JACOB BOEHME

You are reading this on a device that would have filled a skyscraper had it been built in 1956. You have terabytes of the world’s accumulated wisdom at your fingertips via the Internet. You have a college education in your pocket. Einstein, Feynman, Fort, Jung, Tolkien, the Wachowskis, Fermi, Crick and Watson have all blazed an intellectual trail for you to follow. With all this going for you, your major contribution to society so far consists of a message board post theorizing that the castaways on Lost might be in Purgatory.

About 400 years ago, before the discovery of electricity and only 150 years after the invention of the printing press, a barely literate German cobbler came up with the idea that God was a binary, fractal, self-replicating algorithm and that the universe was a genetic matrix resulting from the existential tension created by His desire for self-knowledge.

Clearly, someone’s been slacking off.

It all started one day around 1610. A young German shoemaker was looking at a pewter dish when a dazzling ray of reflected sunlight unexpectedly turned out to be a message from God.

Many people receive messages from God. However, these usually tend to run along the lines of “Kill! Kill! Kill!” Such messages are not particularly interesting unless you happen to be on the wrong end of the ax.

Jacob Boehme’s transmission was considerably deeper than the usual psychotic imperative. In fact, his vision contained profound theological insights well beyond his educational level, which amounted to little more than Bible study and sole-cobbling techniques.

Boehme wrote about his experience and the strange thoughts which resulted, but he sensibly decided to keep these notions within his circle of close friends. His friends had different ideas and copied Boehme’s manuscript without his permission, circulating it around the prominent intellectual circles of the day.

Boehme became a celebrity overnight — which was not a good thing. The local religious authorities were not amused. Luckily for Boehme, he was a Protestant and not a Catholic, so he was simply threatened with exile instead of the Iron Maiden. Inconveniently, the visions kept coming.

Although he was initially deterred by the threats of the local pastor, Boehme eventually began to write again.

His ideas were radical and exciting, and Boehme began to attract adherents — which again led to trouble. His radical and exciting ideas received the exact same reception the second time around, but this time he was actually banished. Boehme received a friendlier reception in Dresden, but the positive attention there only further infuriated the clerical authorities back home.

Boehme died at the age of 49 but his ideas would live on, helping to shape a vast lineage of occultists, philosophers and lunatics for centuries to come.

Boehme’s treatises were mostly Gnostic and Kabbalistic in nature. His concepts often reflected Eastern spiritual concepts that were not widely known in Germany at the time. Boehme began with a radical rethink of the traditional Judeo-Christian God. He threw out the traditional picture of a guy with a beard and long robes in favor of an abstract, formless deity.

Prior to the creation of man, Boehme wrote, God was an undifferentiated unity defined by the absence of everything else — the Abyss, or “Ungrund.” Creation was the result of the Ungrund dividing from its state of original unity — a proposition completely familiar to Taoists but foreign and offensive to Boehme’s fellow Lutherans.

Even more controversially, Boehme argued that God could not be omniscient and omnipotent, since He was eternal and unique.

“He knows no beginning, and also nothing like Himself, and also no end,” Boehme wrote, arguing that God created man in His own image so that He could learn about Himself.

To initiate this learning process, God rendered Himself into positive and negative aspects — yin and yang to the Taoists, although the material substance of Boehme’s universe is not itself synonymous with God.

Prior to the initial split, God was only a potential mind with an unformed longing to know itself. After the split, God iterated into a binary-based matrix, continually increasing in complexity as He collected more and more information about Himself. In other words, Boehme’s God evolves with the passage of time, in sharp contrast to the traditional Judeo-Christian view of a perfect, complete and unchanging figure who exists outside the normal flow of time. The positive and negative aspects of creation were necessarily opposed to each other, and Boehme believed that this conflict was at the heart of the universe’s logic and all of its processes.

Since this tension is inherent to the design of all reality, evil and suffering are a necessary part of reality — and both originate with God. The tension between God’s positive and negative aspects boils down to an identity crisis — cosmic self-loathing. The positive force is the part of God that chose to differentiate itself in search of self-knowledge; the negative force is the part of God that seeks to return to its original unified state (obliterating reality in the process). Boehme characterized this negative force as “divine wrath,” the eternal frustration of seeking a goal that can never be accomplished. In Boehme’s cosmology, the wrathful element of God is the Father, the beneficent element is Jesus Christ, the Son.

The syzygy of the conflict between the opposite poles created a process of change — the Holy Spirit, as the continual interaction of the Father and Son through time. Boehme presented the universe as the product of the dueling forces of Father and Son, one bent on disordering and a return to unity (entropy), the other bent on ordering and harmonizing in the process of differentiation (organization), a formula now understood to foreshadow key concepts in chaos theory and genetic sequencing.

The human body and soul, according to Boehme, were a microcosm of the divine model, akin to the holographic universe physics model first formally proposed in the 20th century. Boehme expanded on these thoughts to develop theoretical frameworks encompassing virtually every aspect of the Christian mystical experience, covering everything from Sacred Geometry to the book of Genesis to the nature of Satan, the angels and the Antichrist.

With the basic underlying premise of creation firmly in hand, Boehme turned his attention to the details, integrating concepts from the Kabbalah and alchemy, and laying out a new foundation for scientific and especially philosophical thought that exerted a wide-ranging influence on the elite minds of the Enlightenment.

Boehme’s work reflected so many diverse spiritual concepts that he is considered to be the father of Theosophy — a precursor to the New Age movement which stipulates that all religions are basically talking about the same thing in different words.﻿

For three centuries Jacob Boehme's thought would run through the western world like a hidden stream, never widely known but influencing the influential - Newton, Milton, George Fox, the Philadelphian Society, the Cambridge Platonists, the Bavarian Illuminati (!), Goethe, Kant, Heidegger, Blake, Coleridge, Emerson, William Law, Madam Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Hegel and his nemesis Schopenhauer, Wagner and his nemesis Nietzsche, Martensen and his nemesis Kierkegaard, Carl Jung and his nemesis Martin Buber; many occultists and many clergymen.

His modern day exponents have been similarly diverse, from evangelical missionary Norman Grubb to theoretical physicist Basarab Nicolescu to nutty sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick.

His books remained difficult to find until 2010 when they were rescued from oblivion by, well, by this website. All of Boehme's works in English translation are now digitized and available on the LIBRARY PAGE.