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Boehme, Jakob

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Jakob Böhme Summary

Boehme, Jakob

BOEHME, JAKOB (1575–1624), Protestant visionary and theologian. Born into a Lutheran farming family in the village of Alt Seidenberg near Görlitz, Saxony, Boehme was apprenticed to a shoemaker following his elementary education. In 1599 he became a citizen of Görlitz, where he opened a shoemaking business and married. Boehme was early associated with various religious groups in the city, and through them he encountered the work of the alchemist Paracelsus (1493–1541) and the nature mystic Valentin Weigel (1533–1588). He also shared with his religious associates an interest in Qabbalah.

In 1600 Martin Moller (d. 1606) came to the city as Lutheran pastor and formed the Conventicle of God's Real Servants, which Boehme joined following a religious conversion. Deeply concerned with the problem of theodicy, Boehme in 1612 completed Aurora, but when a copy of the manuscript fell into the hands of the local Lutheran pastor, the book was confiscated and the author banned from further writing. Seven years later, as the result of an illumination, Boehme broke his silence with the publication of On the Three Principles of Divine Being, a work abounding in alchemic imagery, which was to shape the form of his arguments for the next several years. In 1620 there appeared On the Three-fold Life of Man, On the Incarnation, Six Theosophical Points, and Six Mystical Points. Other major works followed quickly, including, Concerning the Birth and Designation of All Being, On Election to Grace, the large commentary on Genesis titled Mysterium magnum, and the various tracts that make up The Way to Christ. As a result of these publications, Boehme was involved in bitter controversy, and suffered exile for a short time. He died in Görlitz on November 17, 1624.

In an attempt to solve the problem of theodicy, Boehme began with the nothing (unknown even to itself), which, as a single unified will, wills a something. In this act of willing, the Son is begotten. In this begetting the nothing discovers the something within itself, which is itself the ground of the abyss. Simultaneously the will proceeds from the Son as Holy Spirit to an eternal contemplation of itself as wisdom (Sophia).

In this contemplation are conceived the various possibilities of being present in the Word (the Son) and created by it. The will of the nothing looks out to the something as light (love) and returns into itself as a desiring fire (wrath). In the knowledge that results, eternal nature has its being. The two fused principles of fire and light reflect in themselves a third, the being of the universe, which is progressively manifested through seven properties: harshness; attraction; dread; the ignition of fire, which is the basis of sensitive and intellectual life; love, which overcomes the individualism of the first four; the power of speech; and speech itself. All properties are present in all being. Further, the seven properties can be categorized according to three principles. The first three properties represent the fire (wrath) principle. The fifth and sixth properties represent the light (love) principle. The seventh property represents the third principle (being of the universe). The fourth property is the center on which all turn. All beings of the third principle are free and can turn to either of the first two principles, thereby upsetting the balance. Searching for the controlling fire of light, Lucifer refused to accept the light principle within himself and as a result fell.

At the moment of Lucifer's fall, temporal creation came into existence. At its height stood Adam, a perfect balance of the four elements fire and light, male and female. But Adam, too, chose to know the principles separately and fell. In the loss of the balance, these four elements were awakened and male and female divided. Thereafter human beings have chosen the fiery origin that, untempered by light, love, or the spiritual water of the new life, would destroy each individual human being. In his mercy, however, God fully revealed the light element in the New Man, Christ, in whose perfect balance each human being can once more live in harmony with the divine contemplation, the virgin Sophia.

Following Boehme's death, his disciples, chief among whom was Abraham von Franckenberg (1593–1649), spread his ideas throughout Europe. The Silesian poet Angelus Silesius (Johann Scheffler, 1624–1677) used Boehme's images extensively in his poetry before and after his conversion from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism. By 1661 Boehme's works appeared in English translation, and under the direction of Jane Leade (1623–1704) the Philadelphian Society was founded in London on Boehmist principles. In England alone Boehme's influence can be traced in the seventeenth century to persons of such stature as the Cambridge Platonist Benjamin Whichcote, the poet John Milton, and the physicist Isaac Newton, and in the eighteenth century to the spiritual writer William Law and the visionary poet William Blake. In the Low Countries, Boehme's thought was popularized by the most important of his editors and students, Johann Georg Gichtel (1638–1710), and by radical Quietists such as Antoinette Bourignon (1616–1680) and Pierre Poiret (1646–1719).