Journal of English and Germanic Philology, July 1994, 398-401.

Andrew Weeks, BOEHME.  An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic.  State University of New York Press.

"Few writers are remembered more by their legend and less by the content of their writing than Jacob Boehme.  Few have been rediscovered as often.  And few have been marked by such contradictory cachets: as the humble soul and God-taught theosophist, and as the 'fanatical' heretic and blasphemer; the illuminate outside of time, and the philosopher in advance of his time; harbinger of enlightenment, and vanguard of German chauvinism; devious charlatan, and forthright muddle-head.  No common ground has been found for reconciling these contradictory images. "

Weeks sets himself a most ambitious agenda:  "What this study attempts is therefore not a balance but a new presentation, based on the premise that the writings are virtually all we can know of the man."  He goes on to claim that "there is no basic study in English or German of the kind that examines his writings work by work and relates them to his life and times, in order to survey and, where necessary, revise his standing in intellectual history.  This book, as an introductory portrait and intellectual biography of Jacob Boehme, is intended to fill that gap."  The claim that the book is the first of its kind is slightly modified by he admission (p. 248) "that the works by Brinton, Stoudt, Tesch, Walsh, and Wehr combine concise and very intelligible introductions with some significant discussion of Boehme's times and influences upon posterity."

But never mind this and other minor temptations to exercise one's pedantry.  It is a superbly crafted book.  It is a timely book as well, the 400th anniversary of Boehme's birth in1575 passed nearly unnoticed; it is eminently readable, not to say eloquent; and it calls renewed attention to a man who more than any other author save Shakespeare influenced the Romantic movement .  Ziegler and Vischer, Friedrich Schlegel and Tieck, Novalis and Schelling, paid homage to him, often with hyberbole typical of their time.  Schlegel states flatly that he invented poesy.  And probably the only matter of substance on which Schopenhauer agreed with Hegel was the importance of Boehme in the evolution of German philosophy.  Hegel called him the first German philosopher, while Schopenhauer found a wealth of material anticipated that is at the core of his major work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.  Still, even Hegel who along with Tieck spearheaded the Boehme revival found Boehme's manner of presentation less than elegant ("roh und barbarisch")  while Friedrich Engels wrote the sentence that should serve as a preface and guide to any serious study of this most unusual writer: "Es ist eine dunkle, aber eine tiefe Seele.  Das meiste aber muss entsetzlich studiert werden, wenn man etwas davon kapieren will."

It is in this spirit that Andrew Weeks sets out to interpret a body of writing that has fascinated and influenced people as diverse as Milton and Newton and Goethe (the latter by way of Gottfried Arnold), the romantics, von Baader and Hegel, Buber and Steiner and Berdyaev, in addition to countless "simple folk," for nearly four hundred years, which is all the more baffling, as Weeks rightly states, since so little is known of the man.  Hence the aim (or wise restriction) to construct an intellectual biography.  And once one accepts the premise that the evolution of a person's writing  is indeed a biography of sorts one appreciates the highly informed chronological survey of all that is known and relevant about Boehme himself, his writings and the contemporary European scene.

What were the influences that prompted an untutored cobbler of apparently intense religiosity (Weeks calls him a "plebeian intellectual of the Baroque Age" p. 10) to produce these volumes of speculative theosophy?   Was it the much quoted gleam of light in a pewter or tin vessel that suddenly and unexpectedly caused him to believe that he was "seeing into the secret heart of nature, into a concealed divine world" (p. 1) a sensation which according to Boehme's friend and biographer Franckenberg became all the more intense as Boehme left his room and went into the countryside?  Weeks takes great care to point out that neither Franckenberg nor Boehme himself reported anything out of the ordinary that may have caused the experience which according to Boehme himself lasted no more than fifteen minutes and of which the most searing was the feeling of having been embraced by divine love.  In any case, something life-transforming took place but, writes Weeks, it can hardly be assumed "that an author whose first three books alone add up to more than 1200 pages [was] motivated exclusively by a fifteen-minute inspiration" or, resphrasing and improving the argument: "the illumination of the year 1600 is an important theme, but it is hardly the complete content of his writings" (p. 7).
 
Weeks readily admits Boehme's proximity to Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, although here he was probably more besprochen than belesen.  He does not believe in claiming for Boehme "a cosmic consciousness, an ineffable experience, or a primitive mythopoetic thinking"( p. 8).   Instead he insists, rightly, that "like any set of symbols, his speculative vision was also molded  by a specific time, place, culture, and character" and goes on to announce that "the consideration of his symbolism in its own setting and idiom will take precedence here over comparisons with other systems of thought and intuition" (p.7).
 
Boehme's "place,"  geographically and intellectually, is Middle Europe (p. 10), Upper Lusatia to be specific, which becomes the title of  the book's first chapter. Weeks begins with an important geographical point: Lusatia is not Silesia in Boehme's time (did not become part of it until 1815) and "Silesian mystic" is a misnomer.   Much of the chapter deals with the history, politics and religious strife of the region called die Lausitz  and the town of Görlitz in particular.  But already here and in the following chapter called The Genesis of Boehme's Vision  (actually an account, both fact and legend, of Boehme's  years before 1600 and the various theological, philosophical and scientific issues of the time) he begins his discussion of Boehme's first  treatise, the Aurora,  the most astonishing aspect of which is its firm heliocentrism.  Like his contemporaries Kepler and Galileo, Boehme recognized that one of the main obstacles to insight is "common sense" which would have you believe what you see; for instance, that the sun rises in the East and settles in the West.  It follows that what we "see" in the world "is not its true and ultimate form. ...the reality discerned by the spirit is quite different from the impenetrable surfaces of elemental things" (p. 55).  What changed Boehme's melancholy and depressed outlook of 1600 was the simultaneity of two events (one senses that Weeks agonizes over his inability to relate them to each other causally, but intellectual honesty forbids it): his celebrated visionary experience and his acceptance of Keplerian astronomy.  "Liberated from mechanical spheres, the celestial bodies were now guided through a fluid and continuous space by spirit forces ... the animae motrices of Kepler" (p. 57).  Coupled with this is his "seminal intuition ... that a universal pattern reconciles order and hierarchy with multiplicity and spiritual freedom" (p. 56).

The Aurora  chapter itself devotes 30 pages to the discussion of the work that took twelve years to write and remains Boehme's most famous.  Weeks believes that the Aurora  betrays a tendency toward  "the synthesis of two notions of nature, each with its corresponding notion of God" (p. 62)  The first holds that the world was created out of nothing, and that man was made of clay.  The second claims that man is created in God's image and that the world, too, is a reflection of an ideal, divine world.  "The synthesis attempted in Aurora and more nearly achieved in the second book aims at showing that spirit is a vital substrate of elemental matter, latent in the element.  Since God creates nature not out of nothing but rather out of His own being, the indivisible divine life of the spirit is entirely present at every level ... in macrocosm and in microcosm" (p. 64).

"Nature as Quality" is the heading of a sub-chapter that deals with Boehme's creation and use of terminology.  It will probably be forever impossible to agree on a translation of Boehmean technical terms and to employ them consistently.  But "quality" here, Eigenschaft orQualitaet in German, would be better translated as "property" to maintain the scientific aura Boehme cherished.  In fact, Weeks seems to  have no problem using either term to refer to the same thing.  More importantly, however, and with great profit, he uses the German term Qualitaet  in the context of his brief discussion of Boehme's notion of Ursprache  to allow us a glimpse at an etymological inventiveness, purely phonetically inspired, that anticipates Heideggerian obfuscation (p. 77).  But what appears whimsical, not to say half-baked, in the Aurora merely foreshadows a much more involved although no more easily understood presentation in subsequent works, particularly in what might be called Boehme's "Summa," his Mysterium Magnum.  The same holds true of the concept of Sophia, the Virgin of Divine Wisdom, very nearly a fourth person of the Deity, who makes her first appearance here.  And, most importantly, the manner in which Boehme tries to come to terms with the reality of evil in a world that was created by God "out of his own being."  Both topics will resurface in the discussion ofThe Three Principles  and beyond.  The Aurora itself, for all its inspired beauty, remains a splendid torso, unfinished and inconclusive.  "Compared with the later writings, its ecstatic presentation fails by not providing an adequate interpretation of the deity as subject" (p. 90).  But then, as Weeks well knows, how could it?

The Three Priciples of Divine Being  provide more of a challenge, they are "uncommonly difficult" in Weeks' words.  While Boehme fails to become a systematic thinker or even a clearer one, Weeks becomes ever more eloquent and precise in recording his impressions as he turns ever more pages written in "an age of riddles and conondrums, of curiosity cabinets and mazelike gardens, byzantine conspiracies and intricate theoretical constructs" (p. 99).  Boehme's questions remain the same, as does the elusiveness of his answers, particularly the existence of evil given the creation ex Deo.    Boehme will find more and more beautiful metaphors to explain the inexplicable, but the exegete Weeks will not be able to improve on his own simple and paradoxical statement that "evil arises out of the eternal nature of God; but, in God, this evil nature is eternally overcome and sublimated, so that is cannot be said that there is evil and darkness in God" (p. 107).  And suddenly we are no longer sure whether we are witnessing a development of Boehme's thought or merely a change in style.

There is additional subject matter, though, the most potent of which is Boehme's myth of the androgynous Adam of whom Weeks claims that he was "neither man nor woman (hence, not hermaphroditic)" (p. 115).   Be that as it may.  The original, "ideal" Adam was both male and female, bi-sexual in the sense that he had the ability to procreate or "multiply" without a partner.  But unlike the fallen Lucifer whom he was to replace, he possessed a body, he was made of spirit and matter.  That is why he insists on partnership and the manner of procreation that he witnessed among the mammals around him.  His "fall" is no more than an excercise of his free will, the precious and fatal divine gift, in other words, a proud demonstration of autonomy.  In this he is the exact opposite of "Sophia," the noble Virgin of Divine Wisdom, "the serene and reflective aspect of the Deity" (p. 121) to whom Weeks  devotes a few splendid pages in the conclusion of his discussion of The Three Principles.
 
So much has now been said, so many of Boehme's concepts, ideas and circumlocutions analysed, usually with material taken from later works where they receive a lengthier although by no means clearer treatment, in other words,  so many expectations are now met that we need to be reminded that we are still engaged in following an intellectual biography with more to come.  "The Aurora  already asserted the freedom of the will.  The Three Principles  expanded the assertion into a voluntaristic metaphysics.  The ultimate major works again will propound theories of nature and Scripture, interpreting them as expressions of the divine free will" (p. 143).

In his discussion of Boehme's Forty Questions   Weeks grapples with one of Boehme's most elusive concepts, the "unusual term" Ungrund, wisely declining to find a good English equivalent (p. 148).  What follows is an admirable exercise in clarity.  He considers the noun the "substantive form" of the older (in Boehme's writing) term ungruendlich  which in turn is the equivalent of unergruendlich  in modern German, meaning "unfathomable" or "incomprehensible."   Ungrund is a synonym for God.   To understand Boehme's "God" it is important to realize that not only can no finite being know him but that God as Ungrund  would not know himself were it not for the longing of his "wisdom" to know who he is.  The resulting self-awareness Boehme calls Grund.  Lest the reader get the impression that God undergoes a development , in this case from ignorance of self to the perfection of self-awareness, Boehme repeats over and over that all of this happened "from eternity," simultaneously as it were, non-sequentially and outside of time.  God is,  there is no change in him ever.  Naturally His "children" have inherited this very yearning for completeness and self-knowledge, it is indeed testimony to their exalted origin.  Enter the test of obedience, "thou shalt not."  Their resolve to become God-like ("sicut deus") is a decision for change, in this case a conscious exercise of their free will not to embrace the divinely ordained limitations, but to upgrade an inferior existence.  It is this dissatisfaction with the status quo that, incredibly, marks the rebellion and causes the "fall" of Lucifer and Adam.  Two hundred years later the same passionate desire for knowledge and the fullness of life will endear Faust to Goethe's God: the spirit of the Renaissance has conquered the Heavens and the German literary scene.

Obsessed with the topic Boehme returns to it again and again.  Yet even in Mysterium Magnum  that devotes many more pages to the eternal "self-creation" of God and the subsequent fall of Lucifer and Adam and the corruption of all creation he offers no more clarity, only more beautiful imagery and intense, even pleading, language.  "Rhetorical mystifications"  Weeks calls it at one point and goes on to state, correctly, I believe, "that the efforts to discover a full-blown philosophical system in his writing are misguided.  By the same token, those who accuse him of ambiguity and inconsistency miss the point. ... Many of his writings are only superficially structured as treatises.  They are more like great series of thematic cycles and epicycles, dominated by briefer expositions, each of which treats its topic by bringing the literary equivalents of emblematic symbols to bear upon it" (p. 170).

Boehme is a typical Baroque writer who joyfully splashes about in a sea of language.  There is some of Fischart's mischief at play here but more importantly the attempt to allow a multitude of words to do the work denied the impulse to be precise.  I'll finish with Weeks' own conclusion:  "What remains of the philosopher and mystic is above all else his revolving zodiac of symbols which were intended to mean many things, and can therefore continue meaning even more: the figure of an excruciatingly self-made god ...; the image of a world, emanating out of the chaos and darkness of the will...; the figure of the virginal Sophia...; and finally the ideal of the pristine seeing of an Adam whose wide open eyes behold the diverse hues and virtues articulating the inchoate divine intention ..." (p. 219).  A mile post.
 

Herbert Deinert
Cornell University