Part 9

[17] The error in this line of thought will be found explained in my book, _The Philosophy of Freedom_, Berlin, 1894. Here I must limit myself to mentioning that Valentine Weigel, with his simple, robust way of conceiving things, stands far higher than Kant.

Weigel says to himself: Even if the knowledge flows out from man, it is still only the being of the “counterpart” (or object) which comes to light in this indirect way through man. As I learn the content of the book by reading it, and not by my own content, so also I learn the colour of the “counterpart” through the eye, not any colour to be found in the eye, or in myself. (Thus Weigel arrives by a road of his own at a result that we have already encountered in Nicholas of Cusa. Cp. pages 151-160). In this way Weigel attained to clearness as to the nature of sense-perception. He arrived at the conviction that everything which external things have to tell us can only flow forth from our own inner nature itself. Man cannot remain passive when he tries to know sensible objects and seeks merely to allow them to act upon him; but he must assume an active attitude, and bring forth the knowledge from within himself. The counterpart (or object) merely awakens the knowledge in the spirit. Man rises to higher knowledge when his spirit becomes its own “counterpart.” One can see from sensible cognition that no cognition can flow into man from outside. Therefore there can be no such thing as an external revelation, but only an inner awakening.

As now the external counterpart waits till there comes into its presence man, in whom it can express its being, so too must man wait, when he seeks to be his own “counterpart” (or object) until the knowledge of his own being shall be awakened in him. If, in cognition through the senses, man must assume an active attitude in order that he may bring to meet the “counterpart” its own being, so in the higher knowing, man must hold himself passive, because he is himself now the “counterpart.” He must admit its being into himself. Therefore the cognition of the spirit appears to him as enlightenment from above. In contrast to cognition through the senses, Weigel therefore terms the higher cognition the “Light of Mercy” This “Light of Mercy” is, in reality, nothing other than the self-knowledge of the spirit in man, or the re-birth of knowledge on the higher level of beholding.

Now just as Nicholas of Cusa, in following up his road from knowing to beholding, does not really bring about the re-birth of the knowledge he has gained, on the higher level, but only the faith of the Church in which he was brought up appears deceptively before him as such a re-birth, so is it also the case with Weigel. He guides himself to the right road, but loses it again in the very moment in which he steps upon it. He who will travel the road that Weigel points out, can regard the latter as his guide only as far as the starting-point.

* * * * *

What rings out to meet us from the works of the Master-Shoemaker of Görlitz, JACOB BOEHME (1575-1624), sounds like the joyous outburst of Nature admiring her own being upon the summit of her evolution. A man appears before us whose words have wings, woven out of the inspiring feeling of having seen knowledge shining within him as Higher Wisdom. Jacob Boehme describes his own state as Piety which strives only to be Wisdom, and as a Wisdom that seeks to live only in Piety: “As I was wrestling and fighting in God’s behalf, behold a wondrous light shone into my soul, such as was quite foreign to savage nature; therein I first knew what God and man were, and what God had to do with men.”

Jacob Boehme no longer feels himself as a separated being expressing its insights; he feels himself as an organ of the great All-Spirit, speaking in him. The limits of his personality do not appear to him as the limits of the Spirit that speaks from within him. This Spirit is for him present everywhere. He knows that “the Sophist will blame him” when he speaks of the beginning of the world and its creation: “the while I was not thereby and did not myself see it. To him be it said that in the essence of my soul and body, when I was not yet the ‘I,’ but when I was still Adam’s essence, I was there present and myself squandered away my glory in Adam.”

Only in external similes is Boehme able to indicate how the light broke forth in his inner being. When once as a boy he finds himself on the top of a mountain, he sees above him a place where large red stones seem to shut up the mountain; the entrance is open and in its depth he sees a vessel full of gold. A shudder runs through him; and he goes on his way without touching the treasure. Later on he is apprenticed to a shoemaker in Görlitz. A stranger steps into the shop and demands a pair of shoes. Boehme is not allowed to sell them in the absence of his master. The stranger departs, but after a while calls the apprentice out of the shop and says to him: “Jacob, thou art little, but thou wilt some day become quite another man, over whom the world will break out into wonder.” In riper years, Jacob Boehme sees the reflection of the bright sun in a tin vessel: the view that thus presents itself to him seems to him to unveil a profound secret. Even after the impression of this appearance, he believes himself to be in possession of the key to the riddles of Nature.

He lives as a spiritual anchorite, humbly earning his living by his trade, and between whiles, as though for his own recollection, he notes down the harmonies which resound in his inner being when he feels the Spirit in himself. The zealotry of priestly fervour makes life hard for the man; he, who desires naught but to read the Scripture which the light of his inner nature illuminates for him, is persecuted and tortured by those to whom only the external writ, the rigid, dogmatic confession of faith, is accessible.

One world-riddle remains as a disquieting presence in Jacob Boehme’s soul, driving him on to knowledge. He believes himself to be in his spirit enfolded in a divine harmony; but when he looks around him, he sees discord everywhere in the divine workings. To man belongs the light of Wisdom; and yet he is exposed to error; in him lives the impulse to the good, and yet the discord of evil sounds throughout the whole of human development. Nature is governed by its own great laws; yet its harmony is disturbed by happenings of no purport, and the warfare of the elements. How is this discord in the harmonious world-whole to be understood? This question tortures Jacob Boehme. It strides into the centre of the world of his thought. He strives to gain a view of the world as a whole, which shall include the discordant. For how can a conception which leaves the actual present discord unexplained explain the world? The discord must be explained out of the harmony, the evil out of the good itself. Let us restrict ourselves, in speaking of these things, to the good and the evil, wherein the lack of harmony in the narrower sense finds its expression. For, fundamentally, Jacob Boehme also restricts himself to this. He can do so, for Nature and man appear to him as a single entity. He sees in both similar laws and processes. The purposeless seems to him an evil something in Nature, just as evil seems to him something purposeless in man. Similar fundamental forces rule both here and there. To one who has known the origin of evil in man, the source of evil in Nature also lies open and clear.

Now, how can the evil as well as the good flow forth from the very same Root-Being? Speaking in Jacob Boehme’s sense, one would give the following answer. The Root-Being does not live out its existence in itself. The multiplicity of the world shares in this existence. As the human body lives its life, not as a single member, but as a multiplicity of members, so also the Root-Being. And as human life is poured out into this multiplicity of members, so too the Root-Being is poured out into the manifoldness of the things of this world. As true as it is that the entire man has only one life, so true is it that every member has its own life. And as little as it contradicts the whole harmonious life of a man, that his hand should turn itself against his own body and wound it, so little is it impossible that the things of the world, which live the life of the Root-Being in their own way, should turn themselves against each other. Thus the Root-Being, in dividing itself among different lives, confers upon each such life the capacity to turn itself against the whole.

It is not from the good that evil streams forth, but from the way in which the good lives. As the light is only able to shine when it pierces the darkness, so the good can bring itself to life only when it permeates its opposite. From out of the “fathomless abyss” of darkness there streams forth the light; from the “groundlessness” of the indifferent there is brought to birth the Good. And as in the shadow only the brightening demands a pointing to the light; but the darkness, as a matter of course, is felt as that which weakens the light; so too in the world, it is only the law-abiding character that is sought for in all things; and the evil, the purposeless, is accepted as a matter of course, intelligible in itself. Thus, in spite of the fact that for Jacob Boehme the Root-Being is the All, still nothing in the world can be understood, unless one has an eye both to the Root-Being and its opposite at once. “The good has swallowed up into itself the evil or the hideous.... Every being has in itself good and evil, and in its unfoldment, as it passes over into division, it becomes a contradiction of qualities, as one seeks to overcome the other.”

Hence it is altogether in accordance with Jacob Boehme’s view to see in everything, and in every process of the world, both good and evil; but it is not in accord with his meaning, without more ado to seek the Root-Being in the mingling of good and evil. The Root-Being must swallow up the evil; but the evil is not a part of the Root-Being. Jacob Boehme seeks the Root-Being of the world; but the world itself has sprung forth from the “fathomless abyss” through the Root-Being. “The external world is not God, and eternally will not be called God, but only a being wherein God manifests Himself.... When one says: God is all, God is heaven and earth, and also the outer world, so is that true: for from him and in him all stands originally rooted. But what am I to do with such a saying, which is no religion?”

With such a view in the background, Jacob Boehme’s conceptions as to the being of the whole world built themselves up in his mind, so that he makes the orderly world emerge in a series of steps from the “fathomless abyss.” This world builds itself up in seven natural forms. In dark astringency the Root-Being receives form, dumbly shut up within itself and motionless. This astringency Boehme grasps under the symbol of Salt. In employing such designations he leans upon Paracelsus, who had borrowed from chemical processes his names for the processes of Nature. By swallowing up its opposite, the first nature-form passes over into the form of the second; the astringent, the motionless, takes on movement; Power and Life enter into it. Quicksilver (Mercury) is the symbol for this second form. In the struggle of Rest and Motion, of Death with Life, the third form of Nature unveils itself (Sulphur). This Life battling within itself, becomes manifest to itself; it lives thenceforward no longer an outer battle of its members; there quivers through it as it were a unifying glowing flash, itself lighting up its own being (Fire). This fourth form of Nature rises to the fifth, the living battle of the parts resting in themselves (Water). On this level, as upon the first, there is present an inner astringency and dumbness; only it is not an absolute rest, a silence of the inner opposites, but an interior movement of the opposites. It is not the motionless resting in itself, but the moved, that which has been kindled by the fire-flash of the fourth stage. Upon the sixth level, the Root-Being itself becomes aware of itself as such inner life. Living beings endowed with senses represent this form of Nature. Jacob Boehme calls it the “Clang” or Call, and in so doing adopts the sense-perception of sound as the symbol for sense-perception in general. The seventh form of Nature is the Spirit, raising itself on the basis of its sense-perceptions (Wisdom). He finds himself again as himself, as the Root-Being, within the world that has grown up out of the “fathomless abyss,” shaping itself out of the harmonious and the discordant. “The Holy Ghost brings the Glory of this Majesty into the being, wherein the Godhead stands revealed.”

It is with such views that Jacob Boehme seeks to fathom that world which for him, according to the knowledge of his time, was reckoned as the actual world of fact. For him all is fact which is so regarded by the natural science of his time and by the Bible. His way of conceiving things is one thing, his world of facts quite another. One can imagine the former applied to a totally different knowledge of facts. And thus there appears before our eyes a Jacob Boehme as he might stand at the parting of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Such a one would not saturate with his way of conceiving things the six days’ creation work of the Bible and the fight of the angels and the devils, but Lyell’s geological knowledge and the facts of Haeckel’s _The History of Creation_. He who can penetrate into the spirit of Jacob Boehme’s writings must arrive at this conviction.[18]

[18] We may here name the most important of Boehme’s writings: _Die Morgenröthe im Aufgang_; _Die drei Prinzipien göttlichen Lebens oder über das dreifache Leben des Menschen_; _Das umgewandte Auge_; _“Signatura rerum” oder von der Geburt und Bezeichnung aller Wesen_; _Das “Mysterium Magnum_.”

GIORDANO BRUNO AND ANGELUS SILESIUS

In the first decennium of the sixteenth century, the scientific genius of Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) thinks out in the castle of Heilsberg, in Prussia, an intellectual structure which compels the men of subsequent epochs to look up to the starry heavens with other conceptions than those which their forefathers in antiquity and the Middle Ages had. To them the earth was their dwelling-place, at rest in the centre of the Universe. The stars, however, were for them beings of a perfect nature, whose motion took place in circles because the circle is the representative of perfection.

In that which the stars showed to human senses they beheld something of the nature of soul, something spiritual. It was one kind of speech that the things and processes upon earth spoke to man; quite another, that of the shining stars, beyond the moon in the pure æther, which seemed like some spiritual nature filling space. Nicholas of Cusa had already formed other ideas.

Through Copernicus, earth became for man a brother-being in face of the other heavenly bodies, a star moving like others. All the difference that earth has to show for man he could now reduce to this: that earth is his dwelling-place. He was no longer forced to think differently about the events of this earth and those of the rest of universal space. The world of his senses had expanded itself into the most remote spaces. He was compelled henceforth to allow that which penetrated his eye from the æther to count as sense-world just as much as the things of earth. He could no longer seek in the æther in sensuous fashion for the Spirit.

Whoever, henceforth, strove after higher knowledge, must needs come to an understanding with this expanded world of the senses. In earlier centuries, the brooding mind of man stood before a world of facts. Now he was confronted with a new task. No longer could the things of earth only express this nature from within man’s inner being. This inner nature of his was called on to embrace the spirit of a sense-world, which fills the All of Space everywhere alike.

The thinker of Nola, PHILOTHEO GIORDANO BRUNO (1548-1600) found himself faced by such a problem. The senses have conquered the universe of space; henceforth the Spirit is no more to be found in space. Thus man was guided from without to seek henceforward for the Spirit there alone where from out of profound inner experiences those glorious thinkers sought it, whose ranks our previous expositions have led before us. These thinkers drew upon a view of the world to which, later on, the advance of natural knowledge forces humanity. The sun of those ideas, which later should shine upon a new view of Nature, with them still stands below the horizon; but their light already appears as the early dawn at a time when men’s thoughts of Nature itself still lay in the darkness of night.

The sixteenth century gave the heavenly spaces to natural science for the sense-world to which it rightfully belongs; by the end of the nineteenth century, this science had advanced so far that, even within the phenomena of plant, animal, and human life, it could assign to the world of sensible facts that which belongs to it. Neither, then, in the æther above, nor in the development of living creatures, can this natural science henceforth seek for anything but sensible, matter-of-fact processes. As the thinker in the sixteenth century had to say: “The earth is a star among other stars, subject to the same laws as other stars”; so must the thinker of the nineteenth century say: “Man, whatever may be his origin and his future, is for anthropology only a mammal, and further, that mammal whose organisation, needs and diseases are the most complex, whose brain, with its marvellous capacities, has reached the highest level of development.”[19]

[19] Paul Topinard: _Anthropologie_, Leipzig, 1888, p. 528.

From such a standpoint, attained through natural science, there can no longer occur any confusion between the spiritual and the sensible, provided man understands himself rightly. Developed natural science makes it impossible to seek in Nature for a Spirit conceived of after the fashion of something material, just as healthy thinking makes it impossible to seek for the reason of the forward movement of the clock-hand, not in mechanical laws (the Spirit of inorganic Nature), but in a special Daimon, supposed to bring about the movements of the hands. Ernst Haeckel was quite right in rejecting, as a scientist, the gross conception of a God conceived of in material fashion. “In the higher and more abstract forms of religion, the bodily appearance is abandoned and God is worshipped as pure Spirit, devoid of body. ‘God is a Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.’ But, nevertheless, the soul-activity of this pure Spirit remains quite the same as that of the anthropomorphic personal God. In reality, even this immaterial Spirit is not thought of as bodiless, but as invisible, like a gas. We thus arrive at the paradoxical conception of God as a gaseous vertebrate.”[20]

[20] Haeckel, _Riddle of the Universe_.

In reality, the matter-of-fact, sensible existence of something spiritual may be assumed only when immediate sensible experience shows something spiritual, and only such a degree of the spiritual may be assumed as can be perceived in this manner. That first rate thinker, B. Carneri, ventured to say (in his book: _Empfindung und Bewusstsein_, p. 15): “The dictum: No spirit without matter, but also no matter without spirit,--would entitle us to extend the question to the plant also, nay, even to any block of stone taken at random, wherein there seems very little to speak in favour of these correlative conceptions.” Spiritual occurrences as matters of fact are the results of various doings of an organism; the Spirit of the world is not present in the world in a material sense, but precisely after a spiritual fashion. Man’s soul is a sum of processes in which Spirit appears most immediately as fact. In the form of such a soul, however, Spirit is present in man only. And it implies that one misunderstands Spirit, that one commits the worst sin against Spirit, to seek for Spirit in the form of Soul elsewhere than in man, to imagine other beings thus ensouled as man is. Whoever does this, only shows that he has not experienced Spirit within himself; he has only experienced that outer form of appearance of Spirit, the Soul, which reigns in him. But that is just the same as though one regarded a circle drawn with a pencil as the real, mathematically ideal circle. Whoever experiences in himself nothing other than the soul-form of the Spirit, feels himself thereupon driven to assume also such a soul-form in non-human things, in order that thereby he may not need to remain rooted in the materiality of the gross senses. Instead of thinking of the Root-Being of the world as Spirit, he thinks of it as World-Soul, and postulates a general ensoulment of Nature.

Giordano Bruno, upon whom the new Copernican view of Nature forced itself, could grasp Spirit in the world, from which it had been expelled in its old form, in no other manner than as World-Soul. On plunging into Bruno’s writings (especially his deeply thoughtful book: _De Rerum Principiis et Elementis et Causis_) one gets the impression that he thought of things as ensouled, although in varying degree. He has not, in reality, experienced in himself the Spirit, therefore he conceives Spirit after the fashion of the human soul, wherein alone he has encountered it. When he speaks of Spirit, he conceives of it in the following way: “The universal reason is the inmost, most effective and most special capacity, and a potential part of the World-Soul; it is something one and identical, which fills the All, illuminates the universe and instructs Nature how to bring forth her species as they ought to be.” In these sentences Spirit, it is true, is not described as a “gaseous vertebrate,” but it is described as a being that is like to the human soul. “Let now a thing be as small and tiny as you please, it yet has within it a portion of spiritual substance, which, when it finds a substratum adapted thereto, reaches out to become a plant, an animal, and organises itself to any body you choose that is ordinarily called ensouled. For Spirit is to be found in all things, and there does not exist even the tiniest little body which does not embrace in itself such a share thereof as causes it to come to life.”