The Life and Legacy of Jacob Boehme: Review

I see in sudden total vision

The substance of entranc’d Boehme’s awe:

The illimitable hour glass

Of the universe eternally

Turning, and the gold sands falling

From God, and the silver sands rising

From God, the double splendors of joy

That fuse and divide again

In the narrow passage of the Cross.

~ Kenneth Rexroth, “The Phoenix and the Tortoise”

Unarguably, the most important figure in the secret history of Sophiology is the early modern German mystic Jacob Boehme. The importance of Boehme to theosophical Christian thought cannot be underestimated, and his contribution to Christian thinking can rightly be compared to that of Martin Heidegger to philosophy. With Heidegger, Western philosophy hit the reset button. Likewise with Boehme in regard to Christian theology. It is for this reason at the very least that the appearance of The Life and Legacy of Jacob Boehme, a new documentary by director Łukasz Chwałko, is a most welcome event. It couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time.

The film begins by setting the cultural context of Boehme—a Europe nearly destroyed by religious conflict, a time of great anxiety and widespread persecution. In the midst of this, a simple shoemaker, Jacob Boehme came to insights into the nature of God that challenged the religious orthodoxies of his day (not to mention ours) in his sincere and courageous dedication to untangling the problem of evil. When, noticing the light glancing from a pewter dish, Boehme looked into the nature of good and evil (or what we often interpret to be good and evil) and saw them both as part of God. Needless to say, this was a radical insight and drew Boehme into controversy. The idea here, as one of the film’s interviewees, Józef Piórczyński describes it, is that, for Boehme, good and evil are metaphysical categories, not moral qualities.

The first half of the short film touches on Boehme’s life and theosophical insights and turns to a number of Polish, German, Russian, and American scholars for commentary (in addition to Piórczyński, Jan Tomkowski, Jerzy Prokopiuk, Andreas Hahn, Matthias Wentzel, Monika Rzeczycka, and Joel Burnell). They and Chwałko do an admirable job of digesting the often bewildering (to the uninitiated) thought-world of Boehme who was himself, as the film says, “at the margins of rationality” (which is why he is so essential to Sophiology, a poetic metaphysics). In addition to Boehme’s insights into good and evil and nature of God (for Boehme, God only becomes fully God in Jesus Christ) the commentary explores Boehme’s concept of the Ungrund, the primal ground of both Divinity and Reality and gives some attention to his theology of Sophia, whom Boehme believed incarnated as the Virgin Mary.

The second half of the film explores Boehme’s legacy in German Pietism, the English Behmenists (mostly focusing on John Sparrow and William Law, though overlooking the Philadelphians—whom I covered in my previous post), Romanticism (Novalis, Goethe, Schelling, Adam Mickiewicz), and in the Russian Silver Age (Vladimir Solovyov, in particular) and gives a helpful survey of Boehme’s importance to intellectual history as well as theosophy.

The film is widely available on Vimeo, Amazon, and other streaming sources and I highly recommend anyone interested in Boehme, Christian theosophy, or Sophiology give it a look. It is a very helpful invitation into the world and thought of this important figure. As Piórczyriski explains, Boehme’s religious ethos, centered in the goodness of Christ, is likewise centered in a volunaristic dynamism:

“Only through human beings can the world become a good world. Never without them.”

How true these words ring at this particular cultural crossroads.

Kate Bush’s “Love and Anger”—pretty much saturated with Boehme, whether she knows it or not.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

“Great Pan is...alive!”

Cernunos

“Once upon a time,” begins Eugene McCrarrher in The Enchantments of Mammon, “the world was enchanted. Rocks, trees, rivers, and rain pulsated with invisible forces, powers that enlivened and determined the affairs of tribes and empires as well. Though beholden to the caprice or providential design of a variety of spirits and deities, the world of enchantment could be commanded by magic or humbly beseeched through prayer.”1 He goes on to argue that first the Protestant Reformation, followed by the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and so forth (we’ve heard it all before) further alienated human beings from the visible and invisible commonwealths of Things.

Of course, not everyone has been down with Project Disenchantment and a Counter Enlightenment, a Counter Modernity, though its adherents have been relatively small in number, has always resisted the totalizing claims of the false modernity we take for real. This was clearly the case with Hermeticism in the seventeenth century, with various forms of mysticism (though not all) through the centuries, through the persistence of folk religion and magic, and, obviously, through the various iterations of Sophiology.

At its simplest level, this counter stream is dedicated to the idea of the sacred. Modernity, it seems, has no room for a sacredness not attached to profit or efficiency—as is most disgustingly obvious in the anxieties Wall Street exhibits concerning sales numbers leading up to Christmas—but such is not sacred anyway. Sacredness is found when we enter the temenos, the space at the threshold of the visible and invisible worlds. As Patrick Harpur explains,

“We humans can make anything sacred. To the profane mind, nothing is sacred—the soul of the forest is only a metal pipe, the blood of Christ only weak wine. Everything depends on the creative act of imagination. The more we imbue the world with imagination, the more the world is ensouled—and the more soul it returns to us, singing with meaning.”2

Disenchantment—as well as sacredness—is also a matter of disposition. What is our state of receptivity?

One example of this is in the responses to a story told by Plutarch (De defectu oraculorum). According to the historian, a sailor named Thamus heard a voice, apparently at the time of the crucifixion of Christ, that told him, “Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead.” The early Christian historian Eusebius interpreted this utterance as proof that the ancient gods, Pan the one most venerated by the agrarian peasantry, were no more as a result of Christ’s death and resurrection. There is another tradition, however, that suggests the voice was actually speaking of Christ and was horrified at the death of the God of Nature; that the God of Zoë, of Life, could die. I prefer the second tradition, just as I prefer to think of Christ as the Lord of the Dance, He Who Lives.

But the death is a very real thing, as it was to the disciples and as it was to voice which spoke to Thamus. But He Who Lives is simultaneously He Who Dies. And we all have blood on our hands. As the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich wrote in the 1950s,

“In Christ man has searched for the key to his own nature and his own fate for two thousand years. In Christ man has found the access to a possible solution of the tragedy of mankind. Christ had been murdered long before Christ was born. And Christ continued to be murdered every single hour of every single year since. Unless Christ’s fate is understood fully and practically, the murder will continue with no letup. Christ’s fate represents the secret tragedy of the human animal.”3

For Reich, Christ is the representative par excellence of Life, both bios and zoë, and in our daily, hourly murder of Christ we simultaneously murder life. The ways in which we murder life are the ways in which we murder Christ. It is that simple. We murder him through all of our life-denying commitments—in the poisonous methods of conventional agriculture (which may have even had a hand in the current pandemic), in the toxicity created by industry, in the technological colonization of the human person, in our life-killing economics (and, sorry, socialism and communism don’t get a pass here). Indeed, as Sergei Bulgakov has written concerning the latter, only a sophianic economy (which can only be simultaneously a sophianic ecology) is concerned with life: “The purpose of economic activity is to defend and to spread the seeds of life, to resurrect nature. This is the action of Sophia on the universe in an effort to restore it to being in Truth.”4

Great Pan, then, is really alive. But maybe we should stop killing him.

1 Eugene McCrarrher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism became the Religion of Modernity (Harvard, 2019), 1.4

2 Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul (Evolver Editions, 2011), 50.

3 Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1953), 54.

4 Sergei Bulgakov, The Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household, trans. and ed. Catherine Evtuhov (Yale University Press, 2000), 153.

The Stolen World

Modernity has a unique gift—that of generating its opposite. In the sterile wake of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the Romantic philosophers and poets, especially those of Germany and England, resisted the totalizing demands of “science” and “progress” and sought to restore a vision of human flourishing mindful of mystery, of nature, and of the imagination. In the bleak aftermath of industrialization and rapacious streams of Capitalism in the late 19th century, people turned to alternative methods of inquiry in movements as diverse as the Celtic Twilight, The Theosophical Society, the Occult Renaissance, and a renewed fascination with the World of Faerie. All of these various movements hide within themselves the often unspoken admission that modernity (and postmodernity) leaves much unspoken and more unaddressed.

We live in such times, times that are always-already happening.

In the early modern period, hermetic thinkers like Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, Robert Fludd, as well as the Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan and his twin brother, the Anglican priest and alchemist Thomas, resisted the abstractions of Descartes and the world he was creating (by ignoring half of it) that directly led to the disenchanted and dismal landscape we now inhabit. In the transition from the 18th to the 19th centuries, William Blake’s poetic railing against all forms of slavery—both of physical servitude as well as of mental and imaginative enthrallment—did much the same thing. They all may have been on the losing side of history, but they were not on the wrong side.

In the late 19th and into the 20th century, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats straddled all of these worlds. A folklorist, hermetic magician, mystic, and politician as well as a poet, Yeats upheld the value of what might be called the Great Tradition, which encompassed not only Neoplatonism and medieval sensibilities of the microcosm and the macrocosm, but also folk traditions he found in the Irish peasantry, particularly the belief in faerie and the magical properties of stones and plants. Indeed, the desire for a society more closely connected to the visible and palpable world as well as the invisible worlds that coincide and shine through it is characteristic of those facing the abyss of modernity’s false promises of progress. The Cottingly Fairies, for instance, became cause célèbre in face of the inhumanities and horrors of World War I (the 1997 film Fairy Tale: A True Story illustrates this beautifully), echoing the popularity of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan just a decade earlier. All were responses to the crowning features of alienation and confusion that is modernity: “For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand,” in Yeats’s apt phrase.

We live in such a time.

Yet, it is still a time of hope, a time of creating a new world, reimagining where we are and examining how we arrived here. Unfortunately, not everyone in the reimagining business is interested in hope so much as in control, and I am as concerned as anyone about people in whom I have no trust (politicians for the most part) exerting power in a moment of distress. Nevertheless, I find great comfort in Yeats’s short meditation “The Body of Father Christian Rosencrux,” first published in 1895 and later gathered in the collection, Ideas of Good and Evil (and which I later published in The Heavenly Country):

The followers of the Father Christian Rosencrux, says the old tradition, wrapped his imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it under the house of their order, in a tomb containing the symbols of all things in heaven and earth, and in the waters under the earth, and set about him inextinguishable magical lamps, which burnt on generation after generation, until other students of the order came upon the tomb by chance. It seems to me that the imagination has had no very different history during the last two hundred years, but has been laid in a great tomb of criticism, and had set over it inextinguishable magical lamps of wisdom and romance, and has been altogether so nobly housed and apparelled that we have forgotten that its wizard lips are closed, or but opened for the complaining of some melancholy and ghostly voice. The ancients and the Elizabethans abandoned themselves to imagination as a woman abandons herself to love, and created great beings who made the people of this world seem but shadows, and great passions which made our loves and hatreds appear but ephemeral and trivial phantasies; but now it is not the great persons, or the great passions we imagine, which absorb us, for the persons and passions in our poems are mainly reflections our mirror has caught from older poems or from the life about us, but the wise comments we make upon them, the criticism of life we wring from their fortunes. Arthur and his Court are nothing, but the many-coloured lights that play about them are as beautiful as the lights from cathedral windows; Pompilia and Guido are but little, while the ever-recurring meditations and expositions which climax in the mouth of the Pope are among the wisest of the Christian age. I cannot get it out of my mind that this age of criticism is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of revelation, about to come in its place; for certainly belief in a supersensual world is at hand again; and when the notion that we are “phantoms of the earth and water” has gone down the wind, we will trust our own being and all it desires to invent; and when the external world is no more the standard of reality, we will learn again that the great Passions are angels of God, and that to embody them “uncurbed in their eternal glory,” even in their labour for the ending of man’s peace and prosperity, is more than to comment, however wisely, upon the tendencies of our time, or to express the socialistic, or humanitarian, or other forces of our time, or even ‘to sum up’ our time, as the phrase is; for Art is a revelation, and not a criticism, and the life of the artist is in the old saying, “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the spirit.”

Neither can I get it out of my mind that this age is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of revelation, about to come in its place.

William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child” set to music by Mike Scott of The Waterboys

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutzand Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.