Valentin Weigel (born in 1533, pastor in Zschopau from 1567), whose works were not printed until after his death, combines his predecessors’ doctrine of inner and eternal Christianity with the microcosmos-idea of Paracelsus.  God, who lacks nothing, has not created the world in order to gain, but in order to give.  Man not only bears the earthly world in his body, and the heavenly world of the angels in his reason (his spirit), but by virtue of his intellect (his immortal soul) participates in the divine world also.  As he is thus a microcosm and, moreover, an image of God, all his knowledge becomes self-knowledge, both sensuous perception (which is not caused by the object, but only occasioned by it), and the knowledge of God.  The literalist knows not God, but he alone who bears God in himself.  Man is favored above other beings with the freedom to dwell in himself or in God.  When man came out from God, he was his own tempter and made himself proud and selfish.  Thus evil, which had before remained hidden, was revealed, and became sin.  As the separation from God is an eternal act, so also redemption and resurrection form an inner event.  Christ is born in everyone who gives up the I-ness (Ichheit); each regenerate man is a son of God.  But no vicarious suffering can save him who does not put off the old Adam, no matter how much an atheology sunk in literalism may comfort itself with the hope that man can “drink at another’s cost” (that the merit of another is imputed to him).[1]

[Footnote 1:  Weigel is discussed by J.O.  Opel, Leipsic, 1864.]

German mysticism reaches its culmination in the Goerlitz cobbler, Jacob Boehme (1575-1624; Aurora, or the Rising Dawn; Mysterium Magnum, or on the First Book of Moses, etc.  The works of Boehme, collected by his apostle, Gichtel, appeared in 1682 in ten volumes, and in 1730 in six volumes; a new edition was prepared by Schiebler in 1831-47, with a second edition in 1861 seq.).  Boehme’s doctrine[1] centers about the problem of the origin of evil.  He transfers this to God himself and joins therewith the leading thought of Eckhart, that God goes through a process, that he proceeds from an unrevealed to a revealed condition.  At the sight of a tin vessel glistening in the sun, he conceived, as by inspiration, the idea that as the sunlight reveals itself on the dark vessel so all light needs darkness and all good evil in order to appear and to become knowable.  Everything becomes perceptible through its opposite alone:  gentleness through sternness, love through anger, affirmation through negation.  Without evil there would be no life, no movement, no distinctions, no revelation; all would be unqualified, uniform nothingness.  And as in nature nothing exists in which good and evil do not reside, so in God, besides power or the good, a contrary exists, without which he would remain unknown to himself.  The theogonic process is twofold:  self-knowledge on the part of God, and his revelation outward, as eternal nature, in seven moments.