Jakob Böhme

Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) was a German philosopher, Christian mystic and heterodox theologian working within the Lutheran tradition. Many of his contemporaries regarded his thought as original, yet his writings brought him into conflict with church authorities, who accused him of heresy. He is remembered today as one of the most unusual forerunners of German philosophy, and Hegel called him "the first German philosopher."

Böhme was born on 24 April 1575 in Alt Seidenberg, a village near Görlitz in Upper Lusatia. His father was a Lutheran peasant of modest means. As the fourth of five children, Böhme was first put to work as a herd boy, since he was judged too frail for farm labour. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Seidenberg. The apprenticeship was hard, and he lived with a household that was not Christian, which exposed him to the religious disputes of the day. He had no formal schooling, yet he read the Bible and the works of visionaries such as Paracelsus, Valentin Weigel and Schwenckfeld. After several years of travelling as a journeyman he settled in Görlitz, and by 1599 he was a master shoemaker and had married Katharina, with whom he would have six children.

In 1600 he had a vision which, as he later described it, revealed to him the spiritual structure of the world and the relation between God, humanity, good and evil. He chose not to speak of it publicly and went on with his family and trade. A second inner experience in 1610 deepened his sense of the unity of the cosmos and of a calling from God. Around 1613 he gave up shoemaking and sold woollen gloves, which took him often to Prague.

Twelve years after the first vision he began writing Aurora, his first book, intended for himself and never finished. Manuscript copies circulated without his consent and caused a scandal. The chief pastor of Görlitz, Gregorius Richter, denounced it from the pulpit and threatened Böhme with exile, and Böhme stopped writing for several years. Around 1618 friends urged him to resume, and between 1619 and 1624 he produced a remarkable body of treatises, among them De Tribus Principiis, De Signatura Rerum and Mysterium Magnum, which circulated by hand among a small circle. The publication of The Way to Christ in 1624 brought another clerical quarrel, and in May of that year he travelled to Dresden, where nobles and some professors received him with interest. He died in Görlitz on 17 November 1624 after a long bowel illness, and the new clergy questioned him before allowing him to take communion.

The core of his thought is the problem of sin, evil and redemption. In line with Lutheran theology, Böhme held that humanity had fallen from grace into sin and suffering, and that God intended to restore the world. Yet he departed from accepted doctrine by rejecting justification by faith alone and by describing the Fall as a necessary stage in the evolution of the universe. He conceived God as a reality that unfolds from within: the Father as fire, the Son as light, and the Spirit as the living divine life. He insisted that evil does not come from any divine decree but begets further evil within the order of nature.

His influence was considerable. His followers, known as Behmenists, spread across Europe, and his complete works were first printed in 1730. Thinkers of German idealism and Romanticism found in him an intuition about the unity of nature and spirit that would resonate for generations.