One Hundred and Seventy-Seven Theosophic Questions

Theosophische Fragen is a set of answers by Jakob Böhme, the Görlitz shoemaker whose visionary writings had made him a controversial figure in Lutheran Silesia, to questions posed to him by a younger admirer, Balthasar Walter. Walter was a physician who had travelled in the East in search of ancient wisdom and who regarded Böhme as the true bearer of what he sought. The work belongs to Böhme's last years, after the hostility of Gregorius Richter, the senior pastor of Görlitz, had brought him public censure and a ban on writing. In the 1624 treatise, sometimes called the Book of Forty Questions on the Soul, Böhme returns to the pen and addresses the questions put to him by Walter, concerning the origin, nature, and destiny of the soul.

The questions are the old ones: what the soul is, where it comes from, how it falls, and what becomes of it in death. Böhme does not answer them as a scholastic would, by definition and distinction. He answers by unfolding what he took to be the inner life of God and of the creature made in God's image. The soul, he argues, arises from the eternal will of God as a fire-source, a hunger and longing that can burn in anger or be kindled into light and love. Everything depends on which way the soul's will turns. Turned toward itself, it lives in the dark fire of self-assertion; turned toward God, it receives the light and becomes a living image of the divine. Heaven and hell are therefore not first of all places but conditions of the will, and Böhme presses the point that the saved and the lost are separated by orientation, not by a decree standing outside the soul. His language is dense with the vocabulary of alchemy and Paracelsian nature-philosophy, and it often strains toward what it cannot quite say. The structure is a series of discrete answers, each a fresh attempt at the same central vision of will, fire, and light.

The treatise has continued to matter because it shows Böhme at his most concentrated on the question that held his whole thought together: how a creature of God can be bound to selfhood and yet be restored. His writings shaped German Pietism and Romanticism, English Behmenists such as William Law, and later philosophers including Hegel and Schelling, and they remain a primary witness to the Protestant mystical tradition.

Who should read this: readers already at home in early modern mysticism, or willing to read slowly and tolerate strange symbolic idiom, will find in it a vivid account of the soul as will and fire. It is not for those wanting a clear systematic doctrine of the soul, and it is a poor first encounter with Böhme; Aurora or The Way to Christ are better places to begin.