Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 15

There can be no question in the mind of any one who is familiar with the literature and religious thought of seventeenth-century England, that the ideas set forth in this chapter exerted a wide and profound influence, and were a part of the psychological climate of the middle decades of that century. The channel here indicated was only one of the ways through which these ideas came in. In due time we shall discover other channels of this spiritual message.

[1] Ficino is dealt with at greater length in Chapter XIII.

[2] The Cabala was, as I have tried to make clear, only one of the influences which produced this new intellectual climate. The rediscovered "Hermes Trismegistus," the mystically coloured Platonism, as it came from Italy, the awakened interest in Nature and in man, and the powerful message of the German Mystics all played an important part toward the formation of the new _Weltanschauung_.

[3] _Three Books of Occult Philosophy_, translated by J. F. (London, 1651).

[4] Stoddart's Life of Paracelsus (London, 1911), p. 76.

[5] Browning, _Paracelsus_, B. i. This pa.s.sage fairly represents Paracelsus' general position. "There is," he says in his _Philosophia sagax_, "a Light in the spirit of man which illuminates everything. . . . The quality of each thing created by G.o.d, whether it be visible or invisible to the senses, may be perceived and known. If man knows the essence of things, their attributes, their attractions, and the elements of which they consist, he will be a Master of nature, of the elements, and of the spirits."

[6] _Christliches Gesprach_, chap. iii.

[7] There is an excellent critical study of Weigel's writings by A.

Israel, ent.i.tled, _Weigels Leben und Schriften nach den Quellen dargestellt_ (Zschopau, 1888).

[8] "Of the Life of Christ, That is, Of True Faith which is the Rule, Square, Levell or Measuring Line of the Holy City of G.o.d and of the Inhabitants thereof here on Earth. Written in the German Language by Valentine Weigelus." (London, Giles Calvert, 1648.)

[9] Quoted from Israel, _op. cit._ p. 107.

[10] _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chap. ii.

[11] _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chap. iii.

[12] _Ibid._ part i. chap. viii.

[13] _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chap. ix.

[14] _Ibid._ part ii. chap. ix.; part i. chap. x.; part ii. chap. x.; and part. i. chap. xiv.

[15] _Ibid._ part ii. chaps. iii. and iv.

[16] This is the view set forth in his [Greek] _Gnothi Seauton_ [Know Thyself].

[17] _On the Life of Christ_, part ii. chaps. v. and vii.

[18] _Ibid._ part i. chap. viii.

[19] _Vom himmlischen Jerusalem in uns_, chap. viii.

[20] Weigel enjoins his readers to read Franck's book on "the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." See _On the Life of Christ_, part ii.

p. 57.

[21] "Faith," he says, "cannot be forced into any person by gallows or pillory." _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chap. xv.

[22] _Ibid._ part ii. chap. xiv. This is built on a pa.s.sage in Franck's _Apologia_.

[23] _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chaps. iv. and v.

[24] _Ibid._ part i. chap. vi.

[25] _Ibid._ part i. chaps. xii. and xiii.

[26] Quoted from Tauler by Weigel, _ibid._ chap. vii. See also part iii. chap. i.

[27] _Ibid._ part ii. chap. ii.

[28] _Op. cit._ chap. xx.

[29] _Christ. Gesprach_, chap. ii.

[30] In his _Der guldene Griff_, he tells of a personal spiritual "opening" which is very similar to the one which occurred later in the life of Boehme. He found himself astray in "a wilderness of darkness"

and he cried to G.o.d for Light to enlighten his soul. "_Suddenly,_" he says, "_the Light came and my eyes were opened so that I saw more clearly than all the teachers in all the world with all their books could teach me._" Chap. xxiv.

[31] _Astrologie Theologized_, p. 8.

[32] _Ibid._ pp. 16-17.

[33] This little book refers with much appreciation to Theophrastus Paracelsus. It uses his theory of "first matter" and his doctrine of "the seven governours of the world," which we shall meet in a new form in Boehme. Another book which carried astrological ideas into religious thought in a much cruder way was Andreas Tentzel's _De ratione naturali arboris vitae et scientiae boni et mali_, etc., which was Pars Secunda of his _Medicinii diastatica_ (Jena, 1629). It was translated into English in 1657 by N. Turner with the t.i.tle: "The Mumial Treatise of Tentzelius, being a natural account of the Tree of Life and of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, with a mystical interpretation of that great Secret, to wit, the Cabalistical Concordance of the Tree of Life and Death, of Christ and Adam." Tentzel was a famous doctor and disciple of Paracelsus and "flourished" in Germany during the first half of the seventeenth century.

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CHAPTER IX

JACOB BOEHME: HIS LIFE AND SPIRIT[1]

Few men have ever made greater claim to be the bearer of a new revelation than did the humble shoemaker-prophet of Silesia, Jacob Boehme. "I am," he wrote in his earliest book, "only a very little spark of G.o.d's Light, but He is now pleased in this last time to reveal through me what has been partly concealed from the beginning of the World,"[2] and he admonished the reader, if he would understand what is written, to let go opinion {152} and conceit and heathenish wisdom, and read with the Light and Power of the Holy Spirit, "for this book comes not forth from Reason, but by the impulse of the Spirit."[3] "I have not dared," he wrote to a friend in 1620, "to write otherwise than was given and indited to me. I have continually written as the Spirit dictated and have not given place to Reason."[4] Again and again he warns the reader to let his book alone unless he is ready for a new dawning of divine Truth, for a fresh Light to break: "If thou art not a spiritual overcomer, then let my book alone. Do not meddle with it, but _stick to thy old matters_!"[5]

Before the Spirit came upon him, he felt himself to be a "little stammering child," and he always declared that without this Spirit he could not comprehend even his own writings--"when He parteth from me, I know nothing but the elementary and earthly things of this world"[6]--but with this divine Spirit unfolding within him "the profoundest depth" of mysteries, he believed, though with much simplicity and generally with humility, that the true ground of things had "not been so fully revealed to any man from the beginning of the world"--"but," he adds, "seeing G.o.d will have it so, I submit to His will."[7] n.o.body before him, he declares, no matter how learned he was, "has had the ax by the handle," but, with a sudden change of figure, he proclaims that now the Morning Glow is breaking and the Day Dawn is rising.[8] In his _Epistles_ he says: "I am only a layman, I have not studied, yet I bring to light things which all the High Schools and Universities have been unable to do. . . . The language of Nature is made known to me so that I can understand the greatest mysteries, in my own mother-tongue. Though I cannot say I have _learned_ or _comprehended_ these things, yet so long as the hand of G.o.d stayeth upon me I understand."[9]

We shall be able to estimate the value of these lofty {153} claims after we have gathered up the substance of his teaching, but it may be well to say at the opening of this Study of Boehme that in my opinion no more remarkable religious message has come in modern centuries from an untrained and undisciplined mind than that which lies scattered through the voluminous and somewhat chaotic writings of this seventeenth-century prophet of the common people.[19]

He frequently speaks of himself as "unlearned," and in the technical sense of the word he was unlearned. He had only a simple schooling, but he possessed extraordinary native capacity and he was well and widely read in the books which fitted the frame and temper of his mind, and he had very unusual powers of meditation and recollection so that he thought over and over again in his quiet hours of labour the ideas which he seized upon in the books he read.

There are many strands of thought woven together in his writings, and everything he dealt with is given a {154} new aspect through the vivid insights which he always brings into play, the amazing visual power which he displays, and his profoundly penetrating moral and intellectual grasp. But, nevertheless, he plainly belongs in the direct line of these spiritual reformers whom we have been studying.

He was deeply influenced, first of all, by Luther, especially in two directions. He got primarily from the great reformer his transforming insight of the immense importance of personal faith for salvation, and secondly he was impressed--almost overwhelmingly impressed in his early years--with the awful reality and range of the principle of positive evil in the universe, upon which Luther had insisted with intensity of emphasis. His feet, however, were set upon the track which seemed to him to lead to light by the help which he got from the other line of reformers. Schwenckfeld made him feel the impossibility of any scheme of salvation that rested on transactions and operations external to the human soul itself, and through that same n.o.ble Silesian reformer he discovered the central significance of the new birth through a creative work of Grace within. Sebastian Franck was clearly one of his spiritual masters. From him, directly or indirectly, he learned that the spirit must be freed from the letter, that external revelations are symbols which remain dead and inert until they are vivified and vitalized by the inwardly illuminated spirit. He was still more directly influenced by Valentine Weigel, the pastor of Zschopau, who united the spiritual-mystical views of Schwenckfeld, Franck, and the other teachers of his type with a nature mysticism or theosophy which had become, as we have seen, a powerful interest in the sixteenth century when a real science was struggling to be born, but had not yet seen the light. This nature mysticism came to him also in a crude and indigestible form through the writings of Paracelsus. Through him Boehme acquired a vocabulary of alchemistical terms which he was always labouring to turn to spiritual meaning, but which always baffled him.

It has been customary to treat Boehme as a mystic, and he has not {155} usually been brought into this line of spiritual development where I am placing him, but his entire outlook and body of ideas are different from those of the great Roman Catholic mystics. He has read neither the cla.s.sical nor the scholastic interpreters of mysticism. In so far as he knows of historical mysticism he knows it through Franck and Weigel and others, where it is profoundly transformed and subordinated to other aspects of religion and thought. Unlike the great mystics, he does not treat the visible and the finite as unreal and to be negated.

The world is a positive reality and a divine revelation. Nor, again, are sin and evil negative in character for him. Evil is tremendously real and positive, in grim conflict with the good and to be conquered only through stern battle. A mystic, an illuminate, he undoubtedly was in his first-hand experience, but his message of salvation and his interpretation of life are of the wider, distinctively "spiritual" type.

Jacob Boehme[11] was born in November 1575 in the little market-town of Alt Seidenberg, a few miles from Gorlitz. His father's name was Jacob and his mother's Ursula, both persons of good old German peasant stock, possessed of a strong strain of simple piety. The family religion was Lutheran, and Jacob the son was brought up both at home and at church in the Lutheran faith as it had shaped itself into definite form at the end of the sixteenth century. His early education was very limited, but he was possessed of unusual fundamental capacity and always exhibited a native mental power of very high order. He was always a keen observer; he looked through things, and whether he was in the fields, where much of his early life was spent as a watcher of cattle, or reading the Bible, which he knew as few persons have known it, he saw everything with a vivid and quickened imagination. He plainly began, while still very young, to revolt from the orthodox theology of his time, and his {156} years of reading and of silent meditation and reflection were the actual preparation for what seemed finally to come to him like a sudden revelation or, to use his own common figure, as "a flash."[12]

His external appearance has been quaintly portrayed by his admiring friend and biographer, Abraham von Franckenberg, who, like a good portrait-painter, strives to let the body reveal the soul. "The external form of Jacob's body," he says, "was worn and very plain; his stature was small, his forehead low, his temples broad and prominent, his nose somewhat crooked, his eyes grey and rather of an azure-cast, lighting up like the windows of Solomon's Temple; his beard was short and thin; his voice was feeble, yet his conversation was mild and pleasant. He was gentle in manner, modest in his words, humble in conduct, patient in suffering and meek of heart. His spirit was highly illuminated of G.o.d beyond anything Nature could produce."[13]