Jacob Boehme was born in 1575 of poor parents, at Altseidenburg, near G?rlitz, in Upper Lusatia. In his youth he was a peasant boy who tended the cattle. He was brought up as a Lutheran, and always remained such. The account of his life which is given with his works was drawn up by a clergyman who knew him personally, from information given by Boehme himself.
Much is there related as to how he attained to more profound knowledge and wisdom by means of certain experiences through which he passed. Even when a herd tending the cattle, as he tells of himself, he had these wonderful manifestations. The first marvellous awakening that occurred to him took place in a thicket in which he saw a cavern and a vessel of gold. Startled by the splendour of this sight he was inwardly awakened from a dull stupor, but afterwards he found it was impossible for him to discover the objects of his vision. Subsequently he was bound apprentice to a shoemaker. More especially “was he spiritually awakened by the words: 'Your heavenly Father will give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him' (Luke xi. 13), so that, desiring to come to a knowledge of the truth, and yet retaining the simplicity of his mind, he prayed and sought, and knocked, fervently and earnestly, until, while travelling about with his master, he was, through the influence of the Father in the Son, spiritually transported into the glorious pence and the Sabbath of the soul, and thus his request was granted. According to his own account, he was then surrounded with divine light, and for seven days he remained in the supremest divine contemplation and joy.” His master for this dismissed him, saying he could not keep in his service “house-prophets such as he was.” After that he lived at G?rlitz. In 1594 he rose in his trade to be master, and married. Later on, “in the year 1600, and in the twenty-fifth year of his age, once more” the light broke upon him in a second vision of the same kind. He tells that he saw a brightly scoured pewter dish in the room, and “by the sudden sight of this shining metal with its brilliant radiance” he was brought (into a meditation and a breaking free of his astral mind) “into the central point of secret nature,” and into the light of divine essence. “He went out into the open air in order that he might rid his brain of this hallucination, and none the less did he continue all the more clearly as time went on to experience the vision in this way received. Thus by means of the signatures or figures, lineaments, and colours which were depicted, he could, so to speak, look into the heart and inmost nature of all creatures (in his book De signatura rerum this reason which was impressed upon him is found and fully explained); and for this he was overwhelmed with joy, thanked God, and went peacefully about his affairs.” Later on he wrote several works.
He continued to pursue his handicraft at G?rlitz, and died at the same place in 1624, being then a master shoemaker.(2)His works are especially popular with the Dutch, and for that reason most of the editions are issued from Amsterdam, though they were also surreptitiously printed in Hamburg. His first writing is the “Aurora” or “Morgenr?the im Aufgange,” and this was followed by others; the work “Von den drei Principien,” and another “Vom dreifachen Leben des Menschen,” are, along with several others, the most noteworthy. Boehme constantly read the Bible, but what other works he read is not known. A number of passages in his works, however, prove that he read much -evidently mystical, theosophic, and alchemistic writings for the most part, and he must certainly have included in his reading the works of Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus, a philosopher of a somewhat similar calibre, but much more confused, and without Boehme's profundity of mind. He met with much persecution at the hands of the clergy, but he aroused less attention in Germany than in Holland and England, where his writings have been often printed.(3) In reading his works we are struck with wonder, and one must be familiar with his ideas in order to discover the truth in this most confused method of expression.
The matter of Jacob Boehme's philosophy is genuinely German; for what marks him out and makes him noteworthy is the Protestant principle already mentioned of placing the intellectual world within one's own mind and heart, and of experiencing and knowing and feeling in one's own self-consciousness all that formerly was conceived as a Beyond. Boehme's general conceptions thus on the one hand reveal themselves as both deep and sound, but on the other, with all his need for and struggle after determination and distinction in the development of his divine intuitions of the universe, he does not attain either to clearness or order. There is no systematic connection but the greatest confusion in his divisions - and this exists even in his tables,(4) in which three numbers are made use of.
I.
What God is beside nature and Creation.
II.
Separability God in Love Mysterium magnum The first Principium.
God in Wrath.
III.
God in wrath and love.
Here nothing definite to hold the moments asunder is shown, and we have the sense of merely doing it by effort; now these and now other distinctions are set forth, and as they are laid down disconnectedly, they again come into confusion.
