JACOB BOEHME'S "WAY OF SALVATION"
"I will write a Process or Way which I myself have gone."[1] Most
writers who have treated of Boehme have mainly dealt with his
_Weltanschauung_--his theosophical view of the Abyss and the worlds of
time and eternity,--or they have devoted themselves to descriptions of
his type of mysticism.[2] His important permanent contribution to
Christianity is, however, to be found in his interpretation of the way,
or, as he calls it, the process of salvation. Very much that he wrote
about the procession of the universe is capricious and subjective. His
interpretations of Genesis, and of Old Testament Scripture in general,
are thoroughly uncritical and of value only as they reveal his own mind
and his occasional flashes of insight. But his accounts of his own
_experience_ and his message of the way to God possess an elemental and
universal value, and belong among the precious words of the prophets of
the race. His Way of Salvation is in direct line with the central
ideas of Denck, Buenderlin, Entfelder, Franck, Schwenckfeld, and Weigel;
that is, his emphasis is always, as was theirs, upon the native divine
possibilities of the soul, upon the fact of a spiritual environment in
immediate correspondence and co-operation with the soul, and upon the
necessity of personal and inward experience as the key to every gate of
life; but he puts more stress even than Schwenckfeld did {191} upon the
epoch-making new birth, and he sees more in the Person of Christ as the
way of salvation than any of the spiritual Reformers of the sixteenth
century had seen, while his own personal experience was so unique and
illuminating, so profound and transforming, that he was able to speak
on divine things with a grasp and insight and with a spiritual
authority beyond that attained by any of the reformers in this group.
He has given, I think, as profound and as simple, and at the same time
as vital an interpretation of salvation through Christ as the
Reformation movement produced before the nineteenth century, and much
that he said touches the very core of what seems to us to-day to be the
heart of the Gospel, the central fact of mature religion.[3]
As we have seen, Boehme does not in the least blink the tragic depth of
sin, while he goes as far as anybody in holding that "the centre of
man's soul came out of eternity,"[4] that "as a mother bringeth forth a
child out of her own substance and nourisheth it therewith, so doth God
with man his child,"[5] and that the inward ground and centre of the
soul, with its divine capacity of response to Grace and Light, is an
inalienable possession of every man.[6] Yet, at the same time, he
insists that there is in every soul "both a yes and a no," a vision of
the good and a _contrarium_, a hunger for the universal will of God and
a hunger for the particular will of self.[7] The form of hunger, the
inclination of desire, the attitude of will shapes the destiny, forms
the fundamental disposition, and builds the life of every man into
heaven or into hell--"a man puts on a garment of light or a garment of
wrath as he puts on clothes."[8] To consent to false desire, to turn
toward objects that feed only the particular selfish will, to live in
the lower "qualities" of dark-fire is to {192} form a soul _tinctured_
with darkness and sundered from the eternal root of Life. Lucifer went
the whole way in his consent to false and evil desire. He said, "Evil
be thou my good!" and formed his entire nature out of the
dark-principle, and "his Light went out." Adam and his offspring after
him, however, only dimmed the native Light and deadened the original
power that belongs to one who comes from God, to live in heavenly
harmony and joy. Man has fallen indeed, but he is not hopelessly lost,
he is "forever seeking his native country," and he forever bears within
himself an immortal seed which may burst into Life--into a
"Lily-blossom."[9] The way of salvation for Boehme is the _process_ by
which this original Light and power, dimmed and deadened by sin, are
restored to the soul.
He never tires of insisting that the restoration can come only by a
_process of Life_, not by a "scheme" of theology. Like the early
prophets of Israel, in their sweeping attacks on the ritual and
sacrificial systems that were being substituted for moral and spiritual
life, Boehme flings himself with holy passion against the substitution
of doctrines of salvation for a real life-process of salvation,
personally experienced in the soul. "Cain" and "Babel" are his two
favourite types of the prevailing substitute-religion which he calls
"verbal," or "historical," or "titular" Christianity.[10] "Whatever
Babel teaches," he says, "of external imputed righteousness, or of
external assumed adoption is without foundation or footing."[11] He is
still only a follower of "Cain" who tries to cover his old, evil,
unchanged self "with the purple mantle of Christ's death."[12] The
"opinion" that the old man of evil-will can be "covered" with Christ's
merit, the "faith" that His death pays off for us the debt of our sin
is only "a supposed religion."[13] "Christianity," he says again,
"does not consist in the mere knowing of history and applying the
history-knowledge to ourselves, {193} saying: 'Christ died for us; He
hath paid the ransom for us, so that we need do nothing but comfort
ourselves therewith and steadfastly believe that it is so.'"[14] The
"doctors" and "the wise world" and "the makers of opinion" will have it
that Christ has suffered on the Cross for all our sins, and that we can
be justified and acquitted of all our transgressions by what He did for
us, but it is no true, safe way for the soul. To stake faith upon a
history that once was, to look for "satisfaction" through the
sufferings which Christ endured before we were born is to be "the child
of an assumed grace," is to possess a mere external and historical
faith that leaves the dim, weak soul where it was before. All such
"invented works" and "supposed schemes" are of Anti-Christ, they "avail
nothing" whatever toward the real process of salvation.[15]
The gravamen of his charge is not that the "opinions" are false, or
that the "history" is unimportant, but that "opinions" and "history"
are taken as substitutes for religion itself, which is and must always
be an actual inward process constructing a new and victorious life in
the person himself. "All fictions, I say, and devices which men
contrive to come to God by are lost labour and vain endeavour _without
a new mind_. Verbal forgiveness and outward imputation of
righteousness are false and vain comforts--soft cushions for the evil
soul--without the creation of a will wholly new, which loveth and
willeth evil no more."[16] The whole problem, then, is the problem of
the formation of a new vision, a new desire, a new will, and Boehme
finds the solution of this deepest human problem in Christ. Christ is
the Light-revelation of God--the shining forth of the Light and Love
nature of the Eternal God. It must not be supposed for a moment that
once--before satisfaction was made to Him--God was an angry God who had
to be "reconciled" by a transaction, or that there was _a time in
history_ when God began to reveal His Heart in a Christ-revelation, or
{194} that when Christ became man, Deity divided itself into sundered
Persons.[17] "No. You ought not to have such thoughts," Boehme says.
The Heart and Light and Love of God are from eternity. Christ has
never sundered or broken Himself away from God; they are not two but
forever One. All the Light and Love and Joy of God have blossomed into
the Christ-manifestation and become revealed in Him. Like everything
else in the universe, Christ is both outward and inward. He belongs in
the eternal inward world and He also has had His temporal manifestation
in the visible world. The Heart of God became a human soul, brought
the fulness of the Deity into humanity, and slew the spirit of the
world.[18] The inward penetrated the outward and illuminated it with
Light.[19] Christ entered into humanity and tinctured it with
Deity.[20] In Him the Heart of God became man, and in the power of the
heavenly Light He wrestled with our wild human nature and conquered
it.[21] Eternity and time are united in Him.[22] He is the wedding
chamber of God and man.[23] He is God and man in one undivided
Person.[24] He is actual God; He is essential man--the God-man, the
man-God, in whom the arms of everlasting Love are outstretched and
through whom humanity is brought into the power of the Eternal God.[25]
It was in this "dear Emmanuel," as he often calls Christ, that "Love
became man and put on our human flesh and our human soul,"[26] and the
full power of Eternal Love stood revealed in time, for "One who is Love
itself was born of our own very birth."[27] The Cross was not a
transaction. It was the culmination of this mighty Love, for "here on
the cross hung God and man"--God's Love springing forth in a soul
strong enough to show it in its full scope.[28]
But let no person think that he can "cover himself with the purple
mantle of Christ's sufferings and death," {195} and so win his
salvation: "Thou thyself," he says, "must go through Christ's whole
journey, and enter wholly into His process."[29] "We become children
of God in Christ," he wrote in one of his Epistles, "not by an outward,
adventitious show of appropriating Grace, not through some merit of
Grace appropriated from without, or received in an historical
apprehension of being justified by another, but through an inward,
resident Grace, which regenerates us into childlikeness, so that Christ
the conqueror of death arises in us and becomes a dominating operation
in us."[30] This is the heart of his entire message. Every step must
be experimental. Salvation is an inward process, and Christ is
efficacious and effective because _He lives and operates in us_. "The
suffering and death of Christ," he says, "avail only for those who die
to their own will in and with Christ, and are buried with Him to a new
will and obedience, and hate sin; who put on Christ in His suffering,
reproach, and persecution, take His cross upon them and follow Him
under His red banner; to those who put on Christ in His process and now
become in the inward spiritual man Christ's members and the Temple of
God who dwells in us. No one has a right to comfort himself with
Christ's merits unless he desires wholly to put on Christ in himself.
He is not a Christian until he has put Him on by true repentance and
conversion to Him with absolute resignation and self-denial, so that
Christ espouseth and betrotheth Himself with him. . . . For a
Christian must be born of Christ and must die to the will of Adam. He
must have Christ in him and be a member of His Life according to the
spiritual man."[31]
Faith, which is always the key-word in any person's interpretation of
Christianity, is for Boehme a dynamic process of appropriating Christ,
and of re-living Him. "Faith," he writes in his treatise on _The
Incarnation_, {196} "is not historical knowledge for a man to make
articles of it and to depend on them, but faith is one spirit with God,
it is the activity of God; it is free, but only for the right and for
pure Love, in which it draws the breath of its power and strength. It
is, finally, itself the substance."[32] Faith is, thus, not knowledge,
it is not believing facts of history, it is not accepting metaphysical
dogma. It is, as he is never weary of saying, "strong earnestness of
spirit," the earnest will to live in the inward and eternal, passionate
hunger and thirst for God, and finally the act of receiving Christ into
the soul as a present power and spirit to live by. "I must die," he
wrote, "with my outward man [the man of self-centred will] in Christ's
death and arise and live anew in Him. Therefore I live now by the will
of faith in the spirit of Christ and receive Christ with His humanity
into my will. He makes through me a manifestation of the spiritual
world and introduces the true Love-sound into the harp-strings of my
life. He became that which I am, and now He has made me that which He
is!"[33]
Another word for this efficacious and dynamic Faith is "Birth" or
"innermost Birth," by which Boehme means the act of discovering the
Gate to the Heart and Love and Light of God, and of entering it. "The
Son of God, the Eternal Word of the Father, the Glance and Brightness
and Power of Eternal Light must become man and _be born in you_;
otherwise you are in the dark stable and go about groping."[34] "If
thou art born of God, then within the circle of thy own life is the
whole undivided Heart of God."[35] It is a transforming event by which
one swings over from life in the outer to life in the inner world, from
life in the dark world to life in the light world, and is born into the
kingdom, or principle, which Christ revealed in His triumphant
spiritual Life. The human spirit, by this innermost Birth, reaches the
principle of Life by which Christ lived, and the gate into heaven is
opened and paradise is in the soul. In a {197} beautiful passage he
says: "This birth must be wrought within you. The Heart, or the Son of
God must arise in the birth of your life, and then you are in Christ
and He is in you, and all that He and the Father have is yours; and as
the Son is one with the Father, so also the new man is one with the
Father and with the Son, one virtue, one power, one light, one life,
one eternal paradise, one enduring substance, one Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost, and thou His child!"[36] God is no longer conceived as far
away. He is now with His Love and Light as near as the soul is to
itself, and the joy of being born in Christ is like the joy of parents
when a little child is born to them.[37] God's will now becomes the
man's will, he turns back into the unity from which he broke away, he
sees now in one moment what all the doctors in the schools, on the mere
level of reason, have never seen, and his inward eye is so opened that
he knows God as soon as his eye turns toward Him.[38]
This Faith-process, or innermost life-birth, is not the act of a moment
that is over and done with. It means the progressive formation of a
new man within the man, so that the real Christian becomes a living
branch in a mighty Christ-Tree. Just as Adam was the trunk of a great
race-tree of fallen humanity, Christ is to be the Eternal Life-Tree of
the universe in whom all the new-born souls of men shall live as
springing, flowering branches or twigs: God created only one Man; all
other men are twigs of the One Stem.[39] "In Christ," he says, "we are
all only one, as a tree in many boughs and branches," and, with a
return to autobiography, Boehme adds, "His Life has been brought into
mine, so that I am atoned with Him in His Love. The will of Christ has
entered into humanity again in me, and now my will in me enters into
His humanity."[40] He writes to one of his Silesian friends: "You are
a growing branch in the Life-Tree of God in Christ, in whom all the
children of God are also branches," and he adds that there is "no other
faith {198} which saves except Christ in us," the Life of our
lives.[41] Sometimes he calls this triumphant experience the birth of
a new branch in Christ's Life-Tree, sometimes the birth of the Lily in
Christ's garden of flowers, sometimes it is the birth of the immortal
seed. Sometimes it is uniting in life and spirit with Him who is "the
Treader on the Serpent," sometimes it is finding the noble Virgin,
sometimes it is discovering the Philosopher's Stone, sometimes it is
winning the precious Diadem, sometimes it is possessing the key which
unlocks the Door, sometimes it is arriving at the Sabbath Quiet of the
soul. These are only a variety of ways, many of them forgotten
inheritances from alchemy and astrology, of saying that the soul finds
its goal in an experience which binds it into one common corporate life
with Christ and so into an elemental Love-Unity with God: whoever is
born of Christ liveth and walketh in Him, puts Him on in His suffering,
death, and resurrection, becomes a member of Christ's body, is
"tinctured" with His spirit, and has his own human life rooted in the
Love of God.[42] Here, then, in the creation and formation of this
organic Life-Tree the universe attains its ultimate goal. It is wholly
an achievement of free will, of holy choice. The dark Principle is not
annihilated, is not suppressed, but the Heart of God moves ever on in a
steadily growing triumph, binding soul after soul into the divine
Igdrasil Tree of the Light Universe, in a unity that is not now the
unity of negation and undifferentiation--an Abyss that swallows up all
that is in it,--but a unity of many wills united in a spirit of concord
and love, many persons formed by holy desire into one unbroken symphony
as harps of God.
With the change of _centre_ in the inner man corresponds also the outer
life of word and deed, for the outer, here as everywhere, is only the
"signature" of an inner which fits it: "A man must show the root of the
tree out of which spirit and flesh have their origin."[43] When the
will becomes new-born and the soul unites itself as a twig {199} in
Christ's Life-Tree, then it ceases to love sin and will it. When God
brings His will into birth in us, He gives us virtue and power to will
what He wills, and to leave our sins behind.[44] The attitude of hate,
the spirit of war are marks of the old unchanged nature, and are
heathenish and not Christian. When Christ is formed in the inner
ground of the soul, a man leaves the sword in the sheath and lives in
the virtue and power of peace and love. "What will Christ say," he
asks the ministers of the Church of his day, "when He sees your
apostolic hearts covered with armor? When He gave you the sword of the
Spirit, did He command you to fight and make war, or to instigate kings
and princes to put on the sword and kill?"[45]
Like the prophets of Israel, he feels intensely the sufferings of the
poor and the oppressed, and he breaks out frequently into a biting
satire on a kind of Christianity which not only neglects the true
_cure_ of soul and body, but "consumes the sweat and blood of the
needy," and feeds upon "the sighs and groans and tears of the
poor."[46] The true idea of a _real_ Christianity is "fraternity in
the Life of Christ"--"thy brother's soul," he says, "is a fellow-member
with thy soul,"[47] and he insists, as though it were the mighty burden
of his spirit, that all possessions, goods, and talents shall
contribute to the common life of humanity and to the benefit of the
social group.[48] It is much better for parents to labour to form good
souls in their children than to strive to gather and to leave behind
for them great riches and abundance of goods![49] Self-desire is a
ground not only of personal disquiet but also of social disturbance,
and Boehme feels that the way to spread peace and joy through the world
is to cultivate the Love-spirit of Christ and to practice it in
fellowship with men.
Like his German predecessor, Sebastian Franck, he is {200} primarily
concerned with the invisible Church, and he holds lightly to the
empirical Church as he knows it. The Church to which his spirit is
dedicated is the organic Life-Tree of which Christ is the living Stem.
The holy Zion is not from without, he says, it is built up of those who
are joined to Christ and who all live together in one city which is
Christ in us.[50] A Christian in the life belongs to no sect, he
ceases to wrangle over opinions and words, he dwells in the midst of
sects and Babel-churches, but he keeps above the controversies and
contentions, and "puts his knowing and willing into the Life of
Christ," and works quietly on toward the formation and triumph of the
one true Christian Church,[51] which will be, when its glory is
complete, the visible expression of the Divine Life-Tree.
He dislikes, as much as did the English Quaker, George Fox, the custom
of calling "stone houses" churches, and he will not admit that a
building is anything but a building: "Stone houses, called churches,
have no greater holiness than other houses, for they are built of stone
and other such material, as other houses are, and God is no more
powerful in them than He is in other houses, but the Church [_i.e._ the
Congregation] which meets there, if the members of it bind themselves
by prayer into one body in Christ, is a holy Temple of Jesus
Christ."[52]
His attitude toward outward sacraments consistently fits in with all
his central teachings. The outward, for Boehme, is never unimportant.
It is always significant and can always be used as a parable or symbol
of something inner and eternal. But the outward is at best only
temporal, only symbolic, and it becomes a hindrance if it is taken for
the real substance of which it is only the outward "signature": "The
form shall be destroyed and shall cease with time, but the spirit
remains forever."[53] The sacraments, he declares, do not take away
sin, for men go to church all their lives and receive the sacraments
{201} and remain as wicked and beastly as ever--while a holy man always
has a Church within himself and an inward ministry.[54] Blessedness,
therefore, lies not in the outward, but in the life and power of the
inward spirit, and it is only a Babel-Church that claims the right to
cast out those who have the real substance and neglect only the outward
form.[55] In his _Treatise on the Holy Supper_, he wrote: "It is not
enough for a man to hear sermons preached, and to be baptised in the
name of Christ, and to go to the Supper. This maketh no Christian.
For that, there must be _earnestness_. No person is a Christian unless
Christ live and work in him."[56]
The pith and heart of Christianity, the consummate goal of the way of
Salvation, for Boehme is, as we have seen, not "history" and not any
kind of outward "form" or "letter"--_buchstaebliches Wort_,--it is an
experience in which the soul finds itself "at the top of Jacob's
ladder," and feels its life in God and God's Life in it in an ineffable
Love-union. He has himself given a very simple and penetrating account
of this type of experience drawn from what he calls his own book of
life: "Finding within myself a powerful _contrarium_, namely, the
desires that belong to flesh and blood, I began to fight a hard battle
against my corrupted nature, and with the aid of God I made up my mind
to overcome the inherited evil will, to break it, and to enter wholly
into the Love of God. . . . This, however, was not possible for me to
accomplish, but I stood firmly by my _earnest resolution_, and fought a
hard battle with myself. Now while I was wrestling and battling, being
aided by God, a wonderful light arose within my soul. It was a light
entirely foreign to my unruly nature, but in it I recognized the true
nature of God and man, and the relation existing between them, a thing
which heretofore I had never understood."[57] In one of his other
autobiographical passages, he says that after much earnest seeking and
desire and many a hard repulse, "the Gate was opened!" These are {202}
characteristic accounts of a profound mystical experience. There had
been long stress and inward battle, the tension of a divided self, and
then a great ground swell of earnest will--a resolve, he says, to put
my life in hazard rather than give over, when "a wonderful light arose
within the soul" and "the Gate was opened." And "when this mighty
light fell upon me, I saw," he says, in still another description, "in
an effectual peculiar manner, and I knew in the spirit."[58]
The central aspect of his experience was plainly an overmastering
_conviction_ of contact with, an immersion into, a deeper world of
spirit and of inner unity of life and spirit with this deeper world.
His own personal spirit united, as he once put it, "with the innermost
Birth in God and stood in the Light."[59] He discovered that "God goes
clean another way to work" than by the way of reasoning or of sense
experience[60]--instead of waiting for man to climb up to Him, He
climbs up into man's soul.[61] By a new and inner way, to change the
figure, the tides of the shoreless Divine Sea break in upon the life of
a man and bathe his entire being. It seems to Boehme, at one time,
like the rising of a mid-noon Sun, with illuminating rays, and he
describes the experience in terms of Light and enlarged Vision, or,
again, it appears like the bursting open of a secret door into a world
of new dimensions, and he calls it the opening of the Gate, or now
again he feels as though the elemental creative power of God had burst
into operation within him and that a mighty birth-process had lifted
him to a new kingdom, or to a new order of nature, or, finally, hushed
and soothed and healed as though he had suddenly found the breast of an
infinite Mother, he describes his state as "the innermost Quiet"--the
return to "the soul's eternal native country and abiding Home."
Descriptions here all fail and are only "stammering words of a child,"
as Boehme himself says. But, as a matter of fact, descriptions fail
and fall short in the case of all genuine life-experiences, {203} even
those that are most universal and common to the race. How one feels
when after nights of agony from watching over a child that is hovering
between life and death, and seemingly certain to slip away from human
reach, the doctor says, "He has passed the crisis and the danger is
over!" one cannot describe. Whenever it is a matter that concerns the
inner _quick_ of the soul, all words are the stammerings of a child.
The true mystical experience is not primarily a knowledge-experience,
it is not the apprehension of one more describable fact to be added to
our total stock of information--what Boehme so often calls "opinions"
and "history,"--it is a sudden plunge or immersion into the stream of
Life itself, it is an interior appreciation of the higher meaning of
life by the discovery of a way of entering the Life-process, or,
better, of letting the Life-process enter you, on a higher level than
is usual. Life always advances by a kind of leap, an _elan_, which
would not have been predicted or anticipated, but which, now it is here
revealed in a being with a novel function and a higher capacity of
survival, will lift the whole scale of life henceforth to a new level.
So, in some way which must for the present at least remain mysterious,
the eternal Source of Life, when it finds a human door ready for its
entrance, breaks in--or shall we say that the _earnest will_ climbs up
and pushes open the door into new regions in this eternal Life
Source?--and it seems then, as Boehme says, as though "the true nature
of God and man and the true relation between God and man" had been
found. The mystical experience is, thus, one way, perhaps the highest
we have yet discovered, of entering the Life-process itself and of
gaining an interior appreciation of Reality by living in the central
stream and flow of it, so that the Spirit can "break through" and can
"see into the Depth of Deity."
Boehme appears to hold two inconsistent and seemingly contradictory
views about the human attitude which is the psychological pre-condition
for this epoch-making experience. In his own autobiographical {204}
accounts, he always refers to the part that _earnest resolution_ has
played in bringing success to his momentous quest. No great mystic
since St. Augustine has made more of the will in spiritual matters than
he does. We have seen how the doors to both world-kingdoms stand
before the soul, and how "free-will," "earnest purpose," "decisive
endeavour" settle for each soul which door shall open and which shall
shut, and so determine its eternal destiny. "Election" is, for Boehme,
a fiction of the false imagination, a "Babel-opinion," a perverse
invention of "the Church of Cain." Christ never says "thou couldst
not," but rather "thou wouldst not."[62]
Not only does he, in a general way, thus make the will the decisive
element in human destiny, he also implies that the creative "flash" of
spiritual insight, "the innermost birth" which brings the soul into
living union with its source is due, on the human side, to
"resolution," to "earnestness," to "valiant wrestling," to a brave
venture of faith that risks everything. It requires "mighty
endurance," "hard labour," "stoutness of spirit," and "a great storm,
assault, and onset" to open the Gate. In a word, the key to any
important spiritual experience is _intention_, inward pre-perception,
that holds the mind intently focussed in expectation, without which the
"flash" of spiritual vision is not likely to come.
But on the other hand Boehme is a powerful exponent of the idea that
desire and will must utterly, absolutely die before God can come to
birth in the soul--"Christ is born and lives in our Nothingness."[63] A
man, he says, must die wholly to self-hood, forsake it and enter again
into the original Nothing,--the eternal Unity in which nothing is
willed in particular,--before God can have His way with him; all sin
arises from self-hood, from desire.[64] "How," asks a disciple in one
of Boehme's imaginary dialogues, "shall I come to the hidden centre
where God dwelleth and not man? Tell me plainly, loving sir, how it is
to be found and entered into?"
{205}
_The Master_: "There where the soul hath slain its own will and willeth
no more anything of itself." . . .
_The Disciple_: "But how shall I comprehend it?"
_The Master_: "If thou goest about to comprehend in thy own will, it
flieth from thee, but if thou dost surrender thyself wholly, then thou
art dead to thy own will, and Love will be the Life of thy nature."[65]
He seems to go as far in this direction toward the annihilation of
desire, negation of the finite, and loss of self-hood as any of the
pantheistic mystics. This sample passage will indicate his teaching:
"When thou art wholly gone forth from the creature and become nothing
to all that is nature and creature, then thou art in that Eternal One
which is God Himself, and then thou shalt experience the supreme virtue
of Love."[66]
These two diverse statements are, however, not as inconsistent as they
at first seem. The _will_, the _intention_ that is a psychological
preparation for this mystical experience is a will washed and purged of
selfish impulse and self-seeking aims. It is an _intention_ that
cannot be described in terms of any finite "content." It is the
intense heave of the whole undivided being toward God with no
reservation, no calculation of return profits, no thought even of
isolated and independent personality. A true account of consciousness,
preceding the moment of bursting through the Gate, might emphasize with
equal accuracy either the "earnest resolution," "the storm and onset of
will," or "the annihilation of particular desire," "the surrender of
individualistic self-hood," "death to own will in the Life and Virtue
of Love."
The effects of such an experience as that which came to Boehme, if we
may take his case as typical, are (1) The birth of an inner conviction
of God's immediate and environing Presence amounting to axiomatic
certainty--faith through experience has become "the substance," and "is
now one spirit with God"; (2) The radiation of the whole being with "a
joy like that which parents have at the birth of their first-born
child"--the joy now of the {206} soul crying, "Abba"; (3) A vastly
heightened perception of what is involved in the eternal nature of the
religious life and in the spiritual relation between the soul and God,
_i.e._ increased ability to see what promotes and furthers the soul's
health and development; (4) A unification, co-ordination, and
centralizing of the inner faculties, so that there is an increment of
power revealed in the entire personality; and (5) An increase of
clarity and a sharpening of focus in the perception of moral
distinctions together with a distinctly heightened moral and social
passion.
Boehme himself always believed, further, that his entire system of
ideas, his philosophy of the universe, and his way of salvation were a
"revelation" of the Spirit to him,--in a word, that his wisdom was
"theosophy," a God-communicated knowledge. I have no desire to mark
off dogmatically the scope and possible limits of "revelation," nor is
it necessary here to discuss the abstract question whether "ideas" are
ever "communicated" to a mind _ab extra_, and without the mediation of
subjective processes, or not. In the concrete case of Jacob Boehme, I
do not find any compelling evidence of the unmediated communication of
ideas. He was a man of unusual native capacity, and, though untrained,
his mind possessed a high order of range and quality, and swept, as he
was, by a mighty transforming experience, he _found himself_ in novel
fashion, and was the recipient of inspirations, which fired and fused
his soul, gave him heightened insight into the significance of things
old and new, and often enabled him to build better than he knew. He
is, however, obviously using the stock of ideas which his generation
and those early and late before it, had made "part of the necessary air
men breathed." His terminology and symbolism were as old as mythology,
and were the warp and woof of the nature philosophies and the alchemy
of his day. His impressive and spiritual interpretation of
Christianity is always deep and vital, and freighted with the weight of
his own inward direct appreciation of God's revelation of Himself in
Christ, {207} but even here he is walking on a road which many brave
souls before him had helped to build, and we cannot with truth say that
he supplies us with a new gospel which had been privately
"communicated" to him. In fact, the portions of his voluminous
writings which bear the mark of having been written as automatic
script--by "this hand," as he often says--are the chaotic and confused
portions, full of monotonous repetitions, of undigested and
indigestible phrases and the dreary re-shufflings of sub-conscious
wreckage. Boehme used to say that "in the time of the lily" his
writings would be "much sought after." But I doubt if, even "in the
time of the lily," most persons will have the patience to read this
shoemaker-prophet's books in their present form, that is, if "in the
time of the lily" men still enjoy and prize intelligence and lucidity;
but there already is enough of "the lily-spirit" in the world to
appreciate and to give thanks for the experience, the flashes of
insight, the simple wisdom, the brave sincerity, the inner certainty of
the true World within the world we see, and the spiritual message of
"the way to the soul's native Country," which he has given us.
[1] _True Repentance_, i.
[2] I have given his _Weltanschauung_ in the previous chapter, and I
shall discuss his mysticism at the end of this chapter.
[3] Hegel says that Boehme's piety is "in the highest degree deep and
inward."--_History of Philos._ iii. p. 216.
[4] _True Resignation_, iii. 20.
[5] _The Three Princ._, Preface, 4.
[6] "There is in every man an incorporate ground of Grace, an inner
Temple of Christ, the soul's immortal Dowry. No man can sell or pawn
this ground of Grace, this habitation and dwelling-place of Christ. It
remains unlost as the possession of God--an inward Ground and spiritual
substance."--_Myst. mag._ lxxiv. 20-33, freely rendered.
[7] _Sig. re._ xv. 45.
[8] _Aurora_, xviii. 43.
[9] _The Three Princ._, xiv. 3 and 12; also _ibid._ 85 and 88.
[10] _Myst. mag._ xxvii. 41.
[11] _Ninth Epistle_, 16.
[12] _Myst. mag._ xxvii. _passim_; also _Seventh Epistle_, 11-14.
[13] _Tenth Epistle_, 13-14.
[14] _Regeneration_, 6.
[15] For a sample passage see _Sig. re._ xv. 22-47.
[16] _True Resignation_, 30-41. Freely rendered.
[17] _The Three Princ._ xxxiii. 8-17.
[18] _Ibid._ xix. 6.
[19] _Sig. re._ ix. 67.
[20] _Ibid._ xi. 88.
[21] _Aurora_, Preface, 27.
[22] _Sig. re._ xi. 80.
[23] Prayer in _True Repentance_.
[24] _Three Princ._ xxii. 81.
[25] _Myst. mag._ lxx. 7-10; _Three Princ._ xviii. 80; and
_Supersensual Life_, 27.
[26] _Three. Princ._ xxv. 43.
[27] _Ibid._ xxv. 6.
[28] Read _Ibid._ xxv. 7-41.
[29] _True Repentance_.
[30] _First Epistle_, 6. Hegel well says of Boehme: "What marks him
out and makes him noteworthy is the Protestant principle of placing the
intellectual world within one's own mind and heart, and of experiencing
and knowing and feeling in one's own self-consciousness all that was
formerly conceived as a Beyond."--_History of Philos._ iii. p. 191.
[31] _Tenth Epistle_, 16-19.
[32] _Incarnation_, part iii. chap. i. 5-15.
[33] _Sig. re._ xii. 10-13.
[34] _The Threefold Life_, iii. 31.
[35] _Ibid._ vi. 71.
[36] _The Three Princ._ iv. 9.
[37] _Aurora_, xix. 52-66.
[38] _Myst. mag._ lxxii. 7-10.
[39] _Ibid._ xxiv. 17.
[40] _Sig. re._ ix. 63.
[41] _Seventh Epistle_, 1.
[42] _Ibid._, 6 and 12.
[43] _Apology to Stiefel_, 23.
[44] _True Resignation_, iii. 21.
[45] _Myst. mag._ lxii. 25.
[46] _The Three Principles_, xix. 47; xxi. 32.; _Sig. re._ viii. 27.
[47] _Forty Questions_, xii. 39.
[48] For an example of it, see _Myst. mag._ lxxiv. 46.
[49] _Forty Questions_, x. 9.
[50] _Fourth Epistle_, 32, and _True Repentance_.
[51] _Regeneration_, 161-162.
[52] _Myst. mag._ lxiii. 47. This theme constantly reappears.
[53] _Sig. re._ xv. 37.
[54] _Resignation_, vi. 134-151.
[55] _Forty Questions_, xiv. 17-19.
[56] _Op. cit._ iv. 16.
[57] Von Hartmann's _Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme_, p. 50.
[58] _Twenty-fifth Epistle_, 2.
[59] _Aurora_, xix. 95.
[60] _Twenty-sixth Epistle_, 7.
[61] _Aurora_, xviii. 9.
[62] _Sig. re._ xvi. 38.
[63] _Ibid._ ix. 65.
[64] _Ibid._ xiii. 27 and xv. 9.
[65] _The Supersensual Life_, 29 and 30.
[66] _Ibid._ 27.
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