And this simple shoemaker of Görlitz, with his amazing range of thought and depth of experience, practised and embodied the way of life which he recommended. He was a good man, and his life touches us even now with a kind of awe. "Life," he once said, "is a strange bath of thorns and thistles,"[62] and he himself experienced that "bath," but he went through the world hearing everywhere a divine music and "having a joy in his heart which made his whole being tremble and his soul triumph as if it were in God."[63]
[1] I have used as primary source the German edition of Boehme's Works—Theosophia revelata—published in 1730 in 8 vols. All my references are to the English translations made by Sparrow, Ellistone, and Blunden, 1647-61. These translations were republished, 1764, in 4 vols. in an edition which has incorrectly been called William Law's edition. Four volumes have been republished by John M. Watkins of London, as follows:The Threefold Life of Man, 1909;The Three Principles, 1910;The Forty QuestionsandThe Clavis, 1911; andThe Way to Christ, 1911. TheSignatura rerum, in English, has been published in "Everyman's Library." A valuable volume of selections from "Jacob Behmen's Theosophic Philosophy" was made by Edward Taylor, London, 1691. Many volumes of selections have been published in recent years. The books on Boehme which I have found most suggestive and helpful are the following: Franz von Baader's "Vorlesungen und Erläuterungen über J. Böhme's Lehre,"Werke(Leipzig, 1852), vol. iii. [edition of 1855, vol. xiii.]; Émile Boutroux,Le Philosophe allemand(Paris, 1888): translated into English by Rothwell in Boutroux'sHistorical Studies in Philosophy(London, 1912), pp. 169-233; Hans Lassen Martensen'sJacob Boehme(translated from the Danish by T. Rhys Evans, London, 1885); Franz Hartmann'sLife and Doctrine of Jacob Boehme(London, 1891); Von Harless'Jacob Boehme und die Alchymisten(Leipzig, 1882); Ederheimer'sJakob Boehme und die Romantiker(Heidelberg, 1901); Paul Deussen'sJacob Boehme—an Address delivered at Kiel, May 8, 1897—translated from the German by Mrs. D. S. Hehner and printed as Introduction to Watkin's edition ofThe Three Principles(1910); Christopher Walton'sNotes and Materials for a Biography of William Law(London, 1854)—a volume of great value to the student of Boehme; Rudolph Steiner'sMystics of the Renaissance(translated, London, 1911), pp. 223-245; A. J. Penny'sStudies in Jacob Boehme(London, 1912), uncritical and written from the theosophical point of view; Hegel'sHistory of philosophy(translated by Haldane and Simson, London, 1895), iii. pp. 188-216.
[2] Aurora, John Sparrow's translation (London, 1656), ii. 79-80.
[3]Aurora, iii. 1-3.
[4]Third Epistle, 15.
[5]Aurora, xiii. 27.
[6]Ibid.viii. 19.
[7]Ibid.ix 90.
[8]Ibid.xiii. 2-4.
[9]Third Epistle, 22.
[10] Many thinkers of prominent rank have borne testimony to the greatness of Boehme's genius. I shall mention only a few of these estimates:
"I would recommend you to procure the writings of Boehme and diligently read them. For though I have studied philosophy and theology from my youth . . . yet I must acknowledge that the above writings have been to me of more service for the understanding of the Bible than all my University learning."—"J. G. Gictell, 1698.
"Jacob Boehme, as a religious and philosophical genius, has not often had his equal in the world's history."—"Jacob Boehme: His Life and Philosophy." An Address by Dr. Paul Deussen.
"Jacob Boehme est le seul, au moins dont on ait eu les écrits jusqu'à lui, auquel Dieu ait découvert le fond de la nature, tant des choses spirituelles, que des corporelles."—Peter Poiret, in a note at the end of hisThéologie germanique, 1700.
"As a chosen servant of God, Jacob Boehme must be placed among those who have received the highest measures of light, wisdom, and knowledge from above. . . . All that lay in religion and nature as a mystery unsearchable was in its deepest ground opened to this instrument of God."—William Law,Works(ed. 1893), vi. p. 205.
"To Jacob Boehme belongs the merit of having taught more profoundly than any one else before or after him the truth that back of and behind all that has come to appear of good and evil there is an immaterial World which is the essence and reality of all that is."—Franz von Baader,Werke(Leipzig, 1852), iii. p. 382.
Novalis wrote in a letter to Ludwig Tieck in 1800: "Man sieht durchaus in ihm [Jakob Böhme] den gewaltigen Frühling mit seinen quellenden, treibenden, bildenden, und mischenden Kräften, die von innen heraus die Welt gebären. Ein echtes Chaos voll dunkler Begier und wunderbarem Leben—einen wahren auseinandergehenden Mikrokosmos."—Quoted from Edgar Ederheimer'sJakob Boehme und die Romantiker(1904), p. 57.
[11] His English translators in the seventeenth century variously spelled his name Behm, Behme, and Behmen. This latter spelling was adopted in the so-called Law Edition of 1764, and has thus come into common use in England and America.
[12] Boehme refers frequently to "the writings of high masters," whom he says he read (Aurora, x. 45), and he often names Schwenckfeld and Weigel in particular. See especiallyThe Second Epistle, sec. 54-62
[13]Memoirs of the Life, Death and Burial, and Wonderful Writings of Jacob Behmen, translated by Francis Okeley (1780), p. 22.
[14]Memoirs, p. 2.
[15]Memoirs, p. 6. Von Franckenberg says that Boehme himself told him this incident.
[16] Ibid. pp. 4-5. The reader will have noted the long history of this phrase, "Sabbath of the soul."
[17]Ibid.p. 7.
[18]Memoirs, p. 8. Paracelsus taught that the inner nature of things might be seen by one who has become an organ of the Universal Mind. He says: "Hidden things which cannot be perceived by the physical senses may be found through the sidereal body, through whose organism we may look into nature in the same way as the sun shines through a glass. The inner nature of everything may be known through Magic [The Divine Magia] and the power of inner sight."—Hartmann'sLife of Paracelsus(1896), p. 53.
[19] He uses this wordSeekerhundreds of times in his writings.
[20]Second Epistle, sec. 6-8.
[21]Aurora, xix. 10-13. He goes on in the following sections to describe how for twelve years this insight "grew in his soul like a young tree before the exact understanding of it all" was arrived at.
[22]The Fifth Epistle, 50.
[23]Aurora, xi. 146.
[24]Ibid.xi. 6.
[25] Aurora, xxii. 47.
[26] In theAuroraBoehme speaks of the Flash as an experience: "As the lightning flash appears and disappears again in a moment, so it is also with the soul. In its battle the soul suddenly penetrates through the clouds and sees God like a flash of Light."—Ibid. xi. 76.
[27]Memoirs, p. 8.
[28] Evidently the "flash" of the year 1610 was not the last one. In fact, he seems to have had frequent ecstasies.
[29]The Second Epistle, 9-10.
[30]Third Epistle, 35.
[31] See especiallySignatura rerum, ix. 63, andForty Questions, xxvi. 2-3 and xxx. 3 and 5.
[32]Third Epistle, 32. TheMemoirsdescribe how it was copied by "a Gentleman of some rank" [Carl von Endern].
[33]Memoirs, p. 9.
[34] Preserved in the Diary of Bartholomew Scultetus, then Mayor of Görlitz (Ueberfeld's edition, 1730). This Diary does not record any actual banishment of Boehme. The data for our knowledge of the persecutions of Boehme are found in a personal narrative written by his friend Cornelius Weissner, M.D.—Memoirs, pp. 39-50.
[35]Aurora, xiii. 7-10.
[36]Ibid.xxxvi. 152.
[37]Third Epistle, 7.
[38]Fifteenth Epistle, 18. This "new smell in the life of God" often occurs in Boehme's writings. Compare George Fox's testimony, "The whole creation had a new smell." For further comparisons see pp. 221-227.
[39] The following is a complete list of his writings:
1612.The Aurora.
1619.The Three Principles of the Divine Essence.
1620.The Threefold Life of Man; Forty Questions; The Incarnation of Jesus Christ; The Suffering, Death and Resurrection of Christ; The Tree of Faith; Six Points; Heavenly and Earthly Mysterium; The Last Times.
1621.De signatura rerum; The Four Complexions; Apology to Balthazar Tilkenin 2 parts;Consideration on Esaias Stiefel's Book.
1622. Sec.Apology to Stiefel; Repentance; Resignation; Regeneration.
1623.Predestination and Election of God; A Short Compendium of Repentance; The Mysterium magnum.
1624.The Clavis; The Supersensual Life; Divine Contemplation;Baptism and the Supper; A Dialogue Between the Enlightened andUnenlightened Soul; An Apology on the Book of Repentance; 177Theosophic Questions; An Epitome of the Mysterium magnum; The HolyWeek; An Exposition of the Threefold World.
Undated.An Apology to Esaias Stiefel; The Last Judgment; Epistles.
[40]Thirty-first Epistle, 10.
[41]The Third Epistle, 30.
[42]Ibid.29.
[43] There are as many blasphemies in the shoemaker's book as there are lines. It smells of shoemaker's wax and filthy blacking. May this intolerable stench be far from us.
[44]Thirty-fourth Epistle, 5.
[45]Thirty-third Epistle.
[46]Thirty-fourth Epistle, 16 and 21.
[47] Weissner's Narrative,Memoirs, p. 49.
[48]Ibid.p. 58.
[49]Wort und Geist, p. 196seq.
[50] What could be a bolder criticism of the existing Church of his day than this: "In place of the wolf [the Roman Church] there has grown up the fox [the Lutheran Church] another anti-Christ, never a whit better than the first. If he should come to be old enough how he would devour the poor people's hens!"—The Three Principles of the Divine Essence, xviii. 102.
[51]Mysterium magnum, xxvii. 47.
[52]Ibid.xxviii. 49-51.
[53]Mysterium magnum, xxxvi. 34; xl. 98.
[54]Ibid.lxiii. 47-51;Twenty-first Epistle, 1.
[55]Myst. mag.xxv. 13.
[56]The First Epistle, 3-5.
[57]Apology to Tilken, ii. 298.
[58]Ibid.72. Compare George Fox's testimony: "All must come to that Spirit, if they would know God or Christ or the Scriptures aright, which they that gave them forth were led and taught by."—Journal(ed. 1901), i. 35 andpassim.
[59]Sig. re.xiv. i.
[60]Myst. mag.lxx. 40.
[61]Fourth Epistle, 27 and 32.
[62]The Three Princ.xxii. 2.
[63]Aurora, iii. 39.
{172}
"If thou wilt be a philosopher or naturalist and search into God's being in Nature and discern how it all came to pass, then pray to God for the Holy Spirit to enlighten thee. In thy flesh and blood thou art not able to apprehend it, but dost read it as if a mist were before thy eyes. In the Holy Spirit alone, and in the whole Nature out of which all things were made, canst thou search into Nature."—Aurora, ii. 15-17.
One idea underlies everything which Boehme has written, namely, that nobody can successfully "search into visible Nature," or can say anything true about Man or about the problem of good and evil, until he has "apprehendedthe whole Nature out of which all things were made." It will not do, he thinks, to make the easy assumption that in the beginning the world was made out of nothing. "If God made all things out of nothing," he says, "then the visible world would be no revelation of Him, for it would have nothing of Him in it. He would still be off beyond and outside, and would not be known in this world. Persons however learned they may be, who hold such 'opinions' have never opened the Gates of God."[1]
Behind the visible universe and in it there is an invisible universe; behind the material universe and in it there is an immaterial universe; behind the temporal universe and in it there is an eternal universe, and the first business of the philosopher or naturalist, as Boehme conceives it, is to discover the essential Nature of this invisible, immaterial, eternal universe out of which this fragment of a visible world has come forth.
{173}
Need have we,Sore need, of stars that set not in mid storm,Lights that outlast the lightnings.[2]
The visible fragment is never self-explanatory; all attempts to account for what occurs in it drive the serious observer deeper for his answer, and with a breathless boldness this meditative shoemaker of Görlitz undertakes to tell of the nature of this deeper World within the world. As a boy he saw a vast treasury of wealth hidden in the inside of a mountain, though he could never make anybody else see it. As a man he believed that he saw an immeasurable wealth of reality hidden within the world of sense, and he tried, often with poor enough success, to make others see the inside world which he found. We must now endeavour to grasp what it was that he saw. There is no doubt at all that this inside world which he discovered within and behind visible Nature, within and behind man, is really there, nor is there any doubt in my mind that he, Jacob Boehme, got an insight into its nature and significance which is of real worth to the modern world, but he is seriously hampered by the poverty of his categories, by the difficulties of his symbolism and by his literary limitations, when he comes to the almost insuperable task of expressing what he has seen. He is himself perfectly conscious of his limitations. He is constantly amazed that God uses such "a mean instrument," he regrets again and again that he is "so difficult to be understood," and he often wishes that he could "impart his own soul" to his readers that they "might grasp his meaning,"[3] for he never for a moment doubts that "by God's grace he has eyes of his own."[4] He lived in an unscientific age, before our present exact terminology was coined. He was the inheritor of the vocabulary and symbolism of alchemy and astrology, and he was obliged to force his spiritual insight into a language which for us has become largely an antique rubbish heap.[5] If he {174} had possessed the marvellous power that Dante had to compel words to express what his soul saw, he might have fused these artificial symbolisms with the fire of his spirit, and given them an eternal value as the Florentine did with the equally dry and stubborn terminology of scholasticism, but that gift he did not have.[6] We must not blame him too much for his obscurities and for his large regions of rubbish and confusion, but be thankful for the luminous patches, and try to seize the meaning and the message where it breaks through and gets revealed.
The outward, visible, temporal world, he declares, is "a spiration, or outbreathing, or egress" of an eternal spiritual World and this inner, spiritual World "couches within" our visible world and is its ground and mother, and the outward world is from husk to core a parable or figure of the inward and eternal World. "The whole outward visible world, with all its being, is a 'signature' or figure of the inward, spiritual World, and everything has a character that fits an internal reality and process, and the internal is in the external."[7] As he expresses the same idea in another book: "The visible world is a manifestation of the inward spiritual World, and it is an image or figure of eternity, whereby eternity has made itself visible."[8]
But there is a still deeper Source of things than this inward spiritual World, which is after all a manifested and organized World, and Boehme begins his account with That which is before beginnings—the unoriginated Mother of all Worlds and of All that is, visible and invisible. This infinite Mother of all births, this eternal Matrix, he calls theUngrund, "Abyss," or the "Great {175} Mystery,"[9] or the "Eternal Stillness." Here we are beyond beginnings, beyond time, beyond "nature," and we can say nothing in the language of reason that is true or adequate. The eternal divine Abyss is its own origin and explanation; it presupposes nothing but itself; there is nothing beyond it, nothing outside it—there is, in fact, no "beyond" and "outside"—it is "neither near nor far off."[10] It is an absolute Peace, an indivisible Unity, an undifferentiated One—an Abysmal Deep, which no Name can adequately name and which can be described in no words of time and space, of here and now.
But we must not make the common blunder of supposing that Boehme means thatbeforeGod expressed Himself and unfolded Himself in the infinite processes of revelation and creation, He existed apart, as this undifferentiated One, this unknowable Abyss, this incomprehensible Matrix. There is no "before." Creation, revelation, manifestation is a dateless and eternal fact. God to be a personal God must go out of Himself and find Himself in something that mirrors Him. He must have a Son. He must pour His Life and Love through a universe. What Boehme means, then, is that no manifestation, no created universe, no expression, is the ultimate Reality itself. The manifested universe has come out of More than itself. The Abyss is more than anything, or all, that comes out of it, or can come out of it, and it lies with its infinite depth beneath everything which appears, as a man's entire life, conscious and unconscious, is in and yet lies behind every act of will, though we can "talk about" only what is voiced or expressed.
Even within this Abysmal Depth, that underlies all that comes to being, there is eternal process—eternal movement toward Personality and Character: "God is the eternal Seeker and Finder of Himself."[11] "In the {176} Stillness an eternal Will arises, a longing desire for manifestation, the eye of eternity turns upon itself and discovers itself"[12]—in a word there is within the infinite Divine Deep an eternal process of self-consciousness and personality, which Boehme expresses in the words, "The Father eternally generates the Son." "God hath no beginning and there is nothing sooner than He, but His Word hath a bottomless, unfathomable origin in Him and an eternal end: which is not rightly calledend, but Person,i.e.the Heart of the Father, for it is generated in the eternal Centre."[13] This inner process toward Personality is often called by Boehme "the eternal Virgin" who brings to birth God as Person, or sometimes "the Mirror," in which God sees Himself revealed as will and wisdom and goodness.
In the greatest artistic creation of the modern world—"The Sistine Madonna"—Raphael has with almost infinite pictorial power of genius tried to express in visible form this Birth of God. Behind curtains which hang suspended from nowhere and stretch across the universe, dividing the visible from the invisible, the world of Nature from the world of holy mystery, the infinite, immeasurable and abysmal God is pictured as defined and personal in the face and figure of a little Child, in which the artist suggests in symbolism the infinite depth and joy and potency of Divinity breaking forth out of mystery into form. It is precisely this birth of God into visibility that Boehme is endeavouring to tell. "The Son," however, Boehme says, "is not divided or sundered from the Father, as two persons side by side—there are not two Gods. The Son is the heart of the Father—God as Person—the outspringing Joy of the total triumphing Reality,[14] and through this eternal movement toward self-consciousness and Personality, God becomes Spirit, an out-going energy of purpose, a dynamic activity, bursting forth into infinite manifestation and differentiation—a forth-breathed or expressed Word.[15] Through {177} this eternal process of self-differentiation and outgoing activity, the inner spiritual universe comes into being—as an intermediate Nature or world, between the ineffable Abyss of God on the one hand, and our world of material, visible things on the other hand." "The process of the whole creation," he says, "is nothing else but a manifestation of the deep and unsearchable God, and yet creation is not God but rather like an apple which springs from the power of the tree and grows upon the tree, and yet is not the tree—even so all things have sprung forth out of the central divine Desire."[16]
This entire manifested or out-breathed universe is, he says, the expression of the divine desire for holy sport and play. The Heart of God enjoys this myriad play of created beings, all tuned as the infinite strings of a harp for contributing to one mighty harmony, and all together uttering and voicing the infinite variety of the divine purpose. Each differentiated spirit or light or property or atom of creation has a part to play in the infinite sport or game or harmony, "so that in God there might be a holy play through the universe as a child plays with his mother, and that so the joy in the Heart of God might be increased,"[17] or again, "so that each being may be a true sounding string in God's harmonious concert."[18]
This eternal, interior World—the Mirror in which the Spirit manifests Himself—is a double world of darkness and light, for there can be no manifestation except through opposites.[19] There must be yes and no. In order to have a play there must be opposing players. In order to have life and reality there must be conflict and conquest. As soon as the forth-going Word of God is differentiated into many concrete expressions and the fundamental Unity of the Abyss is broken up into particular desires and wills, there is bound to be a clash of opposites—will and contra-will, strain and tension, light and joy and beauty, and over against them pain and sorrow and evil. Evil must appear as soon as there is {178} process of separation, differentiation, variety, specialization and particularity.[20] Darkness appears as soon as there is a contraction or narrowing into concrete desire and will.
Both worlds—the light world and the dark world—are made by desire and will. Narrowing desires for individual and particular aims, which sever a being from the total whole of divine goodness, make the kingdom of darkness, while death to self-will and a yearning desire and will for all that is expressed in the Heart and Light of God, in the Person of His Son, make the kingdom of Light. Lucifer—the awful example of the dark World—fell because he stood in pride and despised the Birth of the Heart of God and its gentle, universalizing love-spirit; and so his light went out into darkness. His climbing up into a severed will was his fall. The more he climbed toward the sundered aim of his own will and turned away from the Heart of God, the greater was his fall, for to turn away from the Heart of God is always to fall.[21] There is no darkness, no evil, in angel or devil or man, except the nature of that particular being's own will and desire—both darkness and light are born of desire. The origin of the fall of any creature, therefore, is not outside that creature, but within it.[22]
The evil in the world is only a possible good spoiled. Beings created for a holy sport and play, for an ordered harmony, as infinite harp-strings for a celestial music, set their wilful desires upon sundered ends, broke the intended harmony, or "temperature," as Boehme calls it, introduced strife—theturba magna—and darkness, and so spoiled the actual material out of which the kingdoms of nature are made, for the attitude of will moulds the permanent structure of the being. Through the whole universe, visible and invisible, as a result, the dark lines run, and the drama of the whole process of the universe is the mighty issue between light and darkness, good and evil: Two universal qualities persist from {179} beginning to end and produce two kingdoms arrayed against each other—each within the other—one love, the other wrath; one light, the other darkness; one heavenly, the other hellish.[23]
Now out of this inner spiritual universe—a double universe of light and darkness—this temporal, visible, more or less material, world has come forth, as an outer sheath of an inner world, and, like its Mother, it, too, is a double world of good and evil. "There is not," as William Law, interpreting Boehme, once said, "the smallest thing or the smallest quality of a thing in this world, but is a quality of heaven or hell discovered [i.e.revealed] under a temporal form. Every thing that is disagreeable to taste, to the sight, to our hearing, smelling or feeling has its root and ground and cause in and from hell [the dark kingdom], and is as surely in its degree the working and manifestation of hell in this world, as the most diabolical malice and wickedness is; the stink of weeds, of mire, of all poisonous, corrupted things; shrieks, horrible sounds; wrathful fire, rage of tempests and thick darkness, are all of them things that had no possibility of existence, till the fallen angels disordered their kingdom [i.e.until the inner universe was spoiled by narrow, sundered desires]. Therefore everything that is disagreeable and horrible in this life, everything that can afflict and terrify our senses, all the kinds of natural and moral evil, are only so much of the nature, effects and manifestation of hell, for hell and evil are only two words for one and the same thing. . . . On the other hand, all that is sweet, delightful and amiable in the world, in the serenity of air, the fineness of seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colours, the fragrance of smells, the splendour of precious stones, is nothing else but heaven breaking through the veil of this world, manifesting itself in such a degree and darting forth in such variety so much of its own nature."[24]
I have spoken so far as though Boehme traced the {180} source of every thing towill and desire, as though, in fact, the visible universe were the manifold outer expression of some deep-lying personal will, and in the last analysis that is true, but his more usual form of interpretation is that of the working of great structuraltendencies, orenergies, or "qualities," as he calls them, which are common both to the inner and the outer universe. There are, he declares again and again with painful reiteration, but with little advance of lucidity, seven of these fundamental laws or energies or qualities, like the sevenfold colour-band of the rainbow, though they can never be untangled or sundered or thought of as standing side by side, for together in their unity and interprocesses they form the universe, with its warp and woof of light and darkness.[25]
The first "quality" is a contracting, compacting tendency which runs through the entire universe, outer and inner. It is in its inmost essencedesire, the egoistic tendency, the focusing of will upon a definite aim so that consciousness contracts from its universal and absolute possibilities to a definite, limited, concretesomething in particular, and thus negates everything else. Desire always disturbs the "Quiet" and brings contraction, negation and darkness. In the outer world it appears as the property of cohesion which makes the particles of a particular thing hold and cling together and form one self-contained and separate thing. It is the individualizing tendency which permeates the universe and which may be expressed either as a material law in the outer world, or as personal will-tendency in the inner world.
The second "quality" is the attractive, gravitating tendency which binds whole with whole as an organizing, universalizing energy. This, again, is both spiritual and physical—it has an outer and an inner aspect. It is a fundamental love-principle in the inner world—the {181} foundation, as Boehme says, of sweetness and warmth and mercy[26]—and at the same time is a structural, organizing law of nature, which tends out of many parts to make one universe.[27]
These two diverse tendencies at work eternally in the same world produce strain and tension andanguish. The tension occasioned by these opposite forces gives rise to the third "quality," which is a tendency toward movement, oscillation, rotation—what Boehme often callsthe wheel of nature, or the wheel of motion, or the wheel of life.[28] This, too, is both outer and inner; a law of the physical world and a tendency of spirit. There is nothing in nature that is not ceaselessly moved, and there is no life without its restlessness and anguish, its inward strain and stress, its tension and its problem, its dizzy wheel of life—the perpetual pursuit of a goal which ends at the starting-point as an endless circular process.
The fourth "quality" is theflash, or ignition, due to collision between nature and spirit, in which a new principle of activity breaks through what before was mere play offorces, and reveals something that has activity in itself, the kindling, burning power of fire, though not yet fire which giveslight. In the outer world it is the bursting forth of the elemental, fusing, consuming powers of Nature which may either construct or destroy. In the inner world it is the birth of self-consciousness on its lower levels, the awaking of the soul, the kindling of passion, and desire, and purpose. Any one of these four lower "qualities" may stay at its own level, remain in itself, out of "temperature" or balance with the rest, and so be only a "dark principle"; or it may go on and fulfil itself in one of the higher "qualities" next to be described, and so become a part of the triumphing "light principle." Fire may be only a "fire of anguish" or it may go up into a "fire of love"; it may be a harsh, {182} self-tormenting fire, or it may be a soft, light-bringing, purifying fire. Suffering may harden the spirit, or it may be the condition of joy. Crucifixion may be mere torture, or it may be the way of salvation. It is then here at thegreat dividebetween the "qualities" that the universe reveals its differentiation into two kingdoms—"the dark" and "the light."
The fifth "quality" is Light, springing out of the "flash" of fire and rising to the level of illumination and the revelation of beauty. It is at this stage of Light that the lower force-forms and fire-forms first stand revealed in their full meaning and come to their real fulfilment. On its inner or spiritual side this Light-quality is an "amiable and blessed Love." It is the dawn and beginning of the triumphing spirit of freedom which wills to draw all things back to one centre, one harmony, one unity, in which wild will and selfish passion and isolating pride, and all that springs from the dark fire-root are quenched, and instead the central principle of the spiritual world—Love—comes into play.
Boehme calls his sixth "quality" voice or sound, but he means by it the entire range of intelligent expression through tone and melody, music and speech, everything in the world, in fact, that gives joy and beauty through purposeful utterance. He even widens his category of "sound" to include colours and smells and tastes, in short, all the sense-qualities by which the world gets revealed in its richness of beauty and harmony to our perception. He widens it, too, to include deeper and subtler tones than those of our earth-born sense—the heavenly sports and melodies and harmonies which the rightly attuned spirit may hear with a finer organ than the ear.
The seventh, and final, "quality" is body or figure, by which he means the fundamental tendency or energy toward expression in actuality and concrete form. The final goal of intelligent purpose is the realization of wisdom, of idea, in actual Nature-forms and life-forms—theincarnation of the spirit. There is nothing real in the {183} universe but has its form, its "signature," its figure, its body-aspect: "There is not anything but has its soul and its body, and each soul is as it were an inner kernel, or seed, to a visible and comprehensible body,"[29] and, as we shall see, the supreme achievement of the universe is the visible appearance of the Word of God, the eternal Son, in flesh like ours—a visible realization in time of the eternal Heart of God. The glory of God appears in a kingdom of God, a visible vesture of the Spirit.
All these seven qualities, or "fountain-spirits," or fundamental tendencies, are in every part and parcel of the universe, and each particular thing or being finds his true place in the vast drama or play of the universe, according to which "quality" is prepotent, and marks the thing or being with its "signature." They constitute in their eternal nature what Boehme callsThe Three Principlesthat underlie all reality of every order. The first principle is the substratum or essence of these first three "qualities," the nature-tendencies at the level of forces, which he generally calls thefire-principle,i.e.the dark fire, before the "flash" has come. The second principle is the substratum or essence of the last three "qualities"—the tendencies toward unity, harmony, order, love, which he calls thelight-principle. The third principle produces the union or synthesis of the other two—the principle of realization in body and form, the triumph over opposition of these two opposing principles in the exhibition of the real, the actual, the living, the conscious, where dark and light are both joined, but are dominated by another irreducible principle. To these three fundamental principles correspond the three supreme divine aspects: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.[30]
We are here, of course, far from a scientific account of the processes and evolution of the universe. Boehme {184} is no scientific genius and he did not dream that every item and event of the world of phenomena could be causally explained, without reference to any deeper abysmal world of Spirit. His mission is rather that of the prophet who "has eyes of his own." He is endeavouring to tell us, often no doubt in very laborious fashion, sometimes as "one who is tunnelling through long tracts of darkness," that this outside world which we see and describe is a parable, a pictorial drama, suggesting, hinting, revealing an inside world of Spirit and Will; that every slightest fragment of the seen is big with significance as a revelation of an unseen realm, which again is an egress from the unimaginable Splendour of God. He believes, like Paracelsus, that everything in Nature—plants, metals, and stars—"can be fundamentally searched out and comprehended" by the inward way of approach, can be read like an open book by the children of the Spirit who have caught the secret clue that leads in, and who have the key that unlocks the inner realm.[31]
Obviously his "inner way of approach" works more successfully when applied tomanthan when applied to plants and metals and stars—and when he writes of man, whether in the first or in the third person, he does often seem to have "eyes of his own," and to "hold the key that unlocks."
It is an elemental idea with him that man is "a little world"—a microcosm—and expresses in himself all the properties of the great world—the macrocosm.[32] "As you find man to be," he writes, "just so is eternity. Consider man in body and soul, in good and evil, in light and darkness, in joy and sorrow, in power and weakness, in life and death—all is in man, both heaven and earth, stars and elements. Nothing can be named that is not man."[33] Every man's life is inwardly bottomless and opens from within into all the immeasurable depth of God. Eternity springs through time and reveals itself in every person, for the foundation property of the soul {185} of every man is essentially eternal, spiritual, and abysmal—it is a little drop out of the Fountain of the Life of God, it is a little sparkle of the Divine Splendour.[34] God is spoken of again and again as "man's native country," his true "origin and home"—"The soul of man is always seeking after its native country, out of which it has wandered, seeking to return home again to its rest in God."[25] "The soul of man," he says again, "has come out from the eternal Father, out from the Divine Centre, but this soul—with this high origin and this noble mark—stands always at the opening of two gates."[36] Two worlds, two mighty cosmic principles, make their appeal to his will. Two kingdoms wrestle in him, two natures strive for the mastery in his life, and he makes his world, his nature, his life, his eternal destiny by his choices: "Whatsoever thou buildest and sowest here in thy spirit, be it words, works, or thought, that will be thy eternal house."[37] "The good or evil that men do, by acts of will, enters into and forms the soul and so moulds its permanent habitation."[38] Adam once, and every man after him also once, has belonged, in the centre of the soul, to God, and whether it be Adam or some far-off descendant of him, each is the creator of his own real world, and settles for himself the atmosphere in which he shall live and the inner "tincture" of his abiding nature. "Adam fell"—and any man's name can here be substituted for "Adam"—"because, though he was a spark of God's eternal essence, he broke himself off and sundered himself from the universal Will—by contraction—and withdrew into self-seeking, and centred himself in selfishness. He broke the perfect temperature—or harmonious balance of qualities—and turned his will toward the dark world and the light in him grew dim."[39] To follow the dark world is to be Lucifer or fallen Adam, to follow the light world completely is to be Christ[40]—and before every soul the two {186} gates stand open.[41] In a powerful and penetrating passage he says: "We should take heed and beget that which is good out of ourselves. If we make an angel of ourselves we are that; if we make a devil of ourselves, we are that."[42]
This last sentence is a good introduction to Boehme's conception of "the next world"—"the great beyond." He was as completely free of the crude idea that heaven is a shining locality in the sky, and hell a yawning pit of fire below the earth, as the most exact scientific scholar of the modern world is likely to be. He had grasped the essential and enduring character of man's spiritual nature so firmly that he ceased to have any further interest in the mythological aspects in which vivid and pictorial imagination has invested the unseen world. "God's presence itself," he says, "is heaven, and if God did but put away the veiling shadows, which now curtain thy sight, thou wouldst see, even where thou now art, the Face of God and the heavenly gate. God is so near that at any moment a holy Birth [a Birth into the Life of God] may be accomplished in thy heart,"[43] and, again, in the same book he writes: "If man's eyes were opened he would see God everywhere, for heaven is everywhere for those who are in the innermost Birth. When Stephen saw heaven opened and Jesus at the right hand of God, his spirit did not swing itself aloft into some heaven in the sky, but it rather penetrated into the innermost Birth where heaven always is. Thou must not think that God is a Being who is off in an upper heaven, or that when the soul departs it goes many hundred thousands of miles aloft. It does not need to do that, for as soon as it has entered the innermost Birth it is in heaven already with God—near and far in God is one thing."[44]
The "next world"—"the beyond"—therefore, must not be thought of in terms of space and time, of here and there, of now and then, as a place to which we shall journey at the momentous moment of death: "the soul {187} needeth no going forth."[45] As soon as the external veil of flesh dissolves, each person is in his own country and has all the time been in it. There is nothing nearer to you than heaven and hell. To whichever of them youinclineand toward whichever of them you tend—that is most near you, and every man has in himself the key.[46] Heaven and hell are everywhere throughout the whole world. You need not seek them far off.
It is always the nature of "Anti-Christ" and "Babel" and "opinion-peddlers" to seek God and heaven and hell above the stars or under the deep. There is only one "place" to look for God and that is in one's own soul, there is only one "region" in which to find heaven or hell, and that is in the nature and character of the person's own desire and will: "Even though the devil should go many millions of miles, desiring to see heaven and enter into it, yet he would still be in hell and could not see heaven at all."[47] The soul, Boehme says in substance, hath heaven or hell in itself. Heaven is the turning of the will into God's love; hell is the turning of the will into hate. Now when the body falls away the heavenly soul is thoroughly penetrated with the Love and Light of God, even as fire penetrates and enlightens white-hot iron, whereby it loses its darkness—this is heaven and this is the right hand of God. The soul that dwells in falsehood, lust, pride, envy, and anger carries hell in itself and cannot reach the Light and Love of God. Though it should go a thousand miles or a thousand times ten thousand miles—even climb beyond the spaces of the stars and the bounds of the universe—it would still remain in the same property and source of darkness as before.[48] The "next world"—"the world beyond"—is {188} justthisworld, as it is in each one of us, with its essential spirit and nature and character clearly revealed and fulfilled. God creates and maintains no hell of ever-lasting torture; He builds and supports no heaven of endless glory. They are both formed out of the soul's own substance as it turns toward light or darkness, toward love or hate—in short, as "it keeps house," to use one of his vivid words, with the eternal nature of things.
Something like this, then, was the universe which Boehme—with those "azure-grey eyes that lighted up like the windows of Solomon's Temple"—saw there in Görlitz, as he pegged his shoes. "Open your eyes," he once said, "and the whole world is full of God."[49] But he is not a pantheist, in the usual sense of that word, blurring away the lines between good and evil, or the boundaries which mark off self from self, and self from God. There is forever, to be sure, a hidden essence or substance in the soul which is from God, and which remains to the end unlost and unspoiled—something to which God can speak and to which His Light and Grace can make appeal; but I am indestructibly a real I, and God is in His true nature no vague Abyss—He eternally utters Himself as Person: "The first Abysmal God without beginning begets a comprehensible will which is Son. Thus the Abyss which in itself is an indescribable Nothing [nothing in particular] forms itself into Something [definite] through the Birth of a Son, and so is Spirit."[50] In God Himself there is only Good, only triumphing eternal Joy,[51] but as soon as finite processes appear, as soon as anything is differentiated into actuality, the potentialities of darkness and light appear, the possibilities of good and evil are there: "All things consist in Yes or No. In order to have anything definite made manifest there must be a contrary therein—a Yes and a No."[52] The universe, therefore, though it came forth out of the eternal Mother and remains still, in its deepest origin and being, rooted in the substance of God, is a {189} battleground of strife, an endless Armageddon. Both within and without the world is woven of mixed strands, a warp of darkness and a woof of light, and all beings possessed of will are thus actors in a mighty drama of eternal significance, with exits, not only at the end of the Fifth Act but throughout the play, through two gates into two worlds which are both all the time present here and now.
[1]Aurora, xxi. 60-62.
[2] Swinburne,Erechtheus.
[3] SeeFifteenth Epistle, 25.
[4]Fifth Epistle, 50.
[5] Like Paracelsus, he uses "sulphur" in a symbolic way to represent an active energy of the universe and a form of will in man. In a similar way, "mercury" stands for intelligence and spirit, and "salt" is the symbol for substance. No one could find in a chemist's shop the salt or sulphur that Boehme talks about!
[6] There is a fine saying about Dante in the Ottimo Commento: "I, the writer, heard Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to say other than he would, but that many a time and oft he had made words say for him what they were not wont to say for other poets."
[7]Sig. re.ix. 1-3. Paracelsus said, "Everything is the product of one creative effort," and, "There is nothing corporeal that does not possess a soul."
[8]The Supersensual Life, p. 44.
[9] Paracelsus and others used the termMysterium magnumto denote the original, but unoriginated, matter out of which all things were made. "Mysterium" is anything out of which something germinally contained in it can be developed.
[10]Mysterium magnum, xxix. 1-2.
[11]Forty Questions, i. 57.
[12]Sig. re.ii. 4-15, and iii. 1-10.
[13]The Threefold Life of Man, iii. 2.
[14]Aurora, iii. 35-39.
[15]Ibid.vi. 6-8;Clavis, 18-29.
[16]Sig. re.xvi. i.
[17]Aurora, xiii. 48-57;Myst. mag.viii. 31;The Three Principles, iv. 66.
[18]Sig. re.xv. 38.
[19]Myst. mag.viii. 27.
[20]Myst. mag.xxix. 1-10.
[21]The Three Principles, iv. 68-74;The Threefold Life, iv. 33.
[22]Myst. mag.ix. 3-8.
[23]Aurora, Preface 84.
[24] Christopher Walton,Notes and Materials for a Biography of Wm. Law(London, 1854), 55.
[25] The great passages in which Boehme expounds the seven qualities are found in theAurora, chaps. viii.-xi.;Sig. re.chap. xiv.;The Clavis, 54-132; though they are more or less definitely stated or implied in nearly everything he wrote. Seven "qualities" or "principles" or "sources" appear and reappear in ever shifting forms throughout the entire literature of Gnosticism, alchemy, and nature-mysticism.
[26]Aurora, viii. 32-35.
[27] Some of Boehme's enthusiastic friends insist that Sir Isaac Newton, who was an admirer of Boehme, "ploughed with Boehme's heifer,"i.e.got his suggestion of the law of universal gravitation from the philosopher of Görlitz. See Walton,Notes, p. 46 andpassim.
[28]Sig. re.iv.passim.
[29]Sig. re.xiii.
[30] For fuller treatment of this point see Boutroux,Historical Studies in Philosophy, chapter on "Jacob Boehme, the German Philosopher," pp. 199-201.
[31]Third Epistle, 33.
[32]Twenty-fourth Epistle, 7;Sig. re.i.
[33]The Threefold Life, vi. 47.
[34]The Three Princ.xiv. 89;First Epistle, 42.
[35]The Three Princ.x. 26; xvi. 50.
[36]Ibid.x. 13.
[37]Aurora, xviii. 49.
[38]Myst. mag.xxii. 41.
[39]Ibid.xviii. 31-43, given in substance.
[40]Ibid.xxvi. 19. The place of Christ in Boehme's system will be given in the next chapter.
[41]Myst. mag.xxvi. 5.
[42]Incarnation, part ii. ix. 12-14.
[43]Aurora, x. 100-103.
[44]Ibid.xix. 56-59.
[45]The Supersensual Life, 36.
[46]The Three Princ.ix. 25-27 and xix. 33.
[47]Myst. mag.viii. 28.
[48]The Supersensual Life, 38. Every reader will naturally be reminded of Milton's great lines:
"The mind is its own place, and in itselfCan make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
There were no doubt manysourcesin Milton's time for such a conception, but the poet surely would read the translations of Boehme which were coming from the press all through the period of his literary activity.
[49]The Threefold Life, xi. 106.
[50]Election, i. 10-17.
[51]Aurora, ii. 63.
[52]Theosoph. Quest.iii. 2-4.
{190}
"I will write a Process or Way which I myself have gone."[1] Most writers who have treated of Boehme have mainly dealt with hisWeltanschauung—his theosophical view of the Abyss and the worlds of time and eternity,—or they have devoted themselves to descriptions of his type of mysticism.[2] His important permanent contribution to Christianity is, however, to be found in his interpretation of the way, or, as he calls it, the process of salvation. Very much that he wrote about the procession of the universe is capricious and subjective. His interpretations of Genesis, and of Old Testament Scripture in general, are thoroughly uncritical and of value only as they reveal his own mind and his occasional flashes of insight. But his accounts of his ownexperienceand his message of the way to God possess an elemental and universal value, and belong among the precious words of the prophets of the race. His Way of Salvation is in direct line with the central ideas of Denck, Bünderlin, Entfelder, Franck, Schwenckfeld, and Weigel; that is, his emphasis is always, as was theirs, upon the native divine possibilities of the soul, upon the fact of a spiritual environment in immediate correspondence and co-operation with the soul, and upon the necessity of personal and inward experience as the key to every gate of life; but he puts more stress even than Schwenckfeld did {191} upon the epoch-making new birth, and he sees more in the Person of Christ as the way of salvation than any of the spiritual Reformers of the sixteenth century had seen, while his own personal experience was so unique and illuminating, so profound and transforming, that he was able to speak on divine things with a grasp and insight and with a spiritual authority beyond that attained by any of the reformers in this group. He has given, I think, as profound and as simple, and at the same time as vital an interpretation of salvation through Christ as the Reformation movement produced before the nineteenth century, and much that he said touches the very core of what seems to us to-day to be the heart of the Gospel, the central fact of mature religion.[3]
As we have seen, Boehme does not in the least blink the tragic depth of sin, while he goes as far as anybody in holding that "the centre of man's soul came out of eternity,"[4] that "as a mother bringeth forth a child out of her own substance and nourisheth it therewith, so doth God with man his child,"[5] and that the inward ground and centre of the soul, with its divine capacity of response to Grace and Light, is an inalienable possession of every man.[6] Yet, at the same time, he insists that there is in every soul "both a yes and a no," a vision of the good and acontrarium, a hunger for the universal will of God and a hunger for the particular will of self.[7] The form of hunger, the inclination of desire, the attitude of will shapes the destiny, forms the fundamental disposition, and builds the life of every man into heaven or into hell—"a man puts on a garment of light or a garment of wrath as he puts on clothes."[8] To consent to false desire, to turn toward objects that feed only the particular selfish will, to live in the lower "qualities" of dark-fire is to {192} form a soultincturedwith darkness and sundered from the eternal root of Life. Lucifer went the whole way in his consent to false and evil desire. He said, "Evil be thou my good!" and formed his entire nature out of the dark-principle, and "his Light went out." Adam and his offspring after him, however, only dimmed the native Light and deadened the original power that belongs to one who comes from God, to live in heavenly harmony and joy. Man has fallen indeed, but he is not hopelessly lost, he is "forever seeking his native country," and he forever bears within himself an immortal seed which may burst into Life—into a "Lily-blossom."[9] The way of salvation for Boehme is theprocessby which this original Light and power, dimmed and deadened by sin, are restored to the soul.
He never tires of insisting that the restoration can come only by aprocess of Life, not by a "scheme" of theology. Like the early prophets of Israel, in their sweeping attacks on the ritual and sacrificial systems that were being substituted for moral and spiritual life, Boehme flings himself with holy passion against the substitution of doctrines of salvation for a real life-process of salvation, personally experienced in the soul. "Cain" and "Babel" are his two favourite types of the prevailing substitute-religion which he calls "verbal," or "historical," or "titular" Christianity.[10] "Whatever Babel teaches," he says, "of external imputed righteousness, or of external assumed adoption is without foundation or footing."[11] He is still only a follower of "Cain" who tries to cover his old, evil, unchanged self "with the purple mantle of Christ's death."[12] The "opinion" that the old man of evil-will can be "covered" with Christ's merit, the "faith" that His death pays off for us the debt of our sin is only "a supposed religion."[13] "Christianity," he says again, "does not consist in the mere knowing of history and applying the history-knowledge to ourselves, {193} saying: 'Christ died for us; He hath paid the ransom for us, so that we need do nothing but comfort ourselves therewith and steadfastly believe that it is so.'"[14] The "doctors" and "the wise world" and "the makers of opinion" will have it that Christ has suffered on the Cross for all our sins, and that we can be justified and acquitted of all our transgressions by what He did for us, but it is no true, safe way for the soul. To stake faith upon a history that once was, to look for "satisfaction" through the sufferings which Christ endured before we were born is to be "the child of an assumed grace," is to possess a mere external and historical faith that leaves the dim, weak soul where it was before. All such "invented works" and "supposed schemes" are of Anti-Christ, they "avail nothing" whatever toward the real process of salvation.[15]
The gravamen of his charge is not that the "opinions" are false, or that the "history" is unimportant, but that "opinions" and "history" are taken as substitutes for religion itself, which is and must always be an actual inward process constructing a new and victorious life in the person himself. "All fictions, I say, and devices which men contrive to come to God by are lost labour and vain endeavourwithout a new mind. Verbal forgiveness and outward imputation of righteousness are false and vain comforts—soft cushions for the evil soul—without the creation of a will wholly new, which loveth and willeth evil no more."[16] The whole problem, then, is the problem of the formation of a new vision, a new desire, a new will, and Boehme finds the solution of this deepest human problem in Christ. Christ is the Light-revelation of God—the shining forth of the Light and Love nature of the Eternal God. It must not be supposed for a moment that once—before satisfaction was made to Him—God was an angry God who had to be "reconciled" by a transaction, or that there wasa time in historywhen God began to reveal His Heart in a Christ-revelation, or {194} that when Christ became man, Deity divided itself into sundered Persons.[17] "No. You ought not to have such thoughts," Boehme says. The Heart and Light and Love of God are from eternity. Christ has never sundered or broken Himself away from God; they are not two but forever One. All the Light and Love and Joy of God have blossomed into the Christ-manifestation and become revealed in Him. Like everything else in the universe, Christ is both outward and inward. He belongs in the eternal inward world and He also has had His temporal manifestation in the visible world. The Heart of God became a human soul, brought the fulness of the Deity into humanity, and slew the spirit of the world.[18] The inward penetrated the outward and illuminated it with Light.[19] Christ entered into humanity and tinctured it with Deity.[20] In Him the Heart of God became man, and in the power of the heavenly Light He wrestled with our wild human nature and conquered it.[21] Eternity and time are united in Him.[22] He is the wedding chamber of God and man.[23] He is God and man in one undivided Person.[24] He is actual God; He is essential man—the God-man, the man-God, in whom the arms of everlasting Love are outstretched and through whom humanity is brought into the power of the Eternal God.[25] It was in this "dear Emmanuel," as he often calls Christ, that "Love became man and put on our human flesh and our human soul,"[26] and the full power of Eternal Love stood revealed in time, for "One who is Love itself was born of our own very birth."[27] The Cross was not a transaction. It was the culmination of this mighty Love, for "here on the cross hung God and man"—God's Love springing forth in a soul strong enough to show it in its full scope.[28]
But let no person think that he can "cover himself with the purple mantle of Christ's sufferings and death," {195} and so win his salvation: "Thou thyself," he says, "must go through Christ's whole journey, and enter wholly into His process."[29] "We become children of God in Christ," he wrote in one of his Epistles, "not by an outward, adventitious show of appropriating Grace, not through some merit of Grace appropriated from without, or received in an historical apprehension of being justified by another, but through an inward, resident Grace, which regenerates us into childlikeness, so that Christ the conqueror of death arises in us and becomes a dominating operation in us."[30] This is the heart of his entire message. Every step must be experimental. Salvation is an inward process, and Christ is efficacious and effective becauseHe lives and operates in us. "The suffering and death of Christ," he says, "avail only for those who die to their own will in and with Christ, and are buried with Him to a new will and obedience, and hate sin; who put on Christ in His suffering, reproach, and persecution, take His cross upon them and follow Him under His red banner; to those who put on Christ in His process and now become in the inward spiritual man Christ's members and the Temple of God who dwells in us. No one has a right to comfort himself with Christ's merits unless he desires wholly to put on Christ in himself. He is not a Christian until he has put Him on by true repentance and conversion to Him with absolute resignation and self-denial, so that Christ espouseth and betrotheth Himself with him. . . . For a Christian must be born of Christ and must die to the will of Adam. He must have Christ in him and be a member of His Life according to the spiritual man."[31]
Faith, which is always the key-word in any person's interpretation of Christianity, is for Boehme a dynamic process of appropriating Christ, and of re-living Him. "Faith," he writes in his treatise onThe Incarnation, {196} "is not historical knowledge for a man to make articles of it and to depend on them, but faith is one spirit with God, it is the activity of God; it is free, but only for the right and for pure Love, in which it draws the breath of its power and strength. It is, finally, itself the substance."[32] Faith is, thus, not knowledge, it is not believing facts of history, it is not accepting metaphysical dogma. It is, as he is never weary of saying, "strong earnestness of spirit," the earnest will to live in the inward and eternal, passionate hunger and thirst for God, and finally the act of receiving Christ into the soul as a present power and spirit to live by. "I must die," he wrote, "with my outward man [the man of self-centred will] in Christ's death and arise and live anew in Him. Therefore I live now by the will of faith in the spirit of Christ and receive Christ with His humanity into my will. He makes through me a manifestation of the spiritual world and introduces the true Love-sound into the harp-strings of my life. He became that which I am, and now He has made me that which He is!"[33]
Another word for this efficacious and dynamic Faith is "Birth" or "innermost Birth," by which Boehme means the act of discovering the Gate to the Heart and Love and Light of God, and of entering it. "The Son of God, the Eternal Word of the Father, the Glance and Brightness and Power of Eternal Light must become man andbe born in you; otherwise you are in the dark stable and go about groping."[34] "If thou art born of God, then within the circle of thy own life is the whole undivided Heart of God."[35] It is a transforming event by which one swings over from life in the outer to life in the inner world, from life in the dark world to life in the light world, and is born into the kingdom, or principle, which Christ revealed in His triumphant spiritual Life. The human spirit, by this innermost Birth, reaches the principle of Life by which Christ lived, and the gate into heaven is opened and paradise is in the soul. In a {197} beautiful passage he says: "This birth must be wrought within you. The Heart, or the Son of God must arise in the birth of your life, and then you are in Christ and He is in you, and all that He and the Father have is yours; and as the Son is one with the Father, so also the new man is one with the Father and with the Son, one virtue, one power, one light, one life, one eternal paradise, one enduring substance, one Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and thou His child!"[36] God is no longer conceived as far away. He is now with His Love and Light as near as the soul is to itself, and the joy of being born in Christ is like the joy of parents when a little child is born to them.[37] God's will now becomes the man's will, he turns back into the unity from which he broke away, he sees now in one moment what all the doctors in the schools, on the mere level of reason, have never seen, and his inward eye is so opened that he knows God as soon as his eye turns toward Him.[38]
This Faith-process, or innermost life-birth, is not the act of a moment that is over and done with. It means the progressive formation of a new man within the man, so that the real Christian becomes a living branch in a mighty Christ-Tree. Just as Adam was the trunk of a great race-tree of fallen humanity, Christ is to be the Eternal Life-Tree of the universe in whom all the new-born souls of men shall live as springing, flowering branches or twigs: God created only one Man; all other men are twigs of the One Stem.[39] "In Christ," he says, "we are all only one, as a tree in many boughs and branches," and, with a return to autobiography, Boehme adds, "His Life has been brought into mine, so that I am atoned with Him in His Love. The will of Christ has entered into humanity again in me, and now my will in me enters into His humanity."[40] He writes to one of his Silesian friends: "You are a growing branch in the Life-Tree of God in Christ, in whom all the children of God are also branches," and he adds that there is "no other faith {198} which saves except Christ in us," the Life of our lives.[41] Sometimes he calls this triumphant experience the birth of a new branch in Christ's Life-Tree, sometimes the birth of the Lily in Christ's garden of flowers, sometimes it is the birth of the immortal seed. Sometimes it is uniting in life and spirit with Him who is "the Treader on the Serpent," sometimes it is finding the noble Virgin, sometimes it is discovering the Philosopher's Stone, sometimes it is winning the precious Diadem, sometimes it is possessing the key which unlocks the Door, sometimes it is arriving at the Sabbath Quiet of the soul. These are only a variety of ways, many of them forgotten inheritances from alchemy and astrology, of saying that the soul finds its goal in an experience which binds it into one common corporate life with Christ and so into an elemental Love-Unity with God: whoever is born of Christ liveth and walketh in Him, puts Him on in His suffering, death, and resurrection, becomes a member of Christ's body, is "tinctured" with His spirit, and has his own human life rooted in the Love of God.[42] Here, then, in the creation and formation of this organic Life-Tree the universe attains its ultimate goal. It is wholly an achievement of free will, of holy choice. The dark Principle is not annihilated, is not suppressed, but the Heart of God moves ever on in a steadily growing triumph, binding soul after soul into the divine Igdrasil Tree of the Light Universe, in a unity that is not now the unity of negation and undifferentiation—an Abyss that swallows up all that is in it,—but a unity of many wills united in a spirit of concord and love, many persons formed by holy desire into one unbroken symphony as harps of God.
With the change ofcentrein the inner man corresponds also the outer life of word and deed, for the outer, here as everywhere, is only the "signature" of an inner which fits it: "A man must show the root of the tree out of which spirit and flesh have their origin."[43] When the will becomes new-born and the soul unites itself as a twig {199} in Christ's Life-Tree, then it ceases to love sin and will it. When God brings His will into birth in us, He gives us virtue and power to will what He wills, and to leave our sins behind.[44] The attitude of hate, the spirit of war are marks of the old unchanged nature, and are heathenish and not Christian. When Christ is formed in the inner ground of the soul, a man leaves the sword in the sheath and lives in the virtue and power of peace and love. "What will Christ say," he asks the ministers of the Church of his day, "when He sees your apostolic hearts covered with armor? When He gave you the sword of the Spirit, did He command you to fight and make war, or to instigate kings and princes to put on the sword and kill?"[45]
Like the prophets of Israel, he feels intensely the sufferings of the poor and the oppressed, and he breaks out frequently into a biting satire on a kind of Christianity which not only neglects the truecureof soul and body, but "consumes the sweat and blood of the needy," and feeds upon "the sighs and groans and tears of the poor."[46] The true idea of arealChristianity is "fraternity in the Life of Christ"—"thy brother's soul," he says, "is a fellow-member with thy soul,"[47] and he insists, as though it were the mighty burden of his spirit, that all possessions, goods, and talents shall contribute to the common life of humanity and to the benefit of the social group.[48] It is much better for parents to labour to form good souls in their children than to strive to gather and to leave behind for them great riches and abundance of goods![49] Self-desire is a ground not only of personal disquiet but also of social disturbance, and Boehme feels that the way to spread peace and joy through the world is to cultivate the Love-spirit of Christ and to practice it in fellowship with men.
Like his German predecessor, Sebastian Franck, he is {200} primarily concerned with the invisible Church, and he holds lightly to the empirical Church as he knows it. The Church to which his spirit is dedicated is the organic Life-Tree of which Christ is the living Stem. The holy Zion is not from without, he says, it is built up of those who are joined to Christ and who all live together in one city which is Christ in us.[50] A Christian in the life belongs to no sect, he ceases to wrangle over opinions and words, he dwells in the midst of sects and Babel-churches, but he keeps above the controversies and contentions, and "puts his knowing and willing into the Life of Christ," and works quietly on toward the formation and triumph of the one true Christian Church,[51] which will be, when its glory is complete, the visible expression of the Divine Life-Tree.
He dislikes, as much as did the English Quaker, George Fox, the custom of calling "stone houses" churches, and he will not admit that a building is anything but a building: "Stone houses, called churches, have no greater holiness than other houses, for they are built of stone and other such material, as other houses are, and God is no more powerful in them than He is in other houses, but the Church [i.e.the Congregation] which meets there, if the members of it bind themselves by prayer into one body in Christ, is a holy Temple of Jesus Christ."[52]
His attitude toward outward sacraments consistently fits in with all his central teachings. The outward, for Boehme, is never unimportant. It is always significant and can always be used as a parable or symbol of something inner and eternal. But the outward is at best only temporal, only symbolic, and it becomes a hindrance if it is taken for the real substance of which it is only the outward "signature": "The form shall be destroyed and shall cease with time, but the spirit remains forever."[53] The sacraments, he declares, do not take away sin, for men go to church all their lives and receive the sacraments {201} and remain as wicked and beastly as ever—while a holy man always has a Church within himself and an inward ministry.[54] Blessedness, therefore, lies not in the outward, but in the life and power of the inward spirit, and it is only a Babel-Church that claims the right to cast out those who have the real substance and neglect only the outward form.[55] In hisTreatise on the Holy Supper, he wrote: "It is not enough for a man to hear sermons preached, and to be baptised in the name of Christ, and to go to the Supper. This maketh no Christian. For that, there must beearnestness. No person is a Christian unless Christ live and work in him."[56]
The pith and heart of Christianity, the consummate goal of the way of Salvation, for Boehme is, as we have seen, not "history" and not any kind of outward "form" or "letter"—buchstäbliches Wort,—it is an experience in which the soul finds itself "at the top of Jacob's ladder," and feels its life in God and God's Life in it in an ineffable Love-union. He has himself given a very simple and penetrating account of this type of experience drawn from what he calls his own book of life: "Finding within myself a powerfulcontrarium, namely, the desires that belong to flesh and blood, I began to fight a hard battle against my corrupted nature, and with the aid of God I made up my mind to overcome the inherited evil will, to break it, and to enter wholly into the Love of God. . . . This, however, was not possible for me to accomplish, but I stood firmly by myearnest resolution, and fought a hard battle with myself. Now while I was wrestling and battling, being aided by God, a wonderful light arose within my soul. It was a light entirely foreign to my unruly nature, but in it I recognized the true nature of God and man, and the relation existing between them, a thing which heretofore I had never understood."[57] In one of his other autobiographical passages, he says that after much earnest seeking and desire and many a hard repulse, "the Gate was opened!" These are {202} characteristic accounts of a profound mystical experience. There had been long stress and inward battle, the tension of a divided self, and then a great ground swell of earnest will—a resolve, he says, to put my life in hazard rather than give over, when "a wonderful light arose within the soul" and "the Gate was opened." And "when this mighty light fell upon me, I saw," he says, in still another description, "in an effectual peculiar manner, and I knew in the spirit."[58]