Jacob Boehme

There have been few more polarizing figures in early modern religious history than Jacob Boehme (b. c. 1575–d. 1624). He has been regarded as a divinely illuminated genius by his most devoted disciples yet also reviled in equal measure by his fiercest critics as an incomprehensible, ignorant heretic. According to the reckoning of his first biographer, Boehme was the author of thirty works, many of which are extremely long and difficult. These were all written in German, although several have Latin titles. Whether by choice or circumstance, some writings remained unfinished. Remarkably, very little has been lost with the exception of some minor treatises. In addition, much of Boehme’s extensive correspondence survives. A Lutheran by birth, by formative religious instruction and steadfastly at his death, Boehme’s major theological concerns were with the nature of creation and how it came into being, the origin and presence of evil, and the attainment of salvation through a process of inward spiritual regeneration and rebirth. Nonetheless, influenced initially by the teachings of Paracelsus and the Spiritual Reformers Caspar Schwenckfeld and Valentin Weigel, as well as by popular alchemical and astrological texts, and then, following the clandestine circulation of his first incomplete book “Aurora” in manuscript, a widening social network of friends, learned correspondents, and noble patrons, Boehme began developing certain heretical views. These included his understanding of the Trinity, which he was accused of denying through the introduction of a fourth figure, Sophia (symbolizing the Noble Virgin of Divine Wisdom); his explanations for the fall of Lucifer and the rebel angels (constituting a first fall preceding the second fall of humanity from paradise); Adam’s prelapsarian androgynous nature; the existence of seven qualities (dry, sweet, bitter, fire, love, sound, and corpus); and the three principles that corresponded to the dark world, light world, and our temporal visible world. Moreover, having settled and established himself as a shoemaker at Görlitz in Upper Lusatia, and writing against a backdrop of vibrant scientific, astronomical, and medical enquiry; damaging regional political struggles, religious polemic, apocalyptic speculation; and the earliest phase of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), Boehme interposed himself—ignorantly and presumptuously according to his better-educated critics—in important doctrinal debates over the nature of free will and the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper by expounding an irenic, anticlerical message. This culminated in his announcement of an impending Great Reformation, a new age of love, patience, peace, and joy.