The mystic will, based on a study of the philosophy of Jacob Boehme

Front matter

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Nes ye ae

Pies eierrey fer

Preface

THE purpose of this study is twofold. Its primary aim is to interpret Jacob Boehme’s answer to the central problem of the philosophy of mysticism. It also presents a survey of the nature and historical significance of positive ethical types of mysticism.

The philosophy of Protestant mysticism has not received the attention it deserves. The world-denying mystics of the Middle Ages inherited from Neo-Platonism a well-known type of thought which has come to be considered as peculiarly characteristic of all speculative mystics. But mysticism has not always fled from the finite. This is evident from the experience of the Quakers and other ethically active mystical groups. A widespread, world-affirming type of mystical theory characterized by a well-rounded philosophy of its own, culminated in Jacob Boehme. I have endeavored to portray this positive attitude through an exposition of his ideas and experiences. To an age such as ours, torn between a desire to follow up the great success of its mechanistic theories and a yearning for mystic insight to pierce beyond the symbols of science, Boehme’s philosophy conveys a striking message.

Historians of philosophy usually acknowledge the penetrating and prophetic character of Jacob Boehme’s insight, but few have gone far in the analysis of his thought. The difficulty of his unique vocabulary in which, as William Law says, “Words were made to mean what they have never meant before nor have ever meant since,’ and the chaotic

Vv vi PREFACE tush of his ideas repel investigation. I have undertaken to paraphrase his obsolete pictorial language in modern terms, taking pains at the same time to supply a sufficient number of direct quotations to justify my interpretations. In this free rendering I have particularly emphasized those aspects of Boehme’s philosophy which throw light on modern problems, passing over or touching incidentally upon the outworn history and the broken bits of mediaeval pseudo-science which often appear in Boehme’s pages and which to-day retain only an antiquarian interest.

In spite of Boehme’s great influence, impartial studies of his system have been few. Some of his many followers have interpreted him in the light of strong religious bias, others attracted by his dark mysterious language have tried with his help to probe further into the secrets of nature than is permitted ordinary mortals. The general trend of conventional interpretation which appears in the various histories of philosophy was set by Franz von Baader (1765-1841) who was followed closely by Julius Hamburger (flor. 1844) and the Danish bishop, H. L. Martensen (1808-1884). In the endeavor to show that Boehme was an orthodox Christian teacher these writers have followed only the less original half of his exploration. They discovered his route from God to nature. But Boehme worked empirically from nature up to God before he charted the return trip. He is preéminently a philosopher of evolution.

Later writers have approached Boehme’s thought from a variety of points of view. Three excellent, though brief, contemporary works are: W. Elert’s monograph entitled Dze Voluntaristische Mystik Jacob Bohmes, Eine Psychologische Studie (Berlin, 1913) ; three chapters by Rufus M. Jones in his Spiritual Reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries (1914)

PREFACE vil and the article by G. W. Allen under the heading Jacob Boehme in Hasting’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. Christopher Walton’s Notes and Materials for a Biography of William Law (London, 1854) is a mine of material for the patient reader. Dr. Herman Vetterling’s volume entitled The Illuminate of Gorlitz, of which fifty copies were privately printed in Leipzig in 1923, is a veritable Boehme encyclopedia and would have saved me some labor had I found it at the beginning of my study. A number of other works have contained useful material. These are acknowledged in connection with the discussion of the subjects to which they have contributed. I am frequently indebted to John Sparrow’s seventeenth century translation of Boehme’s works. A recent book by P. Hankamer (1924) has come to my attention since the completion of this manuscript. It is an interesting study which aims primarily at literary interpretation rather than philosophic analysis.

My own study differs from others in its analysis of Boehme’s elaborate descriptions of the creative act and the corresponding evolutionary process from nature to spirit. In so centering my attention I have been compelled to ignore some characteristic aspects of Boehme’s philosophy which have been more fully and more frequently treated elsewhere. Boehme’s theory of evolution portrays a unique mystical ladder of genuine practical value to modern religious seekers and of real theoretical significance to students of the psychology and philosophy of mysticism. It has seemed worth while to devote the major part of the present discussion to a description and interpretation of this basic but hitherto neglected aspect of his thought.

Boehme’s thought is in such close accord with certain aspects of two modern theories of mystical religion, one of

Vill PREFACE which was propounded by Baron F. von Higel in his Mystical Element in Religion, and the other by W. E. Hocking in The Meaning of God in Human Experience, that I have _ found these two works helpful. The same is true of E. Troeltsch’s Grundprobleme der Ethik and A. Schweitzet's Civilization and Ethics.

I am indebted to Professor Rufus M. Jones for initiating me into this study and for encouraging its completion. My thanks are also due to Professor George P. Adams, who has given helpful advice and important suggestions during the progress of the work. Dr. Herman Vetterling has generously allowed me the use of his collection of books by and about Jacob Boehme. Miss Flora B. Ludington of the staff of the Mills College Library has kindly assisted in reading the proof. )

Introduction

At last, after three hundred years, Jacob Boehme has found the interpreter who can both understand and transmit his vital message. He has been lying in the lanes of intellectual traffic like a mighty bowlder which every traveler had at least to recognize. Most students who have reviewed the period of history to which he belonged have walked around the bowlder and have noted its immense size. Some have described its weird form and shape as seen from the outside, and a few patient workers have attempted to penetrate it with acids or with drills, but it has all the time baffled them and remained a bowlder.

To the author of this book Jacob Boehme ceases to be a glacial bowlder lying in the path and obstructing the course of history; he is discovered to be an essential part of the main highway of human thought from the ancient world to the modern one. He has baffled the interpreter in the past because most of those who have struggled with the task of interpreting him have dealt with him as though he were an isolated and solitary mystic who, like Melchisedec of old, had no historical pedigree, but just mysteriously “came”’ and as mysteriously uttered his strange, prophetic revelations. Here in this book he is presented in his true historical setting. His spiritual ancestry is carefully traced. His peculiar debts to both the near and the far past are duly noted. His vocabulary is studied with insight, and, for Boehme’s historical period, it is found to be neither weird

ix x INTRODUCTION nor perverse. He was honestly endeavoring to beat out his message in the language which his generation and its forerunners had produced as the living speech of the time. It cannot of course be taken over without revaluation and be used as “current coin” to-day. It sounds to us like barbaric jargon with little meaning, “though the words are strong.” The interpreter’s task, therefore, has first of all involved the mastery of the vocabulary, the recovery of the key that opens what otherwise would remain a set of seven-sealed books.

The author has done that preliminary work with fidelity and with patient, painstaking skill. His readers will not be left in an uncharted waste to wonder at the meaning of words that sound as mysterious as “Jabberwock,” “snark,” or “boojum.” “‘Salniter,” “‘tincture,” and “‘signature” will become old friends with whom the reader will have the ease of more than a speaking acquaintance. But much more important than the unique vocabulary of Boehme is the stock of ideas which he handles so profusely and withal so profoundly. They, too, seem foreign to our modern ears. He preceded Descartes and Newton in time, and was a contemporary of Galileo, so that he belonged in a prescientific epoch, and he was forced to do his thinking without the exact and carefully wrought concepts which were forged in the next century. He was the inheritor of that tremendous legacy that came down through the schools of Neo-Platonism, the Jewish Kabbalah, the strivings of the mystics, the pursuits of the alchemists, the passionate struggles of the spiritual reformers in the birth-period of the Reformation and the rich contributions of the humanists of the Renaissance. Boehme is the most vital single transmissive organ of this blend or fusion of thought-currents. The stream did

INTRODUCTION xi not flow through him unaltered, for the life-stream of historical movements can never flow through a genius and emerge the same as it was before.

A genius Boehme certainly was, and in a marked degree. He is not to be dismissed as a mere peasant or a shoemaker or a cobbler of Gorlitz, nor is he to be classed without more ado as a “God-taught seer.’”” He was to be sure a man who had almost no advantages such as come from systematic education. No refining culture came his way from schools and universities. He was forced to support his family by penurious labor. But he shows unmistakably that extraordinary gift of the genius who, the moment the opportunity comes, gathers up out of his environment what fits his main purpose, draws it to himself as by a magnet, reshapes it in the alembic of his own soul and turns it out forever marked with the “‘tincture” of his own spirit. Boehme was never satisfied to wait quiescently for truths to drop into his mind through some secret doorway. He grappled manfully with the problems of life and thought. To use his own words, his spirit ‘‘made a violent assault’? on the dark issues of life and death, of heaven and hell. He steadily educated himself, for a person who has the quality of genius in his native fiber can turn a cobbler’s shop into a college and can dig his way through the husks and coverings of truth until he reaches the inner kernel of it itself. If Boehme was “God-taught,” it was because he seized every conceivable chance that lay open to him to quicken his mind and prepare it to be an organ of the divine Spirit. It often seemed to him that powers and forces from beyond him were working through him and were lifting him to heights that he could not have attained alone, but that something more than self operated only after he had done all that could be done with xii INTRODUCTION the gifts and powers which he possessed as his own and with the sources of truth within his reach.

Jacob Boehme may well be called, I think, one of the most extraordinary cases in modern history of a man of no outwatd promise, no favoring circumstances, no advantages from school or college, no external helps of any kind, who, nevertheless, has made a permanent contribution to the intellectual life of the race and to the spiritual progress of the world. He belongs not only in the order of the ‘prophets,’ but he must as well be reckoned with as a thinker who has sounded the abysmal deeps of thought and being and has produced an interpretation of the universe which has profoundly influenced some of the greatest systems of modern philosophy.

But let no one suppose, too fondly, that now that Boehme has been successfully unlocked and interpreted he will henceforth be easy to read and digest. Boehme is still Boehme! If he proves to be a highway of thought rather than an obstructive bowlder across the path, it is at best a rugged highway, and much unbroken rock still remains to jolt the wayfarer. No reader who travels through Chapter V of this book will have any illusions left of an easy pathway to the eternal secrets of truth and life, of nature and grace, of evil and good, of the world and God.

If it takes “the world’s eternal wars,” if

It takes the might of heaven and hell And the everlasting love as well, to make a rose that blooms in the field, we should not expect to get at the secret of the unfolding world of light and darkness without some labor and sweat. But I, for one, feel that Boehme is worth the struggle that he costs. What-

INTRODUCTION xii ever one may conclude as to his wisdom about the processes of creation, there can be little question of his insight in reference to the ethical and spiritual issues of life. Here he has his finger on the beating artery. Best of all, his own life tallied with his message. He was a tender, gentle, loving spirit, full of grace and goodness. ‘There is a perfume about him like that from his own “‘lily,” which symbolized for him the coming of the Spirit into the lives of men. Any person is a better person for having lived in the neighborhood and atmosphere of Jacob Boehme, and we are grateful to Dr. Brinton that he has brought so much of the thought and life and spirit of this good man back into our time and climate.

RuFus M. JoNngs.

HAVERFORD COLLEGE, Haverford, Penna.

Contents

As German Boehme never cared for plants

Until it happed, a-walking in the fields,

He noticed all at once the plants could speak,

Chapter II Boehme’s Life And Influence

THE outer circumstances of Boehme’s life bear little direct relation to his inner struggles. He was born in 1575 at Alt Seidenberg, a village near Gorlitz in Silesia." His parents, Jacob and Ursula, were of poor but solid peasant stock. They gave him the usual village school education. At an early age he was sent to the fields with other children to herd cattle. His peculiar psychic temperament and vivid imagination soon became evident. As a shepherd boy he climbed to the top of the neighboring “Landeskrone”’ and there beheld a vaulted entrance leading into a cavern. On entering he found a great vessel filled with money from which he ran away in fright. Afterwards he often returned to the spot with other boys, but the cave and its treasure had vanished. His biographer Frankenberg, to whose account we owe the incident, finds in it an omen of Boehme’s “‘spiritual entrance into the hidden treasury of divine and natural wisdom.”

Jacob Boehme was a dreamy, thoughtful stripling, ill-quali-

* Boehme’s first and principal biographer was his friend Abraham von Frankenberg, whose Bericht, dated 1651, is printed in the first editions of Boehme’s works (1682, 1715 and 1730) along with a number of brief biographical documents written by other disciples. (English translation by Okeley, 1780.) These reports, however, contain an obvious mythological element arising out of the passionate devotion of the writers to their master. Boehme’s epistles are the most trustworthy sources of biographical information. They disagree at some points with the accounts of his disciples. The tercentenary memorial volume published by the city of Gorlitz (R. Jecht.

Gorlitz, 1924) contains a quantity of new, but not very important biographical material from the city archives.

fied to become an agriculturist so he was apprenticed to a shoemaker. Soon the lad experienced another portent of his future. A stranger with “‘light-flashing eyes” came into the shop. “Jacob,” he said, with a piercing glance, “thou art little, but thou shalt become great so that the world will wonder at thee. Thou must endure much misery and poverty and suffer persecution, but be courageous and strong for God loves and is gracious unto thee.” The result of this and other apparently subjective experiences was that Jacob made such a nuisance of himself in exhorting his fellow apprentices to godliness that his master dismissed him on the sufficient grounds that he wanted a shoemaker and not a “house prophet.” Then, probably between the years 1592 and 1595, he wandered over Germany as a traveling journeyman. Little is known of this period, but it was undoubtedly crowded with experiences which later found expression in books. Boehme was deeply distressed by the sufferings of his countrymen and by the bitter contentions of princes. A profound hatred of war took possession of his soul. Being a devout churchgoer he discovered that the Evangelical Church was split into wrangling factions which consigned each other to damnation. Henceforth to him the established Church was “Babel und Fabel’ (M. M. 51:49), more representative of the devil than of Christ. Afflicted with melancholy and oppressed with doubt, he earnestly sought a guiding light. Sometimes he found it in a stray bit of alchemistic or Kaballistic lore. More often it shone out from within himself. Once, says Frankenberg, he was lifted into a ‘sabbath of the soul” and for seven days was “‘enrapt in the highest divine vision and joy.”

About 1595 he returned to Gorlitz, became a master shoemaker, and married Katherina Kuntzschmann, a tradesman’s daughter, with whom he lived in happy union for thirty years. She bore him four sons. Frankenberg describes a second, more famous vision to which we have already alluded. It probably occurred about 1600. Boehme’s glance was attracted by a polished pewter dish which reflected the sun. Suddenly a strange feeling overpowered him for it seemed as if he were looking into the very heart of nature and beholding its innermost mystery. Startled and desiring to banish such presumptuous thoughts, he went out on the green. The vision persisted and became even more clear. The grass and flowers were stirred with strange living forces. Over nature the veil of matter grew thin and half revealed the vast struggling life beneath. He told no one but continued in faithful application to his trade, wondering what this mysterious revelation might mean.

During the next twelve years Boehme lived outwardly a simple God-fearing life. Trade must have prospered, for in 1610 the town records show that he purchased a new house at an important street intersection near the Neisse bridge. Inwardly, however, he suffered painful travail while the new philosophy was slowly coming to birth.

We have an account in Boehme’s own words of his experiences at this period of his life. He says:

I fell into great melancholy and sadness when I beheld the mighty deep of this world with its stars and clouds, rain and snow. . . for I saw evil and good, love and anger in all things, in the earth and its elements as well as in man and beast. I considered also that little spark of light, man, and what he might be worth before God in comparison to this great fabric of heaven and earth. Finding that in this world it goes as well with the wicked as with the virtuous, I was exceedingly troubled. The scriptures could not comfort me though I knew them well. Often the devil would give me heathenish thoughts about which I will be silent. In this affliction I raised up my spirit, of which I then understood little or nothing, toward God with a mighty assault and wrapped up my whole heart and soul together with my thought and will in the resolution to struggle with the love and mercy of God without ceasing until he blessed me. . . . And when in my zeal I stormed so hard on God and all the gates of hell, as if my life depended on it, and I had still left some reserves of strength, suddenly at a violent assault my spirit burst through the gates of hell into the innermost birth of Deity and there I was embraced with love as a bridegroom embraces his bride. What this triumph of the spirit was I cannot express. I can compare it with nothing except with the birth of life in the midst of death. It was like the resurrection from the dead. In this Light my spirit saw through all things and into all creatures and I recognized God in grass and plants. Then I had a great impulse to describe the Being of God, but as I could not at once grasp with my reason His profound births in their essence, a year passed before I received true understanding. It was with me as with a young tree planted in the ground, at first it is young and tender and pleasant to the sight, but it does not bear. Though it blossoms the blossoms fall off. Many a cold wind and frost and snow shall pass over it before it bears its fruit.*

This tree of Boehme’s philosophy slowly grew through summers of increase and winters of darkness and depression. The moments of vision which alternated with the periods of doubt gradually became more luminous. “The first fire,” he says, ‘was but a glimmer, not a lasting light. Many a wind blew upon it, but it never went out.” °

I was obliged [he says in a letter to Caspar Lindner, customs collector at Beuthen} to work out this great mystery like a child going to school. I could clearly see it as in a great depth for I looked through as into a chaos where all lies undeveloped, but the unraveling of it was impossible. It opened itself within me from time to time like a growing thing. I was pregnant with it for twelve years and experienced a violent impulse to bring it out into expression. Finally it overwhelmed me like a cloud-burst, what it strikes it strikes. Whatever I could grasp sufficiently to bring into outwardness that I wrote down.*

This statement applies to the year 1612, the turning point of Boehme’s life. Here he steps out from the narrow circle of tradesman acquaintances to the society of the great and learned. The Avrora was composed in this “‘cloud-burst’”’ of literary effort, lest the fleeting visions be forgotten. In his letters Boehme apologizes for his book on the grounds that it was merely a memorandum not intended for eyes other than his own. He writes to Abraham von Sommerfeld in 1620 (Ep. 10:2):

It was written by a single hand with no skill or great understanding, but only in that knowledge which is God’s gift. Its author never intended that it should come into the hands of great people.

He wrote it only as a memorial for himself and as a means of comfort when he was asleep in the flesh.

In a later letter (1621) (Ep. 18:13) he calls the Aurora “my childish beginning not carried out far enough and in need of explanation.” “I thought,” he says, “to keep it by me but it was taken away and broadcast without my will.” A nobleman, Karl von Endern, who had come under the influence of Schwenkfeld’s writings, chanced to see the manuscript in Boehme’s shop and became interested in it. Securing permission to take it home, he read it with enthusiasm and had several copies made. These and the original were distributed widely and Boehme did not see his book again for three years. (Ep. 12:13.) It lacked thirty sheets of being complete and was never finished. A copy came to the attention of Gregorius Richter, pastor primarius of Gorlitz. On a Sunday morning in July, 1613, Boehme sat meekly in church in his usual pew. The pastor gave forth a text on false prophets and then, singling out the astonished shoemaker, directed toward him such a tirade of violent abuse as would have been possible only in that era of theological polemic and religious bitterness. The whole city was consigned to the abyss of Hell unless it should cast out the author of this treatise. The humiliated victim waited at the door at the close of the service and humbly asked his persecutor wherein he had offended. ‘Away from me, Satan,” screamed the pastor, “off to Hell with your disturbances. Have you come to insult me?” The next day the magistrates, overawed by Richter, brought Boehme before them and ordered him to leave town. He meekly replied, ‘Dear sirs, since it cannot be otherwise I am content.” He asked permission to see his family, but this was refused and he was led outside the walls. After a night of reflection the council regained its courage and the next day Boehme was brought back and honorably reinstated in the city. This version of the incident appears in an account by Boehme’s friend and disciple, Dr. Cornelius Weissner.’ It differs from the record in the diary of the Burgermeister, the famous Bartholomaus Scultetus,’ who states simply that

on the 26th of July, 1613, Jacob Boehme, a shoemaker living between the gates behind the hospital smithy, was summoned to the Rathaus for punishment and asked about his enthusiastic opinions. Thereupon he was put in prison and as soon as his book, written in quarto, was brought from his house by Oswald Krause, he was released from confinement and warned to cease from such matters.

At a second trial before the town council in 1624 Boehme said that he had after this earlier trial given his promise to

5 Weissner does not date this entry and it may refer to the second persecution in 1624. In either case it disagrees with the G6rlitz records.

® Jecht, Die Lebensumstande Jacob Bohmes, p. 36. Scultetus was a student of Paracelsus and of the Kabbala and entertained famous Alchemists in his house. Copies made by him (1564-67) of several Paracelsian writings are preserved in Gorlitz. He should have had more sympathy with Boehme, but perhaps he was too old (he was seventy-two) to attempt to unravel the Aurora.

Richter to write no more.” “I did not,” he explained, “understand God’s way nor what he wished to do with me.” He added that a promise made in return by Richter, that attacks from the pulpit would cease, had not been kept, but were so continued that he and his family had become objects of ridicule throughout the city.

Boehme’s letters written during the next five years show how he struggled to keep his promise.

I was timid [he says} and the light of Grace was for a time withdrawn and glimmered in me as a hidden fire, which was outwardly foolishness but inwardly a burning force. (feuriger Trieb) (Ep. £2:13;)

I have implored the spirit of God a hundred times that my knowledge might not serve for his honor and the betterment of my brothers; that he would take it from me and hold me only in his love, but I have found that with all my prayers I have only kindled the fire the more. (Ep. 12:16. )

In the meantime manuscript copies of the Aurora were circulated widely and many new friends, among them physicians, chemists, noblemen, and liberal clergymen visited the shoemaker’s shop by the Neisse bridge. Dr. Tobias Kober, a Paracelsian physician, moved to Gorlitz in 1613 and became a devout disciple of Jacob Boehme. The scholarly and fartraveled Balthasar Walter, hearing of Boehme’s fame, spent three months in his house. These and other learned doctors furnished Boehme with a number of Latin terms which he afterward used with meanings of his own to the further confounding of an already confused vocabulary. His friends, however, performed a real service in persuading him to write again. In his defence before the council in 1624 Boehme telates how this came about:

* Libellus Apologeticus 6.

In spite of the pastor primarius my book was loaned in strange places, cities and villages and copied and spread abroad but without my knowledge or desire. Many learned men both priests and doctors as well as nobles, counts and princes, corresponded with me and some of them sought me out in person and demanded more of my gifts and knowledge. This I dared not give for it was forbidden by the pastor primarius. But they showed me that God would take away my talent and give it to him who could use it, and that God should be obeyed rather than man. This I considered and I implored God day and night that he would do with me what he willed. Finally the divine gift was renewed and kindled into a great and heavenly light. (Libellus apologeticus, 7-8.)

In 1618 Boehme began to write again and produced book after book ° with marvelous rapidity until his death in 1624. Sixty-six of his letters written during this period have been preserved. They indicate feverish activity. ‘The burning fire,’ he writes, “drives me on so swiftly that the pen cannot follow.’’ (Ep. 10:45.) There is much talk of conferences with like-minded philosophers in widely scattered places. At least a third of Boehme’s time appears to have been spent in this way. Sometimes he was much displeased with the extravagance of his entertainment. “Wines and costly spices,’ he writes, “hide the Pearl of the Kingdom.” (Ep. 15:6.

ao, years before this Boehme had given up shoemaking. A town record at Gorlitz states that he sold his cobbler’s bench on March 12, 1613.’ After that he traded in yarns

® For a list of Boehme’s thirty works with dates see Appendix. They cover much the same ground. Partial exceptions to this are the Forty Questions, the Four Complexions and the controversial pieces written against Tilken (1621) and against Stiefel and Meth (1621). The Forty Questions Concerning the Soul (1620) were proposed by Dr. Balthasar Walter and answered by Boehme. The Four Complexions (1621) is a “book for the melancholy.” It contains a keen psychological analysis of the various dangers in the “four temperaments’ and the means of meeting them. In Chapter VI of the present study I have outlined the development of Boehme’s thought as shown in his books.