The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. Valentin Weigel and Jacob Böhme

[ 1 ] Paracelsus was primarily interested in gaining ideas about nature that breathed the spirit of the higher knowledge he advocated. A thinker related to him who applied the same way of thinking preferably to man's own nature is Valentin Weigel (1533-1588). He grew out of Protestant theology in much the same way as Eckhart, Tauler and Suso grew out of Catholic theology. He had predecessors in Sebastian Frank and Caspar Schwenckfeldt. In contrast to the outward confession of church faith, they pointed to the deepening of the inner life. For them, it is not the Jesus preached by the gospel that is valuable, but the Christ who can be born in every person from their deeper nature and who should be their savior from the lower life and guide to ideal elevation. Weigel quietly and modestly administered his pastorate in Zschopau. It was only from the writings he left behind, printed in the seventeenth century, that we learned something of the important ideas he had about the nature of man. (Of his writings, the following should be mentioned: "Der güldene Griff; das ist: All Ding ohne Irrthumb zu erkennen, vieler Hochgelährten unbekannt, und doch allen Menschen nothwendig zu wissen.") "Know thyself." - "From the place of the world.") Weigel was compelled to clarify his relationship to the teachings of the Church. This leads him to examine the foundations of all knowledge. Whether man can recognize something through a profession of faith is something he can only account for if he knows how he recognizes. Weigel starts from the lowest kind of cognition. He asks himself: how do I recognize a sensual thing when it only appears to me? From there he hopes to be able to ascend to the point of view where he can give an account of the highest cognition. - In sensory cognition, the tool (sense organ) and the thing, the "counter-throw", are opposed to each other. "Because in natural cognition there must be two things, as the object or counter-throw, which is to be recognized and seen by the eye; and the eye, or the cognizer, which sees and recognizes the object, so hold against each other: whether the cognition comes from the object into the eye; or whether the judgment and the cognition flow from the eye into the object." ("Der güldene Griff", ch. 9) Now Weigel says to himself: If cognition were to flow from the counter-throw (thing) into the eye, then an equal and perfect cognition would necessarily have to come from one and the same thing into all eyes. However, this is not the case; instead, each person sees according to his own eyes. Only the eyes, not the opposite, can be responsible for the fact that many different perceptions of one and the same thing are possible. To clarify the matter, Weigel compares seeing with reading. If the book were not there, of course I could not read it; but it could still be there, and yet I could not read anything in it if I did not understand the art of reading. The book must therefore be there; but it cannot, of itself, give me the least thing; I must extract from myself all that I read. This is also the essence of natural (sensual) knowledge. Color is there as a "counter-throw"; but of itself it can give nothing to the eye. The eye must recognize of itself what the color is. Just as little as the content of the book is in the reader, so little is the color in the eye. If the content of the book were in the reader, he would not need to read it. Nevertheless, when reading, this content does not flow out of the book, but out of the reader. It is the same with the sensual thing. What this sensual thing is outside does not flow into the person from outside, but from within. - Based on these thoughts, one could say: If all knowledge flows from the human being into the object, then one does not recognize what is in the object, but only what is in the human being himself. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) provided a detailed elaboration of this train of thought. (The falsity of this train of thought can be found in my book "Philosophy of Freedom". Here I must confine myself to mentioning that Valentin Weigel, with his simple, original way of thinking, stands much higher than Kant). - Weigel says to himself: "Even if knowledge flows out of man, it is only the essence of the counter-thought that emerges from it in a roundabout way through man. Just as I experience the contents of the book through reading, and not my own, so I experience the color of the counter-throw through the eye; not the color that is in the eye or in me. In his own way, Weigel thus arrives at a result that we have already encountered in Nicolaus von Kues. Thus Weigel has enlightened himself about the nature of sensory cognition. He came to the conviction that everything that external things have to tell us can only flow out of our own inner being. Man cannot behave in a suffering way if he wants to recognize sensual things and merely let them have an effect on him; rather, he must behave actively and bring knowledge out of himself. The counter-attack only awakens knowledge in the spirit. Man rises to higher knowledge when the spirit becomes its own counter-thought. It can be seen from sensory knowledge that no knowledge can flow into man from outside. Therefore, higher knowledge cannot come from outside either, but can only be awakened within. There can therefore be no external revelation, but only an inner awakening. Just as the external counter-throw waits until man confronts it, in which it can express its essence, so man, if he wants to be a counter-throw to himself, must wait until the realization of his essence is awakened in him. If in sensual cognition man must behave actively so that he can express his essence to the counter-throw, then in higher cognition man must behave suffering because he is now the counter-throw. He must receive his essence within himself. Therefore, the knowledge of the spirit appears to him as enlightenment from above. In contrast to sensual knowledge, Weigel therefore calls higher knowledge the "light of grace". This "light of grace" is in reality nothing other than the self-knowledge of the spirit in man, or the rebirth of knowledge on the higher level of vision. - Just as Nicolaus von Kues, in pursuing his path from knowledge to vision, does not really allow the knowledge he has gained to be reborn on a higher level, but rather, just as the ecclesiastical confession in which he was educated feigns such a rebirth, so it is also the case with Weigel. He leads himself onto the right path and loses it again the moment he sets foot on it. Anyone who wants to follow the path that Weigel points out can only regard him as a guide as far as the starting point.

[ 2 ] It is like the exultation of nature, which, at the peak of its development, marvels at its essence, what we hear from the works of the master shoemaker Jacob Böhme (1575-1624) from Görlitz. A man appears before us whose words have wings, woven from the blissful feeling of seeing the knowledge within him shine as higher wisdom. Jacob Böhme describes his state as a piety that only wants to be wisdom and as a wisdom that only wants to live in piety: "When I struggled and fought in God's support, a wonderful light dawned in my soul that was completely alien to wild nature, in which I first recognized what God and man were, and what God had to do with man." Jacob Böhme no longer feels like an individual personality expressing his insights; he feels like an organ of the great All-Spirit that speaks within him. The boundaries of his personality do not appear to him as boundaries of the spirit that speaks from within him. This spirit is omnipresent to him. He knows that "the sophist will rebuke him" when he speaks of the beginning of the world and its creation, "because I was not there and saw it myself. Let it be said to him that in my soul and body essence, when I was not yet the I, but when I was Adam's essence, I was there and hid my glory in Adam himself." Böhme is only able to hint at how the light burst forth within him in external parables. Once, when he was a boy on the summit of a mountain, he saw the entrance open at the top, where large red stones seemed to close the mountain, and a vessel of gold in its hollow. He is overcome by a shiver and goes his way without touching the treasure. Later, he is apprenticed to a shoemaker in Görlitz. A stranger enters the store and asks for a pair of shoes. Böhme is not allowed to sell them to him in the absence of the master. The stranger leaves, but after a while calls the apprentice out and tells him: "Jacob, you are small, but one day you will become a completely different person who will amaze the world. At a more mature age, Jacob Böhme sees the reflection of a pewter vessel in the glare of the sun: the sight that presents itself to him seems to reveal a deep secret. Ever since he was impressed by this apparition, he believed himself to be in possession of the key to the mysterious language of nature. - He lives as a spiritual hermit, modestly nourishing himself with his craft and, as if for his own memory, recording the sounds that resound within him when he feels the spirit within him. Zealot priestly zeal makes life difficult for the man. He who only wants to read the Scriptures that illuminate the light of his inner being is persecuted and tormented by those to whom only the external Scriptures, the rigid, dogmatic confession, are accessible.

[ 3 ] A world puzzle lives in Jacob Böhme's soul as a restlessness that drives him to knowledge. He believes his spirit to be immersed in a divine harmony; but when he looks around him, he sees disharmony everywhere in the divine works. Man is endowed with the light of wisdom, and yet he is subject to error; the impulse to do good lives in him, and yet the note of evil resounds through the whole of human development. Nature is governed by the great laws of nature; and yet inappropriateness and a wild struggle of the elements disturb its harmony. How is disharmony to be understood in the harmonious whole of the world? This question torments Jacob Böhme. It is at the center of his imagination. He wants to gain a view of the world as a whole that includes the disharmonious. For how could a conception explain the world that left the existing disharmony unexplained? Disharmony must be explained from harmony, evil from the good itself. In speaking of these things, let us confine ourselves to the good and evil in which disharmony in the narrower sense finds its expression in human life. For Jacob Boehme basically confines himself to this. He can, because nature and man appear to him as one entity. He sees similar laws and processes in both. To him, the inexpedient is an evil in nature, just as evil is an inexpedient in human destiny. The same basic forces are at work here and there. Whoever has recognized the origin of evil in man has also recognized the origin of evil in nature. - How can evil and good flow from the same primordial being? If one speaks in the sense of Jacob Böhme, one gives the following answer. The primordial being does not live out its existence in itself. The diversity of the world participates in this existence. Just as the human body does not live its life as a single member, but as a multiplicity of members, so does the primordial being. And just as human life is poured into this multiplicity of members, so is the primordial being poured into the multiplicity of things of this world. As true as it is that the whole human being has one life, so true is it that each member has its own life. And as little as it contradicts the whole harmonious life of man that his hand turns against his own body and wounds it, so little is it impossible that the things of the world, which live the life of the original being in their own way, turn against each other. Thus, by distributing itself among different lives, the uneven gives each life the ability to turn against the whole. Evil does not flow from the good, but from the way in which the good lives. Just as light can only shine when it penetrates the darkness, so good can only bring itself to life when it asserts its opposition. The light shines out of the "unround" of darkness; the good is born out of the "unround" of indifference. And just as in the shadow only the brightness demands a reference to the light, but the darkness is naturally perceived as weakening the light, so also in the world only the lawfulness in all things is sought, and the evil, the inappropriate is accepted as self-evident. Although for Jacob Böhme the primordial being is the universe, nothing in the world can be understood if one does not have the primordial being and its opposite in mind at the same time. "The good has swallowed up the evil or repugnant within itself... Every being has good and evil in itself, and in its development, by leading itself into diversity, it becomes a contrarium of qualities, since one seeks to overpower the other." It is therefore entirely in Jacob Böhme's sense to see good and evil in every thing and process in the world; but it is not in his sense to seek the primordial being in the mixture of good and evil without further ado. The primordial being had to devour evil; but evil is not a part of the primordial being. Jacob Boehme seeks the primordial ground of the world; but the world itself has sprung from the unground through the primordial ground. "The outer world is not God, nor will it ever be called God, but only a being in which God reveals himself ... If one says: God is everything, God is heaven and earth and also the outer world, then this is true; for everything originates from him and in him. But what do I do with such talk, which is not religion?" - With such a view in the background, his ideas about the nature of all the world were built up in Jacob Böhme's mind, in that he allows the lawful world to emerge from the unfathomable in a step-by-step sequence. This world is constructed in seven natural forms. The primordial being takes shape in dark austerity, mutely closed in on itself and motionless. Böhme understands this astringency under the symbol of salt. With such designations he borrows from Paracelsus, who borrowed the names for the natural process from the chemical processes (cf. above p. 116f.). Through the intertwining of their opposites, the first natural form enters into the form of the second; the harsh, motionless takes on the movement; power and life enter into it. Mercury is the symbol of this second form. In the struggle of rest and movement, of death with life, the third natural form (sulphur) reveals itself. This life, struggling within itself, reveals itself; from now on it no longer lives an external struggle of its limbs; it illuminates its being like a uniformly shining flash of lightning (fire). This fourth form of nature ascends to the fifth, the living struggle of the parts resting in itself (water). At this stage there is an inner austerity and muteness as at the first; only it is not an absolute calm, a silence of the inner opposites, but an inner movement of the opposites. It is not the calm that rests within itself, but the moving, that which is ignited by the flash of fire of the fourth stage. On the sixth stage, the primordial being becomes aware of itself as such an inner life; it perceives itself through sense organs. The living beings endowed with senses represent this natural form. Jacob Böhme calls it sound or reverberation and thus uses the sense sensation of sound as a symbol for sensory perception. The seventh natural form is the spirit (wisdom) that rises on the basis of its sensory perceptions. It finds itself as itself, as the primordial ground, within the world that has arisen in the primordial and is formed from the harmonious and the disharmonious. "The Holy Spirit leads the splendor of majesty into the essence in which the Godhead is revealed." With such views, Jacob Böhme seeks to fathom the world, which, according to the knowledge of his time, he considers to be the real one. For him, facts are those regarded as such by the natural science of his time and by the Bible. Another is his way of imagining, another his world of facts. One can imagine the former applied to a completely different knowledge of facts. And so a Jacob Boehme appears before our minds, as he might live on the borderline of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such a person would not penetrate the biblical six-day work and the battle of angels and devils with his way of thinking, but Lyell's geological findings and the fact of Haeckel's "Natural History of Creation". Anyone who penetrates the spirit of Jacob Böhme's writings must come to this conviction. (The most important of these writings are: "Die Morgenröthe im Aufgang." "The three principles of divine being." "Of the threefold life of man." "The turned eye." "Signatura rerum or of the birth and designation of all beings." "Mysterium magnum.") ^{1This sentence must not be understood as if the study of the Bible and the spiritual world is an aberration in the present day; what is meant is that a "Jacob Boehme of the nineteenth century" would be led to the "natural history of creation" by paths similar to those that led him to the Bible in the sixteenth century. But he would proceed from there to the spiritual world.}