Christian Theosophy

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Christian Theosophy is the visionary, speculative current of Western Christian thought that takes Jacob Boehme as its fountainhead: an attempt to know God, nature, and the soul not by argument or by doctrine alone but by an inner seeing, claimed as a kind of direct disclosure. The name carries a hazard. This is not the Theosophy of Helena Blavatsky’s society, founded in 1875, though the two share a Greek word meaning “wisdom of God.” The older sense is the one scholarship marks with a lower case or with Boehme’s name attached.

The current begins with a Lutheran shoemaker in Görlitz. Boehme (1575–1624) reported a sequence of illuminations and spent the rest of his life trying to set down what he had seen, in books such as the Aurora and the Mysterium Magnum. His central problem was the oldest one: how a good and hidden God gives rise to a world that contains darkness and wrath. His answer was a dynamic, almost dramatic account of the divine life unfolding out of an Ungrund — a groundless abyss, will before it has any object — through a tension of opposing principles into manifestation. Set beside that abyss he placed Sophia, divine Wisdom, the mirror and bride in which God beholds and brings forth. The system reads scripture, alchemy, and the inner senses together, and it treats the human being as the place where the whole drama can be retraced and, in the fall and recovery of the soul, reversed.

Boehme left no church, but his writings travelled. In Germany Johann Georg Gichtel edited and propagated them; in England the “Behmenists” gathered, and John Pordage and Jane Leade built the Philadelphian Society around Sophia and her visitations. William Law, late in life, turned from polished Anglican prose to Boehme. In the eighteenth century Friedrich Christoph Oetinger folded the current into Württemberg Pietism, and Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin — the philosophe inconnu, himself trained in Martinism — translated Boehme into French and carried the vision into Romantic-era thought.

What practitioners held in common was a conviction more than a creed: that the divine could be read inwardly, that nature was a book of correspondences answering to the same forces at work in God, and that the soul’s regeneration was a real passage, not a metaphor. Scholarship since Antoine Faivre has used “Christian theosophy” as a precise category — one of the recurring forms of Western esotericism, marked by this triad of the divine, the human, and the natural read as a single living text. The resemblances to Gnostic, Kabbalistic, and Neoplatonic speculation are real and were partly conscious; they are not identities. Boehme’s heirs meant something specific, and meant it in their own Lutheran and alchemical vocabulary. The line is faint now, but it runs forward, through Saint-Martin and the Romantics, into much that later esotericism would gather under other names.

→ In the library: Steiner on Boehme — Mystics of the Renaissance (1910) · Eckartshausen — The Cloud upon the Sanctuary (1896)

→ Related: Martinism · Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Theosophy · Apophatic Theology