Synopses & Reviews
Jakob Boehme (1575–1624) was one of those remarkable teachers, like Meister Eckhart, who pushed language to its limits to describe an experience that happens above and beyond rational thought. He was a Bohemian shoemaker who, in response to the overwhelming visionary experiences he began to undergo as a teenager, wrote a series of theosophical treatises that explored the relationship between the One and the many, existence and nonexistence, the inner process of divine emanation toward self-consciousness, the relationship of good and evil, and the personal and cosmic urge toward reintegration. Some hear in him resonances with alchemy, kabbalah, and Platonism. His influence is seen in the Quakers, the German Romantics, Pietism, various American utopian experiments, and in the European mystics who came after him. The great scholar of mysticism Evelyn Underhill called him “one of the most astonishing cases in history of a natural genius for the transcendent.”
Michael Birkel and Jeff Bachs translation liberates Boehme into modern English. Previous editions have tended toward the academic, or have been couched in intentionally archaic language reminiscent of the King James Bible. This collection includes five essential texts, among them “Life Beyond the Senses,” Boehmes explanation of the relationship between God and the soul.
Synopsis
Here, for the spiritual adventurers of our own age, is an accessible introduction to one of the most important of the Christian mystical writers. Jakob Boehme (1575–1624) was a humble shoemaker of Görlitz in eastern Germany who, in response to the visionary experiences that began for him as a teenager, wrote a series of theosophical treatises that explore the nature of God and humanity. His ability to give words to the ineffable has never been surpassed, and his influence can be felt in the generations of mystics who followed him, as well as in Pietists, German Romantics, Quakers, and American utopianists, among many others. Five of Boehme's most essential works are presented here in fresh translations that demonstrate why Underhill called him "one of the most astonishing cases in history of a natural genius for the transcendent."