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An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception

Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei (eds)

Routledge Studies in Religion 31
(New York, 2014)


Abstracts

1. Introduction: Boehmes legacy in perspective (Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei)
This brief introduction addresses the question: why should we know about Jacob Boehme
and reception of his thought over four centuries? It puts his legacy into perspective by
summarizing and contextualizing Boehmes distinctive teachings, and then outlining the
varied reactions to his work ranging from adulation to exasperation to repulsion. In
addition, it notes that generally there have been three complementary scholarly approaches
to the study of Boehme: the taxonomic, the genealogical, and the contextual. The second
part discusses the main concerns of the essays in this volume.

2. Boehmes life and times (Ariel Hessayon)
The first part of this chapter attempts to provide a balanced account of Jacob Boehmes life
by stripping away the hagiographic myths perpetuated by his earliest biographer Abraham
von Franckenberg, together with the negative portrayal of an arrogant, ignorant purveyor of
presumptuous heterodox nonsense conversely maintained in the heresiography. The
second part contextualizes Boehmes thought against the backdrop of contemporary
political struggles, religious polemic, the Thirty Years War, and apocalyptic speculation. It
also highlights the process whereby he acquired knowledge through texts and a widening
social network of friends, learned correspondents and noble patrons. The outcome was the
sophisticated works of Boehmes intellectual maturity.

3. Radical Reformation and the Anticipation of Modernism in Jacob Boehme
(Andrew Weeks)
In order to re-consider the writings of Jacob Boehme in the context of their time and within
the scope of intellectual history, this chapter calls attention to the importance of a text-
based approach to his work. He openly promoted his theories in opposition to the clerical
and academic authorities of his period, thereby revealing an anticlericalism and nature
philosophy shared with his precursors Paracelsus and Valentin Weigel. His subversion of
hierarchy and transcendence of manifest appearance are keys to his affinities with Baroque
and modernist authors. Further attention to the work and its historical context are needed.

4. Boehmes intellectual networks and the heterodox milieu of his theosophy, 16001624
(Leigh T. I. Penman)
This chapter analyzes Boehme in the context of the heterodox Protestant intellectual milieu
influential within his intellectual network, which was based in and around Boehmes
hometown of Grlitz, Upper Lusatia in the period 1600-1624. Drawing on overlooked
manuscript and printed sources, it demonstrates that Boehmes work emerged from an
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atmosphere in which Paracelsian, Schwenkfeldian, Weigelian, chiliastic and other ideas were
known and discussed by several friends and correspondents. Furthermore, it shows through
key examples such as that of chiliastic thought, precisely how members of his network
helped Boehme to refine and shape his ouvre. Finally, it points to possible new avenues for
discovering further influences on Boehmes works.

5. Jacob Boehmes writings during the English Revolution and afterwards: their
publication, dissemination and influence (Ariel Hessayon)
Contrary to what has usually been argued, Boehmes impact among many religious radicals
and heterodox figures during the English Revolution was quite muted. Indeed, initially he
seems to have mainly been read by continental Protestant exiles, university-educated
ministers, scholars, lawyers, physicians, alchemists, army officers, and a handful of artisans
turned lay preachers. Their responses ranged, however, from condemnation, exasperation,
and ambivalence to qualified approbation and unbridled enthusiasm. Nonetheless,
Boehmes influence can be seen in alchemical experimentation; in almanacs and astrological
predictions; in mystical thought; in the literary expression of prophetic experience; in the
development of heterodox doctrines; in utopian literature; and in the enrichment of the
English language through neologisms.

6. Did any anyone understand Boehme? (Nigel Smith)
This essay discusses the degree to which the writings of Jacob Boehme were understood in
seventeenth-century England. Boehmes works were often invoked but seldom discussed in
detail. Attention is given in particular to comments by Boehmes first English translators in
their prefaces. While the translators seemed unable to discuss Boehme in depth, they were
sure that Boehmes text indicated an intuitive reality beyond reason. Boehmes writings
were seen as filling a gap in the panoply of knowledge that began with Bacons empirical
writings: he was thus the savior of occult learning, and purveyor of a possible universal
medicine. It was contended that frequent reading of the obscure Boehme would ultimately
result in intense enlightenment, a paradisal inward understanding, an intimate
conversation with the uncreated being of God. Boehmes teaching was most fully realized in
the writings of a series of later seventeenth-century disciple prophets, but they in their turn
mystified Boehme, returning him to the category of the difficult.

7. Jacob Boehme and the Anthropology of German Pietism (Lucinda Martin)
This essay first outlines the transmission and transformation of Boehmes thought on the
continent, from early manuscripts to Dutch publishers to German Pietists, especially
through mediators such as Johann Georg Gichtel, Johanna Eleonora Petersen and Gottfried
Arnold. It then explores Boehmes influence on Pietists ecclesiology, language and
anthropology, with a special focus on their reception of Boehmes androgynous Adam and
his Divine Sophia, a female element in the Godhead. In a final step, the essay reveals how
Boehmes anthropological ideas helped to justify Radical Pietists utopian experiments, as
well as Pietist womens writing and activity in the public sphere.

8. No New Truths of Religion: William Laws appropriation of Jacob Boehme
(Alan Gregory)
Unlike other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English admirers of Boehme, William Law
was a respected Anglican devotional writer. This essay places Laws Behmenist writings in
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their theological and controversial context, whilst showing how thoroughly Law truncates
and reworks Boehmes theology in the interests of a broadly orthodox Trinitarianism. Laws
strategies and concerns are clarified by showing how he deployed Behmenist ideas in
polemic against the erastian Bishop Hoadly and Deist tendencies within theological
Newtonianism. Law emerges, not as a respectful follower of Boehme but rather as
mediating his influence to an orthodox Christian tradition hostile to Boehmes theosophical
speculations.

9. Bhme and German Romanticism (Kristine Hannak)
This chapter traces Boehmes influence on key concepts of Romantic poetics and literature
around 1800. It sketches the ways of transmission of Boehmes works in the eighteenth
century and links their rediscovery in Romantic poetry and poetics to the social,
philosophical and economic situation of the early Restoration period. It argues that
Boehmes Theosophy provided in many aspects the blueprint for a still hoped-for spiritual
and poetic revolution that was thought to be brought about by art. Thus the Romantic belief
in the transformative power of art is shown to be intimately linked to Boehmes
theosophical concept of rebirth as a way to salvation in a universe in which God, nature and
humanity are no separate entities.

10. Boehme and the English Romantics: the influence of Boehme on William Blakes works
(Elisabeth Jessen)
This chapter discusses how the works of Boehme influenced writers of the early English
Romantic period, more specifically William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The main
emphasis is on Blake and the way in which Boehme informed both specific concepts in
Blakes works, as well as the way Blake constructed those works to work on the reader. In
Coleridge, on the other hand, we see a more intellectual and less creative approach to
Boehmes works, understanding them as both philosophy and mystical thought. Together,
these two writers illustrate two related though different ways of engaging with Boehme in a
later intellectual and cultural environment.

11. The Russian Boehme (Oliver Smith)
This chapter charts the influence of Jacob Boehme on Russian culture from the seventeenth
century to the present day. It seeks not only to draw attention to the numerous writers and
artists whose work develops ideas and directions sourced from the German mystic but also
to explore the reasons for the particular resonance of Boehmes writings and personal
example within the Russian context. Drawing on a range of often surprising materials
illustrating how Russians adapted Boehme for their own purposes, it represents the most
complete exposition of Boehmes significance for the Russian religious, intellectual and
cultural traditions.

12. Hegels reception of Jacob Boehme (Glenn Magee)
This essay argues that Jacob Boehme had a decisive influence on G. W. F. Hegel in the years
1801-07, when Hegel was working in Jena. This was the period during which Hegel
formulated his philosophical system, leading up to the writing of The Phenomenology of
Spirit in 1806. During this time Hegel lectured in detail on Boehmes thought. A close
reading of his lecture text demonstrates that Hegel knew Boehmes writings well, and was
sympathetic to them. During the same period Hegel wrote several fragmentary pieces in the
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style of Boehme. I argue that in these pieces Hegel is developing the outlines of his
philosophical system, and that it was Boehme who gave Hegel the key that allowed him to
formulate his system in its mature form.

13. H. L. Martensen on Jacob Boehme (George Pattison)
This chapter examines the Boehme interpretation offered by the nineteenth century Danish
theologian Hans Lassen Martensen. Although Martensens monograph on Boehme was not
published till 1881 (English translation 1885), Boehmes influence can be seen in his work of
the 1830s and 1840s, when he introduced speculative (i.e. Hegelian) theology into Denmark,
provoking Kierkegaards famously critical response. Martensen interpreted Boehme as a
genuine theosophist, but although his account is both clear and imaginative, the article
draws comparisons with William Law and Paul Tillich, suggesting that his interpretation was
(as Kierkegaard suggested) too speculative to serve the interests of faith.

14. The place of Jacob Boehme in Western Esotericism (Arthur Versluis)
This chapter surveys how scholars of religion in the twentieth century tended to place Jacob
Boehme in the category mysticism, whereas in the growing academic literature on
Western esotericism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we find some
scholars have sought to deny that Boehme is a mystic and to claim him as an exemplar of a
relatively new academic construct, Western esoteric religion. Some, of course, put
Boehme in both categories. Ultimately, by examining Boehmes vexed place in the study of
Western esotericism, we are compelled to consider how Boehmes voluminous writings
present themselves as initiatic texts.

15. Conclusion: Why Boehme matters today (Bruce B. Janz)
This paper shows the relevance of Boehme to contemporary thought. Boehme has
intellectual strategies, concepts, and questions that matter across a range of contemporary
disciplines. He models a form of creativity which allows him to respond to central questions
of his day by creating concepts adequate to the circumstances. The paper proceeds by
giving examples of Boehmes creativity, along with places that we see similar forms of
creativity today, in writers such as Deleuze and Guattari and Giorgio Agamben. Boehmes
ecology of concepts engages contemporary questions, while modeling how to be creative in
our own conceptual ecologies.