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Jakob Böhme (Jacob Boehme)
Jakob Böhme (/ˈbeɪmə, ˈboʊ-/; German: [ˈbøːmə]; 24 April
1575 – 17 November 1624) was a German philosopher, Christian mystic, and
Lutheran Protestant theologian. He was considered an original thinker by many
of his contemporaries within the Lutheran tradition, and his first book,
commonly known as Aurora, caused a great scandal. In contemporary English, his
name may be spelled Jacob Boehme (retaining the older German spelling); in
seventeenth-century England it was also spelled Behmen, approximating the
contemporary English pronunciation of the German Böhme.
Böhme had a profound influence on later philosophical
movements such as German idealism and German Romanticism. Hegel described Böhme as "the first
German philosopher".
Biography
Böhme was born on 24 April 1575 at Alt Seidenberg (now Stary
Zawidów, Poland), a village near Görlitz in Upper Lusatia, a territory of the
Kingdom of Bohemia. His father, George Wissen, was Lutheran, reasonably
wealthy, but a peasant nonetheless. Böhme was the fourth of five children.
Böhme's first job was that of a herd boy. He was deemed to be not strong enough
for husbandry. When he was 14 years old, he was sent to Seidenberg, as an
apprentice to become a shoemaker. His apprenticeship for shoemaking was hard;
he lived with a family who were not Christians, which exposed him to the
controversies of the time. He regularly prayed and read the Bible as well as
works by visionaries such as Paracelsus, Weigel and Schwenckfeld, although he
received no formal education. After three years as an apprentice, Böhme left to
travel. Although it is unknown just how far he went, he went at least as far as
Görlitz.[6] In 1592 Böhme returned from his journeyman years. By 1599, Böhme
was master of his craft with his own premises in Görlitz. That same year he
married Katharina, daughter of Hans Kuntzschmann, a butcher in Görlitz, and
together he and Katharina had four sons and two daughters.
Böhme's mentor was Abraham Behem who corresponded with
Valentin Weigel. Böhme joined the "Conventicle of God's Real
Servants" - a parochial study group organized by Martin Moller. Böhme had
a number of mystical experiences throughout his youth, culminating in a vision
in 1600 as one day he focused his attention onto the exquisite beauty of a beam
of sunlight reflected in a pewter dish. He believed this vision revealed to him
the spiritual structure of the world, as well as the relationship between God
and man, and good and evil. At the time he chose not to speak of this
experience openly, preferring instead to continue his work and raise a family.
In 1610 Böhme experienced another inner vision in which he
further understood the unity of the cosmos and that he had received a special
vocation from God.
The shop in Görlitz, which was sold in 1613, had allowed
Böhme to buy a house in 1610 and to finish paying for it in 1618. Having given
up shoemaking in 1613, Böhme sold woollen gloves for a while, which caused him
to regularly visit Prague to sell his wares.