {165} dissatisfied with the current orthodox teaching. In
this group of friends who found comfort in the fresh message of Boehme
were Dr. Balthazar Walther, director of the Chemical Laboratory of
Dresden, Dr. Tobias Kober, physician at Goerlitz, a disciple of
Paracelsus, Abraham von Franckenberg, who calls Jacob "our God-taught
man," Doctor Cornelius Weissner, who became intimate with him in 1618,
and the nobleman Carl von Endern, who copied out the entire manuscript
of the _Aurora_. These friends frequently encouraged Boehme to break
his enforced silence, and he himself was restless and melancholy,
feeling that he was "entrusted with a talent which he ought to put to
usury and not return to God singly and without improvement, like the
lazy servant." "It was with me," he writes, describing his years of
silence, "as when a seed is hidden in the earth. It grows up in storm
and rough weather, against all reason. In winter time, all is dead,
and reason says: 'It is all over with it.' But the precious seed
within me sprouted and grew green, oblivious of all storms, and amid
disgrace and ridicule it has blossomed forth into a lily!"[37]
Under the pressure, from without and from within, he resolved after
five years of repression to break the seal of silence and give the
world his message. Writing to a dear friend, whom he called "a plant
of God," he says: "My very dear brother in the life of God, you are
more acceptable to me in that it was you who awaked me out of my sleep,
that I might go on to bring forth fruit in the life of God--and I want
you to know that after I was awakened _a strong smell was given to me
in the life of God_."[38] During the next six years (1618-24) he wrote
almost incessantly, producing, from 1620 on, book after book in rapid
succession.[39] In 1622, he informs a friend that he {166} has "laid
aside his trade to serve God and his brothers,"[40] and in 1623, he
says that he has written without ceasing during the autumn and winter.
He felt throughout his life that the "illumination," which broke upon
him in the year 1600, steadily increased with the years, and he came to
look upon his first book as only the crude attempt of a child as
compared with his later works. "The Day," he writes in 1620, "has now
overtaken the _Aurora_ [the morning glow]; it has grown full daylight
and the morning is extinguished."[41] He says, with artlessness, that
when he wrote the _Aurora_, he was not yet accustomed to the Spirit.
The heavenly joy, indeed, met him and he followed the Spirit's
guidance, but much of his own wild and untamed nature still remained to
mar his work. Each successive book marks a growth of "the spiritual
lily" in him, he thinks: "Each book from the first is ten times
deeper!"[42]
Once again, the zeal of a friend brought Boehme into the storm-centre
of persecution. Until 1623, his works circulated only in manuscript
and were kept from the eye of his ecclesiastical enemy, but toward the
end of that year, an admirer, Sigismund von Schweinitz, printed three
of his little books--_True Repentance_; _True Resignation_; and _The
Supersensual Life_--in one volume under the title _The Way to Christ_.
Richter was immediately aroused and poured forth his feelings in some
desperately bad verses:
Quot continentur lineae, blasphemiae
Tot continentur in libro sutorio,
Qui nil nisi picem redolet sutoriam,
{167}
Atrum et colorem, quern vocant sutorium.
Pfuy! pfuy! teter sit fetor a nobis procul![43]
But the Primarius was not content with this harmless weapon of
ridicule. He stirred up the neighbouring clergymen to join him in the
attack, and a complaint was lodged in Town Council against Boehme as a
"rabid enthusiast," and he was warned to leave the town. Boehme was as
sweet and gentle in spirit now as he had been ten years before. He
wrote in 1624: "I pray for those who have reviled and condemned me.
They curse me and I bless. I am standing the test ["Proba"] and have
the mark of Christ on my forehead."[44] But he thought that it did not
befit him as an instrument of God's revelation to let the false charges
against him go unanswered. He accordingly replied to the accusations
in an _Apology_, in which the whole depth and beauty of his spiritual
nature breathes forth. His appeal was in vain and he was forced to
leave Goerlitz. He went forth, however, in no discouraged mood. He saw
that his message was "being sounded through Europe," and he predicts
that "the nations will take up what his own native town is casting
away. Already, he hears, his book has been read with interest in the
Court of the Elector of Saxony, and he writes, March 15, 1624: "I am
invited there to a conference with high people and I have consented to
go at the end of the Leipzig fair. Soon the revelation of Jesus Christ
shall break forth and destroy the works of the Devil."[45] The real
trouble with the world, he thinks, is that the Christians in it are
titular and verbal,"--they are only "opinion-peddlers,"[46] and that is
why a man who insists upon a reproduction of the life of Christ is
persecuted. The visit to the Elector's Court in Dresden came off well
for the simple shoemaker. He spent two months in the home of the court
physician, Dr. Hinkelmann, where many of the nobility and clergy came
to see {168} him and to talk with him. Three professors of theology
and other learned doctors were asked by the Elector to examine him.
They reported that they did not yet quite succeed in understanding him,
and that therefore they could not pronounce judgment. They hoped "His
Highness would please to have patience and allow the man sufficient
time to expound his ideas"--which were, in fact, already "expounded" in
more than a score of volumes! One of the professors is reported to
have said: "I would not for the world be a party to this man's
condemnation," and another declared: "Nor would I, for who knows what
lies at the bottom of it all!"[47]
The end of the good man's life, however, was near. He was taken ill in
November 1624, while staying with his old friend, von Schweinitz, and
he hurried home to Goerlitz, where his family had remained during his
absence, to die in the quiet of his own house. The night before he
died, he spoke of hearing beautiful music, and asked to have the door
opened that he might hear it better. In the morning--as the _Aurora_
appeared--he bade farewell to his wife and children, committed his soul
to the crucified Lord Jesus Christ, arranged a few simple matters, and,
with a smile on his face, said, "Now I go to Paradise."
His old enemy, Richter, had died a few months before him, but the new
pastor was of the same temper and refused to preach his funeral sermon.
The second pastor of the city was finally ordered by the Governor of
Lausitz to preach the sermon, which he began with the words, "I had
rather have walked a hundred and twenty miles than preach this
sermon!"[48] The common people, however,--the shoemakers, tanners and
a "great concourse of us his fast friends," as one of them
writes,--were at the funeral, and a band of young shoemakers carried
his body to its last resting-place, where a block of porphyry now
informs the visitor that "Jacob Boehme, _philosophus Teutonicus_"
sleeps beneath.
Gruetzmacher holds that Boehme is an "isolated thinker," having little,
if any, historical connection with {169} the past.[49] I do not agree
with this view. I find in him rather the ripe fulfilment of the
powerful protest against the dead letter, against a formal religion,
and equally a fulfilment of a Christianity of inward life, which was
voiced so vigorously in the writings of Denck, Buenderlin, Entfelder,
Franck, and Weigel, neglecting for the moment another side of Boehme
and another set of influences which appeared in him. The central note
of his life-long prophet-cry was against a form of religion built upon
the letter of Scripture and consisting of external ceremonies and
practices, and this is the ground of Richter's bitter hostility and
stubborn opposition.[50]
The Church of his day seems to him a veritable Babel--"full of pride
and wrangling, and jangling, and snarling about the letter of the
written Word," lacking in true, real, effectual knowledge and power; a
pitiably poor "substitute for the Temple of the holy Spirit where God's
living Word is taught."[51] Through each of his books we hear of
"verbal Christendom"; of "titular Christians"; of "historical feigned
faith"; of "history religion"; of "an external forgiveness of sins"; of
"the work of outward letters." "The builders of Babel," he says,
"cannot endure that one should teach that Christ Himself must be the
teacher in the human heart"--"they jangle instead about the mere husk,
about the written word and letter while they miss the living Word."[52]
The divisions of Christendom are due to the fact that its
"master-builders" are of the Babel-type. They always follow the line
of _opinion_; their basis is "the letter"; their method of approach is
_external_. They build "stone houses in which they read the writings
which the Apostles left behind them," while they themselves dispute and
contend about "mental idols and {170} opinions."[53] The true Church
of Christ, on the contrary, is the living Temple of the Spirit. It is
built up of men made wholly new by the inward power of the Divine
Spirit and made _one_ by an inward unity of heart and life with
Christ--as "a living Twig of our Life-Tree Jesus Christ." Nobody can
belong to this Church unless "he puts on the shirt of a little child,"
dies to selfishness and hypocrisy, rises again in a new will and
obedience, and forms his life in its inmost ground according to Christ,
the Life.[54] "The wise world," he declares, "will not believe in the
true inward work of Christ in the heart; it will have only an external
washing away of sins in Grace," but the ABC of true religion is far
different.[55] He only is a Christian in fact in whom Christ dwelleth,
liveth and hath His being, in whom Christ hath arisen as the eternal
ground of the soul. He only is a Christian who has this high title in
himself, and has entered with mind and soul into that Eternal Word
which has manifested itself as the life of our humanity.[56] He wrote
near the end of his life to Balthazar Tilken: "If I had no other book
except the book which I myself am, I should have books enough. The
entire Bible lies in me if I have Christ's Spirit in me. What do I
need of more books? Shall I quarrel over what is outside me before I
have learned what is within me?"[57] "What would it profit me if I
were continually quoting the Bible and knew the whole book by heart but
did not know the Spirit that inspired the holy men who wrote that book,
nor the source from which they received their knowledge? How can I
expect to understand them in truth, if I have not the same Spirit they
had?"[58]
This insistence on personal, first-hand experience and practice of the
Christ-Life, as the ground of true religion, {171} is the fundamental
feature of Boehme's Christianity. He travels, as we shall see, through
immense heights and deeps. Like Dante, who immeasurably surpasses him
in power of expression, but not in prophetic power of vision, he saw
the eternal realities of heaven and hell and the world between, and he
told as well as he could what he _saw_, but his practical message which
runs like a thread through all his writings is always simple--almost
childlike in its simplicity--"Thou must thyself be the way. The
spiritual understanding must be born in thee."[59] "A Christian is a
new creature in the ground of the heart."[60] "The Kingdom of God is
not from without, but it is a new man, who lives in love, in patience,
in hope, in faith and in the Cross of Jesus Christ."[61]
And this simple shoemaker of Goerlitz, with his amazing range of thought
and depth of experience, practised and embodied the way of life which
he recommended. He was a good man, and his life touches us even now
with a kind of awe. "Life," he once said, "is a strange bath of thorns
and thistles,"[62] and he himself experienced that "bath," but he went
through the world hearing everywhere a divine music and "having a joy
in his heart which made his whole being tremble and his soul triumph as
if it were in God."[63]
[1] I have used as primary source the German edition of Boehme's
Works--_Theosophia revelata_--published in 1730 in 8 vols. All my
references are to the English translations made by Sparrow, Ellistone,
and Blunden, 1647-61. These translations were republished, 1764, in 4
vols. in an edition which has incorrectly been called William Law's
edition. Four volumes have been republished by John M. Watkins of
London, as follows: _The Threefold Life of Man_, 1909; _The Three
Principles_, 1910; _The Forty Questions_ and _The Clavis_, 1911; and
_The Way to Christ_, 1911. The _Signatura rerum_, in English, has been
published in "Everyman's Library." A valuable volume of selections
from "Jacob Behmen's Theosophic Philosophy" was made by Edward Taylor,
London, 1691. Many volumes of selections have been published in recent
years. The books on Boehme which I have found most suggestive and
helpful are the following: Franz von Baader's "Vorlesungen und
Erlaeuterungen ueber J. Boehme's Lehre," _Werke_ (Leipzig, 1852), vol.
iii. [edition of 1855, vol. xiii.]; Emile Boutroux, _Le Philosophe
allemand_ (Paris, 1888): translated into English by Rothwell in
Boutroux's _Historical Studies in Philosophy_ (London, 1912), pp.
169-233; Hans Lassen Martensen's _Jacob Boehme_ (translated from the
Danish by T. Rhys Evans, London, 1885); Franz Hartmann's _Life and
Doctrine of Jacob Boehme_ (London, 1891); Von Harless' _Jacob Boehme
und die Alchymisten_ (Leipzig, 1882); Ederheimer's _Jakob Boehme und
die Romantiker_ (Heidelberg, 1901); Paul Deussen's _Jacob Boehme_--an
Address delivered at Kiel, May 8, 1897--translated from the German by
Mrs. D. S. Hehner and printed as Introduction to Watkin's edition of
_The Three Principles_ (1910); Christopher Walton's _Notes and
Materials for a Biography of William Law_ (London, 1854)--a volume of
great value to the student of Boehme; Rudolph Steiner's _Mystics of the
Renaissance_ (translated, London, 1911), pp. 223-245; A. J. Penny's
_Studies in Jacob Boehme_ (London, 1912), uncritical and written from
the theosophical point of view; Hegel's _History of philosophy_
(translated by Haldane and Simson, London, 1895), iii. pp. 188-216.
[2] Aurora, John Sparrow's translation (London, 1656), ii. 79-80.
[3] _Aurora_, iii. 1-3.
[4] _Third Epistle_, 15.
[5] _Aurora_, xiii. 27.
[6] _Ibid._ viii. 19.
[7] _Ibid._ ix 90.
[8] _Ibid._ xiii. 2-4.
[9] _Third Epistle_, 22.
[10] Many thinkers of prominent rank have borne testimony to the
greatness of Boehme's genius. I shall mention only a few of these
estimates:
"I would recommend you to procure the writings of Boehme and diligently
read them. For though I have studied philosophy and theology from my
youth . . . yet I must acknowledge that the above writings have been to
me of more service for the understanding of the Bible than all my
University learning."--"J. G. Gictell, 1698.
"Jacob Boehme, as a religious and philosophical genius, has not often
had his equal in the world's history."--"Jacob Boehme: His Life and
Philosophy." An Address by Dr. Paul Deussen.
"Jacob Boehme est le seul, au moins dont on ait eu les ecrits jusqu'a
lui, auquel Dieu ait decouvert le fond de la nature, tant des choses
spirituelles, que des corporelles."--Peter Poiret, in a note at the end
of his _Theologie germanique_, 1700.
"As a chosen servant of God, Jacob Boehme must be placed among those
who have received the highest measures of light, wisdom, and knowledge
from above. . . . All that lay in religion and nature as a mystery
unsearchable was in its deepest ground opened to this instrument of
God."--William Law, _Works_ (ed. 1893), vi. p. 205.
"To Jacob Boehme belongs the merit of having taught more profoundly
than any one else before or after him the truth that back of and behind
all that has come to appear of good and evil there is an immaterial
World which is the essence and reality of all that is."--Franz von
Baader, _Werke_ (Leipzig, 1852), iii. p. 382.
Novalis wrote in a letter to Ludwig Tieck in 1800: "Man sieht durchaus
in ihm [Jakob Boehme] den gewaltigen Fruehling mit seinen quellenden,
treibenden, bildenden, und mischenden Kraeften, die von innen heraus die
Welt gebaeren. Ein echtes Chaos voll dunkler Begier und wunderbarem
Leben--einen wahren auseinandergehenden Mikrokosmos."--Quoted from
Edgar Ederheimer's _Jakob Boehme und die Romantiker_ (1904), p. 57.
[11] His English translators in the seventeenth century variously
spelled his name Behm, Behme, and Behmen. This latter spelling was
adopted in the so-called Law Edition of 1764, and has thus come into
common use in England and America.
[12] Boehme refers frequently to "the writings of high masters," whom
he says he read (_Aurora_, x. 45), and he often names Schwenckfeld and
Weigel in particular. See especially _The Second Epistle_, sec. 54-62
[13] _Memoirs of the Life, Death and Burial, and Wonderful Writings of
Jacob Behmen_, translated by Francis Okeley (1780), p. 22.
[14] _Memoirs_, p. 2.
[15] _Memoirs_, p. 6. Von Franckenberg says that Boehme himself told
him this incident.
[16] Ibid. pp. 4-5. The reader will have noted the long history of
this phrase, "Sabbath of the soul."
[17] _Ibid._ p. 7.
[18] _Memoirs_, p. 8. Paracelsus taught that the inner nature of
things might be seen by one who has become an organ of the Universal
Mind. He says: "Hidden things which cannot be perceived by the
physical senses may be found through the sidereal body, through whose
organism we may look into nature in the same way as the sun shines
through a glass. The inner nature of everything may be known through
Magic [The Divine Magia] and the power of inner sight."--Hartmann's
_Life of Paracelsus_ (1896), p. 53.
[19] He uses this word _Seeker_ hundreds of times in his writings.
[20] _Second Epistle_, sec. 6-8.
[21] _Aurora_, xix. 10-13. He goes on in the following sections to
describe how for twelve years this insight "grew in his soul like a
young tree before the exact understanding of it all" was arrived at.
[22] _The Fifth Epistle_, 50.
[23] _Aurora_, xi. 146.
[24] _Ibid._ xi. 6.
[25] Aurora, xxii. 47.
[26] In the _Aurora_ Boehme speaks of the Flash as an experience: "As
the lightning flash appears and disappears again in a moment, so it is
also with the soul. In its battle the soul suddenly penetrates through
the clouds and sees God like a flash of Light."--Ibid. xi. 76.
[27] _Memoirs_, p. 8.
[28] Evidently the "flash" of the year 1610 was not the last one. In
fact, he seems to have had frequent ecstasies.
[29] _The Second Epistle_, 9-10.
[30] _Third Epistle_, 35.
[31] See especially _Signatura rerum_, ix. 63, and _Forty Questions_,
xxvi. 2-3 and xxx. 3 and 5.
[32] _Third Epistle_, 32. The _Memoirs_ describe how it was copied by
"a Gentleman of some rank" [Carl von Endern].
[33] _Memoirs_, p. 9.
[34] Preserved in the Diary of Bartholomew Scultetus, then Mayor of
Goerlitz (Ueberfeld's edition, 1730). This Diary does not record any
actual banishment of Boehme. The data for our knowledge of the
persecutions of Boehme are found in a personal narrative written by his
friend Cornelius Weissner, M.D.--_Memoirs_, pp. 39-50.
[35] _Aurora_, xiii. 7-10.
[36] _Ibid._ xxxvi. 152.
[37] _Third Epistle_, 7.
[38] _Fifteenth Epistle_, 18.
This "new smell in the life of God" often occurs in
Boehme's writings. Compare George Fox's testimony, "The whole creation
had a new smell." For further comparisons see pp. 221-227.
[39] The following is a complete list of his writings:
1612. _The Aurora_.
1619. _The Three Principles of the Divine Essence_.
1620. _The Threefold Life of Man; Forty Questions; The Incarnation of
Jesus Christ; The Suffering, Death and Resurrection of Christ; The Tree
of Faith; Six Points; Heavenly and Earthly Mysterium; The Last Times_.
1621. _De signatura rerum; The Four Complexions; Apology to Balthazar
Tilken_ in 2 parts; _Consideration on Esaias Stiefel's Book_.
1622. Sec. _Apology to Stiefel; Repentance; Resignation; Regeneration_.
1623. _Predestination and Election of God; A Short Compendium of
Repentance; The Mysterium magnum_.
1624. _The Clavis; The Supersensual Life; Divine Contemplation;
Baptism and the Supper; A Dialogue Between the Enlightened and
Unenlightened Soul; An Apology on the Book of Repentance; 177
Theosophic Questions; An Epitome of the Mysterium magnum; The Holy
Week; An Exposition of the Threefold World_.
Undated. _An Apology to Esaias Stiefel; The Last Judgment; Epistles_.
[40] _Thirty-first Epistle_, 10.
[41] _The Third Epistle_, 30.
[42] _Ibid._ 29.
[43] There are as many blasphemies in the shoemaker's book as there are
lines. It smells of shoemaker's wax and filthy blacking. May this
intolerable stench be far from us.
[44] _Thirty-fourth Epistle_, 5.
[45] _Thirty-third Epistle_.
[46] _Thirty-fourth Epistle_, 16 and 21.
[47] Weissner's Narrative, _Memoirs_, p. 49.
[48] _Ibid._ p. 58.
[49] _Wort und Geist_, p. 196 _seq._
[50] What could be a bolder criticism of the existing Church of his day
than this: "In place of the wolf [the Roman Church] there has grown up
the fox [the Lutheran Church] another anti-Christ, never a whit better
than the first. If he should come to be old enough how he would devour
the poor people's hens!"--_The Three Principles of the Divine Essence_,
xviii. 102.
[51] _Mysterium magnum_, xxvii. 47.
[52] _Ibid._ xxviii. 49-51.
[53] _Mysterium magnum_, xxxvi. 34; xl. 98.
[54] _Ibid._ lxiii. 47-51; _Twenty-first Epistle_, 1.
[55] _Myst. mag._ xxv. 13.
[56] _The First Epistle_, 3-5.
[57] _Apology to Tilken_, ii. 298.
[58] _Ibid._ 72. Compare George Fox's testimony: "All must come to
that Spirit, if they would know God or Christ or the Scriptures aright,
which they that gave them forth were led and taught by."--_Journal_
(ed. 1901), i. 35 and _passim_.
[59] _Sig. re._ xiv. i.
[60] _Myst. mag._ lxx. 40.
[61] _Fourth Epistle_, 27 and 32.
[62] _The Three Princ._ xxii. 2.
[63] _Aurora_, iii. 39.
{172}