Grützmacher holds that Boehme is an "isolated thinker," having little, if any, historical connection with {169} the past.[49] I do not agree with this view. I find in him rather the ripe fulfilment of the powerful protest against the dead letter, against a formal religion, and equally a fulfilment of a Christianity of inward life, which was voiced so vigorously in the writings of Denck, Bünderlin, Entfelder, Franck, and Weigel, neglecting for the moment another side of Boehme and another set of influences which appeared in him. The central note of his life-long prophet-cry was against a form of religion built upon the letter of Scripture and consisting of external ceremonies and practices, and this is the ground of Richter's bitter hostility and stubborn opposition.[50]
The Church of his day seems to him a veritable Babel—"full of pride and wrangling, and jangling, and snarling about the letter of the written Word," lacking in true, real, effectual knowledge and power; a pitiably poor "substitute for the Temple of the holy Spirit where God's living Word is taught."[51] Through each of his books we hear of "verbal Christendom"; of "titular Christians"; of "historical feigned faith"; of "history religion"; of "an external forgiveness of sins"; of "the work of outward letters." "The builders of Babel," he says, "cannot endure that one should teach that Christ Himself must be the teacher in the human heart"—"they jangle instead about the mere husk, about the written word and letter while they miss the living Word."[52]
The divisions of Christendom are due to the fact that its "master-builders" are of the Babel-type. They always follow the line of opinion; their basis is "the letter"; their method of approach is external. They build "stone houses in which they read the writings which the Apostles left behind them," while they themselves dispute and contend about "mental idols and {170} opinions."[53] The true Church of Christ, on the contrary, is the living Temple of the Spirit. It is built up of men made wholly new by the inward power of the Divine Spirit and made one by an inward unity of heart and life with Christ—as "a living Twig of our Life-Tree Jesus Christ." Nobody can belong to this Church unless "he puts on the shirt of a little child," dies to selfishness and hypocrisy, rises again in a new will and obedience, and forms his life in its inmost ground according to Christ, the Life.[54] "The wise world," he declares, "will not believe in the true inward work of Christ in the heart; it will have only an external washing away of sins in Grace," but the ABC of true religion is far different.[55] He only is a Christian in fact in whom Christ dwelleth, liveth and hath His being, in whom Christ hath arisen as the eternal ground of the soul. He only is a Christian who has this high title in himself, and has entered with mind and soul into that Eternal Word which has manifested itself as the life of our humanity.[56] He wrote near the end of his life to Balthazar Tilken: "If I had no other book except the book which I myself am, I should have books enough. The entire Bible lies in me if I have Christ's Spirit in me. What do I need of more books? Shall I quarrel over what is outside me before I have learned what is within me?"[57] "What would it profit me if I were continually quoting the Bible and knew the whole book by heart but did not know the Spirit that inspired the holy men who wrote that book, nor the source from which they received their knowledge? How can I expect to understand them in truth, if I have not the same Spirit they had?"[58]
This insistence on personal, first-hand experience and practice of the Christ-Life, as the ground of true religion, {171} is the fundamental feature of Boehme's Christianity. He travels, as we shall see, through immense heights and deeps. Like Dante, who immeasurably surpasses him in power of expression, but not in prophetic power of vision, he saw the eternal realities of heaven and hell and the world between, and he told as well as he could what he saw, but his practical message which runs like a thread through all his writings is always simple—almost childlike in its simplicity—"Thou must thyself be the way. The spiritual understanding must be born in thee."[59] "A Christian is a new creature in the ground of the heart."[60] "The Kingdom of God is not from without, but it is a new man, who lives in love, in patience, in hope, in faith and in the Cross of Jesus Christ."[61]
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 Questions and The Clavis, 1911; and The Way to Christ, 1911. The Signatura 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's Historical Studies in Philosophy (London, 1912), pp. 169-233; Hans Lassen Martensen's Jacob Boehme (translated from the Danish by T. Rhys Evans, London, 1885); Franz Hartmann's Life and Doctrine of Jacob Boehme (London, 1891); Von Harless' Jacob Boehme und die Alchymisten (Leipzig, 1882); Ederheimer's Jakob Boehme und die Romantiker (Heidelberg, 1901); Paul Deussen's Jacob 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 of The Three Principles (1910); Christopher Walton's Notes and Materials for a Biography of William Law (London, 1854)—a volume of great value to the student of Boehme; Rudolph Steiner's Mystics of the Renaissance (translated, London, 1911), pp. 223-245; A. J. Penny's Studies in Jacob Boehme (London, 1912), uncritical and written from the theosophical point of view; Hegel's History 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.