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 “Morgenröthe 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.[121] 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,[122] 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.
The manner and system which Boehme adopts must accordingly be termed barbarous; the expressions used in his works prove this, as when, for example, he speaks of the divine Salitter, Marcurius, &c. As Boehme places the life, the movement of absolute existence in the heart, so does he regard all conceptions as being in a condition of actuality; or he makes use of actuality as Notion, that is to say he forcibly takes natural things and sensuous qualities to express his ideas rather than the determinations of the Notion. For instance, sulphur and such like are not to him the things that we so name, but their essence; or the Notion has this form of actuality. Boehme’s profoundest interest is in the Idea, and he struggles hard to express it. The speculative truth which he desires to expound really requires, in order to be comprehended, thought and the form of thought. Only in thought can this unity be comprehended, in the central point of which his mind has its place; but it is just the form of thought that is lacking to him. The forms that he employs are really no longer determinations of the Notion at all. They are on the one hand sensuous, chemical determinations, such qualities as acid, sweet, sour, fierce, and, on the other, emotions such as wrath and love; and, further, tincture, essence, anguish, &c. For him these sensuous forms do not, however, possess the sensuous significance which belongs to them, but he uses them in order to find expression for his thought. It is, however, at once clear to us how the form of manifestation must necessarily appear forced, since thought alone is capable of unity. It thus appears strange to read of the bitterness of God, of the Flagrat, and of lightning; we first require to have the Idea, and then we certainly discern its presence here. But the other side is that Boehme utilizes the Christian form which lies nearest to him, and more especially that of the Trinity, as the form of the Idea: he intermingles the sensuous mode and the mode of popularly conceived religion, sensuous images and conceptions. However rude and barbarous this may on the one hand be, and however impossible it is to read Boehme continuously, or to take a firm grasp of his thoughts (for all these qualities, spirits and angels make one’s head swim), we must on the other hand recognize that he speaks of everything as it is in its actuality, and that he does this from his heart. This solid, deep, German mind which has intercourse with what is most inward, thus really exercises an immense power and force in order to make use of actuality as Notion, and to have what takes place in heaven around and within it. Just as Hans Sachs represented God, Christ and the Holy Ghost, as well as patriarchs and angels, in his own particular manner and as ordinary people like himself, not looking upon them as past and historic, so was it with Boehme.