Jacob Boehme was born in 1575. He received little if any formal
education and was apprenticed to a shoemaker at Goerlitz in Saxony.
From an early age he seems to have been devoted to the study of the
Bible as well as to have had a growing, inner, sense of the reality
of God. Walking one day in the fields, when he was twenty-five
years old, the mystery of creation was suddenly opened to him, of
which he later said that "in one quarter of an hour I saw and knew
more than if I had been many years at the university . . . and
thereupon I turned my heart to praise God for it." As experiences
of this kind came more frequently, he puzzled much as to why such
knowledge should be given to him, of all men, who sought only the
love of God and was quite unlearned in the ordinary sense. Some ten
years later he began to record what he received, as a help to his
own memory, and thus was born The Aurora, his first book, finished
in 1612. From then on he found both friends and enemies of his
work. Due to persecution in his hometown, Boehme later settled in
Dresden, where he died in 1624. Mysterium Magnum, written by Boehme
the year before he died and at a time when his powers of expression
had developed to their full, is perhaps central to his work in some
thirty-one or thirty-two original volumes. Taking the general form
of an interpretation of Genesis, it far outstrips such apparent
confines, touching among other matters upon the meaning of the New
Testament and, from the first sentence, leading to the heart of the
universal experience of all mystics: When we consider the visible
world with its essence, and consider the life of the creatures,
then we find therein the likeness of the invisible, spiritual
world, which is hidden in the visible world as the soul in the
body; and we see thereby that the hidden God is nigh unto all and
through all, and yet wholly hidden to the visible essence. Among
those who have acknowledged the spiritual stature of Boehme are
Hegel, William Law, St. Martin (le Philosophe Inconnu), Dean Inge,
and Nicolas Berdyaev.
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