The Threefold Life of Man

Vom dreifachen Leben des Menschen (On the Threefold Life of Man) was written in 1619 and published in 1620 by Jakob Böhme, a shoemaker in Görlitz in Upper Lusatia who had no university training. It belongs to the years after his first work, Aurora, was circulated in manuscript in 1612 and brought him into conflict with Gregorius Richter, the chief Lutheran pastor of Görlitz, who had it denounced and persuaded the town council to forbid him to write. Böhme kept silence for roughly seven years. When he took up writing again, a circle of friends and patrons, among them the nobleman Karl von Ender, pressed him with questions, and this treatise grew out of that exchange: an account of what a human being is and how he lives, composed for readers who wanted Böhme to say plainly what he saw.

The argument is organized around a threefold ordering of human life, which Böhme describes as the life of the dark world, the life of the outward elemental world, and the life of the light world. The human being stands where these meet. Böhme reads fallenness as the soul being drawn out of its proper ground into a self-will that fastens on the outward world and the astral influences that govern it, and he reads redemption as the soul turning back, dying to its own willing, and being reborn in the light of Christ. He writes in the vocabulary of the old nature-philosophy, with its stars, elements, and qualities, and he insists that these are not separate from the spiritual drama but its outward form. Throughout, he presses a single practical claim: knowing the structure of one's being matters only because it shows where one is standing and which way the will must turn. The language is dense and image-driven, closer to testimony than to scholastic argument, and it asks to be read slowly.

The treatise matters because it shows Böhme at the point where his thought has settled into a more ordered shape than in Aurora, and because it set out in concentrated form themes that later readers took up with great seriousness, including the divided will, the second birth, and the inward conflict of light and darkness. Böhme's influence ran through Pietism, English mystical writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and German philosophy and Romanticism, so this work is a way into a whole stream of Christian thought. It is also a record of how a lay Christian without formal training tried to speak faithfully about God and the soul under the pressure of ecclesial suspicion.

Who should read this: readers of Christian mysticism and the history of Protestant spirituality who are willing to work through strange cosmological imagery for the sake of a demanding vision of rebirth. It is not for those who want a clear, systematic doctrine of the human person, nor for anyone looking for an easy devotional text; Böhme's idiom is difficult, and readers new to him may do better to start with a good introduction to his thought before attempting the treatise itself.