Jacob Boehme

JACOB BOEHME (1575-1624)
"But when this had given me many a hard blow, doubtless from the Spirit that had a desire for me, I finally fell into great sadness and melancholy, when I viewed the great depth of this world, the sun and the stars and the clouds, rain and snow, and contemplated in my mind the whole creation of this world...So then I found in all things good and evil, love and wrath, in creatures of reason as well as in wood, in stone, in earth, in the elements, in men and animals. Withal, I considered the little spark 'man' and what it might be esteemed to be by God in comparison with this great work of heaven and earth...In consequence I grew very melancholy, and what is written, though I knew it well, could not console me."

Biography
Boehme, the German mystic, was born in the East German town of Goerlitz in 1575. He had little in the way of an education and made his living as a shoemaker; he married and had four children. His thought drew on interests including Paracelsus, the Kabbala, alchemy and the Hermetic tradition. His first written work, Aurora, went unfinished, but drew to him a small circle of followers. Like Eckhart and others, Boehme's thought drew fire from the church authorities, who silenced Boehme for five years before he continued writing in secrecy. He again raised the cockles of church authorities, and he was banished from his home. He died soon thereafter, in 1624, after returning home from Dresden. His last words spoken, as he was surrounded by his family, were reported to be, "Now I go hence into Paradise." His thought has since influenced major figures in philosophy, especially German Romantics such as Hegel, Baader, and Schelling. Indirectly, his influence can be traced to the work of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hartmann, Bergson, and Heidegger. Paul Tillich and Martin Buber drew heavily from his work -- as did the psychologist, Carl Jung, who made numerous references to Boehme in his writings.

Thought
Martin Buber has written that the "summation of (Boehme's) thoughts, is the problem of the relation of the individual to the world." For Boehme, as a precursor to existentialist thought, the Godhead, as the Undgrund or Abyss, is unknowable to human beings. God as such appears with the appearance of the world -- creation emerging such that it allows God to emerge from primordial oneness so that He may come to know Himself. The world as such yearns to re-merge with the Undgrund. Submission to the will of Christ, for Boehme, leads to true freedom, as opposed to the fallen will, since Adam, of the individual human being. The world as becoming, in Boehme's cosmology, is the self-revelation of God in the sensible, emerging out of a desire to reveal Himself to Himself. As Boehme writes: "Creation was an act of the free will of God; God unfolded his eternal nature, and through his active love, or desire, he caused that which heretofore had been in him merely as spirit (as an image contained in a piece of wood before the artist has cut it out), to become substantial, corporeal." Thus, it follows, God reveals Himself from within creation when the individual submits his will to the will of God. Of his own divine revelation, Boehme wrote: "I did not climb up into the Godhead, neither can so mean a man as I am do it; but the Godhead climbed up in me, and revealed such to me out of his Love..."