Of Divine Contemplation

Von göttlicher Beschaulichkeit, usually rendered in English as Of Divine Contemplation or The Supersensual Life, is a short dialogue by the Görlitz shoemaker and lay theologian Jakob Böhme, written in 1622 in the last years of his life. By then Böhme had been writing for a decade, beginning with Aurora (1612), and had drawn the hostility of Gregorius Richter, the chief pastor of Görlitz, who had denounced him from the pulpit and had him briefly jailed in 1613. Unlike the long cosmological works that provoked that opposition, this treatise is a small, practical piece in the form of a conversation between a disciple and his master. It addresses a question that runs through all of Böhme's writing: how can a person who feels cut off from God actually come to Him?

The disciple opens by asking how he may reach the supersensual life, so that he can see and hear God. The master answers that the seeker has only to cease from his own willing and thinking. The self, with its busyness and its grasping after wisdom, stands between the soul and God, and what is needed is not more striving but its opposite: a stilling of the natural will so that the divine will may work within. Böhme's term for this is Gelassenheit, the inherited vocabulary of Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics, yielded or released, and he puts it in the plainest possible terms. The disciple objects that this seems impossible, since he cannot make his own thoughts be still. The master replies that the task is less to fight thoughts than to turn the whole will away from self and toward God, as one sinks into a ground. Throughout, Böhme holds that the light of God is not far off but is always present in the soul, hidden by self-will, and that the soul's own resignation is the way it becomes visible. The dialogue is brief and almost devoid of the dense symbolism, the language of the three principles and the seven properties of nature, that makes his longer books difficult.

The treatise has lasted because it is the most approachable doorway into a thinker who is otherwise forbidding. It circulated widely in English in the seventeenth century and later, and William Law, who edited and defended Böhme, drew deeply on this strand of his thought. Its core instruction, that spiritual growth comes by yielding rather than by effort, resonates with later writing on contemplative prayer and surrender.

Who should read this: Readers who want a short, direct encounter with Böhme's practical spirituality before, or instead of, attempting his cosmological writings, and anyone drawn to the contemplative strand of the Lutheran and Rhineland tradition. It is not for those who want systematic theology, a method of prayer with steps to follow, or the theosophical speculation for which Böhme is most famous; this is a brief meditation on letting go, and it will frustrate anyone looking for more.