Jakob Böhme

Jakob Böhme (1575–1624)

Jakob Böhme, whose name appears in English as Jacob Boehme and in older sources as Behmen, was born in 1575 in Alt Seidenberg, a village near Görlitz in Upper Lusatia, on the eastern edge of the German lands. He was the son of Lutheran peasant farmers, reasonably well-off by village standards, and as a boy he was sent to tend cattle. His schooling went no further than reading and writing at the village school. At about fourteen he was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Seidenberg, and after his years as a journeyman he settled in Görlitz, took citizenship there, and in 1599 married Katharina Kuntzschmann, the daughter of a local butcher. They would have four sons. He became a master shoemaker, and for the rest of his life that was his trade. He never held a pulpit, never studied theology, and never took an ecclesiastical office.

Görlitz was a prosperous, devoutly Lutheran town, and it was the world in which his inner life took shape. Böhme grew up on Luther's Bible and the sermons of the town's pastors, and he later drew on the alchemical and Paracelsian vocabulary then circulating among artisans and physicians, which he used to speak of nature and divine life. He was a seeker from adolescence, troubled by the existence of evil, by the gap between what the clergy preached and how people lived, and by the sense that the God of the catechism had not yet become his own. By his own account he passed through a long season of inward distress before the first decisive moment came, around 1600. Gazing at the gleam of light on a pewter dish, he felt his mind open into the inner structure of things, as though he saw into the heart of nature and of God. He kept it largely to himself for a decade. A second, wider illumination followed in 1610 or 1612, and he began to write.

The result was Aurora, begun around 1612, which he never finished and never meant for publication. It circulated in manuscript among a small circle of friends and admirers, including the nobleman Karl von Endern, who had a copy made. A copy reached Gregorius Richter, the chief pastor of Görlitz, and in 1613 Richter denounced Böhme from the pulpit. The town council had him arrested briefly, confiscated the manuscript, and then expelled him from the city for a time. He was released on the condition that he write no more. For some years he kept that promise, returning to his shoemaker's bench.

But the silence did not hold. Around 1619, under the encouragement of friends who valued his thought and sometimes paid for his writing, he took up the pen again, and the following years were extraordinarily productive. He wrote on the nature of the soul, on creation and the fall, on the sacraments, on the way to Christ, and on predestination, and he produced his large work The Signature of All Things and the vast Mysterium Magnum, a commentary on Genesis. He sought no break with the Lutheran church, attending services and receiving communion throughout his life. That loyalty did not protect him. Richter's hostility never softened, and the pastor continued to attack him and his friends.

In the spring of 1624 Böhme traveled to Dresden at the invitation of admirers at the Saxon court, where theologians examined him. The meetings left him with some respect among his hosts but little relief at home. He returned to Görlitz seriously ill. Richter attacked him once more, and Böhme died on November 17, 1624, shortly after receiving communion. Richter reportedly refused him a proper funeral at first, and a cross raised over his grave was torn down. The shoemaker whom the town had silenced would go on to be read across Europe for centuries.

His Writing and Its Influence

Böhme began writing around 1612, at the age of thirty-seven, and wrote in German rather than Latin, in the speech of the workshop. The first work, Aurora (sometimes called Morgenröthe im Aufgang), was an unfinished and turbulent attempt to say what he had seen: how the divine life moves through the dark and light, the good and the terrible, to produce creation. After the silence imposed on him by the Görlitz council, the writing of 1619 to 1624 was calmer and more ordered. Among the works of those years were De Signatura Rerum (The Signature of All Things), Mysterium Magnum, The Way to Christ, and Of the Election of Grace. The Way to Christ is the most accessible, a collection of short devotional treatises on repentance, prayer and yieldedness, and it has remained the usual entry point for readers who find the rest forbidding.

The difficulty is real. Böhme borrowed the vocabulary of alchemy and Paracelsian medicine, words like salt, sulphur and mercury, to speak of divine and natural processes, and he built an elaborate account of how God, from an undifferentiated abyss the later tradition would call the Ungrund, comes to self-knowledge through opposition. His preoccupation was the problem that had troubled him since adolescence: how evil and suffering can exist in a world made by a good God. His answer, that contrast and conflict are woven into the very process by which the divine becomes manifest, was his most distinctive and most contested contribution. Critics then and since have charged that it blurs the line between God and creation and makes evil something God's own life requires. Böhme insisted otherwise. He remained a Lutheran, centered his thought on Christ and on rebirth through faith, and read his own visions as commentary on Scripture. Whether the framework finally holds together with the Lutheran confessions is a question that his readers have never settled.

Publication came largely after his death. His manuscripts were copied, smuggled and printed by admirers, and the first collected editions appeared in the Netherlands in the 1630s and later in Amsterdam. Translations followed quickly, and in England the work was taken up in the mid-seventeenth century by readers of the radical Reformation. The English translation by John Sparrow and others in the 1640s and 1650s brought him to the Behmenists, and later William Law, the author of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, studied him closely and made him known to a more orthodox audience. Through Law and others his influence ran into Quaker, Pietist and Moravian circles, and into the thought of figures who had little sympathy for his devotion.

His reach beyond the churches was wider still. Hegel named him the first German philosopher, and Schelling, Baader and other German Idealists and Romantics drew on his account of divine becoming. In Russia his ideas traveled through the religious philosophers, including Berdyaev. Later generations of scholars, among them the historian Andrew Weeks and the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar in his own way, have treated him as a serious thinker rather than a curiosity. The Lutheran church that silenced him has since reassessed him with greater respect, though not without reservation.

Who should read Böhme: Readers who are willing to work through dense, strange and sometimes baffling prose in exchange for a vision of God and nature that no one else wrote. He is particularly valuable for those troubled by the problem of evil who suspect that tidy answers have missed something, and for those curious about the roots of the German mystical and philosophical tradition. Begin with The Way to Christ. He is not for readers who want systematic theology, doctrinal clarity on the nature of God, or a text that explains itself on first reading.