The Confessions of Jacob Boehme E-Book

Jacob Boehme

• Herausgeber: E-BOOKARAMA
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

"The Confessions of Jacob Boehme" will serve as a gentle introduction to Boehme for curious readers. This work was not published as such by Boehme, but compiled by W. Scott Palmer in 1920 from an 18th century translation of his complete works.

Jacob Boehme was a German Christian mystic, who, despite humble origins, wrote encyclopaedic works detailing a visionary universe, densely inhabited by spirits. Like many other mystics, Boehme saw dualities and trinities everywhere. He believed that there were three worlds: the world of Light, the world of Darkness, and the world of Fire. He believed that heaven and hell overlap spatially. The Devil is incapable of communicating with God, because (as we would say today) he in is a parallel universe!

Leseprobe

Table of contents

THE CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME

Note By The Editor

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

THE CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME

Jacob Boehme

COMPILED AND EDITED BY W. SCOTT PALMER, WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY EVELYN UNDERHILL

Note By The Editor

ONE day last winter, in a moment which I must confess to have been idle, I took up Dr. Alexander Whyte's "Appreciation" of Behmen as, following William Law, he calls him. There I found the following passage:

"While we have nothing that can properly be called a biography of Jacob Behmen, we have ample amends made to us in those priceless morsels of autobiography that lie scattered so plentifully up and down all his books. And nothing could be more charming than just those incidental and unstudied utterances of Behmen about himself. Into the very depths of a passage of the profoundest speculation Behmen will all of a sudden throw a few verses of the most childlike and heart-winning confidences about his own mental history and his own spiritual experience. And thus it is that, without at all intending it, Behmen has left behind him a complete history of his great mind and his holy heart in those outbursts of diffidence, depreciation, explanation, and self-defence, of which his philosophical and theological, as well as his apologetic and experimental, books are all so full. It were an immense service done to our best literature if some of Behmen's students would go through all Behmen's books, so as to make a complete collection and composition of the best of these autobiographic passages. … It would then be seen by all, what few, till then, will believe, that Jacob Behmen's mind and heart and spiritual experience all combine to give him a foremost place among the most classical masters in that great field." I turned at once to the massive volumes of English translation which the eighteenth century has bequeathed to us. My copy has the name of Maurice on the title-page—Frederick Denison Maurice—for whom Boehme was, he said, "a generative thinker," and on the fly-leaf there is John Sterling, whose granddaughter gave me the books. There I found, where before I had looked for the doctrine only, the man himself. I determined to do my best to extract from the formless mass of writings what was necessary to show that man.

The old translation was known to be as faithful as could fairly be hoped for, and nothing better existed or could now be made. Twentieth-century English would not do. So I used my own copy and followed it very closely. No translation is as sacred as an original, and I have therefore allowed myself to make small changes in the interests of clearness and accuracy, while carefully respecting both the style of the translator and the mind and meaning of the author.

My task has been in the main one of rigorous omission; I have kept only what was precious for my purpose. Everything that did not reveal the man himself I have rejected; but some of his doctrine is eminently the man, and this I have retained. The outcome, I believe, is a spiritual autobiography which, although it is by a writer who was born nearly three hundred and fifty years ago and has been read and studied by thousands, has never been seen in its continuity before.

Introduction

IM Wasser lebt der Fisch, die Pflanze in der Erden, Der Vogel in der Luft, die Sonn’ am Firmament, Der Salamander muss im Feu’r erhalten werden, Und Gottes Herz ist Jakob Boehmes Element. Angelas of Silesia.

I

JACOB BOEHME, who reveals to us in this book some of the secrets of his inner life, was among the most original of the great Christian mystics. With a natural genius for the things of the spirit, he also exhibited many of the characteristics of the psychic, the seer, and the metaphysician; and his influence on philosophy has been at least as great as his influence on religious mysticism.

No mystic is born ready-made. He is, like other men, the product of nurture no less than of nature. Tradition and environment condition both his vision and its presentation. So, Boehme's peculiar and often difficult doctrine will better be understood when we know something of his outer life and its influences. He was born of peasant stock in 1575, at a village near Gorlitz on the borders of Saxony and Silesia, and as a boy tended cattle in the fields. Of a pious, dreamy, and brooding disposition, even in childhood he is said to have had visionary experiences. Not being sufficiently robust for field-work, he was apprenticed to a shoemaker; but, his severe moral ideas causing disputes with the other workmen, he was dismissed and became a travelling cobbler. During this enforced exile, which coincided with the most impressionable period of youth, Boehme learned something of the unsatisfactory religious conditions of his time; the bitter disputes and mutual intolerance which divided Protestant Germany, the empty formalism which passed for Christianity. He also came into contact with the theosophic and hermetic speculations which distinguished contemporary German thought, and seemed to many to offer an escape into more spiritual regions from the unrealities of institutional religion. He was himself full of doubts and inward conflict; tortured not only by the craving for spiritual certainty but also by the unruly impulses and passionate longings of adolescence that "powerful contrarium" of which he so constantly speaks which are often felt by the mystic in their most exaggerated form. His religious demands were of the simplest kind: "I never desired to know anything of the Divine Majesty … I sought only after the heart of Jesus Christ, that I might hide myself therein from the wrathful anger of God and the violent assaults of the Devil." Like St. Augustine in his study of the Platonists, Boehme was seeking "the country which is no mere vision, but a home"; and in this he already showed himself a true mystic. His longings and struggles for light were rewarded, as they have been in so many seekers at the beginning of their quest, by an intuition of reality, resolving for a time the disharmonies that tormented him. Conflict gave way to a new sense of stability and "blessed peace." This lasted for seven days, during which he felt himself to be "surrounded by the Divine Light": an experience paralleled in the lives of many other contemplatives.

At nineteen, Boehme returned to Gorlitz, where he married the butcher's daughter. In 1599 he became a master-shoemaker and settled down to his trade. In the following year, his first great illumination took place. Its character was peculiar, and indicative of his abnormal psychic constitution. Having lately passed through a new period of gloom and depression, he was gazing dreamily at a polished pewter dish which caught and reflected the rays of the sun. Thus brought, in a manner which any psychologist will understand, into a state of extreme suggestibility, the mystical faculty took abrupt possession of the mental field. It seemed to him that he had an inward vision of the true character and meaning of all created things. Holding this state of lucidity, so marvellous in its sense of renovation that he compares it to resurrection from the dead, he went out into the fields. As Fox, possessed by the same ecstatic consciousness, found that "all creation gave another smell beyond what words can utter," so Boehme now gazed into the heart of the herbs and grass, and perceived all nature ablaze with the inward light of the Divine.

It was a pure intuition, exceeding his powers of speech and thought: but he brooded over it in secret, "labouring in the mystery as a child that goes to school," and felt its meaning "breeding within him" and gradually unfolding "like a young plant." The inward light was not constant; his unruly lower nature persisted, and often prevented it from breaking through into the outward mind. This state of psychic disequilibrium and moral struggle, during which he read and meditated deeply, lasted for nearly twelve years. At last, in 1610, it was resolved by another experience, coordinating all his scattered intuitions in one great vision of reality. Boehme now felt a strong impulse to write some record of that which he had seen, and began in leisure hours his first book, the Aurora. The title of this work, which he describes as "the Root or Mother of Philosophy, Astrology, and Theology," shows the extent to which he had absorbed current theosophic notions: but his own vivid account—one of the most remarkable first-hand descriptions of automatic or inspirational writing that exists—shows too how small a part his surface mind played in the composition of this book, which he "set down diligently in the impulse of God." Boehme, like the ancient prophets and many lesser seers, was possessed by a spirit which, whether we choose to regard it as an external power or a phase of his own complex nature, was dissociated from the control of his will, and "came and went as a sudden shower." It poured itself forth in streams of strange and turbid eloquence, unchecked by the critical action of the intellect. He has told us that during the years when his vision was breeding within him he "perused many masterpieces of writing." These almost certainly included the works of Valentine Weigel and his disciples, and other hermetic and theosophic books; and the fruit of these half-comprehended studies is manifest in the astrological and alchemical symbolism which adds so much to the obscurity of his style. Like many visionaries, he was abnormally sensitive to the evocative power of words, using them as often for their suggestive quality as for their sense. A story is told of him that, hearing for the first time the Greek word "Idea," he became intensely excited, and exclaimed: "I see a pure and heavenly maiden!" It is to this faculty that we must probably attribute his love of alchemical symbols and the high-sounding magical jargon of his day.

A copy of the manuscript of the Aurora having fallen into the hands of Gregorius Richter, the Pastor Primarius of Gorlitz, Boehme was violently attacked for his unorthodox opinions, and even threatened with immediate exile. Finally he was allowed to remain in the town but forbidden to continue writing. He obeyed this decree for five years; for him, a period of renewed struggle and gloom, during which he was torn between respect for authority and the imperative need for self expression. His opinions, however, became known. They brought him much persecution—"shame, ignominy, and reproach," he says, "budding and blossoming every day"—but also gained him friends and admirers of the educated class, especially among the local students of hermetic philosophy and mysticism. It was under their influence that Boehme—his vocabulary now much enriched and his ideas clarified as the result of numerous discussions began in 1619 to write again. In the five years between this date and his death, he composed all his principal works. Their bulk—and also, we must confess, their frequent obscurities and repetitions—testify to the fury with which the spirit often drove "the penman's hand." Some, however, do seem to have been written with conscious art, to explain special points of difficulty; for Boehme's first confused and overwhelming intuitions of reality had slowly given place to a more lucid vision. The "Aurora" had turned to "a lovely bright day," in which his vigorous intellect was able to deal with that which he had seen "couched and wrapt up in the depths of the Deity." Thus the Forty Questions gives his answers to problems stated by the learned Dr. Walther, principal of the chemical laboratory at Dresden. His reputation had now spread through Germany, and eminent scholars came to his workshop to learn from him. In 1622 he left off the practice of his trade and devoted himself entirely to writing and exposition.

The publication of the beautiful Way to Christ, which was privately printed by one of these admirers in 1623, caused a fresh attack on the part of his old enemy Richter. For once, Boehme condescended to controversy, and replied with dignity to the violent accusations of blasphemy and heresy brought against him. He was nevertheless compelled by the magistrates to leave the town, where he now had a large number of disciples. He went first to the electoral court of Dresden; there meeting the chief theologians of the day, who were deeply impressed by his prophetic earnestness and intense piety, and refused to uphold the charge of heresy. In August 1624, the death of Richter allowed him to return to Gorlitz; but he was already mortally ill, and died on November 21st of that year, at the age of forty-nine.

II