Clavis, or a Key

Clavis, or Key, is a short treatise by the Görlitz shoemaker and visionary Jakob Böhme, written in 1624, the last year of his life. It is a glossary of his own vocabulary. Böhme's first book, Aurora (1612), had brought him into conflict with Gregorius Richter, the chief pastor of Görlitz, who denounced him and secured a ban on his writing. When Böhme resumed writing, his works circulated in manuscript among a widening circle of admirers, many of them educated men, who found his language of Salitter, Mercurius, the Tincture and the Seven Spirits of Nature almost impenetrable. Clavis was his answer to their questions about what those terms meant.

The treatise explains the words one after another, but it is more than a dictionary. Böhme borrows the alchemical and Paracelsian language of his day and turns it toward a doctrine of how God becomes known. Behind the whole book stands the Ungrund, the groundless abyss of divinity, which desires to reveal itself and does so through a dynamic interplay of contraries: contraction and expansion, wrath and love, darkness and light. Böhme holds that nothing could be manifest without opposition, and that the same tension runs through God's self-revelation, the structure of nature, and the interior life of the human being. His key terms name the stages and forces of that process. Read this way, the glossary shows how his seemingly strange vocabulary hangs together as one account of creation, fall and rebirth. It also shows that he thought spiritual knowledge came by experience and inner illumination, not by scholarly learning alone.

The treatise remains the most direct way into Böhme's thought. His influence on Christian mysticism has been wide and lasting, reaching Pietists, English Behmenists such as William Law, and later German philosophers and Romantic writers. Readers who find Aurora or The Signature of All Things bewildering will find here the author's own guidance to his terms. The book is still strange, and its cosmology will not suit every reader's theology, but it rewards patience with a coherent and daring vision.

Who should read this: Readers of Christian mysticism and the history of Western esotericism, and anyone who has started Böhme and been stopped by his terminology. It is not for those looking for a devotional guide or a plain exposition of doctrine, nor for readers who want a first introduction to Christian spiritual writing, since the treatise assumes some willingness to enter an unfamiliar symbolic world.