Of the Four Complexions

Trostschrift von vier Complexionen, usually rendered in English as A Consolatory Book on the Four Complexions, is a short pastoral treatise that Jakob Böhme, the shoemaker of Görlitz, wrote in 1621 for a correspondent troubled by melancholy. It belongs to the last years of his writing, after the 1613 to 1624 stretch in which he produced Aurora and a long sequence of larger works, and after the controversy with Gregor Richter, Görlitz's chief pastor, which had silenced him as an author for several years. Unlike the cosmological books, this one was written for the care of a particular soul: a person afflicted with the heaviness and inward darkness that the learned tradition of his day classed under the temperaments, or complexions.

Böhme takes up the four complexions of the received medical and philosophical tradition, the sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic, but he does not treat them chiefly as physiology. He reads them as qualities of the fallen creature, ways in which the human being, constituted from the fires and powers of nature, has been bent away from its divine origin. Each temperament has its own characteristic temptation and its own way of being tormented by the enemy. The treatise's consolation is that none of these dispositions is the person's final truth. The melancholic in particular is urged not to answer inner darkness by striving harder in his own strength, but to yield his will to God and let Christ's life be born within the troubled nature. Healing comes through surrender and rebirth, not through the mastery of temperament, and the heaviness of the soul becomes a place where grace can be met rather than a proof of abandonment.

The work matters as a compact entry point into Böhme's habits of thought, since it shows his theology of nature, fall and new birth applied to ordinary suffering instead of cosmic speculation. It also stands in the long Christian effort to speak pastorally to melancholy and spiritual dryness, and it influenced the Pietist and mystical currents that drew on his writings in the following centuries. His idiom remains strange, dense with images drawn from alchemy and nature, and the reader must accept that strangeness as the price of his insight.

Who should read this: readers of Böhme who want a shorter, more personal work than Aurora or De signatura rerum, and those interested in how the Christian mystical tradition has counseled the melancholic and the spiritually weighed down. It is not for anyone seeking clinical guidance on depression, nor for readers unwilling to enter an early modern vocabulary of temperaments and inward powers; those looking for plain, systematic devotional instruction will find Böhme demanding.