Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (12 page)

Böhme took the principle of contrariety, widespread in early modern culture, and elevated it to a cosmology understood through day and night, light and darkness. These pairs become inseparable and complementary. He explained his fundamental principle especially clearly in his
Quaestiones Theosophicae
(1624). In response to a question about the coexistence of God’s love and wrath, Böhme began:

The reader should understand that all things consist in Yes and No, be they divine, diabolic, terrestrial, or however they may be named. The One, as the Yes, is pure power and life, and is the truth of God or God himself. He would in himself be unknowable, and in him would be neither joy nor elevation, nor feeling, without the No.
⁶⁷

The Divine manifests itself through its creation of contraries: “The No is a counterstroke of the Yes or the truth, in order that the truth may be manifest and be a something, in which there may be a
contrarium
.” This is not, however, any simple dualism:

And yet it cannot be said that the Yes is separated from the No, and that they are two different things side by side. They are only one thing, but they separate themselves into two beginnings [
principia
], and make two centers, each of which works and wills in itself.

Böhme chose night and day to explain this reciprocity: “Just as day in relation to night, and night in relation to day, form two centers, and yet are not separated, or separated only in will and desire,” so too is the relationship between the Yes and the No, which forms the basis of all existence. Continuing in reference to day and night as expressed by heat and cold, Böhme explains that:

Neither would be manifest or operative without the other … Without these two, which are in continual conflict, all things would be a nothing, and would
stand still without movement. The same is to be understood regarding the eternal unity of the Divine power.
⁶⁸

For light to exist, there must be darkness; and to know light, one must know darkness, because they are coexistent, not in a relationship of presence and absence, but as complements to one another. Böhme’s polarized cosmos comes into being and is known through contrariety.
⁶⁹

Böhme sought to describe the dynamic relationships between God, man, and nature in images as well. In his
Answers to Forty Questions
, composed around 1620, he advises the reader to visualize his thought by contrasting darkness and light in a geometric figure: “Put the
Grimm
[a manifestation of darkness] on the left, and the light on the right …; there is no other way of drawing it, but it is a sphere.”
⁷⁰
The first illustration of this “Philosophische Kugel oder … Wunder = Auge der Ewigkeit” appeared in a 1632 Latin edition of the
Answers to Forty Questions
printed in Amsterdam, and the image appeared in later editions of his works in Latin, English, Dutch, and German, again showing the breadth of the reception of Böhme in the century after his death. The English adaptation of the image (1647) appears as
Figure 3.4
. The contrariety of light and darkness is the dominant theme of the image: one sees the “two centers,” one dark and one light, as referenced above in the
Quaestiones Theosophicae
. The sixty-five specific Behemist terms brought together in the 1632 image suggest the complexity of Böhme’s theosophy; at the same time, the fundamental connection between the spheres of darkness and light is apparent. In words and in images, Böhme thus presented a theology in which light and darkness are balanced and interdependent; this contrasts sharply with the imagery of light and darkness in the Lutheran and radical traditions from which he issued.
⁷¹
Given the distance of his thought from even his closest predecessors, such as Valentin Weigel and Johann Arndt, how should we assess the sources of his ideas?

Figure 3.4
Representing light and darkness in Jacob Böhme’s thought. Engraving from Jacob Böhme,
XL. questions concerning the soule
(London, 1647), pp. 22–23. University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center.

Like the Anabaptists and the Carmelite reformers, Böhme knew intra- and inter-confessional strife and persecution first hand. But his experiences allow us to glimpse deeper crises and more profound solutions formed in the crucible of the confessional age. His
theosophy, which he saw as a divine revelation, can also be understood through its personal, existential origins, and in the rich, relatively open cultural-intellectual milieu of Silesia at the end of the sixteenth century. From his first writing, the unfinished
Rising Dawn
(
Morgenröthe im Aufgang
, later referred to as
Aurora
) of 1612 to his last works in 1624, Böhme sought to explain the relationship between
God and humankind in terms of the physical world, which he understood as fundamental material reality
and
as allegory.

The decentering of the earth by the new astronomy seems to have started Böhme’s search. By his own account, Böhme’s revelations followed a period of “hard melancholy and sadness” caused, as he related in chapter 19 of the
Aurora
, when he “contemplated in [his] spirit the vast Creation of this World.” By the time he wrote
Aurora
in 1612, Böhme held firmly to the new astronomy, stating “the earth turns and courses with the other planets around the sun as in a wheel.”
⁷²
Böhme seems to have first learned of this heliocentric view sometime before 1600: he related in the
Aurora
that he was suddenly and deeply disturbed by his first encounter with heliocentric or polycentric astronomy, and wondered what “the little spark of humanity” could mean to God, lost among his “great works of heaven and earth.” He described in poignant terms the loss of his medieval Christian world view:

Before this … I myself held that the true Heaven formed a round circle, quite sky-blue, high above the stars, in the opinion that God had therein his specific being, and ruled in this world solely through the power of his holy spirit.

This view was given “quite a few hard blows (“gar manchen harten Stoß”) by word of a heliocentric (or perhaps polycentric and infinite) universe.
⁷³

Secure in an Aristotelian-geocentric world view, John of the Cross contemplated the night sky with a sense of divine order that located humankind and nature within concentric spheres of planets and fixed stars encompassed by the celestial realm of angels, saints, and God. Böhme looked at the same night sky with fear, “very melancholy and intensely saddened” by the implications of the new astronomy. He explained that as a result of his heliocentric understanding of the cosmos, the Devil would “often send pagan thoughts” (a circumlocution for atheist conclusions about the absence of God?) to him.
⁷⁴
Where was God in this “new” universe? Infinitely distant from the earth and humankind?
⁷⁵

Böhme feared that the absence of God was confirmed by the world around him: “I found that good and evil were in all things, in the
elements and in the creatures, and that in this world the godless fare as well as the pious, and that the barbarian peoples have the best lands, and that they enjoy more happiness than the godly.”
⁷⁶
His crisis combined the disorientation of the new, infinite, universe with the age-old question of theodicy. Böhme attested that “no writings, even among those I knew so well, could console me.” The cobbler-turned-theologian described the confusion of a new, vast universe alongside the apparent predominance of evil in the world. Böhme’s contemporary John Donne evoked the same confusion at the same time in his
Anniversaries
(1611):

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,

The Element of fire is quite put out;

The Sunne is lost, and th’earth, and no mans wit

Can well direct him where to looke for it.

And freely men confesse that this world’s spent,

When in the Planets, and the Firmament

They seeke so many new; they see that this

Is crumbled out againe to his Atomis.

‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;

All just supply, and all Relation:

Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,

For every man alone thinkes he hath got

To be a Phoenix, and that then can be

None of that kinde, of which he is, but he.
⁷⁷

In this passage Donne, like Böhme, fuses the “new Philosophy” with a sense of moral or social disorder, as the proper relations between princes and subjects, and fathers and sons have lost “All just supply, and all Relation.” With “all coherence gone,” restoring order would not be easy.
⁷⁸
The solution Böhme fashioned transformed him from troubled cobbler to influential theosopher.

The breakthrough came around 1600, as described in chapter 19 of the
Aurora
, titled “On the created Heaven and the form of the earth and the water, also on the light and the darkness.”
⁷⁹

In a word, the solution to Böhme’s crisis was immanence. God dwelt in this world, in everything, not in a distant Heaven. This immanence meant a new embrace of all of the natural world, both as material and as symbol, especially – as the title of the chapter
suggests – its light
and
its darkness. This “awareness [
Erkenntnis
] and revelation from God” came after “wrestling with the love and mercy of God,” a reference to Böhme’s namesake Jacob wrestling at night with an angel.
⁸⁰

Immanence also shaped his new understanding of evil. Through his entire
oeuvre
, the question of evil and redemption remained central to Böhme’s theosophy, as did the imagery of darkness and light. Böhme developed an understanding of evil unique within the Christian tradition, describing its generation through the unfolding of the potential within the
Ungrund
– the undifferentiated Divinity as it existed before creation. This view made evil, Satan, Hell (understood untopologically), and darkness fundamental and necessary aspects of creation. Böhme broke decisively with the traditional Christian view of evil and darkness as deficiency or privation.
Contra
Augustine, evil was in Böhme’s cosmos more than the mere absence of good, and darkness more than the privation of light. Both became real in their own right as necessary aspects of creation. This cosmos and the place of evil in it stands in startling contrast to all orthodox Christian views of his age.
⁸¹

The revelations first received around 1600 and first outlined in the unfinished
Aurora
(1612) ended the depression and confusion prompted by the new astronomy and by the seeming triumph of evil in the world. But the circulation of Böhme’s ideas in manuscript marked a second turning point in the artisan’s life as he faced conflict with the local Lutheran clergy over his startling, heterodox ideas. In the late sixteenth century, Böhme’s Görlitz was a crossroads of heterodox ideas and beliefs where pastors, city councilors, artisans, travelers, and local nobles discussed the diverse intellectual and cultural offerings of the time: Calvinism, Lutheran mysticism, Paracelsan alchemy, the new astronomy, Catholic reform, Schwenkfeldian ideas, and more. Kepler visited the city in 1607; the city councilor Bartholomäus Scultetus and Böhme’s pastor Martin Moeller (1547–1606) were among the city’s leading intellectuals.

This lively, relatively open cultural-intellectual milieu was fundamental to the development of Böhme’s ideas. But Görlitz was becoming less tolerant and more tied to Lutheran orthodoxy just as
his writings began to circulate in 1612–13. A local nobleman, Carl Ender von Sercha, made copies of the unfinished
Aurora
manuscript. In July 1613 a copy reached the new senior Lutheran pastor of Görlitz, Gregor Richter. He immediately informed city councilor Scultetus of the cobbler’s heretical work. Böhme was brought before Scultetus and questioned about his “enthusiastic beliefs.” While Böhme was held briefly at the Rathaus, the
Aurora
manuscript was confiscated from his home. Böhme was warned not to dabble in theology any further and released; the manuscript was locked away. Scultetus handled Böhme fairly gently, but pastor Richter was more forceful. The following Sunday, July 28, 1613, he denounced false prophets such as Böhme from the pulpit; the cobbler-cloth merchant was then questioned by Richter and the clerical council of Görlitz on July 30. The meeting concluded with Böhme’s agreement to cease writing about theological and spiritual matters. This public censure left a lasting mark on Böhme’s life.
⁸²