Boehme was born in 1575 near Goerlitz, where he afterwards settled as a shoemaker and glover.  He began to write in 1612, and in spite of clerical opposition, which silenced him for five years, he produced a number of treatises between that date and his death in 1624.

Boehme professed to write only what he had “seen” by Divine illumination.  His visions are not (with insignificant exceptions) authenticated by any marvellous signs; he simply asserts that he has been allowed to see into the heart of things, and that the very Being of God has been laid open to his spiritual sight.[348] His was that type of mind to which every thought becomes an image, and a logical process is like an animated photograph.  “I am myself my own book,” he says; and in writing, he tries to transcribe on paper the images which float before his mind’s eye.  If he fails, it is because he cannot find words to describe what he is seeing.  Boehme was an unlearned man; but when he is content to describe his visions in homely German, he is lucid enough.  Unfortunately, the scholars who soon gathered round him supplied him with philosophical terms, which he forthwith either personified—­for instance the word “Idea” called forth the image of a beautiful maiden—­or used in a sense of his own.  The study of Paracelsus obscured his style still more, filling his treatises with a bewildering mixture of theosophy and chemistry.  The result is certainly that much of his work is almost unreadable; the nuggets of gold have to be dug out from a bed of rugged stone; and we cannot be surprised that the unmystical eighteenth century declared that “Behmen’s works would disgrace Bedlam at full moon.[349]” But German philosophers have spoken with reverence of “the father of Protestant Mysticism,” who “perhaps only wanted learning and the gift of clear expression to become a German Plato”; and Sir Isaac Newton shut himself up for three months to study Boehme, whose teaching on attraction and the laws of motion seemed to him to have great value.[350]

For us, he is most interesting as marking the transition from the purely subjective type of Mysticism to Symbolism, or rather as the author of a brilliant attempt to fuse the two into one system.  In my brief sketch of Boehme’s doctrines I shall illustrate his teaching from the later works of William Law, who is by far its best exponent.  Law was an enthusiastic admirer of Boehme, and being, unlike his master, a man of learning and a practised writer, was able to bring order out of the chaos in which Boehme left his speculations.  In strength of intellect Law was Boehme’s equal, and as a writer of clear and forcible English he has few superiors.