Another waymark in the link between mysticism and modern Protestantism is Jacob Böhme (1575-1624)
Jacob Böhme is much less well known than Luther. He was not a theologian or a pastor, but a layman, a shoemaker, based in Görlitz in Silesia. He was to publish a complex work based on his personal spiritual experiences which were characterised by flashes of inspiration. It must be said that he was a particularly pious young man, devoted to Protestant worship and private prayer. Böhme gave an account of his spiritual experience in a letter . This missive reveals the fundamentals of Böhme's mystical experience: he was an anxious and melancholy individual who sought peace in “the bosom of Christ”. His journey was in line with isolated mystics: he wished to renounce his own will to follow only the divine will. It is important to emphasise this because, contrary to what is claimed by many of his commentators, Jacob Böhme was not in search of knowledge for the sake of it, but to attain salvation and become “the child of God in his son Jesus Christ”. His theosophy[1] would always be at the service of mystical union with God through Christ.
Prayer is therefore fundamental for Böhme as it is the path to the intuitive and visionary understanding of the mysteries of God, creation and man. It was in the light of this experience that he wrote in 1612, the Aurora, an account of his last inspiration and a work which was condemned by the pastor of Görlitz, Gregor Richter, a tenacious partisan of Lutheran orthodoxy. Furthermore, the minister alerted the authorities who summoned Böhme to the town hall. He was thrown in prison and his text seized. He was not freed until he had promised never to write another word. This he did not for several years.
The spiritual climate in Böhme's time was very different from that at the time of Luther. The major problem was no longer so much that of individual guilt, of anguish about how to achieve salvation, but more the problem of the origin and existence of evil. At the time when Böhme wrote the Aurora, tensions between Catholics and Protestants were palpable (the Thirty Years War broke out shortly afterwards and remains a time of unparalleled violence between the rival churches). Böhme, guided by his basic experience, embraced the question of evil with the clear aim to be able to master and defeat it. According to him, there was something dark in divine nature but the Light must vanquish the Shadow. This is how God is truly born. Böhme described, in mythical fashion, the process of the 'birth' of the Living God: from the darkness to the Light through Love.
The dark period of the Thirty Years War made Böhme break his silence; he joined with the erudite partisans of occultism and read the great Renaissance esoteric authors such as Paracelsus[2]. All this impelled him to return to writing and he produced a great deal from 1619. Some of his titles were:
The three principles of Divine Being
Between the end of 1619 and the beginning of 1620, he published The threefold Life of Man
and, in spring 1620, Psychologia Vera
During the course of the same year, he wrote four other texts: The Incarnation of the Word, The Six Mystical Points, The Pansophical Mystery and Of all New Informers.
A coterie formed around him and he launched himself into a kind of missionary drive to regenerate the believer and the universe (he also engaged with alchemy). Another book was produced and printed (the first Böhme was responsible for printing in 1623), which had a title which well expressed its author's mystic inspiration: The Way to Christ traced a direct line to the mysticism of the Rhine and Flanders. Imagine the reaction of pastor Richter when he learned that Böhme had begun to write again. Once more he was summoned by the town councillors, and he published an Apologia against Gregor Richter in which he responded to the clergyman's calumnies. Böhme then departed for a time to Dresden in Saxony, welcomed by the upper echelons of urban society who had been won over to alchemy and knew and appreciated his work. He then stayed in Seifersdorf, to the north of Dresden, where he wrote even more. Worn out by this work, he returned home to Göritz, where he died in December 1624.
In spite of what was at times his dark side, Böhme had a strong spiritual inspiration, and he has had a great influence on the most marginalised fringe of the Protestant church, 'Christian esotericism'. In one of the three essays which make up The Way to Christ, Of life beyond the senses, one may read a discussion of one of the important themes of mysticism, that of the disappropriation of the self.
Böhme was widely read, notably, in Germany, by the radical Pietist Oetinger[3] (by Catholics too, such as Franz von Baader[4] ), and in France and Russia. He is one of the important authors of modern theosophy. Today, some New Agers in New York have reclaimed his ideas.
