An Introduction to Jacob Boehme

Four Centuries of Thought and Reception

Ariel Hessayon, Sarah Apetrei, Ariel Hessayon, Sarah Apetrei

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135014285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religionsphilosophie

This volume brings together for the first time some of the world's leading authorities on the German mystic Jacob Boehme, to illuminate his thought and its reception over four centuries for the benefit of students and advanced scholars alike. Boehme's theosophical works have influenced Western culture in profound ways since their dissemination in the early 17th Century, and these interdisciplinary essays trace the social and cultural networks as well as the intellectual pathways involved in Boehme's enduring impact. The chapters range from situating Boehme in the 16th Century Radical Reformation, to discussions of his significance in modern theology. They explore the major contexts for Boehme's reception including the Pietist movement, Russian religious thought and Western esotericism, as well as focusing more closely on important readers: the religious radicals of the English Civil Wars and the later English Behmenists; literary figures such as Goethe and Blake, and great philosophers of the modern age, among them Schelling and Hegel. Together, the chapters illustrate the depth and variety of Boehme's influence and a concluding chapter addresses directly an underlying theme of the volume – asking why Boehme matters today, and how readers in the present might be enriched by a fresh engagement with his apparently opaque and complex writings.

1 Introduction

Boehme's Legacy in Perspective

Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei¹

I

Jacob Boehme has variously been called “the illuminated Instrument of God,” “the prince of divine philosophers,” “the most comprehensive, abundant and multifaceted of all mystics,” “the greatest and most famous of all Theosophists in the world,” “the greatest of the mystics, and the father of German philosophy,” “a giant in intelligence,” “a religious and philosophical genius” rarely with “equal in the world’s history,” “the most imaginative genius” of the early seventeenth century—indeed “one of the greatest geniuses of mankind,” and, by no less a figure than the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, “one of the greatest allegorists.”²

Writing in German from about 1600 until shortly before his death in 1624 he was—by his first biographer’s reckoning—the author of thirty works, several of which are extremely long. In addition, Boehme’s extensive correspondence survives for the period from January 1618 to June 1624. A Lutheran by birth, by formative religious instruction, and steadfastly at his death, Boehme’s major theological concerns were with the nature of creation and how it came into being, the origin and presence of evil, and the attainment of salvation through a process of inward spiritual regeneration and rebirth. Nonetheless, influenced initially by the teachings of Paracelsus and the spiritual reformers Caspar Schwenckfeld and Valentin Weigel as well as by popular alchemical and astrological texts, and then, following the clandestine circulation of his first incomplete book in manuscript, by a widening social network of friends, learned correspondents, and noble patrons, Boehme began developing certain heterodox views that were furiously denounced by a local clergyman. These included his understanding of the Trinity, which he was accused of denying through his introduction of a fourth “person,” Sophia (symbolizing the Noble Virgin of Divine Wisdom); his explanations for the fall of Lucifer and the rebel angels (constituting a first fall preceding the second fall of humanity from paradise); Adam’s prelapsarian androgynous nature; the existence of seven qualities (dry, sweet, bitter, fire, love, sound, and corpus); and the three principles that corresponded to the dark world (God the Father), the light world (God the Son), and our temporal visible world (the Holy Spirit). Moreover, having settled and established himself as a cobbler at Görlitz in Upper Lusatia and writing against a backdrop of vibrant scientific, astronomical, and medical enquiry, damaging regional political struggles, religious polemic, apocalyptic speculation, and, from 1618, the earliest phase of the Thirty Years’ War, Boehme interposed himself—ignorantly and presumptuously according to his better educated critics—in important doctrinal debates over the nature of free will and the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper by expounding an irenic, anticlerical message. This culminated in his announcement of an impending Great Reformation—a new age of love, patience, peace, and joy.

Boehme’s writings divided nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators. On the one hand, he was praised as an “independent, bold and profoundly penetrating thinker,” with an “amazing range of thought and depth of experience,” whose “majestic symbols drawn from the Bible” and contemporary chemistry expressed particular doctrines of “wondrous beauty” to produce, in the words of the existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich, “one of the most profound and strangest systems of Western thought.”³ Furthermore, this “illiterate and untrained,” “simple” “peasant shoemaker” was regarded as “one of the giants,” “one of the most amazing phenomena in the history of mysticism.” The “great sweep” of his vision, with its “immense heights and deeps,” led to comparisons with other Christian poets, notably Dante, while “a natural genius for the transcendent” also enabled this “theosophist” and “myth-creator” to leave his “mark upon German philosophy.”⁴ On the other, even Boehme’s admirers acknowledged that, however memorable his concepts, they were nonetheless expressed obscurely. This “notorious opacity,” this “coagulated cyclone of language,” which understandably deterred generations of potential readers, has made Boehme, to quote Cyril O’Regan, “one of the most difficult reads in the history of Christian thought.”⁵ Less generously, it was suggested that few, if any, were “able to pierce the clouds in which his meaning has been charitably presumed to lie hid.”⁶ The “fantastic disorder” of his “chaotic and shapeless” notions supposedly came from an inability to “winnow and arrange” the outpourings of a heated imagination, while Boehme was also “constantly doing violence to language” by impetuously attempting to “express the inexpressible” through the introduction of barbarous neologisms. Consequently, the French idealist philosopher Émile Boutroux regarded Boehme’s work as “a mixture of abstruse theology, alchemy, speculations on the indiscernible, and the incomprehensible, fantastic poetry and mystic effusions”; in short, “a dazzling chaos.”⁷

This tendency to polarize opinion was nothing new. As the nineteenth-century Danish theologian Hans Martensen observed, Boehme:

had to pass, not only during his lifetime, but also after his death, through honour and dishonour, good report and evil report. Many have regarded him as a visionary, and have placed his teaching in the history of human follies. In many libraries his writings are to be found under the rubric Fanatici. Others have extolled him to the skies, and have believed that they have found in him all the treasures of knowledge and all enigmas solved.⁸

To illustrate Martensen’s point, the day after Boehme’s burial, one of the physicians who had attended him on his deathbed lamented the loss of “a precious, enlightened, and highly God-taught” man who should have been revered by his fellow citizens rather than openly reviled as “a Fanatic, Enthusiast, and Visionary.”⁹ Indeed, a spectrum ranging from adulation to exasperation to repulsion characterized the main reactions to Boehme’s thought—either in the original German or in Latin, Dutch, English, Welsh, French, and Russian translations—from the second quarter of the seventeenthto the mid-nineteenth century.¹⁰

Thus, Pierre Poiret, a French devotee of the mystics, believed it was Boehme alone to whom God had “uncovered the foundation of nature, of spiritual as well as corporeal things, and who, with an utterly penetrating insight into matters theological or supernatural, also knew the origin of the true principles of metaphysical and pneumatic, as well as purely physical, philosophy.” In the same vein, Boehme’s early nineteenth-century French translator Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (“le philosophe inconnu”) urged readers to “dip courageously” into his “numerous writings, which contain . . . extraordinary and astonishing expositions of our primitive nature; of the source of evil; of the essence and laws of the universe; of the origin of gravity; of what he calls . . . the seven powers of nature; of the origin of water; . . . of the nature of the disobedience of the angels of darkness; . . . of the way of reconciliation which eternal love employed to reinstate man in his inheritance.”¹¹ Then, there was the German Catholic philosopher Franz von Baader, who had arrived at Boehme through reading Saint-Martin and who defended Boehme from the “absurd” charge of reviving the “blasphemous ancient Gnostic error, which would have the Devil as the cook and seasoning, and the stimulant in God as well as in Creation.” On the contrary, insisted von Baader, Boehme should be recognized for having established more profoundly than anyone else before him or since, the fundamental teaching of a supernatural, supra-worldly, and uncreated God.¹²

More ambivalent was the attitude of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, an eighteenth-century German scientist who, in a remark subsequently popularized by Sigmund Freud in a book on the joke’s relation to the unconscious, likened the prose of Boehme’s “immortal works” to particular odes in that they are “a kind of picnic, where the author provides the words (the sound) and the reader the meaning.”¹³ For the poet Samuel Coleridge, Boehme was “the great German Theosopher.” Although his “delusions” may have been “gross” and easily controverted, and although as a visionary he frequently mistook “the dreams of his own overexcited Nerves, the phantoms and witcheries from the cauldron of his own seething Fancy, for parts or symbols of a universal Process,” as a philosopher, he surprises rather than perplexes. For according to Coleridge, the “unlearned” shoemaker “contemplated Truth and the forms of Nature thro’ a luminous Mist, the vaporous darkness rising from his Ignorance and accidental peculiarities of fancy and sensation, but the Light streaming into it from his inmost Soul.”¹⁴ Similarly, the nineteenth-century American essayist and Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson regarded Boehme as a poet, sage, and mystic who, “tremulous with emotion,” listened “awestruck with the gentlest humanity to the Teacher” whose lessons he conveyed. Notwithstanding his “mystical narrowness,” “incommunicableness,” and “vague, inadequate” propositions, Boehme’s “excellence” was merited by his “comprehensiveness”: “It is his aim that is great. He will know, not one thing, but all things.”¹⁵

At the other extreme, Boehme was denounced as an “ingenious madman” by the eighteenth-century theologian John Wesley. In his journal and correspondence, Wesley fulminated against what he deemed to be Boehme’s unscriptural, irrational, contradictory, crude, and indigestible blending of religion with philosophy. On reading part of Boehme’s allegorical exposition of Genesis, he spluttered, “it is most sublime nonsense; inimitable bombast; fustian not to be paralleled!”¹⁶ A German church historian agreed: those who honored Boehme as an “inspired messenger of heaven” or admired him as a “judicious and wise philosopher” were “deceived and blinded in a very high degree; for never did there reign such obscurity and confusion in the writings of any mortal, as in the miserable productions of Jacob Behmen, which exhibit a motley mixture of chemical terms, crude visions, and mystic jargon.”¹⁷ Such censure chimed with the objections of two eighteenth-century English bishops. William Warburton, bishop of Gloucester, believed that heavenly and earthly wisdom should be communicable and easily understood. Accordingly, he dismissed Boehme as an imposter, a “pretender” to divine inspiration, whose effusions were nothing but a “heap of unmeaning,” “unintelligible words,” “the jargon of the spirit of infatuation .”¹⁸ Likewise, George Horne, bishop of Norwich, objected to these “stupendous reveries”: either Boehme’s scheme was a “new revelation, or an explanation of the old.” If the latter, why was it wrapped up in “mystic jargon ” unheard of before in the Christian church and not given in plain “Scripture language ”? If the former, it was “an imposture and delusion” since “extraordinary inspirations” were only to be credited if supported by miracles.¹⁹

Modern scholarship has generally focused on three complementary approaches in an effort to comprehend Boehme: the taxonomic, the genealogical, and the contextual. The first asks how we should define Boehme; the second, which intellectual and religious traditions he inherited and contributed towards; and the third, what milieu he should be situated within. As we have seen, various Protestant clergymen and church historians tended to label Boehme a heretic, fanatic, enthusiast, visionary, or impostor, discrediting his unwelcome plebeian challenge to ecclesiastical power structures and doctrinal orthodoxy by ridiculing him as an ignorant, delusional artisan venting derivative, impenetrable gibberish. By contrast, Boehme’s followers generally revered him as a divine instrument, sanctified figure, prophet, illuminate, sincere teacher, and genius. Others, including those intrigued but frustrated by his writings, have usually classed him either a mystic, Theosopher, philosopher, or prodigy. Boehme, however, does not readily conform to a specific type. Nor are these neutral terms, because each discloses— albeit to different degrees—the reader’s perspective. So it may be unhelpful to categorize Boehme as one thing or another and more useful to envisage him as an exceptional hybrid.

Similar issues arise from the second approach. Here, investigators run the risk of repeating the methodology of both heresiographers and hagiographers, who sought to damage or enhance Boehme’s reputation by seeking precedents—though rarely with sufficient attention to subtle doctrinal distinctions or indeed an adequate explanation for how ideas were transmitted to and received by him. All the same, Boehme’s concepts clearly did not originate from nothing, so it is worthwhile to briefly review these traditions and his potential sources. Writing approximately a century after the German Reformation and calling for a Great Reformation, Boehme was occasionally likened to a second Luther, and Lutheran thought—especially as mediated in Görlitz—clearly had a big impact on his development. Boehme has also been positioned within a tradition of German mysticism, with roots going back to pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, which attempted to understand and describe the divine nature by emphasizing what God was not. Moreover, he has been regarded as an independently-minded successor of the spiritual reformers, notably Caspar Schwenckfeld and Valentin Weigel. Then there is Paracelsus, whose influence is undeniable. Through him and his interpreters, Boehme became acquainted with the wider alchemical tradition, while his knowledge of heliocentrism shows familiarity with astrological texts. These resonances, in conjunction with perceived pantheistic elements, have prompted suggestions that Boehme drew ultimate inspiration from an ancient theology that embraced currents of Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and Christian adaptations of the Jewish Kabbalah. In addition, although not a staunch millenarian, Boehme expected an imminent period of great tribulation, and hence his apocalyptic thought has been compared with Joachim of Fiore’s eschatological scheme.

Despite the paucity of evidence, the third approach, namely the painstaking recovery of Boehme’s milieu, has been instrumental in overturning enduring misconceptions. Here, biographical discoveries have supplemented and corrected the familiar, idealized portrait, while important research on the backdrop—Görlitz’s lively intellectual scene; contemporary r...