JACOB
BOEHME, who reveals to us
in this book some of the secrets of
his inner life, was among the most original
of the great Christian mystics. With a
natural genius for the things of the spirit,
he also exhibited many of the characteristics
of the psychic, the seer, and the
metaphysician ; and his influence on philosophy
has been at least as great as his
influence on religious mysticism.
No mystic is born ready-made. He is,
like other men, the product of nurture no
less than of nature. Tradition and environment
condition both his vision and its
presentation. So, Boehme's peculiar and often difficult doctrine will better be understood
when we know something of his
outer life and its influences. He was
born of peasant stock in 1575, at a village
near Gorlitz on the borders of Saxony and
Silesia, and as a boy tended cattle in the
fields. Of a pious, dreamy, and brooding
disposition, even in childhood he is
said to have had visionary experiences.
Not being sufficiently robust for field-work,
he was apprenticed to a shoemaker ; but,
his severe moral ideas causing disputes
with the other workmen, he was dismissed
and became a travelling cobbler. During
this enforced exile, which coincided with
the most impressionable period of youth,
Boehme learned something of the unsatisfactory
religious conditions of his
time ; the bitter disputes and mutual
intolerance which divided Protestant
Germany, the empty formalism which
passed for Christianity. He also came
into contact with the theosophic and hermetic speculations which distinguished
contemporary German thought, and seemed
to many to offer an escape into more
spiritual regions from the unrealities of
institutional religion. He was himself full
of doubts and inward conflict ; tortured not
only by the craving for spiritual certainty
but also by the unruly impulses and
passionate longings of adolescence that "powerful contrarium "
of which he so
constantly speaks which are often felt
by the mystic in their most exaggerated
form. His religious demands were of the
simplest kind: "
I never desired to know
anything of the Divine Majesty ... I
sought only after the heart of Jesus Christ,
that I might hide myself therein from the
wrathful anger of God and the violent
assaults of the Devil." Like St. Augustine
in his study of the Platonists, Boehme was
seeking "the country which is no mere
vision, but a home"; and in this he already
showed himself a true mystic. His longings and struggles for light were rewarded, as
they have been in so many seekers at the
beginning of their quest, by an intuition
of reality, resolving for a time the disharmonies
that tormented him. Conflict
gave way to a new sense of stability and "blessed peace." This lasted for seven
days, during which he felt himself to be"surrounded by the Divine Light": an
experience paralleled in the lives of many
other contemplatives.
At nineteen, Boehme returned to Gorlitz,
where he married the butcher's daughter.
In 1599 he became a master-shoemaker
and settled down to his trade. In the
following year, his first great illumination
took place. Its character was peculiar,
and indicative of his abnormal psychic
constitution. Having lately passed through
a new period of gloom and depression, he
was gazing dreamily at a polished pewter
dish which caught and reflected the rays
of the sun. Thus brought, in a manner which any psychologist will understand,
into a state of extreme suggestibility, the
mystical faculty took abrupt possession of
the mental field. It seemed to him that
he had an inward vision of the true
character and meaning of all created things.
Holding this state of lucidity, so marvellous
in its sense of renovation that he compares
it to resurrection from the dead, he went
out into the fields. As Fox, possessed by
the same ecstatic consciousness, found that "all creation gave another smell beyond
what words can utter," so Boehme now
gazed into the heart of the herbs and
grass, and perceived all nature ablaze with
the inward light of the Divine.
It was a pure intuition, exceeding his
powers of speech and thought : but he
brooded over it in secret, "labouring in
the mystery as a child that goes to school,"
and felt its meaning "breeding within him"
and gradually unfolding "like a young
plant." The inward light was not constant ; his unruly lower nature persisted, and often
prevented it from breaking through into
the outward mind. This state of psychic
disequilibrium and moral struggle, during
which he read and meditated deeply, lasted
for nearly twelve years. At last, in 1610,
it was resolved by another experience, coordinating
all his scattered intuitions in one
great vision of reality. Boehme now felt
a strong impulse to write some record of
that which he had seen, and began in
leisure hours his first book, the Aurora.
The title of this work, which he describes
as "the Root or Mother of Philosophy,
Astrology, and Theology," shows the extent
to which he had absorbed current theosophic
notions : but his own vivid account
one of the most remarkable first-hand
descriptions of automatic or inspirational
writing that exists shows too how small
a part his surface mind played in the composition
of this book, which he "set down
diligently in the impulse of God." Boehme, like the ancient prophets and
many lesser seers, was possessed by a
spirit which, whether we choose to regard
it as an external power or a phase of his
own complex nature, was dissociated from
the control of his will, and "came and
went as a sudden shower." It poured
itself forth in streams of strange and
turbid eloquence, unchecked by the critical
action of the intellect. He has told us
that during the years when his vision was
breeding within him he "perused many
masterpieces of writing." These almost
certainly included the works of Valentine
Weigel and his disciples, and other
hermetic and theosophic books ; and the
fruit of these half-comprehended studies is
manifest in the astrological and alchemical
symbolism which adds so much to the
obscurity of his style. Like many visionaries,
he was abnormally sensitive to the
evocative power of words, using them as
often for their suggestive quality as for their sense. A story is told of him that,
hearing for the first time the Greek word "
Idea," he became intensely excited, and
exclaimed : "
I see a pure and heavenly
maiden !"
It is to this faculty that we
must probably attribute his love of alchemical
symbols and the high-sounding
magical jargon of his day.
A copy of the manuscript of the Aurora
having fallen into the hands of Gregorius
Richter, the Pastor Primarius of Gorlitz,
Boehme was violently attacked for his
unorthodox opinions, and even threatened
with immediate exile. Finally he was
allowed to remain in the town but forbidden
to continue writing. He obeyed
this decree for five years ; for him, a period
of renewed struggle and gloom, during
which he was torn between respect for
authority and the imperative need for self-expression.
His opinions, however, became
known. They brought him much persecution, "shame, ignominy, and reproach," he says, "budding and blossoming every
day"- but also gained him friends and
admirers of the educated class, especially
among the local students of hermetic
philosophy and mysticism. It was under
their influence that Boehme, his vocabulary
now much enriched and his ideas clarified as
the result of numerous discussions began
in 1619 to write again. In the five years
between this date and his death, he composed
all his principal works. Their bulk
and also, we must confess, their frequent
obscurities and repetitions testify to the
fury with which the spirit often drove"the penman's hand." Some, however,
do seem to have been written with
conscious art, to explain special points of
difficulty ; for Boehme's first confused and
overwhelming intuitions of reality had
slowly given place to a more lucid vision.
The "Aurora" had turned to "a lovely
bright day," in which his vigorous intellect
was able to deal with that which he had seen " couched and wrapt up in the
depths of the Deity." Thus the Forty
Questions gives his answers to problems
stated by the learned Dr. Walther, principal
of the chemical laboratory at Dresden.
His reputation had now spread through
Germany, and eminent scholars came to
his workshop to learn from him. In 1622
he left off the practice of his trade and
devoted himself entirely to writing and
exposition.
The publication of the beautiful Way to
Christ, which was privately printed by one
of these admirers in 1623, caused a fresh
attack on the part of his old enemy Richter.
For once, Boehme condescended to controversy,
and replied with dignity to the
violent accusations of blasphemy and
heresy brought against him. He was
nevertheless compelled by the magistrates
to leave the town, where he now had a
large number of disciples. He went first
to the electoral court of Dresden; there meeting the chief theologians of the day,
who were deeply impressed by his prophetic
earnestness and intense piety, and refused
to uphold the charge of heresy. In August
1624, the death of Richter allowed him to
return to Gorlitz ; but he was already
mortally ill, and died on November 21st of
that year, at the age of forty-nine.
II
In trying to estimate the character of
Boehme's teaching, it is important to realize
the sources of his principal conceptions.
Though his early revelations, abruptly
surging up from the unconscious region,
seemed to him to owe nothing to the art
of reason, yet it is undeniable that they
were strongly influenced by memories of
books read, beliefs accepted, and experiences
endured. The "lightning-flash"
in which he had his sudden visions of the
Universe, also illuminated the furniture of
his own mind and gave to it a fresh significance and authority. Thus it is often his
own interior drama which he sees reflected
on the cosmic screen ; a proceeding which
the "theosophic"
doctrine of man as the
microcosm of the Universe helped him to
justify. His unstable temperament, with
its alternations between gloom and illumination,
its constant sense of struggle,
its abrupt escapes into the light, the "powerful contrarium" with which he "stood in perpetual combat"
conditions
his picture of the eternal conflict between
light and darkness at the very heart of
creation ; the crude stuff of striving nature
and the formative Spirit of God. The "living, running fire" which he feels in
his own spirit, is his assurance of the
Divine fiery creative energy.
Further, the Lutheran Christianity
which formed the basis of his religious life
contributed many elements to his scheme.
Thence came the intense moral dualism,
the Pauline opposition between the "dark world" of unregenerate nature and the
"'light-world "
of grace, the doctrines of
the Trinity and of regeneration, and
generally those credal symbols which he
often uses in a theosophic sense. He is
familiar with the Bible, making constant
though sometimes fantastic use of its
language and imagery. Finally, the
German mystics and hermetic philosophers
of the Renaissance, in whom he was deeply
read, gave him much of the raw material
of his philosophy. Alchemy in his day
was still a favourite toy of speculative
minds ; being understood partly in the
physical, partly in the transcendental sense.
The "doctrine of signatures," which is
the subject of one of Boehme's later works,
was still taken seriously as a guide to
practical medicine ; the stuffed crocodile
hung in the laboratory, the toad and the
spider were carefully distilled. Yet for
the spiritual alchemists the quest of the
Stone was the quest of an unearthly perfection, and human nature was the true
matter of the "great work." This "hermetic science," in which chemistry,
magic, and mysticism were strangely combined,
plainly made a strong appeal to
Boehme ; and its influence upon his work
was not always fortunate. But his debt to
the more genuinely mystical writers of the
sixteenth century, especially the Silesian reformer,
Caspar Schwenckfeld, and Valentine
Weigel, is of far greater importance.
Certainly through Weigel, and perhaps also
at first-hand, he became acquainted with
Paracelsus, whose doctrine of humanity
as the sum of three orders the natural,
the astral, and the divine he adopts in
the Threefold Life of Man and Three
Principles of the Divine Essence. Through
Weigel, too, he traces his descent from
the great German mystics of the fourteenth
century ; for the saintly pastor of Zschopau
was soaked in the works of Tauler, and
edited that pearl of Christian mysticism the Theologia Germanica. Boehme, therefore,
was far from being an isolated spiritual
phenomenon. He was fed from many
sources ; but all that he received was fused
and remade in the furnace of his own inner
life. The result was a new creation, as
unique as the White Stone which the
alchemist made from his mercury, sulphur,
and salt ; but we do it no honour by
ignoring the elements from which it sprang.
It is not possible to extract from
Boehme's vast, prolix, and often difficult
works any closed system of philosophy.
Often he repeats himself, sometimes contradicts
himself, or hides his meaning
behind a haze of inconsistent symbols ;
for his writing never wholly lost its
inspirational character. But as we study
these writings we gradually discern certain
guiding lines, certain fixed characters,
which help us to find our way through the
maze. These, thoroughly grasped, enable
us to recognize order and meaning in that which is often an apparent chaos ; to enjoy
and understand something of that revelation
which transformed the little Saxon cobbler
into a prophet of the Kingdom of God.
Boehme's map of reality is based, like
that of most mystics, on the number three,
and has several interesting points of contact
with Neoplatonism. The universe in its
essence consists of three worlds, which are "none other than God Himself in His
wonderful works." Without and beyond
Nature is the Abyss of the Deity, "the
Eternal Good that is the Eternal One"
:
a Plotinian definition of the Absolute which
may have reached Boehme through
Eckhart and his school. The three worlds
are the trinity of emanations through which
the transcendent Unity achieves self-expression.
Boehme calls them the fireworld,
the light-world, and the dark-world.
They are not mutually exclusive spheres,
but aspects of a whole. By them "we are
to understand a threefold Being, or three worlds in one another"
; and all have their
part in the production of that outward
world of sense in which we live.
Fire is the eternal energetic Divine will
towards creation ; that unresting life, born
of a craving, which inspires the natural
world of becoming. "What ever is to come
to anything must have Fire": it is the self-expression
of the Father. From the primal
fire or fount of generation in its fierceness
are born the pair of opposites through
which the Divine energy is manifested: the "dark-world"
of conflict, evil, and wrath
which is Eternal Nature in itself, and the "light-world"
of wisdom and love, which
is Eternal Spirit in itself the Platonic
Nous, the Son of Christian theology.
The dark-world represents that quality in
life which is recalcitrant to all we call
divine; "unregenerate nature," which was
for Boehme no illusion but a dreadful fact.
It is the sphere of undetermined nonmoral
striving, and of all "biting, hating, and striking and arrogant self-will among
men and beasts." The light-world is the
sphere of all determined goodness and
beauty ; the state of being towards which
the fiery impulse of becoming should tend.
It is the Word, or " Heart of God," as
distinguished from His Will, and holds
within itself all those values which we
speak of as divine. In the Light is "the
eternal original of all powers, colours, and
virtues." Here again, we perceive the
Platonic ancestry of one of Boehme's most
characteristic ideas. In and through this
Light the crude strivings of the fiery lifeforce
are sublimated ; its titanic zest is
transformed into " the desire of love and
joy." The Dark is necessary to it, because "nothing without opposition can become
manifest to itself."
The outer world in which we dwell
according to the body is the creation of
the Fire and the Light. Ignoring the
separate existence of the dark-world, which is then looked upon as one aspect of the
Fire, Boehme sometimes speaks of this
physical order as the third Divine Principle,
or sphere of the Holy Spirit, the "Lord
and Giver of Life"; who is thus assigned
a position very close to the Plotinian
Psyche, or "soul of the world." This
outer world, he says, is "both evil and
good, both terrible and lovely," since in it
love and wrath strive together. "The
Nature-life works unto Fire, and the
Spirit-life unto Light." The business
alike of universal and of human life, the
essence of its "salvation," is the bringing
of the Light out of its fiery origin —
spiritual beauty out of the raw stuff of
energetic nature. This perpetual shooting
up of life from nature-dark to spiritlight
is sometimes called by Boehme the "new birth of Christ" and sometimes the "growing up of the Lily." It is happening
all the while ; the triumphant self-realization
of the perfection of God. He sees the universe as a vast alchemic process,
a seething pot, perpetually distilling
the base metals into celestial gold.
As with the cosmos, so with its microcosm
man. He, too, is in process of
becoming. The "great work"
of the
hermetists must be accomplished in him,
and he must accept its "anguish" —
the
conflict of the fire and the light. "Man
must be a war with himself, if he wishes
to be a heavenly citizen." The combat is
inevitable, and the victory is possible, because
we have the essence of all three
worlds within us, and are "made of all
the powers of God." The eternal Light "glimmers" in every consciousness. "When I see a right man," says Boehme,"there I see three worlds standing."
Hence human life is "a hinge between
light and darkness ; to whichever it gives
itself up, in that same does it burn." Its possibilities of adventure are infinite. The arc through which it may swing is as wide as the difference between hell and heaven.
Fire anguish, effort, and conflict it cannot
escape; this is the manifestation of
that will which is life. But it can choose
between the torment of its own separate
dark fire the self-centred craving which
is the essence of sin and self- abandonment
to the divine fire of God's unresting
will towards perfection. The one sets up
a whirlpool within the eternal process : the
other contributes its store of energy and
love to that universal work which transmutes
the dark elements into the light,
and heals the apparent cleavage between "nature" and "spirit." "Our whole
teaching," says Boehme, "is nothing else
than how a man should kindle in himself
God's light-world." That world is here
and now ; and his one aim was to open
the eyes of other men to this encompassing
and all-penetrating reality. All lies in
the direction of the will :"What we make
of ourselves, that we are."
For him, the universe was primarily a
religious fact : its fiery energies, its impulse
towards growth and change, were significant
because they were aspects of the life
of God. His cosmic vision was the direct
outcome of spiritual experience ; he told it,
because he wished to stimulate in all men
the spiritual life, make them realize that "Heaven and Hell are present everywhere,
and it is but the turning of the will
either into God's love or into His wrath,
that introduceth into them." When the
restlessness of becoming, the anxious
craving, which should lead both cosmic
and human life to its bourne, is turned
back on itself and becomes a fiery self-devouring
desire, a "wheel of anguish,"
the alchemic process goes wrong. Then
is produced the condition which Boehme
calls the turba ; and the turba is the
essence of hell. But everyone who yields
himself to the impulse of the Light stands
by that very act in the heaven of God's heart ; for "Heaven is nothing but a manifestation
of the Eternal One, wherein all
worketh and willeth in quiet love."
Hence at the end of this vast dynamic
vision, this astonishing harmony of the scientific
and the Christian universe, we find that
the imperatives which govern man's entry
into truth are moral : patience, courage,
love, and surrender of the will. These
evangelical virtues are the condition of our
knowledge of reality ; for though"God
dwells in all things, nothing comprehends
Him unless it be one with Him." This is
the doctrine of all the great mystics, and
they have proved its truth in their own
lives. Such an attunement of human to
divine life is the real object of Christianity:
and we must not forget that Boehme was
before all else a practical Christian, for
whom his religion was a vital process, not
merely a creed. He complained that the
orthodox of his day were content to believe
that Christ had once died for them; but such acceptance of history saved none. "A true Christian is not a mere historical
new man" — he is a biological fact, the
crown of the "great work" of spiritual
alchemy. Christian history is only "the
cradle of the Child"
; the framework
within which the law of regeneration is
perpetually manifested, and the "heavenly
man," citizen of the eternal light-world, is
brought forth in the world of time. This,
says Boehme," we heartily wish that the
titular and Lip-Christians might once find
by experience in themselves, and so pass
from the history into the substance." It
was from the fulness of his own experience
that he wrote, as this collection of his
personal declarations shows. In it we see
how close was the connection between his
inner life and his
"mystical"
vision ; the
great moral demands and perpetual conflicts
which conditioned his intuitive knowledge
of reality. That knowledge was the
fruit of the "earnest seeking" pursued from adolescence to the end of his earthly
life : of a will and craving persistently yet
humbly set on the only rational object of
desire, and turning to its purposes every
element of his threefold nature. Such
completeness of dedication is the foundation
of all sane mysticism, and works in
those who achieve it a veritable change
of consciousness, an enhancement of life,
inconceivable to other men."
Make trial in this manner," says
Boehme again, "and thou wilt quickly see
and feel another man with another sense
and thoughts and understanding. I speak
as I know and have found by experience;
a soldier knows how it is in the wars.
This I write out of love as one who telleth
in the spirit how it hath gone with himself,
for an example to others, to try if any
would follow him and find out how true
it is."
EVELYN UNDERHILL