Jacob Boehme

Boehme was a shoemaker in Gorlitz in Lusatia, with a village school education and no Latin, when in 1600 he experienced something he spent the rest of his life trying to state. The traditional account has it beginning with sunlight striking a pewter dish. What he claimed to have been shown, in a quarter of an hour, was the inner constitution of everything: the ground of nature, the origin of good and evil, and the reason there is a world at all.

He said nothing for twelve years. Then, in 1612, he wrote it out in a manuscript he called Aurora, the dawning of the day in the east, which is dense, repetitive, strange, unfinished and unlike any theological writing before it. He lent it to a friend, copies were made without his knowledge, and one reached Gregorius Richter, the chief pastor of the town, who denounced him from the pulpit as a heretic. The council confiscated the manuscript and instructed him to stop writing.

He obeyed for seven years. Then, in 1618, he began again and did not stop, producing an enormous body of work in six years, circulating in manuscript among a network of sympathetic physicians and nobles, and drawing a second and more violent attack from Richter that drove him out of the town shortly before his death. Almost all of it was printed only after he died.

Boehme's difficulty is not obscurity for its own sake; he is trying to say something that his available vocabulary was not built for. He begins before God as usually conceived, with what he calls the Ungrund, the groundless: an unfathomable will that is not yet anything in particular, because there is nothing outside it by which it could be distinguished. Such a will cannot know itself, since knowledge requires something to stand against.

Everything else follows from that requirement. In order to become manifest, the groundless must generate a contrary within itself, a principle of contraction, desire and wrath, against which a principle of light and love can be revealed. Boehme is explicit that the dark principle is inside God and is not a mistake, and that without it there would be no manifestation, no nature and no world. Evil, in his account, is that principle detached and running on its own account rather than a substance created by anyone.

This solved a problem and created a worse one, and his critics said so immediately: a God with wrath in his ground looks like a God who is the author of evil. The influence was nonetheless immense and ran in directions he could not have anticipated. Pietism took him up, English readers formed a following, Newton's circle read him, and through Oetinger he reached German Idealism, so that Schelling's treatment of freedom and Hegel's account of a spirit that must go out of itself both have a shoemaker from Gorlitz somewhere behind them. Blake and the Romantics took the imagery, and Western esotericism has never let go of him.