The Way to Christ by Jakob Böhme

First published:Der Weg zu Christo, 1623 (English translation, 1647)

Edition(s) used:Jakob Böhme’s “The Way to Christ,” translated by John Joseph Stoudt with a foreword by Rufus M. Jones. London: J. M. Watkins, 1953

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Meditation and contemplation; mysticism; spiritual treatise

Core issue(s): Conversion; the Fall; humility; illumination; Jesus Christ; mysticism; reason; soul

Overview

In his twenty-fifth year, Jakob Böhme, a cobbler, saw in a vision the origin of all things. When the manuscript in which he tried to expound the vision (later named “The Aurora”) came to the attention of the local pastor, he was forbidden by the civil authority to write anything more. This was 1612. Although he complied, he became the center of a growing circle of admirers, kept up a wide correspondence, and was active in a secret brotherhood. Except for village schooling, he was self-taught. Among his friends, however, were persons of quality who lent him books and introduced him to theosophical and alchemical writings. About 1619 he resumed writing and allowed his manuscripts to circulate. The Way to Christ, comprising three short devotional pieces, is the only one of his manuscripts that was published during his lifetime. Written in 1622, it shows him turning back from theosophical speculation to the tradition of German mysticism. Böhme intended no break with official Lutheranism, it but is clear that his affinities lay elsewhere, and it comes as no surprise that English Behmenists allied themselves with the Quaker movement.

Böhme’s The Way to Christ originally consisted of three tracts: “Of True Repentance,” “Of True Resignation,” and “Of Regeneration.” In subsequent editions, from three to five additional tracts written during the same period were always included. The period was one of revivalist intensity: Böhme himself had experienced a new illumination and had assumed the role of a lay evangelist. The three tracts that made up the original collection were clearly intended for the newly converted. The same might be said of the “Dialogue Between an Enlightened and an Unenlightened Soul” (1624). “The Supersensual Life” (1622), however, was addressed to the mature disciple.

“Of True Repentance,” as the author wrote to a friend, was the outgrowth of a new conversion that Böhme himself had lately experienced. “As this tract will lead you to the Praxis, you will experience its good since it was born through the fire of an anguishable twig, and it was and still is my own process through which I have attained the Pearl of divine knowledge.” It is an awkward composition. Addressing persons who feel an inclination to repent but were unable to act, he begins by recounting reasons for repenting and follows these with various considerations that ought to lead one to take the needed steps, among them the enormity of the Fall. Consider, he says, “the noble image in which God fashioned [human beings] to his likeness.” (Böhme is thinking not so much of Adam as of the Heavenly Man, rival of Lucifer, described in the Cabala.) Then consider what the human being has become instead, “a formless grub, like a hellish worm or abominable animal, an enemy to God, to heaven, and to all holy angels and men; and that his intercourse is—and forever shall be—with devils and hellish worms in gruesome darkness.” Böhme intersperses persuasion with prayer, and through the whole he weaves an allegory of the soul engaged in knightly combat, hoping to receive a crown from the hand of the Virgin Sophia. What is the Way? Even the same as Evangelist showed Christian (though Böhme never achieves anything approaching John Bunyan’s pathos): “He who does not forsake wife, children . . . even his earthly life, is not worthy of me.” “Gracious reader, this is no joke,” Böhme warns; “Better to be judged early in youth before the Devil has bastioned his robber’s castle in the soul!” Of the Sophia-tale, he advises, “Dear reader, Do not consider this an untrue myth. This is the . . . sum and substance of Sacred Scriptures . . . clearly presented to the eyes just as it became known to the author, for this has been his whole process.”

In “Of True Resignation,” the second tract, Böhme makes use of the term Gelassenheit (from lassen, leave alone), which Tauler had helped to popularize. In more ordinary speech, what is here demanded is humility or, as the Psalmist expressed it, “a broken and a contrite heart.” The examples of Lucifer and of Archetypal Man show what happens when God grants reason to even the most promising of his creatures. Reason is the best of treasures, but “we also see that in our technically trained men, when they acquire the light of external reason as their own, nothing results but pride.” Böhme translates into his own jargon Christ’s parable about the unclean spirit which, returning to finding his old quarters empty and garnished, reoccupies them together with seven other spirits more foul than himself. Says Böhme:

As the creaturely will-spirit rises with the rational light into the center, that is, into selfhood, and begins self-delusion, it again departs from God’s light. Now the Devil finds a gate opening up into him, and a garnished house, or rational light, for habitation. Then he appropriates to himself the seven forms of the life-properties which have departed from God into selfhood. Then he becomes self-conscious and sets his desire into the inclination toward his own self and into a false imagination.

In short, those who think that the light of reason is sufficient for salvation are easy game for the Devil. Instead of looking to external reason, one must descend into oneself and become dead to the world, resign oneself to Christ, and do what Christ wishes to do with his own instrument. This is the praxis; but Böhme is always ready with the theoria. The question how the creature can have any will at all, as distinct from that of its Maker, was one that Böhme was prepared to answer. There are two poles in God, as Böhme had been shown: his Love-will and his Wrath-will. These same two poles are present in every creature also. When God created Lucifer and Heavenly Man (a glorious androgynous being), he did so out of love and looked for love in response. The rest of the story is well known: The two splendid creatures got what they chose—and what they still choose even when they are aware of the error of their choice. For Lucifer, there is no hope. For the human race, the only hope lies in appropriating Christ’s Passion. “Any meditative scheme leading to God” is fruitless apart from a regeneration of the mind; and for that to take place, the soul must “envelop its will in Christ’s death, so that the soul’s mind no longer wills sin.”

The third tract, “Of Regeneration: Or, The New Birth,” is concerned with the conflict that Christians experience within themselves as a result of their union with Christ. How can one be the Temple of God and at the same time a sinful mortal? To answer this question, Böhme must go back to the beginning and explain how man was created (Scripture does not tell all!); how he “stood in heaven as well as in the external world” (this was paradise); how the Devil overcame man through his imagination; how man originally begat offspring in the way God created heaven and earth (by fiat); how Adam slept (for the first time!), therein exchanging his angelic life for the life of a beast. Desolation followed, but also a covenant, which was fulfilled when “the divine Vitality introduced heavenly, living essence, and reawakened the distorted essence in Mary’s seed and brought it to life.” Much of the tract is directed against false Christians and against the “stone churches,” which is not surprising in view of the slanders he endured from the pulpits. Their preaching and sacraments would be good, he says, if spiritually used. Still, how many there were who had attended church for decades, heard the sermons, received the sacraments, and been absolved, but remained as much beasts and children of the Devil as before! “A true Christian brings his holy church into the congregation; his heart is the true church in which one should practice the worship of God.”

“A Dialogue Between an Enlightened and an Unenlightened Soul” has the makings of a morality play. Soul, in her innocence, leaves paradise in order to satisfy her curiosity about the world of creatures. The Devil offers his services and promises her all knowledge and power on condition that she break off from God and focus her desires on the serpent image. This image (which is the circle formed by the serpent biting its own tail, and also the magical fire-wheel of Mercury) ignited Soul’s egocentric passions, thereby liberating Arrogance, Avarice, Envy, and Wrath—the very “foundation of Hell.” So, Soul began to rule on earth in a bestial manner. Then Soul met Christ, who had come into the world to destroy the works of the Devil. When Christ offered to free Soul from her wormlike image, Soul repented and sought God’s grace. However, the properties of the astral spirit that the Devil had formed in her would not let her will remain with God. Meanwhile, the Devil reappeared and drew her back into worldly things. “What are you troubling yourself about? Just look how the world lives in joy! Hasn’t Christ paid the ransom and satisfied for all men? All you need to do is to comfort yourself that it has happened . . . Don’t you ever think what will happen to you if you become so melancholy and insane? You will be everybody’s fool.” Soul was disconsolate. She decided to forsake the world and engage in charitable works—but to no avail. Then Troubled Soul met Enlightened Soul, who assured her that there was an ointment that would remove the serpent image and restore the paradisal image. “You yourself shall do nothing except surrender your self-centered, self-calculating will. Then your evil qualities will weaken and begin to die, and you will sink your own will back into the One out of which you originally came.” After Enlightened Soul preached her a long sermon on following Christ and walking the straight way, Troubled Soul resolved to forsake her egocentric will and to surrender to Christ. Bewailing her wormlike form and the presence in her of the four passions, she embraced the death of Christ as her own and, permeated by God’s love, broke into joyful prayer. “The marriage-feast of the Lamb was now celebrated, and the espousal of the noble Sophia with the Soul. The signet ring of Christ’s Victory was impressed upon her essence and she was received again as a child and heir of God.” The tract is interesting mainly because in it one can overhear the arguments and discussions, admonitions and counsels, that must have engaged Böhme and his friends in their evangelical activities.

“Of the Supersensual Life: A Dialogue Between a Scholar and His Master,” dated 1622, was obviously written for Böhme’s more intellectual friends. “How,” the disciple asks, “may I come to the supersensual life so that I can see God and hear him speak?” The master answers: “When you can leap for a moment into that where no creature dwells then you can hear what God speaks.” Salvation, in this dialogue, is presented less as a matter of embracing Christ’s death than of sinking oneself into the No-thing out of which everything has come and to which it will return. Human beings fell when they separated themselves from the All, emerging as ego-centered selves in the midst of a world of severed things known to them through sensible images. In this condition, they rule externally over other creatures, led by the desires of their bestial nature. If one wants to see and hear God, one must forsake the world of images and no longer desire to claim things as one’s own. Then one becomes like all things—a no-thing among no-things.

There follows an example of what Böhme calls his “deep writing.” The talk has turned to love, which, the master says, is a no-thing. He explains that all things have emerged from one source, the Supersensual Unconditioned (Ungrund). Because it is potentially all things the Source is actually no-thing. God’s being and that of his creatures are things, differentiated in virtue of an order superimposed on the Ungrund—but only the limited degree of order that the Ungrund can receive. Hence, there remains in God himself and in each of his creatures a residual no-thingness. In this no-thingness love resides, but also hate; for, one member of a pair of opposites cannot exist without the other. Human beings, for example, must love the divine that is within them but must hate the I-ness that has raised itself against God. This consideration helps the master explain to the disciple why it is that though so many people seek love, so few are able to find it. “Though Love offers itself to them it can find no place within them to live, for the imaginativeness of selfish inclinations wants to own it. Love flees, however, for it lives only in the no-thing, and therefore the ego-centric will cannot find it.”

It also helps the master answer the disciple’s questions about heaven and hell. These are not places but states of men’s souls. Heaven operates everywhere, for it is “nothing more than a manifestation of the Eternal One wherein all works and wills in love.” Hell is its counterpart: It is active everywhere God and love are excluded. “What then is an angel,” asks the disciple, “and what is man’s soul, that they become manifest in God’s love or in his wrath?” The master’s explanation is that they are projections of God’s knowledge into objects of his love. “They come out of the eternal ground from which Light and darkness arise. As darkness lies in the employment of ego-centric desire, so Light consists in a similar willing with God.” As for one’s body, and the visible world in general, they are external manifestations of the inner spiritual world, whether good or evil. With this in mind, the master is able to answer the disciple’s questions concerning life beyond the grave, the resurrection of the body, the Last Judgment, and the eternal separation of the children of darkness from the children of light. One last question: “Why does God allow such strife in this time?” There must be strife for life to exist and for wisdom to become manifest and for joy to triumph. “For this the Eternal One assumed sensibility and divisibility, and by sensibility brought itself forth again through death into the mighty Kingdom of Joy, so that there might be an eternal play in the endless unity.”

Christian Themes

Böhme’s Christian message in The Way to Christ can be summarized in the following points:

•True repentance is a lifelong struggle between the good and the evil forces in human beings.

•In true resignation, egocentric knowing and willing is replaced by God’s love.

•Only as Christ restores to a soul the divine vitality lost to humankind in Adam’s fall can this renewal take place.

•Heaven and hell are not places that human beings enter after death but present states of their souls.

Sources for Further Study

Böhme, Jakob. Six Theosophic Points, and Other Writings. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958. The introductory essay, “Ungrund and Freedom,” by Nicolas Berdyaev, offers a convenient introduction to Böhme’s general philosophical position.

Erb, Peter, ed. Jacob Boehme: The Way to Christ. New York: Paulist Press, 1977. Erb’s introduction reaffirms that this work “provides the best introduction to [Böhme’s] thought and spirituality.”

Jones, Rufus M. Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: Macmillan, 1909. Chapters 9 through 12 offer an introduction to Böhme’s life and thought and to his influence in England, by a noted modern Quaker.

O’Regan, Cyril. Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Assesses Böhme’s thought as a return to Gnosticism after a millennium. Although O’Regan questions the nineteenth century arguments for this stance, he agrees that in the modern period Böhme’s discourse does represent a return of Gnosticism. Bibliography, index.

Stoudt, John Joseph. Sunrise to Eternity: A Study in Jacob Böhme’s Life. Preface by Paul Tillich. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957. Traces the growth of Böhme’s thought, which is seen as a new, personalist type of mysticism. Useful mainly for biographical details.

Weeks, Andrew. Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. An overview of Böhme’s life and thought suitable for both serious and beginning students. Bibliography, index.