Jakob Boehme
Jakob Boehme (1575-1624) was a German religious mystic from the town of Goerlitz (Zgorzelec in Polish) in Silesia, on the Polish side of the Oder river just across from eastern Germany. A cobbler by profession, he was an autodidact much influenced by Paracelsus, the Kabbala, astrology, alchemy, and the Hermetic tradition (Peuckert, 1924 101; Merkel 302-310; Hvolbel 6-17). He experienced a seminal religious epiphany in 1600, when a ray of sunlight reflected in a pewter dish catapulted him into an ecstatic vision of the Godhead as penetrating all existence, including even the Abyss of Non-being. This and other mystical experiences caused Boehme to write a series of obscure but powerful religious treatises. According to him, negativity, finitude, and suffering are essential aspects of the Deity, for it is only through the participatory activity of his creatures that God achieves full self-consciousness of his own nature.
Boehme's first treatise, entitled Aurora, or Die Morgenroete im Aufgang (1612), expressed his insights in an abstruse, oracular style. This work aroused profound interest among a small circle of followers, but it also provoked the heated opposition of the authorities. After being prosecuted by the local pastor of Goerlitz, Boehme had to promise on pain of imprisonment to cease writing. This judgment he obeyed for five years, until, unable to restrain himself any longer, he began writing again in secret for private circulation among friends. The publication of his Weg zu Christo (Way to Christ) in 1623 by one of these friends led to renewed persecutions. Banished from Goerlitz, Boehme lived for a time in Dresden and on the country estates of wealthy supporters. Finally, stricken by illness in 1624, ...
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...ndon: Richardson, 1764. Passages from this English translation are cited above, following the corresponding German citations.
The Way to Christ. A modern translation of Boehme's Weg zu Christo (1620). Trans. W. Zeller. New York: Paulist Press, 1978.
Works about Boehme:
Merkel, Ingrid. "Aurora; or, The Rising Sun of Allegory: Hermetic Imagery in the Work of Jakob Boehme." Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe. Eds. I. Merkel and A. G. Debus. Washington: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988. 302-310.
Peuckert, Will-Erich. Das Leben Jakob Boehmes. Jena: E. Dieterichs, 1924.
Stoudt, John Joesph. Sunrise to Eternity: A Study in Jacob Boehme's Life and Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957.
Hvolbel, R. H. "Was Jacob Boehme a Paracelsian?" Hermetic Journal 19 (Spring 1983): 6-17.
...such as extreme spiritual austerities can hold their place in history because they mattered to the people who practiced them, not necessarily because they were an agent for driving change. Bynum rejects morally absolutist reconstructions of the past in favour of a more relativistic reading which delves into the imagination and subconscious of the medieval writers themselves. She meets them, as much as possible, in their own milieu rather than projecting modern constructions (such as ‘anorexia nervosa’) into the past where they serve little use in our understanding of the medieval mind. Despite her close work with the Annalist School, Bynum makes no attempt toward ‘l’Histoire Totale’ or some grand narrative of the past, and in this regard the work is most honest, thought-provoking, and definitive for 21st century scholars studying the medieval mind and its times.
In Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut invents a religion based on lies, called Bokononism. It tells that all of humanity are unknowingly organized into teams, called karass, that do God’s will and don’t ever discover what they are doing. These karass revolve around a wampeter, an object that guides the people t...
Julian of Norwich lived during a time of great fear dominated by economic and physical hardships, feudal era of control, fear of death from the bubonic plague, corruption within the church’s hierarchy and doubt and insincerity was rampant amongst believers. Living a simple existence she depende...
Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 19(1), 69-84. Heim, D. (1996). The 'Standard'. Phil Jackson, Seeker in Sneakers. Christian Century, 133(20), 654-656.
Frick, Frank S.. A Journey Through The Hewbrew Scriptures. New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995.
Pickering, W. S. F. 1990. “The Eternality of the Sacred: Durkheim's Error?” Archives de Sciences
In this essay my aim is to separate the truth from the predjudice and find out whether Heinrich Schliemann was a greedy charlottarian, a talented archeologist or just someone who stumbled upon a great discovery.
Religion in the Middle Ages takes on a character all of its own as it is lived out differently in the lives of medieval men and women spanning from ordinary laity to vehement devotees. Though it is difficult to identify what the average faith consists of in the Middle Ages, the life told of a radical devotee in The Book of Margery Kempe provides insight to the highly intense version of medieval paths of approaching Christ. Another medieval religious text, The Cloud of Unknowing, provides a record of approaching the same Christ. I will explore the consistencies and inconsistencies of both ways to approach Christ and religious fulfillment during the Middle Ages combined with the motivations to do so on the basis of both texts.
Davis, Edward B. “The Christian Century”. Chicago. Jul 15 – Jul 22. 1998. Vol 115,
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Trans. John W. Harvey. New York: Oxford UP, 1958. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: n.p., 1998. Print. fourth
ABSTRACT: There have been many interpretations of Bildung in the history of German philosophy, from the Medieval mystics to the secularization of the Enlightenment. Wilhelm von Humboldt's work at the end of the 18th century is a good example. He placed the idea of Bildung at the center of his work because it was rooted in a dynamic, transforming idea of the natural and human worlds while also being oriented toward a model of balance and perfection. Von Humboldt's interpretation of modernity is characterized by a strong emphasis on change as well as the need to find criteria for guiding such a transformation that has no intrinsic or predetermined end. Love of classical antiquity was not merely nostalgia for a lost world, a normative current that placed the idea of perfection and balance foremost in order to achieve the ideal of Humanitas in an attempt to overcome the unilaterally of modernity.
Carson, D, & Moo, D. (2005) An introduction to the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
Weyer, J. (1563). De praestigiis daemonum [The Deception of Demons]. Basel, Switzerland: Per Joannem Oporinum.
Gonzalez, Justo L. The Story of Christianity. 2nd ed. New York City, NY: HarperOne, 2010.