Boehme, Jakob

(1575–1624)

   Mystic.

   Boehme was born in Altseidenberg in Germany and earned his living as a shoemaker. During the course of his life he had various mystical experiences which he described in his books. Other works, published after his death, include a treatise on baptism and the eucharist, an allegorical reading of the Book of Genesis, and a discussion of the essence of God. He believed that God is the ungrund, the ‘abyss’, from which both good and wrath flow. The Christian life involves a mystical imitation of Jesus’s death and resurrection and he insisted that each human being must make a choice between living on the lower natural plane, or on the higher spiritual one. Boehme was very critical of the Protestantism of his day and, on one occasion, he was forced to leave his village of Gorlitz in Silesia and take refuge with friends in Dresden. His work is not straightforward, but is complicated and hard to understand. It was none the less influential on William law and the Cambridge Platonists as well as on the later German Romantic movement.

   J.J. Stoudt, Sunrise to Eternity: A Study in Jakob Boehm’s Life and Thought, revised edition (1968).