Studies on Jacob Böhme

What enables Berdyaev to achieve this sympathetic understanding is his own position as a religious philosopher—one who thinks philosophically about ultimate questions while remaining rooted in spiritual experience and Orthodox Christian faith. He recognizes in Böhme a kindred spirit: a Christian visionary grappling with the deepest mysteries of existence, theodicy, and divine freedom. Where academic philosophers see confused proto-idealism, Berdyaev sees profound theological wrestling. Where they see problems to be solved through conceptual clarification, he sees mysteries to be contemplated through spiritual empathy.

Beyond serving as an unparalleled introduction to Böhme's vision and its fateful appropriation by German Idealism, these studies offer perhaps the clearest exposition of Berdyaev's own metaphysical position—his doctrine of uncreated, meonic freedom rooted in the Ungrund, which constitutes the generative core of his entire philosophical edifice.

Böhme's gnosis was experiential and vital; it arose from anguish over the fate of man and the world. Böhme possessed a childlike purity of soul, a kind and compassionate nature. Yet his feeling for the life of the world was austere, not sentimental. His fundamental intuition of being was an intuition of fire. In this he is akin to Heraclitus. He possessed an extraordinarily acute and powerful sense of evil in the life of the world. Everywhere he perceives a struggle of opposing principles, a struggle of light and darkness.

Unlike the majority of mystics, Böhme writes not of his own soul, nor of his own spiritual path, nor of what happened to him, but of what happened to God, to the world, and to man. This is the distinguishing mark of mystical theosophy as opposed to pure mysticism.

Böhme's teaching on freedom is not a psychological and ethical doctrine of freedom of the will; it is a metaphysical teaching on the first-foundation of being. Freedom for him is not the grounding of man's moral responsibility, nor the regulation of man's relations to God and neighbor, but the explanation of the genesis of being and, together with it, of the genesis of evil as an ontological and cosmological problem.

The primal mystery of being, according to Böhme, consists in the fact that nothing seeks something. Böhme describes apophatically and antinomically the mystery that unfolds in the depths of being, in that depth which borders upon primordial nothingness. In the darkness a fire is kindled and light begins to dawn; nothing becomes something; groundless freedom gives birth to nature.

The teaching on Sophia is inseparable in Böhme from the teaching on the androgyne, that is, on the primordial integrity of man. Sophianicity is, in essence, androgyny. Man possesses an androgynous, bisexual, male-female nature. To man belongs Sophia, that is, the Virgin. The fall is precisely the loss of one's Sophia-Virgin, who departed to heaven. On earth there arose femininity—Eve. Man yearns for his Sophia, for the Virgin, for integrity and chastity. A sexual being is a sundered being, one that has lost its wholeness.

When the unschooled Böhme first heard the word "idea," he exclaimed: "I see the Heavenly Virgin!" This was a vision of Sophia, of Sophianic man, of the male-virgin. The world was created by God through Sophia-Wisdom, by means of God's creative imagination.

The German metaphysicians of the nineteenth century attempted to express the musical theme in a system of concepts. In this lies the grandeur of their design, and in this lies the cause of the collapse of these systems. A revival of Böhme is now possible. A number of new books are being written about him. He can help overcome not only the habits of Greek thought and medieval scholasticism, but also that German idealism upon which he himself exerted an internal influence.

For us Russians, Böhme, like Franz Baader, ought to be closer than other Western thinkers. By the properties of our spirit we are called to construct a philosophy of tragedy; the optimistic rationalism of European thought is alien to us. Böhme so loved freedom that he perceived the true church only where freedom exists.