The Shoemaker of Gorlitz  

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"The Shoemaker of Gorlitz" is a story by R. E. Thompson and one by Robert Ellis. The title is a reference to Jakob Böhme who was born in Görlitz. Parts of these texts is also found in Guesses at Truth by Augustus William Hare.

Full text of part I

1874.] The Shoemaker of &d'rUtz. 243

THE SHOEMAKER OF GORLITZ.

" Jamie, yon man*s crack't."

•• Sandy, while's there's light comes through a crack."

The little Silesian inllage of Alt Seidenberg has but one claim to escape omniyorous oblivion : a child was bom there, whose name the world has not forgotten, nor seems likely to forget. It was three hundred years ago, just as the close of the third quarter of the sixteenth century was striking, that this soul

" Drew near from out the vast. And struck its being into bounds."

That was the century of giants and gigantic works. Almost the Jirgt quarter had been spent in rast efforts of scholarship, — the revival of the ancient literatures, and the formation of new* The tecand and third were eras of great religious agitation and growth, in which theology and the church gave shape to all men's thinking, and armed tongue and hand for civil strife throughout Europe. Wi& ^e fourth quarter was coming a new period, when the strongest minds of Europe were to be busied with philosophy, the search into the ground of certainty and truth, rather than the dogmatic and polemic assertion of traditions and systems, — the age of Bacon, Gassendi, Giordano, Bruno, Campanella, and of the subject of this paper, Jakob Bohme. This soul was to bear the impress of its age, and to face the age's problems, with the least possible propsedeutic for the work. Upon it was laid the call to attempt to solve the mystery of the universe, with hardly any knowledge, save what Luther's German Bible furnished, of what other inspired souls had thought and said of that vast riddle. He looked upon life and its surroundings with his own clear gray eyes, and found them so wonderful, and suggested such strange explana- tions of their wonders, that the boldest radical must be startled at the audacity of his rejection of all our cherished prepossessions and our established forms of thought. In outer life he was a simple and dutiful apprentice, took care of his domestic affairs, submitted to be silenced because he was only a layman, treated

244 The Shoemaker of Qdrlitz. [Oct.

every one with whom he came into contact submissively and gra- ciously, indulged in no reproaches against those who pronounced him accursed and procured his banishment;" but his inner life was full of strange experiences, wonderful '^ beholdings/' and daring thoughts, that have extorted praise often from the most unlikely quarters. Among those who confess his greatness, ac- knowledge indebtedness to him for help and suggestion, are num- bered philosophers (Leibnitz, Henry More, Coleridge, Schelling, Hegel, Baader, G. H. Weisse, Feuerbach, and St. Martin), theo- logians (Spener, Arnold, William Law, Bengel, (Etinger, Semler, Harms, Auberlen, F. C. Baur, and Bleek), and masters in litera- ture (Henry Brooke, Fr. Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, de la Motte Fouque, Lichtenberg, Wolfgang Menzel, and C. F. D. Schubart^.* Every historian of philosophy pauses at his name as that of the one creative mind that Germany has to show between t^e generation of the reformers and that of Leibnitz and Kepler. Though his books display, on every page, his lack of culture, and the inadequacy of his expression to his thought, they have passed through seven editions in German, and are found in translations, partial or complete, in five of the principal languages of Europe. A vast literature, friendly and unfriendly, has grown up around his name, and has received additions during the past year.f

• Bohme^s English scholars claim that Sir Isaac Newton had plowed

with Behmen's heifer." William Law writes to Dr. Cheyne, ** When Sir Isaac Newton died, there were found among his papers large extracts out of J. Behmen's works, written with his own hand. This I have from undoubted authority. ... My vouchers are names well known, and of great esteem with you. It is evidently plain that all that Sir Isaac has said of the universality, nature, and effects of attraction, of the three first laws of nature, was not only said, but proved, in its truest and deepest ground, by J. B., in his three first properties of eternal nature."

t See Leibnitz's Nouveaux Essais, IV. cap. 19; Henry More's Phil- osophiae Teutonic* Censura; Coleridge's Works (Am. ed.). III. 249-54, 691-9, IV. 311, V. 61-2, 324-5, 526, VI. 293; Schelling's Uber d. Wesen d. menschlichen Freiheit (1806), and his Philosophic der Offen- barung I. 123 et seq; Hegel's Encyclopadie (Preface to Second Edition), and Geschichte der Philosophic, III. 300-27 ; Baader's Vorlesungen liber peculative Dogmatik (especially Pt. V.) ; C. H. Weisse's Phil- osophie des Christenthums ; Feuerbach's Geschichte der Philosophie, Pp. 150-214. Also P. J. Spener's Theologische Bedenken ; Gottfried

1874.] The Shoemaker of Qdrliiz. 246

Jakob Bohine was the child of peasant farmers of pure Grerman descent, — free, that is, from any mixture with the Slavic element that predominates in that part of Germany. He received the edu- cation common to all lads of his class, in that age, benefiting, no doubt, by Dr. Martin Luther's strenuous efforts for the establish- ment of good G-erman schools. Like others, he shared in the pleasant task — experto crede — of herding the cows of the village on the common lajids. Once, we are told, '^ in the heat of mid- day, retiring from his playfellows to a little stony crag, hard by, called ike Land's Gro¥m, where the natural situation of the rock made a seeming enclosure of some part of the mountain, and, finding an entrance into it, he went in and saw there a great wooden vessel full of money ; at which sight, being in a sudden astonishment, he did in haste retire, not moving his hand thereunto, and came and related his fortune to the rest of the boys, who, coming up along with him, sought often, and with much diligence, an entrance, but never found any." All of which portended that the hidden secrets of nature, the treasures of recondite knowledge, would hereafter be laid open to the lad. He has hardly had better luck in leading others to see what he did.

Fouque teUs us that he, ^' with several of his companions in arms, saw the place on their way to the battle of Liitaen, in 1813, and did their best to carve their names on the stones as a memento of the gladly-solemn moment. If we may trust tradition, the place is changed greatly, and the vaulted roof that once shut out the light of sun, moon, and stars, has fallen in. Masses of rock, how- ever, still stand fast, rising like a row of grim, steep pillars above the magic treasure-house, and a little pool of water, clear as a

Arnold's Kirch und Ketzergeschichte, Book XVI., Chap. xix. ; CEtinger's Lehrtafel, and his Selbstbiographie ; J. S. Semler's Selbstbiographie, II. 107 seq. ; F. C. Baur*s Christliche Gnosis ; Auberlen sub voce Bohme in Kerzog*s Realencyclopadie. Also Henry Brooke's Fool of Quality ; Fr. Schlegel's Vorlesungen aus der Jahren 1804-6, and his Geschichte der Alten und Neuen litteratur ; la Motte Fouque's Jakob B5hme, ein biographischer Denkstein, (183 1); Lichtenberg's Tagebuch and Schu- bart's later Poems. Editions of Bohme 's Works, (i) Amsterdam, 1634-77 ; (2) [minor works] Frankfort, 1675 ; (3) Amsterdam, 1682, 9 vols.; (4) Am- sterdam, 171 5, 2 vols.; (5) Amsterdam, 1730, vols.; (5) Leipzig, 1831-47, 7 vols.; (7) reissue of last, 1861, seq. 6

246 The Shoemaker of Gdrlitz. [Oct.

mirror, covers, not unpoetically, the spot where the pot of gold rested."

As his physical frame was not strong, his father thought best to apprentice him to a trade, instead of making a bauer of him. The honorable craft of the cordwainers — already boasting of a Hans Sach, and destined to be proud of such sons as George Fox, John Pounds, Roger Sherman, and our Silesian — was the one selected ; and Jacob was entered as an apprentice in Gorlitz. Omens of his future still accompanied him. One day a queer-looking stranger called at the shop, when all but Jakob were out, and priced a pair of shoes. To be rid of him, and of the responsibility of trading, the timid apprentice asked an exorbitant price ; but the stranger submitted to be jewed, and paid the money. When once in the street again, he called Jakob out by name, and, taking the melan- choly, nervous lad by the hand, said, " Jakob, thou art little, but thou shalt be great, and become another man, — such a one as at whom the world shall wonder. Therefore be devout, fear God, and irevere his word. Above all, read diligently the Holy Scriptures, wherein thou hast comfort and teaching; for thou must needs undergo distress and want, and withal persecution. But be of good cheer, and stand fast, for thou art dear to God, and he is gracious to thee."

As was the exhortation, so was the life, it appears, from all that we know of these apprentice years of this upright. God-fearing lad, and of the Wander-Jahre or journeyman-years that followed them. We judge, however, from his own vivid pictures of the process of the mystical regeneration, that ^Hhe gray luik o' life" was all that was vouchsafed him as yet. The soul, finding itself cast out from Paradise, was pressing back thither through the piercing, fiery sword of the cherub that kept the gate, and under that sword it must stand till the divine fire should consume its vanity of craft and lust. Once an ecstasy fell upon him, — the reaction of the inward suffering of the true mystic. ^^ A divine light shone around him for seven days together, and he stood in the highest beholding and kingdom of joy."

But the enlightenment, at this stage went no farther than to awaken in him a deep concern for the moral uprightness and Chris- tian consistency of his fellow-men, and an impulse to reprove their

1874.] The Shoemaker of G-drUtz. 247

faults. He was cast among strangers, — a situation especially pain- ful to the melancholy and introverted mind. But the fire burned in his bones, and would not let him be silent ; and we hear that one master sent him about his business, rather than bear his pointed rebukes of the sins of house and shop. We get a glimpse of these experiences when he is dwelling upon the story of Joseph's early life, and especially the words, ^^ Behold this dreamer," in his ^' Exposition of Genesis," '^ a fanatic fellow ! He will inveigh against our good customs, wherein we have honor and good days. What ! shall this fellow teach and reprove us ? "

In 1594 he attained mastership in his craft, and set up his own shop in Gorlitz, marrying Frau Catharina Kunschmann, the daugh- ter of a butcher in that city. They had four sons about their table, as the years went on, and Kate made him a good, loving wife ; so the little out-of-the-way house '^ between the gates, behind the 'Spital Forge," was the home of peace. Except in the very last years of his hfe, Jakob seems to have entirely supported his family by his awl, and to have stood well with his neighbors as an honest, hard-working man. In some things, doubtless, ho seemed a little - queer. He was not as sociable and neighborly as might be de sired ; but he was always ready to lend a helping hand if need were.

In 1600 — the year they burnt Giordano Bruno — came a sec- ond great crisis in the spiritual life to Bohme. The mystery of the universe, the problem of good and evil, had been pressing on mind and heart for we know not how long, — perhaps we might say for these twenty years back. ^^ Heathenish thoughts " were suggested to him, but he thrust them away, and '^ strove with heart and mind, thought and will," in prayer ^' with the love and mercy of God, and, after sundry sore tempests of the soul, broke tiirough the gates of hell into the innermost birth of the Godhead." '^ I beheld and knew the being of all beings, the ground and the unground ; also the birth of the 'Ho]y Trinity, the descent and the first estate of this world and of all creatures through the Divine Wisdom. I knew and beheld in myself all the three worlds, — namely, the Divine, Angelic, or Paradisic [world as light] ; the dark world or the first estate of nature as fire ; and this outer world as a creative or outbirth, or as an uttered being from both

248 The Shoemaker of Qi>rUtz. [Oct.

the inward spiritual worlds." . . . And many other such high and mystical matters, of which this is a taste.*

The occasion of this enlightenment was simple enough to pro- yoke the scomer to laughter. The shoemaker was gazing on the reflection of the sun's rajs from a bright pewter cover, — one of a row, no doubt, on Frau Bohme's well-scourect dresser. Thoughts and ideas rushed upon him, which almost overwhelmed his brain. He went out into the fields, that lay near at hand, to shake them off; but everything seemed to renew and deepen them. In the very grass and flowers of the field he found the impress of a divine signature t on their* lineaments and figures that discloses to him

• ' their essences, uses, and properties," and showed him an un-

earthly meaning uttering itself through them.

• George Fox, in the year when Bohme's works were printing in

English, was making that strange search through all sects and parties in England for any that knew a deeper truth than opinion or tradition, — the search that ended in 1647 with the discovery that One was seeking him. Did he come upon Bdhme's Books, and find any help there ? Here is the story of his illumination : —

"Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the Paradise of God. All things were new, and all creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. . . . The crea- tion was opened to me, and it was shown me how all things had their names given to them according to their nature and virtue. I was at a stand in my mind whether I should practice physic, seeing the nature and virtues of things were so opened to me by the Lord. . . . He showed me that the physicians were out of the wisdom of God, by which the creatures were made, and so knew not their virtues, because they knew not the Word of Wisdom by which they were made."

" I saw into that, which was without end, things which cannot be uttered, and of the greatness and infinitude of the love of God, which cannot be expressed by words. For I had been brought through the very ocean of darkness and death, and through and over the power of Satan, by the eternal and glorious power of Christ." . . .

t A word borrowed from the Spagiric or Paracelsian school of medi- cine, which held that the shape of plants, by resemblance to parts of the human body, designated the organs whose disorders they would be likely to heal. Hence the names of many of them, such as liverwort Bohme's signatures " are traced in far more recondite lineaments, and can be seen only by the theosopher who enters into communion with the divine mjnd, and submits to have God " open " his creative thoughts within him, that he may think them after God.

1874.] The Shoemaker of Gd'rlitz. 249

Those who have any acquaintance with the Hermetic and Al- chjmical literature that abounded at that period will have dis- cerned that Bohme was no intellectual Melchizedek ; that his mind had taken its direction from the books and men of his own time. His turns, both of thought and expression, saror of Para- celsus and his school, and of 'the congeries of strange notions, and still stranger previsions of late discoveries, that passed with them for natural philosophy. And, indeed, from the moment we get any clear notion of Bohme' s outer life, we find him the centre of a group of such persons ; their opinions form one of the three ele- ments that are commingled in his writings, and detract much from their clearness and worth. In his very first book he tells us, ^^ I have read the writings of many high masters, in the hope to find therein the ground and the true deep ; but I found naught save a half-dead spirit that yearned in anguish after health, but could not, for its great weakness, attain to complete strength." And indeed he makes what he borrows his own, fusing it with new fire, and often filling up the dry husks and shells of the alchemical phraseology with substance and meaning of his own. Those who knew more about those books than he did confessed that they found in his writings a satisfaction and a depth that was lacking in those others.*

Another and a better influence was that of the noble mysticism of the Silesian Enight, Caspar von Schwerkfeld (1490-1562), and the Saxon Pastor, Valentine Weigel (1533-1588), the latter one of the most remarkable men of the century. Starting from the standpoint of the Theologia Germanica," he developed a system of absolute idealism three centuries before Schelling. Their fol- lowers were numerous in Silesia, which is the eastern focus of German mysticism, as Wurtemberg is the western ; some of them were Hermeticists also, and Weigel himself was not free from the influence of Paracelsus.

Sut a third element in Bohme's writings cannot be traced to any previous source : it is all his own. We mean his profound speculative thoughts and " beholdmgs,'* which would give him

♦ See Dr. Harless : Jakob Bohme und die Alchymisten. (Berlin, 1870.)

250 The Shoemaker of Q-drUtz. [Oct.

rank with Plato, Eckhart, Spinoza, and Hegel, were it not for his dialectic deficiencies, that unfitted him to develop his thoughts as a consecutive philosophy. It is this element that is all his own, wrought for and fought for, seen with his own eyes, received by no tradition, either orthodox or heretical. Therefore, with small faculty of making the many understand him, he has made a few enter into his meaning in a sense which is peculiar to the seer ; has made them feel how strange this world is ; how much stranger the things that fools count common than the things that fools stare at, all agape.

How soon these new friends discovered that here there was a congenial spirit, and a greater nund than their own, because an originative, we do not know. Not till 1611 or 1612 did the im- pulse to authorship come upon the shoemaker ; for his illumination was slow and progressive. ^^ I must needs begin to labor in this great mystery as a child that goeth to school. In the inward I saw it indeed as in a great deep ; for I saw through it as a chaos, wherein all lay ; but to develop it was to me impossible. It opened itself, however, from time to time in me, as in a growing plant ; yet I was twelve years about it, and it was breeding in me. And I found in me somewhat that drove fiercely till I should bring it forth. And presently it came therewithal strongly into mind to write this down for a memorial to myself; albeit I could very hardly apprehend the same in my outer man, and bring my pen to express it. ... I can write nothing of myself, but as a child that neither knoweth nor understandeth anything, nor hath ever learnt, but only that which the Lord vouchsafeth to know in me, according to the measure that He discloseth Himself in me."

As he wrote at this first book " The Aurora " (Die Morgenrothe im Anfang), a possible public took shape before him, and the mat- ter cast itself into the colloquial form that characterizes most of his writings. He sketched out the plan of a work designed to cover the three great fields of theology proper ("philosophy"), natural philosophy ("astrology"), and the spiritual life of man (" theology"), purposing to disclose the true ground of each to his readers. " But the Devil bethought him to give me a holiday at the work, since he saw that day would break therein." When Bohme was busy with the second grand topic, a friend got sight of

1874.] The Shoemaker of Gdrlitz. 251

the MS., and began to speak of it ; then another borrowed the work, and had it copied secretly and harriedlv. The bruit of it spread more and more, until it reached the ears of the clergj of the city, who called the attention of the magistracy. Three entries in the diary of one of the burgomasters — Bartholomew Scultetus — tell us how the Prophet of Gorlitz was honored in his own country : —

^^Anno 1613, yuL 26mo. — Jakob B6hme, a shoemaker, living between the Gates, and behind the 'Spital Forge, was brought up to the Raths- house, and questioned about his enthusiastic faith. He was put in ward, and his written book, in quarto, was fetched immediately from his house by the sergeant. Thereafter he was dismissed from custody, and charged to meddle no more with such matters.

^^Eodem anno, yuly 2%vo, — This day, the Gospel being that about ' false prophets,' the Primarius made a sharp sermon against the shoe- maker, J. B.

^^Eodem anno, Jul. yuno* — J. B., the shoemaker, was brought be- fore the preachers, at the house of the Primarius, and straightly ques- tioned concerning his confession.

This seems to have been Bohme's first unfriendly contact with the dominant Lutheran Church. From her doctors and divines he "was not likely to receive any help or guidance that would meet his case ; that they would simply let him alone, and accept as suffi- cient his attendance on public worship and the sacraments, was all he could ask, and more than he could expect. Since he had settled in Gorlitz, he had had proof sufficient of the bitter polemic temper of the times. The Crypto-Calvinistic Controversy, so- called, — rather the persecution and expulsion of the Melanch- thonian or moderate party from the primitive home of Lutheran- ism, — had been begun and ended. In Saxony, great memories irere condemned to infamy. Wittemberg University was stripped of her professors, and their places filled with zealots, collected firom country parsonages. Scholars and divines of European reputation were sent to prison, and only released and sent into exile at the intercession of reformed sovereigns like Queen Eliza- beth. Printers of obnoxious pamphlets were impoverished by heavy fines, and banished from the country. The houses of honest citizens were mobbed, and their lives openly threatened ; and the Chancellor of Saxony expiated the crime of Calvinism upon the scaffold.

252 The Shoemaker of G-drlUz. [Oct.

Bohme's side of Silesia lay just on the frontiers of Saxony, and the controversy spread thither. A p^tty reign of terror followed in Gorlitz, destroying all anity of feeling among the citiaens, and sowing suspicion and mistrust. It is recorded that Bohme's senn- tiye nature was profoundly affected by this state of affiurs, — this opening up of the abyss of religious malevolence at his very feet.

Perhaps it helped Bohme that the questions put by Gregory Bichter, the Pastor Primarius, and the other clergy, ^^ about his confession," — that is, his faith or creed, — elicited no Galviiusm from him. He was no Predestinarian ; and the other doctrinal peculiarities of Lutheranism would not stagger him. He rather went beyond the clergy on those points, as we, know by his writ- ings. At any rate, he was dismissed with a promise on his part to write no more, and an understanding that they would leave him in peace.

Primarius Richter stands out as the head and front in this bit of persecution, — a passionate zealot, full of dry pedantry and a sense of his clerical importance ; yet he represented his class in his treat- ment of Bohme. Down to the time of Spener and his Pietists, at the close of the century, any other course would have imperiled a man's reputation for orthodoxy. Even in Spener's days, a lealot of the Richter type, John F. Mayer, of Hamburg, raised the mob against a brother pastor, Spener's brother-in-law, J. H. Horbius, and drove him into exile, because he would not sign an unauthor- ized formula, repudiating all agreement and sympathy with Bohme.*

• In 1694, Lawrence Sebold was banished from the City of Regens-

burg, at the instigation of the Lutheran clergy, for the offence of owning and reading B6hme*8 " Way to Christ," and refusing to sign a condemna- tion of his opinions. On appeal to the Imperial Chancery, at Wetzlar, he was reinstated in citizenship and communion, on the ground that a man might belong to B5hme's school, without ceasing to be a good Lutheran in the eye of the law, and therefore still entitled to imperial protection under the Treaty of Westphalia.

One of the side issues of the great Pietistic Controversy of diis time was the innocence and orthodoxy of Bohme's teachings, and of the mys- tical theology in general. Spener and the first leaders of the movement took decidedly affirmative ground ; but in the next generation the party became more scholastic, and cut loose from the Mystics, to whom they owed their first impulse.

J

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1874.] The Shoemaker of (}d'rUtz. 258

Sach theologically-inspired mobs were much more frequent in Bobme's onm days, and oar prudent Burgomaster of Gorlitz might well strain a point to avoid offending the clergy.

And to the clergy our tbeosopber must have been an inexpli- cable annoyance. It was impossible that he and they should understand each other. ^^ That the Bible should present to him an entirely different aspect from that which it presented to the doctors ; that they should wish to crush him as a subverter of all their clear and satisfactory deductions, — as an intruder into a province which they had an exclusive right to govern ; that they should simply treat his pretensions to any apprehension of things in heaven and earth, which were not derived from them, as mon- strous and impossible, was altogether natural." *

Till 1619 Bohme kept silence, but was not idle. His ^^ Aurora " was circulated in several MS. copies ; and one was made for him- self to replace the origmal that lay in perdu at the Rathshouse. His circle of friends widened into Saxony and Silesia, and began to embrace nobles and officials, and men of learning. It is said that their acquaintance with Bohme was the turning point in the lives of several of these men of rank, ^^ who had been utterly given up to worldly vanity and fleshly lusts, and had demeaned them- selves no other to their inferiors than as ravemng wolves would,' ' but ^^ now, to the wonder of aH men, became the enemies of all such insolence." To some of them he pidd visits at their country- seats, and seems to have been treated with a queer mixture of def- erence and patronage, — the former being excited by his " gifts ; " Ihe latter by the very humble and unpretending earthen vessel " that contained them. He had not lost his old trick of making enemies by very plain-spoken rebukes, which he now based on spiritual discernment of character, rather than observation of the outer fife. Twice, on these visits, he ran risk of losing his life in consequence ; one wounded spirit actually bribed the lad who guided him to push him into a morass, from which he escaped with difficulfy.

Unless the pictures we have of our tbeosopber are pictorial

• F. D. Maurice : ** History of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy/'

(3d Ed.) vol. 2, p. 325. 7

254 The Shoemaker of Gorlitz. [Oct.

libels, there was little in the man's bearing or countenance to overawe or charm. ^' His presence was mean, his stature small, his forehead low, his temples prominent, his nose a little crooked, his beard short and thin, his voice low." Only his eyes were remarkable, — the bright, clear, bluish-gray eyes of genius, " like the windows of Solomon's temple," men said. The stories told of him show that he possessed the exceptional gifts of the clairvoyant. He would follow the sense of a conversation in any language, though he knew only German. He would tell his medical friends all that they knew about the properties of any plant that they showed him, after looking into its ^^ signature." He would also ask, as a help, to be told its name in Hebrew, or at least Greek ; for he had a notion that a ^' language of nature " underlay all the actual lan- guages, German not excepted, and that the two languages of the original Scriptures were chosen as the Divine medium because they most closely resembled it. He picked up from these friends^ and from books of the Hermetic sort, a host of Latin and artificial terms, which bestrew without adorning his books. He speak? of these as ^' unusual words, some of which are taken from nature and sense, and some are the words of uncommon masters, which I have tried, according to sense, and found them good and fit." This was not merely from the poverty of his vocabulary. His was one of those minds — John Foster's was another — for which cer- tain words and sounds have a fascination of their own, apart from their meaning. Abraham von Frankenberg tells us : '^ The Greek word Mdea,' to which I helped him, pleased him mightily, and, as he said, seemed like a very fair, heavenly, and chaste virgin, — a sort of goddess exalted to spiritual corporeality." Yet, as Wolf- gang Menzel has. remarked, there is sometimes a method in his verbal madness, as when he derives quality from the German yuelleUj — a source or spring.

The clergy now found the seer's dangerous influence had not departed when he ceased to write, and they again began to abuse from the pulpit the unlettered teacher, whose influence over rich and learned and noble men they would fain have possessed. So far as they were concerned, he felt released from his covenant of silence, and his friends kept urging him to disregard the commands of the magistracy. As he feared the judgments of God, let him

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1874.] The Shoetnaker of &orlitz. 255

not hide this talent in the earth ; let him fear God rather than men. There would be no lack of protectors, if the Rath made trouble, and his temporal support they would provide for.

In 1619 he resumed his pen, and threw aside awl and last, hay- ing written nothing but a very few " Theosophical Epistles " during Beven years. His first works were three long and elaborate treat- ises, which some of his admirers regard as marking successive degrees of profound thought. Thej are certainly much clearer than ^' The Aurora ; " the " Chaos " is much " more developed ; " but in all of them the Paracelsian elements are abundant. ^^ The Three Principles" is certainly 6ne of the best and most readable of his works, and was the one that introduced William Law to his writings. " The Threefold Life of Man" and the " Forty Ques- tions concerning the Soul" are more limited and psychological, while the former covers the whole field of his theosophy. The last has a history of its own. ^^ The Forty Questions," answered by Bohme, were proposed by Dr. Balthasar Walther, a Silesian physician who had traveled through the East in search of the hid^ den wisdom, and sought it in vain from the learned bodies and high schools of Europe, to find it at last in the person of an unlearned, untraveled craftsman in his native land. He spent several months with Bohme, and bestowed upon him the title of PkiloBophiis Teutonicus, which, Hegel says, was well deserved. It is noteworthy that Bohme censured his severe, ascetic manner of life, as savoring more of legal severity than of Christian free- dom.

The writings of 1620 are reckoned by many, both inside and outside his school, as his very best, — less dogmatic and more dia- lectic in form, and freer from alien elements thad those that went before them. " The Incarnation of Christ " and " The Six Theo- sophic Points " are the chief of them. This year he had a dis- cussion with a Chiliastic admirer — Paul Kaym — who had made the discovery that the world was to end in 1630. To a really profound mystic, like Bohme, such calculations seemed utterly frivolous, though he himself prophesied most eloquently of *' The Time of the Lily," yet in the future. As to the fate of the more material system, he would have said, with Emerson, ^^ Let it end. We will get on much better without it."

266 The Shoemaker of Gd'rlitz. [Oct.

In 1621 he wrote only one work that is not controversial, a treatise **0n the Four Temperaments," which he classifies and discusses after the traditional method of Hippocrates (as Kant also does in hb ^^Anthropology"), and gives cautions against their dangers. A Schwenkfelder, named Balthazar Tjrlken, had writ- ten two books against ^^The Aurora" and ^^The Incarnation" respectively. He was a Predestinarian, and a stickler for the letter of the Scriptures and of Schwenkfeld. Bohme replied in two " Apologies against B. T.," in which his opponent is handled vigorously, if not conclusively. By a caricature of Weigel's bold mysticism, Ezekiel Meth, of Langensalza, had reached the conclu- sion that true believers are so completely identified with Christ that they may call themselves by his name, and attain to his complete perfection. When Stiefel recanted and withdrew, Esuas Stiefel took his place at the head of the Antinomian and Panthe- istic sect — not unlike the English Banters that troubled George Fox — that had grown up in Saxony. Bohme's books had reached them, and they sent him some of them, asking his judgment upon them. Bohme wrote, " Thoughts upon Esaias Stiefel's Book of the Threefold State of Man — His New Birth," and next year followed it up with a sharper one : ^' Of the Error of the Sect of E. S. and E. M., concerning Perfection." It is interesting to see how sharply Bohme defines the limits within which mysticism re- mains sane and Christian, and notable that he indirectly acknowl. edges his obligations to Weigel. As for their fancy that Christ had many a time been bom of believing parents, and was continu* ally to be looked, for, he says there is hardly a cow but laughs to see men talk nonsense below her own level.

In 1622 he also wrote the treatise '^ Of the Signatures of Things," — the most formal statement of his views on natural sci- ence ; also a number of small devotional tracts, generally included in the collection called '^ The Way to Christ," — the most popular and the most artistic of his writings. One of these, *^ Of Divine Contemplation," ranks very high as a dialectic development of his views, standing beside the treatises of 1620.

In 1623 he had a verbal discussion with Dr. Staricius, a high Predestinarian, though an Alchemist. Bohme's ^^ beholdings " had no &ir chance in such a colloquy, and, feeling that he had not

i

1874.] The Shoemaker of Gd'rlitz. 267

supported the cause as it desenred, he wrote a treatise on ^^ The Election of Grace," in which he aims to refute Predestinarianism on purely theological ground. The idea of *^ an eternal counsel " in the mind of God implied a denial of the divine unity, and the sup- position of a division of views and mterests in the (Godhead. He reckoned this among his best and profoundest writings, and it was the especial faVorite of Franz Baader. The same year he wrote '^Of the Sacraments," a treatise whose ^^high" doctrine has been a stumbling-block to those of his admirers who relish the idealism of his mystic side, but not the realism of his theosophy. When the partial union of Lutheran and Reformed in Germany revived the old controversy, the late eminent critic, Friedrich Bleek, reprinted part of this treatise, as a help to clearing up the 'subject, and to leading both parties to a deeper apprehension of it. To this year belongs also his very large and very curious ^* Expo- sition of Genesis."

In 1624, Bohme's last year, he wrote only two short tracts of any permanent value, — the ^^ Dialogue of an Enlightened and an Unenlightened Soul," and the (unfinished) " Prayer Book." In the early part of the year he went into Silesia, on a visit to his friends, and wrote there the " Clavis," — a glossary of the pecu- liar terms used in his writings, — and the '^ Tables of Divine Rev- elation," also an attempt to simplify his system, made, no doubt, at the suggestion of Abraham von Frankenberg, who was himself a great manufacturer of mystical tables and diagrams, as may be seen in his own voluminous writings. This nobleman, afterwards Bohme's biographer, about this time sent three of Bohme's tracts to the single printer that Gorlitz boasted. These appeared under the title, afterwards given to a much larger collection, " The Way to Christ," and were extensively circulated throughout Liegnitz and Saxony, and even reached the Electoral Court at Dresden. The clergy were enraged, and a Pastor Frisius, of Liegnitz, wrote to Frimarius Richter about the affair ; and then, at his request, to the Rath of Gorlitz, demanding that they no longer tolerate such aheresiarch in their midst. Richter published, by the same printer, a "Judicium," a sheet of bad Latin [verse, fall of ne sutar ultra crepidam jests, personal abuse, and curses. It shows that he had not taken the slightest pains to understand Bohme ; that he had

258 The Shoetnaker of adrlitz. [Oct.

never even seen the book he especially abases ; that he knew absolutely nothing of Bohme's oddities and heresies, if such they were. Much of it comes with the worst grace from a man who had long hesitated between his father's honest trade, as a black- smith, and the sacred office, and who, having unhappily decided for the latter, had notoriously soiled the cloth by his life. The only valuable bit in his pasquil is his lament that the Silesian nobility would receive Bohme with open arms, if Gorhtz cast him out: —

'* Elysias [/>., Silesias] etiam fcedasti dogmati terras ; Isthic te excipiet, sat scio, turba virum, Qui quantum reliquis antiquo stemmati praestant, Tantum aliis prseeunt hac novitate su&."

Bohme, when he came back to Gorlitz, found this second storm ready to burst. At this time, or later, he had a German transla- tion of Richter's '^ Judiciun^," made by some of his friends, and answered it in a vigorous but simple, painstaking way that makes one smile at his guilelessness. In answer to the charge of innova- tion, the one definite impersonal charge that Richter brought, he says, ^^ I have no new doctrine, but only the old, which is to be found in the Bible and the kingdom of nature. I wish nothing more than that men begin once again to learn to know Nature and Scripture, not only in their breadth, but also in their depth, and to leave off unprofitable chatter, that they may enter into the ground of the truth." As Richter had closed his ^^ Judicium" with a curse, — '* male pereas sutor " — Bohme closed his reply by solemnly and earnestly invoking a blessing upon the Prima- rius.

April 1st, being Sunday, Richter mounted the pulpit to poor out the seven vials of clerical wrath upon the shoemaker. He was '^a fanatic, a rogue, a shark, a hog, a fellow soaked in brandy, a despiser of churches and sacraments, a blasphemer who declared there were four persons in the Godhead, and that the Son of God was made of quicksilver." Bohme was pre^nt, and stood facing the pulpit, with his back to a pillar. When the peo- ple were gone, he followed the Primarius out of the church, and with great meekness asked for specific instruction as to his errors, and besought Christian courtesy. The answer was an Apage so-

1874.] The Shoemaker of adrlifz. 259

thanas ! and when the shoemaker besought the friendly interven- tion of another of the clergy, who stood by, he was threatened with the sergeant and the stocks unless he took himself about his business.

On the next and several following days, Bohme was brought before the Rath. In no way could they get the Primarius to sub- stitute specific charges for his general denunciations. Richter threatened them with the fate oi Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, if they failed to cast out the heretic. Some of them had read the much-abused book, and found no harm in it, — very much good, ra&er. They all knew that he had powerful friends find patrons, and the Honorable Rath found themselves, in sailor phrase, '^ be- tween the Devil and a deep sea."

Bohme had prepared a bold, manly '^ supplication " to the Rath, in which his case was clearly stated. He explained his reasons for breaking silence, charging that the clergy, so far from keeping to their part of the agreement, had continued to assail him, attack- ing his character as well as his orthodoxy, taking away his good name, — so far as in them lay, — making his own life and that of his wife and children a burden to them. His townsmen knew that he was no drunken tavern-loafer, as was alleged, — that he rarely crossed any threshold in Gorlitz save as he needs must. Let the Primarius look at home for drunkards. Nor was he a demagogish sect-maker and separatist ; he had been most regular in his church duties as a good Lutheran ; and those whom he had influenced by his teachings and his writings were, for the most part, not of the common people, but men of learning and rank.

Sut the Rath would not even go through the forms of giving him a hearing. They dared not expel him from the city, but they besought him to leave it in peace, and save them from a collision with the higher powers. The clergy had the ear of the Elector and oTthe Emperor ;* what if Dresden or Vienna were brought

♦ In these opening years of the Thirty Years* War, the Elector was siding with the Emperor, against his fellow Protestants of Bohemia and Silesia, and had indeed brought the latter into subjection to Maximih'an, while the Emperor himself was ocetipied with the former. Silesia, for centuries, had been a dependency of Bohemia, and shared in all its com- motions. In return for his services, part of Silesia was ceded to the Elector in 1626.

260 The Shoemaker of Gd'rlUz. [Oct.

to believe that Gorlitz harbored heretics ? Bohme gave way to their entreaties to find a refuge for a time with his friends, and committed himself to God. As he left the Rath-house, a lot of young rogues set upon him, with jeers and mockery, as one ^' who would make the Holy Ghost as common, by and by, as hide-spots at the tanner^ s." He calls them Richter's following.

Several of the officers of the Electoral Court, at Dresden, had read ^^ The^Way to Christ," and perhaps others of Bohme's books ; and one of these now invited him to visit that city. Leaving his wife and children to the generous care of his friends, he set out May 19th. On his way through Saxony, he met with generous hospitality and cordial recognition of his gifts in all quarters, among the upper classes, as he tells us, in a childlike way, in his letters. At Dresden, he was well lodged and cared for ; courtiers came to see him, and took him out riding in their coaches ; his book was praised on all hands, and the meek, sensitive spirit, which Richter had so cruelly bruised and wounded, was healed with the wine and oil of human sympathy. Every one seemed to agree that that worthy's conduct was both unchristian and un- clericaL

The world began to look bright and rosy again to the melan- choly, burdened man. He began to hope for great things from the speedy reception of his message that called men from bitter- ness and wr6th and darkness to the sweetness and light, the mild- ness and sweet reasonableness, of Christ. " The time of the lily " was surely not far off. Did not even Dr. Strauch, the Lutheran Superintendent, love and praise his little book ? and had not Dr. Hoe * now preached much of the new birth, and Christ formed withm us the hope of glory 7 Dr. Strauch had expressed a desure to meet him, and the day for the interview was fixed.

Here Bohmes' letters break off, and the story of the rest of his stay at Dresden is 9ub lite. Tobias Kober, Bohme's friend and

• This worthy was the very embodiment of the odium theologicumn

He wrote a book to prove that the Calvinists in points agree with the Turks, and is charged with having persuaded the Elector of Saxony to take active part with the Emperor against the Calvinists of Bohemia at the opening of the Thirty Years* War. The Jesuits used to drink to his health, and there are strong reasons to believe that he was on the Im- perial pay-roll.

r

1874.] The Shoemaker of Gd'rlitz. 261

physician, writing thirty years after, and at second or third hand, tells us of an interview between the shoemaker and six of the Court divines of Dresden. Drs. Hoe, Moissner, Gerhard, Salduin, Leis- ner, and another, unnamed, together with the two ^'mathemati- cians " or astrologers of the Court. Bohme answered their ques- tions with such depth of understanding, such fullness of matter, and withal so modestly, that they could find no fault in him, — not even when he became the questioner, and propounded queries that their school theology furnished no answers for. They parted without a word of censure, and Dr. Meissner is reported to have said to Dr. Gerhard, " Who knows but God may have designated him for some uncommon work ? And how can we, with justice, pass judgment on that we understand not 7 For surely he seems to be a man of wonderful gifts in the spirit, though we cannot at present, from any ground of certainty, approve or disapprove of many things he holds." The story is a myth ; there may be ^ some now unattunable kernel of truth in it ; but the details given are false, and even impossible.

In the autumn, he left Dresden to visit his friends in Liegnitz, where he stayed some six weeks, and seems to have begun to write answers to '^ 177 Theosophical Questions," and had reached only the fifteenth when he was taken with a violent fever. He drank freely of cold water, which seemed to aggravate it. As he grew worse and worse, he decided to return home. The clerical Herod of Gorlitz was now dead,* so that nothing stood in the way

" Bdhmenist tradition is pretty severe upon Richter, but is not always to be trusted. We pass by an ugly story, that he cast a brother-in-law of Bohme's into a melancholy by cursing him, because the poor man paid him no interest upon a thaler which he had borrowed of him in sore dis- tress. Church and State alike forbade interest as usury, and the Pri- marius could not exact it. Bohme, it is said, interfered, but Richter drove him from his presence by his foul abuse, and flung his slipper at him as he left the room. The shoemaker picked it up, and brought it back, meekly begging him not to be so offended ; which is likely enough. Another tradition, first printed by J. J. Zimmermann in 1691, says that a son of Richter's studied B5hme's writings in order to refute them, and so vindicate his father's memory, but was converted in the process, and pub- lished a topical selection from them in several volumes at Thorn. I can find no trace of the book, and I do not believe the story. 8

262 The Shoemaker of G-drUtz. [Oct

of his retam. He arrived November Tth ; bat he had already sunk so low in health, that his physicians had no hope of his re* coverj, and told him that he had but a few days to live. They suggested that he should call in a clergyman and receive the last offices of the church. Bohme had no superstitious notions about the need of any viaticum ; but, like most men who dissent from their contemporaries on great points, he cultivated no singularity in smaller matters. The suggestion of his physician fell in with his own views. Master Elias Dieterich responded to the dying man's request, and first submitted him to a long theological examen to ascertain his orthodoxy in a Lutheran sense. Happily the ques- tions — still preserved for us — touched on no point of Bohme' s radical differences from the school theology ; for, indeed, the clergy had as yet made no study of his writings, and were aiming in the dark whenever they sought to fix the stigma of heresy on lum. Dieterich, therefore, granted him absolution and admbistered the Lord's Supper.

Early on the morning of November 17th« " he called to him hia son Tobias, and asked him whether he heard that sweet, harmomous music. He replied, * No.' ^ Open then,' saith he, ^ the door, that you may the better hear it ! ' And asking what o'clock it was, he was told that it had struck two. ^* My time,' saith he, ' is not yet ; three hours hence is my time.' Li the meantime he spoke these words, ' O, thou strong Qod of Zebaoth, deliver me according to thy win ! Thou crucified Jesus, have mercy on me, and take me into thy kingdom ! ' When six in the morning came, he took leave of his wife and son, and blessed them, and said, ^ Now I go hence to Paradise ; ' and, bidding his son turn him, he fetched a deep sigh and departed."

Then came a protracted and painful struggle between his friends and the city clergy, who refused him the common honors of Chris- tian burial. Richter's spirit still lingered among them. The re- proaches of Lutheran zealots, in other quarters, roused them to take the most public way possible to disavow all complicity with the dead fanatic who had brought disrepute upon their city, and had poisoned other districts with his heresies. Two sessions of the Rath were held to discuss the matter, and twice did they com- mand the clergy to give Bohme the burial that the civil law grants

r*

1874.] The Shoemaker of G-Mitz. 268

even tx> heretics. The new Primarios, Nicholas Thomas, absolately refused. Elias Dieterich submitted to their positive orders, partly, it is said, because the Imperial Landvogt or Qoveroor of the Prov- ince — the Catholic nobleman, Karl Hannibal von Dohna — waa in the city and exerted himself in the matter ; and not unfitly, as Bohme was to find his ablest expositors among Catholic scholars. His friends were about to leave Gorlitz, and set out with the body for Schloss-Leutolzhain, where Bohme's friends, the Yon Endems, would have received it with all the honors.

Yon Dohna would have no half measures. The clergy and the choir of the school children must accompany the cortege, and there must be a funeral sermon. And so, with psalmody and outer honor, the outer shell was borne from his home to the church, at whose porch the rest of the clergy slunk away, and left Dieterich to officiate. We have the sermon yet, — a wooden, juiceless, pe- dantic bit of chatter about the disagreeableness of dying, — almost as much Latin as German in it. The preacher assured his audi- ence that he only submitted to the positive commands of the Rath ; that he would accept no honorarium for his services, and that he would as lief he were a hundred miles away. As the usage was, at the close he read the " Testimonium Yit»," drawn up by Bohme' 8 friends, — or at least so much of it as to the story of B<3ime's last communion, where he broke it off with a detailed account of the questions he had put to the shoemaker before his absolution, and declared that he accepted Bohme' s affirmative an- swers as a recantation of his heresies. The wooden head of him ! Then with tolling of the bell, and more psalmody by the school children, the shoemaker was borne to his last resting-place by the younger members of his craft.

Hate pursued him even in his grave. His friends sent from Liegnitz a large wooden cross to be placed over his grave. It was covered with emblems and inscriptions in the taste of Abraham von Frankenberg. Unknown hands first defaced it, and then destroyed it, perhaps because its mystical ornaments were supposed to have something to do with the black art. That he was a conjurer, and had a familiar spirit, was certainly believed by the common people during bis life. Even his meekness burst into indignation, when, on one occasion, a stranger approached him with a persistent offi^r

264 Modem Switzerland. [Oct.

of money, in exchange for his magical secret, and would not heed his assurance that he was no wizard, but a good Christian, that loved Gk)d and his neighbor, and had no familiar spirit to bestow upon any. For years his house was pointed out in Gorlitz as that of *^ the heretic Bohme." The common people were still mostly fervent Lutherans, in the heat of the Reformation movement, and devoted to the clergy. They had no deed of Bohme, and he had, as yet, no message for them. Only the classes that possessed some measure of culture, and knew that there were more things in heaven and earth than the school theology had ever dreamed of, received Bohme's message and reverenced his '*• beholdings."

On his death-bed he told his wife that she would not long sur- vive him. She died, in 1626, at the house of Tobias Kober. Of his four sons, one was already dead ; the rest served apprentice- ship to honest trades, were married and settled in life, but have

left no direct posterity.

R. E. Thompson.

Full text of part II (The Shoemaker of Gorlitz. II. By Prof Robert Ellis )

1874.] The Shoemaker of G^Srlitz. 447

THE SHOEMAKER OF GORLITZ.

n.

Wem Zeit ist wie Ewigkeit

Und Ewigkeit wie Zeit,

Der ist befreit

Von alien Streit.

— Bbhme.

At the death of Jakob Bohme all but three of his smallest tracts were still in MSS. It is to a Dutch merchant that their final publication is chieflj due, and the last of them did not ap- pear in German till 1677. Many of them actually came out in Dutch and in English before they were printed in German. A doubtful tradition speaks of Charles I. as reading ^^The Forty Questions " * in 1646 with such rapture that he sent a learned man into Germany to master the language, procure Bohme's works, and translate them into English. But tiie English translation was be- gun two years before, with part of ^^ The Incarnation " and a life of Bohme. It was not finished till 1662, being carried on at the expense of Humphrey Blundel, an English merchant, by himself and three other scholars, John Sparrow, John Elliston, and Dur- andus Hotham.

If ^^ the intelligent reader " should open one of these old quar- tos, even if he does not light on a page where Latin words and phrases are mixed up mth strange terms borrowed fi^m Para- celsus, unless he is very fortunate in the passage that he chances on, he will be likely to conclude that he has before him a mere

• King Charles may very well have seen the Latin version of this

work made by the Jurist J. A. Werdenhagen, and published in 1632. But such a book was not likely to excite rapture in such a mind.

The old English version of B5hme's works, published mostly in Com- monwealth times, was reprinted with slight alterations in i762'-84, in four quarto volumes, by the friends and literary executors of William Law, and passes with the unwary as his translation. Even the '^ Elucidations" ascribed to him in this edition are not his, though found in his hand-writ- ing, nor is it complete ; a fifth volume in i2mo appeared at Dublin and St. Helens in 1820.

448 The Shoemaker of O-d'rlitz. [Dec.

heap of words, to which no meaning can be attached. Only per- sistent reading can find a clue to the sense that underlies dus ver- bal chaos, and much of it has always remained a riddle to the most patient and loving students. William Law confessed that, after many years of study, parts of Bohme still lay in the shadow to him, and he tells a beginner, ^^ Bead his books through, without staying at that which you do not comprehend ; and you will all along see, both why you should continue reading, and why you must be content to learn very gradually."

There are many good reasons for this obscurity : (1) Like all writers of genius, he writes from his personal intuition, his ^^ be- holding," instead of reproducing traditional conceptions. And his intuitions concern the very highest problems of the most ab- struse of sciences, pure metaphysic or ontology. It is a subject that but slightly occupies men's thoughts, though it is perhaps true that the mind of every man, learned or simple, turns to it at some time or other of his life. It has therefore never had a language intelligible to all men ; it has to borrow words and idioms from provinces the most different from its own, and wluch are therefore far from suitable to its uses. Let the intelligent reader take up Plato's **Philebus" or his "Tim»us," or Schelling's " Bruno," or Hegel's " Logic," and see what he will make of them. Even the first sentence of the ^^ Critique of the Pure Beason," the very primer of modem metaphysic, will be ^^all Greek" to most readers: "Are a priori synthetic judgments possible ? " But (2) this man who by his gifls of mind and heart was especially called to this study, if ever man was, had to struggle with special difficulties. His lack of all education but the simplest, and especially that he had never mastered any lan- guage but German, and had therefore never taken that initial step in all true culture which emancipates the mind from the bondage of a single vocabulary, was of the greatest disadvantage to him; nor was he less fettered in mental movement by what he did learn. His yearning after some solution of the universe, some .interpretation of the Bible that went deeper than the scholastic one that he heard from the pulpit, threw him upon writings of the mystics and of the hermetic school. He must have read these

1874.] The Shoemaker of Gd'rlitz. 449

voraciously in his early years ; with the exception of Valentine Weigely and perhaps Schwenkfeld, we believe he received little but injury from them ; and yet less injury than if his had been a less creative intellect. He often filled up their dry husks with a life and meaning that they had not an inkling of; he read between their lines things that were beyond their grasp. To them, how- ever, we owe much of the false natural philosophy and science that deface his pages. He writes best when he casts off this Saul's armor of inherited notions and pseudo-erudition. It is then that he deserves the prabe which a master has given him : ^^ He was a generative thinker, what he knew he knew for himself. It was not transmitted to him, but fought for. And, therefore, how- ever small his faculty of making himself intelligible to the many, he has made himself intelli^ble to a few in a sense in which " many a famous philosopher ^^ never made himself intelligible to any. He spoke to the hearts of those few. He made them feel that they were in the midst of a very strange world, or rather of two strange worlds, full of problems which demand a solution, and which no mere maxims or formulas can solve." * That few contained some that were very unlikely to feel what Feuerbach calls ^' the witchcraft " of his writings. William Law, bred in the very straightest sect of English the- ology, regarding the authority of the priesthood with the profound- est reverence, practising a severe and ascetical religion," and with all a High Churchman's and all a scholar's distrust of visions and fanaticism, sat down at the feet of this uneducated Lutheran lay- man. ^^ When I. first began to read him" said he, ^^ he put me into a perfect sweat. But as I discovered sound truths, and the glimmerings of a deep ground and sense, even in the passages not then clearly inteUi^ble to me, and found myself, as it were, strongly prompted to dig into these writings, I followed this im- pulse with continual aspirations and prayer to Gtoi for his help and divine illumination, if I was called to understand them. By reading in this manner again and again, and from time to time, I perceived that my heart felt well and my understanding opened

♦ F. D. Maurice. History of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, Vol. II., p. 325.

460 The Shoemaker of G-drlUz. [Deo.

graduallj ; till at length I found what a treasure there was hid in this field/' •

After what we have said, it may seem strange to add that the style of Bohme's writings is a chief attraction to many minds. Yet Bohme was in his way a man of very marked power of expres- sion, and the fact makes itself visible on every page of his writ- ings. Just because he had to draw his vocabulary from the simplest household speech, his language is vivid and picturesque. Hps the- osophical interpretations of nature are often in the highest degree poetical, and conceptions that would be dry, colorless abstractions in another writer, are under his pen living things, that quiver with emotion, rush on and shrink back, hunger and thirst, as if a child were telling their story. His larger treatises are rhymeless poems, huge, unkempt, awkward epics, that embrace the tale which is after all — or at least Milton thought so — the highest, noblest, theme of human song, — Paradise Lost and Regained. Hence the charm that the writers of the Romanticist school found in him. Lichtenberg, Schlegel, Fouque, and the Tiecks vie in his praise, while Schelling found in him ein theogonUche Geistj and Hegel called him ^^ the profoundest of philosophers." His school abounded in sacred poets, such as John Scheffler Q^ Angelus Silesius "), his friend David von Schweidnetz, Grottfried Arnold, Gerhard Terstee- gen, 0. F. D. Schubart, La Motte Fouque, and Yon Hardenberg (^'Novalis"). His German- American disciples have been most prolific hymn writers, and their collections of original hymns wore the first books printed in German on this continent. Among Eng- lish poets Coleridge confessess his obligations to him ; but he is represented more fully by Henry Brooke, Sr., better known for his prose novel, The Fool of Quality," and the witty and devout Jacobite, Dr. John Byrom, of Manchester, author of ^' Christians, Awake, Salute the Happy Mom," and of that exquisite thoosophic hymn, " Cheer Up, Desponding Soul.**

I. Bohme is a theosopher, not a philosopher : that is, he begins where Bacon says true philosophy ends, namely, with the intuition of the supreme unity. With him God is not the last thing known,

♦ So told by Rev. Francis Okeley, in his translation of The Life of Behmen, by Abraham von Frankenberg. London. 1780. Pp. 105-6.

1874.] The Shoemaker of O-drlitz. 451

bat the first ; we know other things only as we know God, and share his knowledge of them, think his creative thoughts after him. We are related to other fragments of the circumference only through the centre. We know, therefore, just what he chooses to know in us, — to open up in us.* This is true even of onr most ordmarj perceptions ; but it is a truth that involves the possibility of a &r vaster range of knowledge than the ordinary one, — of an ontology or perception of things in their own essence ted being, as well as in their sensible properties. But to this deeper knowledge of God and the creature, and of Eternal Nature in God and out of God, a spiritual propaedeutic is necessary. Our self-hood, our hearing and seemg as from oursleves, our unwilUng- ness to retain God in our knowledge, stands in the way. The soul must sink itself by self-denial in the eternal silence, tiiat God may speak to it. This is the act of the will, the central point in the xnan's life, as it strips itself of all self-will and reasonings, and ^ves itself up to the £vine contemplation with utter resignation to the Will of God. n. ^^ But the theosopher rismg to such knowledge becomes as a

• '^ In thy light we shall see light" Master Eckart says, '^ We are

united to God, not in being, but in beholding." " Simple people con- ceive that we are to see God, as if he stood on that side and we on this. It is not so ; God and I are one in the act of perceiving him." Aquinas, much more loosely : ^ Cum omnis cognitio fit per assimilationem cognos- centis ad cognitum, oportet et quod qui vident Deum, aliquo modo trans- formeptur in Deum." The late Prof. Maurice says that the Apostle John teaches ^ that God can be known ; that the knowledge of him is the root of all other knowledge ; that we are only capable of knowing our fellow- creatures, and of knowing the world of nature, because we are more directly related to him than to them ; because his knowledge of them is imparted in a measure to the creatures whom he has made in his im- age." In his first reply to Mansel he says, ^ All words like those into which cum enters — ' conviction,' * conception,' < conversion,' ' conscious- ness' — are worthy of the closest study and examination. Hardly any are so suggestive ; hardly any contain so much light respecting our pro- cesses of thought, respecting our human, nature. No one of them has more value than this word ' consciousness.' That it should have been accepted in any age by no means philological, ... is one of those indi- cations of a providence that shapes our ends, which ought not to be overlooked." It hints ^ that there is a fellowship between the conscious man and something else."

452 The Shoemaker of G-drlitz. [Dec.

god. To him there can be no more awe and reverence since he has searched the inmost mysteries."

Not so : to him still God is the unsearchable Grod, dwelling m light unapproachable. The enlightened soul knows of. a depth it cannot know, — " God without nature or creature," the Abyss of the Godhead, the unspeakable and unresolved unity. As con- trasted with the manner of the existence of all that is known, we may speak of this as ^^ the eternal nothing ; " all noble predicates may be asserted of it, and yet denied of it also. Here all after distinctions exist ideally, but are not actualized, nor even tending toward actualization or essentiality. Here is the still Eternity ; here is no this or that; neither quantity nor quality nor quiddity. Knowledge and perception may be with equal truth asserted and denied of it, as indeed may being itself in the sense in which we coilceive of being. Here is will, the will of the Unground, tiie eternal freedom, but it is Will incomprehensible, and with no object of desire outside itself. Here is wisdom, but yet an unre- solved mystery. It is the ^^ indifferentia ab^oluta realitatis infinite et infinite potentialitatis " of Schelling ; the nought of Oken, that is the basis of all number, and yet is no number, is neither plus nor minus. It is and is not, and yet is. The highest angel, were he to seek to gaze into it as with and through its own ^^ Eye of Eternity," would only be confounded at depths inaccessible, — "wonders without number, ground, or end," — the mysteiy of God that only God can grasp.

All the philosophies of the absolute leap from this first unity, this esoteric process of the Godhead, the En Soph of the Cabbalists, directly to the objects given in ordinary experience. The especial work of theosophy — first attempted by the Cabbalists with their Ten Sephiroth * — is to fill up the gaps, and, while confessing the Unknown and the Unknowable G^d, to disclose to us God as he

• Molitor, In his elaborate study of the Cabbala (Philosophic der Ges- chichte, dose of Vol. II.}, says that he was amazed and delighted to find in Bohme just the Ideas that he had already discovered in the Sohar. But other aiithors (see RocholPs Deutsche Theosophie, pages 45-5o)> -while admitting a resemblance and a common purpose, point out a far profounder divergence, — one so great that it is impossible to trace a transition from the Jewish to the Christian theosophies.

1874.] The Shoemaker of QMit^. 458

revealfl himself, -^ ttie God in knowledge of whom is oar Eternal life.

m. The next process is the mediating, as the last of all is the eso- teric. Here is the passage from the Deu4 implicitue to the Deue explieitus. The eternal freedom, the will of the Ungronnd, moved by a derire of an object of its own love, mirrors itself in — as will conceives and as freedom begets — a heart, a centre, the mind of God, and thus attains to consciousness of itself,* which is the essence of spritoalitj, bat not of personality. From this synthe- sis of sabject and object is the going forth of a divine spirit of activity, — the utterance of the will through the mind. The sub- ject of its activity is the (ideal) wisdom of God, which may be contemplated alternately as the passive mate of the spirit, and as ikke whole divine play of spiritual powers in the birth of the Trin- i^, returning upon itself into unity.

• Here most philosophies of the Trinity stop ; especially those

ttiat under the dualiitic influence of Descartes draw a sharp Ime between spirit and nature. To conceive Grod, with Kant, as pure spirit, is to conceive him as natureless; but God, in Bohme^s ^* beholding," though nature-free, is not nature-less. This medi- ate process is a will, a tendency, to something not yet realized ; this conceiving will, conceived mind, and uttered spirit, are not the three persons of the revealed and esoteric Trinity. Were this the last word, God would be *' the unknowable," even to the the- osopher's enlightened eye. Indeed, nothing besides God could have existed, save thought.

But first note that in this birth of the Trinity a certain antithe- ms is disclosed,— «- the desire and the object that satisfies it. In Bohme's dialectic of consciousness, the antithesis is a necessary one ; it is involved in the very nature of all knowledge, especially self-knowledge, and therefore of all conscious existence. He as- serts a universal polarity, *^ all things consist of yes and no.*' ^* Were all but one thmg, that one would not be disclosed to it- self ; even so if the anguish were not, the joy would be unknown."

• So the Roman Catechism : For as our mind^ in becoming conscious

of itself, maketh in itself an image of itself, which we call a word, so the Deity, in eternally begetting the word, becomes conscious of himself (r# ipsum inUlligit). 6

464 The Shoemaker of Q-drUtz. [Dec.

And so in the deity he beholds the dark fiery strength of an in- finite yearning, meeting and swallowed up in the sweetness and light of an infinite joy. * But the antitheeus is only ideal as re- gards God ; the two are one in the divine ground, which is di^ tingoished but not divided in the birth of the Trinity ; one also in the infinite synthesis of the mutual love and satisfaction which is the life of the Godhead ; one in the going forth of the spirit of life and activity. The strength of the desire and the sweetness of the joy blend in unity ; ^^ out of the strong comes forth the sweet."

lY. The thought of the poet (or maker), brought forth out of the dark into intellectual clearness, attains to vividness and reality by being '^ embodied " in an image. Such also is the divine pro- cess, and its last step is the generation of ^^ Eternal Nature,' ' which in its completeness is ^^ the body of God." Here the threefoldness of the self-conscious spirituality passes into tripersonality, — for person is the antithesis in synthesis of spirit and nature or body. This Eternal Nature is the imaging forth of the life of the spirit ; it is therefore trine, but it is also (and especially to-us-ward) sevenfold. Its seven properties or forms are the ^^ seven lamps " of the heavenly sanctuary, ^^ the seven eyes of God that go to and fro through the earth," the seven colors of the rainbow about the throne. In its totality it is the ^^ glassy sea " of the ceaseless in- terplay of divine powers and forces ; it is the light wherewith God clothes himself as with a garment. The piioeess ef its generation, as Bohme depicts it, brings the antitheus or polarity of existence into strong light. He beholds the abyssal will brin^g forth the Eternal Son though its successive seven stages* The first three (considered abstractly) belong to the eternal dark world ; the fourth is the point of indifierenee ; the last belong to the eternal light world, which overcomes and embraces all the rest. By a theosophic dialectic each involves the next. The first property or form is the bare desire of the abyssal will, the blind yearning, pressing to uniiy and rest, as yet unsatisfied ; it is a hand that

• '* I saw also," says George Fox, *' that there was an ocean of darkness

and death, bt|^ an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. In that also I saw the love of God and had great openings." — Journal,

1874.] The Shoemaker of Q-drlitt. 455

closes upon nothing, a centripetal force that has not found its cen- tre. The second, by necessary reaction, is eztensire, tending to manifoldness and motion, a oentrifagal force that strives in enmity with the former. The third is ttie joint result of the strife, a whiriing anguish, a restless circulation, in which the dark world comes to its completeness. The fourth, by a theosophic transmuta- tion of forces, is the generated fire-flash, which seems at first the culmination of the preceding three, but is in truth the point of transition to the holy ternary of light and joy. We have been gazing on a tempest more awful than those of temporal nature ; the lightning flash that seemed its deepest horror, is in truth the opening of the eternal calm, and the victorious sunshine. The Eternal Son, through whom the abyssal will becomes the Father — our Father — comes forth to reign. In the first three properties, the Fatiier, Son, and Spirit are darkly mirrored in the dark ground ; in the last three we have the clear reflection of Spirit, Son, and Father. The seven are substantially three, but seven on the side that we see. The fifth is the gentle spirit of water, not the ma- terial water, but that upon which the Spirit brooded in the be^n- ning, that of which a man must be bom in being bom of the Spirit, the quencher of the fire, the recipient of the light. It is the gentle fiructifying rainfall, in which we reap the blessing of the storm. The sixth is the uttered sound, the voice that is softer than silence, the harmony in which the elements that lay unre- solved in the fifth come forth, and the word is uttered. The seventh returns upon and embraces all the others ; it is the per^ feet rest of the Sabbath, which contains all perfect work ; in it all the others attain to being and substance ; it is the body of God. On another side it is the essential — no longer the ideal — wisdom of God, tiie passive recipient of the working of the Holy Spirit, that proceedeth bom the Father through the Son. It is his especial sphere, and therefore the third principle, as the first prin- ciple (the dark world) and the second principle (the Ught world) are those in which the Father and the Son reign. .

m

Eternal nature is not (jod and not creation. It shares the divine life but not the divine consciousness ; it stands related to God as the human sensorium to the human spirit in an act of thought. It has not a unity of ground, in and of itself; only the

466 The Shoemaker of GdrlUz. [Deo.

unity of synihesiB. Its aeren forms do not exist alongdde each other in a mutaally exclosiye way; they interpenetrate com- pletely ; each of them occupies the entire sphere. The result of the synthesis is like the clear white Hght, when the colors of the prism blend in one ray — a ^^ glory unspeakable/' yet only the hinder-parts —^ the kehrseite that God showed to Moses on the mount.

The conception has been the erux of B<3ime's interpreters, especially the idealists. Schelling, Hegel, and Feuerbadi con- found it ?rith the temporal nature of experience, and so inyolye Bohme in an absurdity that he himself foresaw, when he warned his readers not to think of him as finding ^' cows and calves in heaven."

y. Of the first and proper creation Bohme tells us little. It was a threefold angelic worid — three vast hierarchies — that God loved into bemg, with the Princes Michael, Lucifer, and Uriel as their kings, and each with seven subordinate thrones, and a vast variety and multitude of angelic and natural existences under them. The ideas of each existed teom eternity in the wisdom of God. They were created out of the ground of eternal nature ; they shared in its sevenfold properties ; but to say that ttiey are part of God is ^^ the Devil's religion." Each created life stood especially in the fourth property, the point of indiference between the light and the dark world, with perfect freedom to choose either. The blessedness of each was in humility to ofier up to God its strength that it had of the dark world, and to receive his light. They found their delight in him, and he delighted in tiiem, ideally from all eternity, really from the beginning of their crea- tion. They were the channels in which the divine love and wis- dom flowed to the worlds of nature wherein they stood.

YI. To Bohme this lower world is not directly , and as we see it, the work of Grod. It is a fiiJlen world, a world of disorder that shares in the ^^ anguish " which he finds in his own heart, a crea- tion that ^* groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now, waiting for the redemption." The deadness, darkness, grossness, concreteness of matter, cannot be from God, the Author of life. Its rendings and convulsions cannot be fi^>m the author of unity ; the uselessness of all but small surface fragments of the earth,

1874.] The Shoemaker of Gd'rlitz. 467

bespeaks another author than the Eternal Wisdom. Its tempests and whirlwinds, that called forth Christ's rebuke, cannot have come from the God of peace. The fragments of beauty and ex- cellency that bestrew it are but, as eastern story teUs, bits of the Tast palace of jeweb and crystals that once lifted the earthly paradise with an unearthly beauty. Yet it cannot of itself and alone have fidlen ; a M must be the act of a free wiU. It must be that the intelligent creatures, whom God appomted to be the open gate of all heavenly influences and life-pving powers, are become, by their own free act, the very gateway of heD and all the hellish influxes.

Sut man was not the author of all this mischief. Our universe was once the home and kingdom of Lucifer and his angels. As created beings, the sons of God, they stood in the ground of Eter- nal Nature, glorified and blessed in sharing the sevenfold gifks of its unsevered forms. Pride was their fall. In ima^nation they conceived the fierce, fiery strength of the first principle, and de- sred it as something grander and nobler than the meekness and softness of the victorious light and life of Grod. They awakened the first three properties of Eternal Nature in themselves, to the exclusion of the rest, and found there the nichte of the Unground,* the infinite hunger and craving, the wrath of that God in whom there is no wrath, the fire that is not quenched, the storm that passes mto no calm. (1) That strong, hungry derire and craving is the worm that dieth not ; its fierce constriction is the chain that binds them ; its endless seeking an absent centre or ground in the abyss is their endless inward fall. (2) That expansive force is the repulsion that isolates them in deadly repugnance of hate from even their companions in tan ; there is a prince, but no kingdom of heU. (8) That whirling anguish is the crown of their misery ; for them there is no rest ; the number of the beast is 666, a three-

• '* It 18 a question," says Master Eckart, what buraeth in helL The

masters commonly say, ' self will.' But I say of a truth it is naught that bumeth in hell. ... If God and they that are in the light of his counte- nance have aught of true bliss, which they that are sundered from God do lack, it is that selfsame naught that tortures the souls that be in hell, more than any fire, or than self will." Hence damnation fiom damnum a loss, the coming short of the glory.

458 The Shoemaker of G^drliiz. [Dec.

fold fiulare to reach 7 ; and the Bible always speaks of Satan or Lucifer as in motion. Such are the three well-springs of their torment, their fall from life into death and the lake of fire. Noth- ing lights up that abyss, save the dark fire-flash of the fourth prop- erty, which now passes on to no victory and reign of life and joy, for they hare turned away bom. that. The light that is in tliem is itself darkness. It is no local hell, no place made for torment ; it is a hell that lies shut up within heaven itself; and its outer darkness, by which it is severed bom the world of light, is a moral, not a local, separation.

YU. But the nature-world wherein they reigned shared in the dire effects of their &11, and the dark, fiery properties of nature were kindled into conflagration in it also. To quench these, and to create (by a coagulation of its confused forms) the material world out of its ruins, and then to create a new class of intelli- gences through whom that world might be again raised to its first glory, was the work described in the Mosaic narrative of creation. The dark world's properties were not destroyed, nor as yet re- moved by the victory of the light over them : they were only brought into a certain provisional order, — that in which attractions, repulsions, and circulations are the fundamental laws, — until, by ^^ the manifestation of the sons of God," the redemption should come. Man, that is, was to be the new channel of divine com- munication ; but he, too, must stand in the seven properties of eternal nature. The paradise of his un&llen life was no spot of this material earth, though the Eden wherein it grew and sprang was such; it was that which the Apocalypse promises with its tree of life ^^ to him that overcometh." Between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam stood — in the fourth form of eternal nature — in the point of firee indifference between the light and the dark, or rather the mixed, world. Instigated by envious Lucifer, he chose the latter. The story of the fall is the story of the deep sleep that came upon him, — of the division of the androgynous being into two, by the separation of the meek and womanly nature that looked up to God from the masculine and lordly nature that looked down upon the outer world. It is also the story of the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the yearning after the material satisfactions of fallen

1874.] The Shoemaker of ad'rlitz. 469

nature, in which the severed worlds of Ught and darkness are blended in imperfect and proyisional synthesis. Unlike Lucifer, man desired not the world of pure evil, but the nuxed world. He fell by sensual lust, not by pride, which latter is always the deeper fall. The hearenly body, the garment of lights was rent away ; man became conscious of his nakedness, and sought for his covering in material nature ; and the fig-leaf covering and the coats of skin are merciful incorporations, — the first baptisms ; for this world and this life were to be the standing ground for repentance and regeneration. Hence the hold by which man grasps this outer mixed world of light and darkness, that he may not, with Lucifer, sink into the abyss. But at the same instant the redemption was begun. The divine seed of light was merci- fully shut up in each man's heart, in the ground of the soul, as the treasure hid in the field.

Yin. To man thus fallen there is but one escape, — the incar- nation of the Son of God. The light and heart and life of God — be who reigns in the second principle or eternal light world — must break through into this alien ground, must shine into this darkness until it grasp him, and he overcome it '^ No salvation out of Christ " is an axiom of Bohme's theosophy ; but then, to Bohme, ^^ He is the true light, that enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world." The light and dark worlds are strug-* gling for the mastery m every man's heart, and every temper of mind or imagination of the heart is a victory for one or the other. The escape '^ from darkness into light " is from ^^ the power of sin and Satan unto God."

The expressions of the popular theology, in regard to the re- demption, Bohme finds to be true in very awful senses that are not commonly attached to them. ^^ God out of Christ is a con- suming fire ; " << Christ drank the cup of the divine wrath, due to us for sin;" ^'Christ made satisfaction to the divine wrath;" '^ Ye were the children of wrath." The ordinary legal sense put upon these sayings, and the consequent denials of the truth that

• ^ God is love," were as hateful to him as to any liberal. And yet

they are to him true sayings. That was the work of Christ ; he was treading the wine-press of wrath alone, pierced with sorrows, yearning for man's love. Therefore, as the quencher of wrath,

460 The Shoemaker of Gffrlitz. [Dee.

the bruiser of the serpent's head, he is the source of our salvstioii. The process of Christ must be actualized — not repeated — in tfie regeneration of his people. Christ must be formed within them, must be bom there, grow up in strength, question and confound tiie DoctoM in the Temple, be baptized, carried into the wilder- ness to be tempted ; must do his miracles there, mnltiplying food, healing the dck, raising the dead, stilling the tempest, casting out devils, smiting barren trees with destruction; must qpeak there his parables of wisdom^ his blessings and his declaratioiis of woe ; must pour out his soul unto death to be raised to life and ^017. And so the epos of human redemption is transacted in the human breast, not ^^ in the Conncils of Etemitj."

But the regeneration is not purely spiritual ; " He is the Sayioor of the body also/' In his incarnation he took not merely a physical body firom Mary of Nazareth, but a spiritual body &om the essen- tial Heavenly Wisdom, the mate of the Holy Ghost, whom Maiy represented. Of this body, his people are made partakers in the regeneration, the sacraments being the special though not tiie exclusive means of participation. They feed upon this body by &ith, — on his mystical flesh and blood ; they are members of it, — of his flesh and bones. Thus is bom and nourished in them a spiritual body, enclosed within that which is natural ; at death it comes forth in glory, the sensorium or ground of their conscious spiritual life, in whose use they are now truly body-free, but not bodiless. The other is sown ; this is reaped. The dying saints are ^^ not unclothed, but clothed upon " when ^^ tiie eartUy house of tiiis tabemacle that burdens them is laid aside. In what we call death '^ mortality is swallowed up of life."

IX. Like all mystics, he speaks much of the emptying of tiie human vessel that God may fill it, but not of its annihilatioQ ; num is to become not self-less, but self-firee. God must bring the soul out ^4nto the wilderness," before he can speak comfortably to it, — into the dark silence of the first nothingness, where all desire, save the first craving fofc Christ, the Heart of God, is stilled and forgotten. But from that silence to the glory of the kingdom of joys the way is the way of the cross. The soul must be brought through the dark world, the everlasting burnings, the anguish of the birth, ere it rises to light and (reedom. It must pass through

1874.] The Shoemaker of Odrlitz. 461

the fiery sword of the cherub into the Paradise Lost. The storm comes before the calm ; the evemng and the morning are the day ; for the act of God is, after all, but one ; only the sphere of the act differs. The birth of the eternal ideal trinity, the generation of eternal nature, the creation of the angelic worlds, the restoration of the fallen world of nature to a material order, the process of Christ, and the regeneration (or new creation) of man, are but instances of the same threefold and sevenfold act, — the victory of the light over the darkness, the victorious syntfiesis of the first and the second worlds, issuing in the third. The theosopher's eye, in grasping the meaning and the manner of one, has the clew to them all. « 

X. Bdhme's theosopby is as comprehensive and catholic as it is intensive and Christian. He finds no difficulty in believing that God can save Turks and heathens. Over the conflict between light and darkness in every human heart he sees the spirit of God yearning to reconcile the strife by quenching wrath in love ; and when he prevails, it is not the victory of this or that notion or opinion of the head, but a change in the centre of the man's inmost nature, — the will. It is a victory of '^ sweetness and light," of ^^ the mildness and sweet reasonableness " of Christ in man's inmost life. Those who know not the awful si^ificance of the historical incarnation may, indeed, blaspheme the Son ; but it will be forgiven them. Only the blasphemy and the rejection of the Holy Ghost, who is seeking to work in them the process of Christ, cannot be forgiven; they count themselves unworthy of eternal life. Bohme was not a Universalist. He seems to imply the final loss of part of mankind, and he distinctly disavows any hope of the restoration of the fallen angels. His view of the future of the unregenerate may be inferred from what has been said already. So long as man lives in this world, even though envy and wrath prevail in his life, and though the prodigal has wasted his substance, there is a certain quenching of the inward fire, a satisfaction in the swinish husks. The light of the sun, because it images an invisible sun, and the satisfaction he finds in the creatures, furnish some poor assuagement of his misery, but no real rest and fullness. But when he is cut loose from all this, and goes forth into the outer darkness, ^' where their fire is not 7

462 The Shoemaker of G-Mitz. [Dec.

quenched/' what a miserj of unsatisfied lusts and cruelties, what a tempest of evil passions and envies — '^ lust hard by hate " — must rage in the soul that has never ^^ escaped into the heart and life of God." It is a ^^ wandering star, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.' ' Hence the awful phenomena of demoniac possession, — losfc spirits striving back to the li^t of day and its alleviations of their misery, and even craving bodies of humiliation if they can reach it by no other. ^^They be* sought Him that He would not send them forth into the deep," — into the herd of swine rather.*

Yet a majority of his school have been Universalists, and did much to ^ve currency to the doctrines of final Restoration. Jane Leade, in England, and Gichtel, in Germany, led off in tlus direc- tion. The latter — his biographer, Ueberfeld, tells us — continu- ally offered up his soul, in the discharge of his ^* Melchisedekian priesthood," for the souls of the lost. After years of wrestling in prayer for the soul of a friend who had committed suicide, he was permitted to follow it into the region of the lost, and, like another Hercules, to bring it forth in triumph. He long sought for, and at last obtained, permission to offer salvation through Christ to the fikllen angels, but was driven back with bitter scorn and mockery. Yet William Law has hopes for even them. In some inmost re- cess of their being, God — he thinks — may well have shut up a secret seed of life and light, in the very instant of their &11, which he will yet quicken into life and power.

XI. Bohme's views underwent another notable change at Hie hands of his school. No life could well be freer from asceticism than his ; he rebuked it in Dr. Walther as unchristian. Yet

• Compare Baader's strange description of Satan, quoted in Hare's

Guesses at Truth, p. 540-1 (Boston Edition). So in his Life and Letters (Werke, XV. 245-6) he writes to Dr. Von Stransky : " Sickness can never strictly and properly make itself substantial (or take a nature upon it) ; for it is unnatural, and manifests or utters itself only in destruction, in partial or complete disembodiment or undoing, since it is capable of no permanence (bleibens)^ so also of no embodying {beleibens)^ and keeps up its existence merely as evil spirit, that is capable of no permanent em- bodiment, like the host of the fallen spirits, whose ever-changing, fantas- tic, and monstrous formation is the very proof of their inability to attain reality, to fix, that is to organize, themselves."

1874.] The Shoemaker of CFMitz. 468

almost all his followers — Baader and his philosophic school ex- cepted — hare been ascetics ; generally such before they knew of him, and drawn to him by the natural affinity of his theosophy for asceticism. The relipous societies that Gichtel and Mrs. Leade founded in Holland, Germany, and England, were especially such ; as are the Rappites of Harmony, and as were the old Bohmenist colonies on the Wissahicken, and at Ephrata, — all three in Penn- sylvania.* The scanty fragments of doctrinal opinion that we find in Shakerism are derived from one of the old Philadelphian societies of B(3imenists, of which Anna Lee was a member in early life. William Law draws inferences that would have delighted his favorite De Banco, the founder of the Trappist Order, from Bohme's views as to the fallen condition of outward nature.

It is hardly necessary to point out how profound the antagonism between B(3ime's ideas and the popular conceptions and applica- tions of the Lutheran theology. It comes out on every page of his writing?, in his almost passionate protests, that men could clothe themselves with ^* the purple robe of Christ's merits and blood," by a bare historic faith that never pressed through to the sui- Hance, and then, after living as they pleased, ^^go to heaven" when they died. The only heaven that he beheld was the heaven in man himself, — the kernel of heavenly light and life shut up in his *^ ground " in the very instant of his fall. That must be opened up in him, if he was to enter heaven, — opened by the process of Christ ; just as hell, once equally shut up in him, was opened by the process of Satan. After that change the man would live in Grod, sharing, through his communion with eternal nature^ the life of the Trinity itself, and standing in a blessedness far higher and more steadfiist than that which belonged to unfallen man.

To the ordinary mystical theology Bohme's theosophy stands in very close relation. It embraces nearly the whole range of the thought of the mystics, but much more besides. It avoids many of Ae mystic's perils. The three stages of the inner Ufe of Ae mystic are *^ purification, illumination, and union. In the bold-

• When John Murray, the founder of the Universalist denomination,

came to Boston, in 1771, he found a B5hmenist society in existence there, and was very kindly treated by one of them, — a Mr. Williamson. Can anybody trace them ?

464 The Shoemaker of Q-drlitz. [Dec.

est thinkers the last becomes numerical unity, absorption, the extinction of the individual life in the sea of the divine love. The intense reaUsm of Bohme's theoeophy made such a catastrophe impossible to his thought ; his last step is the clothing the regen- erate man in the spiritual body, that reflects while it obeys the inner life of the spirit, and is the eternal pledge of its distinct personality.

To mystic and orthodox alike it was a stumbling-block, liiat Bohme seemed to place the ground of evil in the divine nature itself. Of evil in one sense, this is* true ; the sense meant by the prophet when he says, ^^ Is there evil in the city, and hath the Lord not done it ? " The evil — or pangs of the birth of nature, of man, of history, and pangs of the death of the old Adam, and of the body — he does behold as rooted in that Eternal Nature which images forth the life of Grod ; but voluntary evil is in his view rooted in the will. He can give you no dew to this mystery, beyond what James gives : '^ Lust, when it is conceived, bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." The evil of the lost spirits is not in their ^^ standing in the three prop- erties of the dark world ; " through those very three the divine will must cany the regenerate soul, in passing from the awful silence of the first nothing to the kingdom of joys. Their evil is in this, that while the divine pulsation throbs ever onward, through the darkness to the light, they have set their faces against that divine stream of saving impulse, and are seeking ti^e darkness as a good in itself, — as nobler in its strength t^an the light in its sweetness ; and so the dark world has its birth within them accord- ing to their wills, — not as a purifying ire, but a consuming one» They are literally a perverse generation, turned away from the light ; to be saved is to be converged, '— to be turned clear round with the stream of the divine wHU So, in nature, the sun's ther- mal and atomic influences, that brwg light and health to the living, are the instrument of the destroeition of the dead body, turning its juices to corroding a^ids. ^^ With the froward. Thou wUt show Thyself froward."

Objections will occur also to the ethics of the system ; it pre- sents the feminine side of the Christian ideal to the exclusion of the a^a^culine. It) will b^ s^id that it exalts meekness and gentle-

1874.] The Shoemaker of Cf-d'rlitz. 465

ness and patience to the exclusion of the complementary virtues. It seems to proscribe all the manly indignation and just wrath even of Christ himself, — as an out-birth of hell. Bohme did not so construe it in his own life ; he found room for indignation and burning words, while he was yet the meekest of men. The same apparent antagonism appears between the teachings and practice of his Master. The Sermon on the Mount goes certainly as far as he does in urging tiie feminine virtues ; but it does not spare the outflow of just indignation upon the blind guides, the unfaithful shepherds of Israel. John brings the apparent contradiction into still sharper antithesis of statement ; he speaks of ^^ the wrath of the Lamb." Nor does Bohme's theory of the two worlds and their relation at all involve any such namby-pambyism as is sup- posed. The strength is only saturated with the sweetness ; the light transforms the darkness without destroying its strength. Out of the strong comes forth the sweet ; the tempest passes into calm, but every force that clashed agunst another in the previous dis- cord, is just as present and aB mighty in the concord of the calm.

On the other hand, his ethical analysis of the vices, tracing all — as the apostle James does — to the root of lust, and making that the immediate cause of anger and murder, has seemed to more than one good judge a very profound suggestion. ^^It is strange," says Novalis, ^^ that the real ground of cruelty is lust." The same truth flashed on Charles Julius Hare, ^^ as I was looking into a bookseller's window, where I saw ^ Illustrations of the Passion of Love,' standing between two volumes of a ^ History of the French Revolution.' " Baader also points out how '^ the impulse of love transforms itself into that of murder, whether the latter displays itself merely physically or psychically, in what the French call perdre des femmeSj^ and in old English was called the undoing of such victims. Milton notes that Chemosh (or lust) enlarged his orgies —

" Even to that hill of scandal, by the grove Of Moloch homicide ; lust hard by hate."

I have sought to reproduce, in intelligible outline, the thought of this untaught seer, whose '^ beholdings " have exerted, and are still exerting, no slight influence upon the philosophy of his coun-

466 The Shoemaker of Q^drUtz. [Dee.

try. I have avoided — as far as possible, and for clearness' sake

— his grotesque phraseology, his lubeti dxAflagraiB^ and verbum fiaU and turba magnasj and cagaaters and HiaaterSj his pious anagrams, and other fieuitastic turns. I hare also — for breyity's sake — been forced to pass over his childlike vividness and naivetfj while feeUng its charm, and often wishing to let the man speak for himself. My sketch is not a complete one ; a large volume would not contain all the details of the system, and the reader must not, even after getting the sense of what I have written, expect to find all of Bohme's writings as clear as water to him, or suppose that there are no more profound intuitions or poetic suggestions in them. Perhaps some few of my readers have mastered Bohme more thoroughly than myself, and can point to places where I have ftiled to grasp his meaning, and discover deep sense in what I have spoken of as dry husks. I know, however, that they will be the first to rejoice in any honest and painstaking attempt to attract attention to his thought I have taken some pains, for I have read Bohme largely, though by no means completely, — first in the old translation, and then in the original ; and I have availed myself of the helps furnished by four of his commentators,

— Dionymus Andreas Freher, William Law, Frans Baader, and Julius Hamberger.

I have no cut and dry judgment to pronounce upon the

man and his opinions. I am not of his school, though I have

learned some things through the open door, — set opea that

others ^^ may the better hear that sweet, harmonious mufflc." At

any rate, I remember the two Scotchmen's colloquy about Edward

Irving : ^* Jamie, yon man's craok't.*' *^ Sandy, whiles there's

light comes throu^ a crack."

BoBSRT Elus Thompson.