Jakob Böhme (1575 - 1624)

 

Jacob Boehme  Anonymous portrait 

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Jakob Böhme

Böhme, in his Aurora, elaborates on the process of spiritual rebirth. We are, he tells us, born into the darkness of physicality, “wherein Lucifer and his angels, as also all fleshly or carnal wicked men lie captive.”14 But we are also born into the astral realm, which is of a mixed nature, including both love and wrath contending with one another. This realm is characterized by the seven spirits, the outwardly symbolized by the planets, which color or condition the nature of existence. The devil, via wrath, can only reach halfway into this realm; the other half lies hidden from him and from us; and accordingly as we live our lives in love or in wrath will we live in this primordial element after death. But both love and wrath have their origin and transcendence in the third realm, the “holy heart of God,” which is beyond all that could be said about it.

Böhme sees the entire cosmos tinctured by love and by wrath, with humanity participating in both. The key to this participation is imagination, symbolized by Mercury. Mercury, representing the principle of consciousness, is in its proper or true nature the Word or Logos—that is, if Mercury is permeated with love, then it is the means of communication with, indeed, identity with the Divine. But when Mercury through imagination allows the wrath to manifest in it, then it becomes poisoned and poisonous; and this is the ordinary, or fallen human condition, our starting point. Böhme discusses in many different ways the process of regeneration and spiritual illumination, one of these being in his Signatura Rerum, when he writes of the “philosophic work.” Böhme here tells us that although “I in the outward man do yet live in my self-hood, therefore I must also die with the outward man in Christ’s death, and arise and live with him.”16 The philosophic work is the process of dying to selfhood and awakening the “inward man.” This process, he tells us, is not one he will divulge in detail, but consists in the “heavenly essentiality” in its virginity permeating the soul’s inward nature, transmuting one’s wrathful and dead fallenness or disharmony into love’s unity. He further remarks that “the poisonous mercurial, martial, and saturnine will and desire die in the blood of Venus in the philosophic work, and both enter together into death, and arise both together in one love, in one will.”17 The seven forms (marked by the planetary energies) must be transformed into one by love, even while remaining distinct; and in this way one’s whole being is restored to paradisal wholeness, harmony, and unity. I am emphasizing Böhme’s insistence on spiritual regeneration and on the specific process through which one accomplishes this because this process is the heart of his work, and in turn reappears as the center of subsequent theosophy. Indeed, the specific process Böhme mentions here as the “philosophic work” recurs again and again in later illustrations and treatises, including those of Johann Gichtel in the Netherlands, and John Pordage in England, as we will shortly see. This process, which is explained using alchemical terms and images, is in fact the work of spiritual awakening through contemplation akin to what we see earlier in the writings of Eckhart and Tauler. Modern Christian theosophy, from Böhme onward, maintains a balance between imagery and the transcendence of imagery, the via positiva and via negativa.

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