Jacob Boehme

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In April 1599 a journeyman cobbler bought a shop on the long bridge over the Neisse at Görlitz, in Upper Lusatia, and married a butcher’s daughter named Katharina Kuntzschmann. He had been born in 1575 a few miles off, at Alt-Seidenberg, the fourth child of Lutheran peasants who set him first to herding cattle and then, when his frame proved too slight for the plow, to the shoemaker’s last. He read little beyond the German Bible and what tracts came to hand in a town swept by the quarrels of the Reformation. By every outward measure Jacob Boehme was an unlettered tradesman of a provincial Saxon town. The record of what he became is one of the strangest in the history of European thought: out of this shoemaker came a vision of the birth of God and the world that Hegel, two centuries later, would salute as the beginning of philosophy in the German tongue.

Engraved portrait of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), the Görlitz shoemaker and theosopher — Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The turning is dated by his own testimony to 1600. Sitting in his room, his eye fell on a beam of noon sunlight thrown back from a pewter dish, and in the glare of that ordinary vessel — so he recounted — the inward constitution of all things stood open to him: the ground of nature, the play of good and evil, the relation of the hidden God to the manifest creation. He walked out into the green of the town to test whether the seeing would hold against the open field, and it held. He told no one and went back to his trade. A renewed and steadier illumination came a decade later, around 1610, and pressed him at last to write.

Aurora and the shoemaker’s silence

He began in January 1612, in a thick manuscript he called Morgenröte im Aufgang — Dawn in the Rising — known to the world by the Latin title later fixed to it, Aurora. It was never finished. He wrote, he said, for no audience but himself, to fasten down what he had been shown before it slipped; the prose labors and circles, half cosmology and half confession, the syntax of a man forcing a new thing into a language that has no words ready for it. A copy passed into the hands of a local nobleman, Karl von Ender, and from there into wider circulation, and the wider circulation brought the manuscript to the attention of Görlitz’s chief pastor, the pastor primarius Gregor Richter. Richter denounced the cobbler from the pulpit as a heretic and a disturber of the peace. On 26 July 1613 the town council confiscated the autograph of Aurora and put its author under an order to write nothing further. The manuscript was locked in the Rathaus, where it lay for close to three decades.

The house associated with Jacob Boehme on the eastern bank of the Neisse at Görlitz (today Zgorzelec, Poland), now home to a Boehme exhibition — photograph via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Boehme obeyed the prohibition for some seven years. Then, between 1618 and his death, the silence broke into a flood. De Tribus Principiis — On the Three Principles of the Divine Essence — came in 1618-19; the Dreyfaches Leben (The Threefold Life of Man) and the Vierzig Fragen von der Seele (Forty Questions of the Soul) in 1620; De Signatura Rerum — The Signature of All Things — in 1622; the vast Mysterium Magnum, his commentary on Genesis, dedicated 11 September 1623. He printed none of them. They went out, as Aurora had, in scribal copies through a sympathetic underground of Silesian nobles, physicians, and Schwenckfelder-leaning readers — the manuscript-network that the nobleman and first biographer Abraham von Franckenberg would later organize and that carried the corpus, after Boehme’s death, to the Amsterdam press.

Only one book appeared in his lifetime. Der Weg zu Christo — The Way to Christ, a set of devotional treatises gentler in temper than the cosmological works — was printed at Görlitz on New Year’s Day 1624 at the expense of the nobleman Sigismund von Schweinitz. Its appearance revived Richter’s enmity. The pastor published a coarse broadside against him; Boehme answered; the town council summoned him in March 1624 and counseled him, for the peace of the town, to leave. He went to Dresden, where he was received with more sympathy by men of the electoral court than he had ever found at home. He fell ill on the way back, of a fever and bowel complaint, and died at Görlitz on 17 November 1624, not yet fifty. Richter had died before him; the cathedral clergy made difficulties over the burial, and the grave was marked with a cross of theosophical figures that local hands soon defaced.

Boehme’s grave at the Nikolaifriedhof (Old Cemetery) in Görlitz; the present memorial plaques were added long after his death — photograph via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Ungrund and the birth of God

Boehme’s lifelong question was the oldest and hardest in theology: how a God who is good, and one, and hidden gives rise to a world shot through with darkness, wrath, and evil — and how that darkness can be real without making God its author. His answer was not a ladder of static categories but a drama: an account of the divine life unfolding out of itself in stages, generating its own opposites and overcoming them. The world, for Boehme, is not a thing God once made and set aside but the still-occurring birth of God into manifestation.

At the root he set the Ungrund — the unground, the groundless, the abyss without bottom or determination. This is the Godhead before God: not yet Father, not yet a being among beings, not yet anything that could be named, but a sheer will without object, a nothing that is also the source of everything. To speak of it at all is to speak in the negative register that the older mystical tradition had long used for the hidden God, the apophatic grammar of apophatic theology — no this, no that, no ground. To the medieval ground-of-the-soul mysticism of Meister Eckhart, whose Gottheit beyond God hovers in the same darkness above the persons of the Trinity, the Ungrund is plainly kin, though Boehme almost certainly reached it without reading Eckhart, by his own road.

The unground does not rest in its own indifference. Boehme figures it as an eye that seeks something to see, a will that turns and contracts upon itself in order to find an object, a hunger of the groundless to become a ground. In that first turning the abyss begins to differentiate; it strikes a spark; it desires manifestation, for a will that meets no resistance cannot know itself, and a light that has no darkness to shine against cannot be seen. From this Boehme drew the principle that governs his whole cosmos: nothing reveals itself except through its opposite. Wrath is the necessary ground of love, fire the necessary ground of light, contraction the necessary ground of expansion. He heard it in the German words themselves — a Qual, a torment or quality, is also a Quell, a wellspring — and made of the pun a metaphysics.

He arranged the self-unfolding of the divine life as seven Quellgeister, source-spirits or qualities, through which the hidden God passes from the dark fire of the first principle, through the lightning-flash of the third, into the fire-flash that becomes light and love. The first three are the principle of wrath, contraction, and anguish — the dark world that, taken alone, is hell. The turning at the fourth, the flash, is the crisis of the whole system: it is where fire becomes light, where the consuming becomes the illuminating, where the same energy that is torment in the dark is gladness in the light. The last three are the principle of love, the light world, the kingdom of joy. The two worlds are not two substances but one fire seen from its two sides, and the human soul, and God’s own life, are the place where the turning happens. Evil, in this account, is not a thing God made but the dark ground considered apart from the light it exists to bring forth — wrath that has not yet turned. It is no illusion, and it is necessary, and it is meant to be overcome.

A symbolic engraving from the 1730 collected edition Theosophia Revelata, the kind of emblematic plate used to diagram Boehme’s account of the divine life — Getty Research Institute, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Sophia, the signatures, and the book of nature

Set against the abyss Boehme placed Sophia — divine Wisdom, the mirror in which the groundless will first beholds what it is bringing forth, the heavenly virgin and bride within the divine life. She is the body of God’s self-knowledge, the eternal nature in which the Son is born, and she gives the whole current its nuptial and erotic temper. In the fall of Adam, Boehme taught, the first man turned from his heavenly Sophia toward the earthly woman and the outward world, and lost her; the soul’s regeneration is figured as the recovery of that lost Wisdom, a marriage with the virgin the soul let slip. The figure carries Boehme within sight of the older Sophia of gnostic speculation, the divine principle that falls and is restored, and the nearness was partly conscious — yet Boehme’s Wisdom is held firmly inside a Lutheran Christology, no fallen aeon but the eternal idea of the world in God, and the channel through which the new birth comes. The Sophia-thread he set running here would prove the most far-traveled thing he wrote, descending centuries later into the Russian sophiology of the Orthodox East.

The same vision shaped how Boehme read the world. For him God, nature, and the human being are a single living text, the same forces at work in all three, so that to read one rightly is to read the others. Nature is a book of signatures: every plant, metal, and creature bears in its outward shape the visible stamp of the inward power that formed it, and the discerning eye reads the spirit from the form. This is the doctrine the physician Paracelsus had pressed a generation before, and Boehme took its vocabulary entire — salt, sulphur, and mercury; tincture and signatura; the work of separation and conjunction. He read alchemy not as a recipe for transmuting metals but as a parable of the soul: the fire that destroys and the fire that purifies are one fire, and the philosopher’s stone is Christ formed within. Whether Boehme read Paracelsus at first hand or absorbed him through the Paracelsian and loosely Rosicrucian ferment of his Silesian world is disputed; the imprint is unmistakable either way.

He was, in his own mind, no founder of a sect and no opponent of his church. Boehme died a communicant Lutheran and understood himself as drawing out the inner sense of Luther’s own gospel of the new birth — though his speculative boldness, his refusal to let evil be a mere privation, and his vision of a God who becomes through opposition placed him at the far edge of, and for his accusers beyond, the Lutheran orthodoxy of the confessional age. The kinship some readers have heard between his sevenfold unfolding and the emanative structures of Lurianic Kabbalah — the contraction of the infinite, the breaking and mending of vessels — would be drawn out explicitly only by his later heirs, who set his source-spirits beside the sefirot of the Christian Kabbalah; in Boehme himself the resemblance is structural, arrived at independently, not a borrowing.

The afterlife of a manuscript corpus

Boehme is the rare foundational author whose entire body of work is, bibliographically, posthumous. The shaping of his corpus into the form the world would read it in was the labor of three Amsterdam custodians across a century. The Dutch merchant Abraham Willemsz van Beyerland (1587-1648) gathered the scattered Silesian manuscripts, financed the first printings, and put Aurora into type in 1634 and the Mysterium Magnum in 1640. The Forty Questions had appeared even earlier, in a 1632 Latin translation that was the first of Boehme’s writings to reach print in any language — and was promptly placed on the Roman Index. Johann Georg Gichtel, founder of the celibate Angelic Brethren, produced in Amsterdam in 1682 the first collected edition, Alle Theosophische Wercken, issued in fifteen parts and decorated with the symbolic engravings that became the visual signature of the tradition. His successor in that circle, Johann Wilhelm Ueberfeld, brought out in 1730 the great collected Theosophia Revelata, the canonical German text-witness in some twenty-two parts. In England the complete corpus appeared in the Sparrow-Ellistone translations of the 1640s and 1650s — the first rendering of Boehme’s whole work into any modern language — and again in the illustrated four-volume edition issued under William Law’s name between 1764 and 1781, with its twenty-six cosmological plates by Dionysius Andreas Freher.

Frontispiece of the 1730 Theosophia Revelata, the canonical German collected edition of Boehme’s works brought out by Johann Wilhelm Ueberfeld — Getty Research Institute, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The reception that followed runs in its own dedicated channel, the speculative lineage of Christian theosophy that takes Boehme as its fountainhead — the English Behmenists John Pordage and Jane Lead and their irenic Philadelphian Society; the churchly Württemberg theosophy of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, who set Boehme’s seven qualities beside the Kabbalist sefirot; the French Catholic turn through Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, who learned German to translate the Aurora; the epigrammatic God-mysticism of Angelus Silesius, out of the same Silesian soil; and the engraved prophetic cosmos of William Blake. Through Franz von Baader the Sophia-doctrine passed into the Russian Orthodox sophiology of Vladimir Solovyov and Sergei Bulgakov. One caution belongs here at the source: the theosophy Boehme founded is this Protestant, alchemical, scripture-soaked current, not the later and unrelated Theosophical Society of Helena Blavatsky, which borrowed the Greek word in 1875 from a wholly separate, chiefly South Asian and occultist root and shares with Boehme the term and nothing of the lineage.

Scholarship and the texts

The serious academic recovery of Boehme is itself a long story, and it begins with the philosophers. F. W. J. Schelling drew the Ungrund, and the whole dramatic narrative of a God who comes to be through self-division, directly into his 1809 essay on human freedom and his late Philosophy of Revelation; the non-ground at the heart of the freedom essay is Boehme’s abyss given the vocabulary of German idealism. Hegel went further, devoting a substantial section of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy to the shoemaker and placing him, against the empiricism of Bacon, at the very threshold of modern thought as der erste deutsche Philosoph, the first German philosopher — a judgment all the more striking for Hegel’s frank impatience with Boehme’s crude and laboring form, the profound matter forced through an untaught and sensuous language. Cecilia Muratori’s study takes its very title, The First German Philosopher, from that verdict (Springer, 2016).

The standard scholarly monograph in any language remains Alexandre Koyré’s La philosophie de Jacob Boehme (Paris: Vrin, 1929), the doctoral thesis that became the spine of all later study. In English the leading intellectual biography is Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), which reads the corpus against the religious and political crises of the Lusatian Reformation; Cyril O’Regan’s Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative (SUNY, 2002) reads it as a modern return of gnostic storytelling. The category Christian theosophy itself was given scholarly precision by Antoine Faivre, whose article on it stands in the field’s standard reference, the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (ed. Wouter Hanegraaff; Leiden: Brill, 2005). The full primary and secondary literature is mapped in Bruce Janz’s Jacob Boehme Bibliography, the most complete working catalog of the corpus and its scholarship; the bibliographic ground-truth for the editions is Werner Buddecke’s Die Jakob Böhme-Ausgaben (Göttingen, 1937/1957). The German originals survive in the 1682 Gichtel and 1730 Ueberfeld collected editions; the public-domain English Boehme runs from Sparrow and Ellistone through the Law edition, with Franz Hartmann’s thematic anthology The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme (1891) the most accessible single introduction still in print-free circulation — though Hartmann, writing from within the Blavatskyan society, reads the older theosopher through the later lineage and is best taken as a witness to how thoroughly the two senses of the word became entangled.

What the shoemaker of Görlitz left was not a doctrine to be subscribed but a way of seeing the whole. The living God, on this account, is no finished perfection resting above the world but a self-revealing fire, striking light out of its own darkness, wrath turning at the flash into love; and the human being, ground down and reborn, is the place where that turning is meant to happen — the small abyss in which the great abyss comes, at last, to see itself.

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

→ Related: Christian Theosophy Boehmean · Paracelsus · Alchemy · Sophia · Meister Eckhart · Angelus Silesius · Jane Lead · Philadelphian Society · Russian Sophiology · Apophatic Theology · Christian Mysticism · Martin Luther · Kabbalah · Christian Kabbalah · Emmanuel Swedenborg · William Blake · Sergei Bulgakov · Pietism · Rosicrucianism · Emanation