Jakob Böhme (1575-1624)

Key dates

A peasant family and fragile health

Jakob Böhme was born on 24 April 1575 at Alt Seidenberg, a small village in Upper Lusatia a few kilometres from Görlitz, into a Lutheran peasant family considered "reasonably well-off" by his biographers^[20]. According to the tradition reported by his first biographer, the Silesian nobleman Abraham von Frankenberg, the child Jakob is said to have known from his earliest years experiences that would today be described as supernatural — visions or presentiments which Frankenberg retrospectively connects with his future vocation^[21]. His physical constitution, judged too weak for field work, led his parents to steer him towards a craft trade rather than the family farming^[22].

The shoemaker's apprenticeship

At about the age of fourteen, Böhme was apprenticed to a master shoemaker in Seidenberg. Biographical legend, circulated from the earliest accounts of his life, has it that his master once drove him out of the workshop after surprising him in full contemplative ecstasy — an old tale which reflects, in the first witnesses, the image of an apprentice already marked by an unusual interior life^[23]. After three years of apprenticeship and several years of itinerant journeyman travel through the German lands, he returned to settle at Görlitz where he obtained, in 1599, his mastership and his own workshop^[24]. The same year he married Katharina Kuntzschmann, daughter of a butcher of the town; the couple would have four sons and two daughters^[25]. In 1610 Böhme bought a house at Görlitz; in 1613 he sold his shoemaking workshop to devote himself to the trade in woollen gloves, which obliged him to frequent journeys as far as Prague^[26].

The vision of the pewter dish

According to the biographical account handed down by Frankenberg and taken up by the whole later tradition, Böhme is said to have experienced in 1600 a decisive illumination while contemplating a ray of sunlight reflected on a pewter dish set on his workbench: this reflection is said to have suddenly revealed to him, in a single all-embracing flash of intuition, "the spiritual structure of the world" and the intimate relation between good and evil in creation^[27]. Böhme himself, in his later writings, describes this experience as an instantaneous unveiling which continued, during the twelve years that followed, to unfold inwardly before finding its written expression. This narrative structure — a dazzling illumination followed by a long silent maturation — is a constant trait of German speculative mysticism, which Böhme inherited through his youthful reading: Paracelsus, Valentin Weigel and Caspar Schwenckfeld, all three representatives of a dissident spiritual current within German Protestantism, whom he frequented as a self-taught reader during his journeyman years^[28].

A second illumination in 1610

Ten years later, in 1610, Böhme reports having received a second inner experience, more decisive still than the first: in it he perceived, in his own words as reported by his biographers, a particular vocation — that of committing to writing what had been shown to him^[29]. It is from this second illumination that, two years later, the decision to write the Aurora was born. Böhme insists, in several of his later treatises, on the unbookish character of his knowledge: he claims no theological training, no mastery of Greek or Hebrew, but an intuition received directly from what he calls the divine light — a position which, while it exalts his legitimacy as a "philosopher without a school" in the eyes of his admirers, from the outset alarmed the Lutheran ecclesiastical authorities, attached to learned exegesis and to organised confessional doctrine.

The writing of the Aurora

Between January and May 1612, Böhme wrote at a single stretch his first treatise, Morgenröte im Aufgang — literally "the day-spring at its rising", which posterity would retain under the shortened title Aurora, a name given to the manuscript by one of its first readers^[30]. The text does not present itself as an organised learned treatise but as a continuous, largely unfinished meditation, in which Böhme undertakes to set out the nature of God, the origin of evil and the cosmic structure of creation from his own inner experience. The manuscript first circulated within a restricted circle of admirers, notably the nobleman Karl Ender von Sercha, who had copies made for his connections^[31].

Pastor Gregorius Richter against the "cobbler-philosopher"

One of these copies fell in 1613 into the hands of Gregorius Richter, chief pastor (head of the Lutheran clergy) of Görlitz, who detected heresy in it and publicly denounced the work from the pulpit^[32]. Richter obtained from the town council a prohibition on Böhme writing any further.

This episode sums up the hostility of an organised Lutheran clergy towards a self-taught theologian claiming directly revealed knowledge, outside the academic curriculum and outside the ordinary doctrinal control of the territorial Church. Böhme submitted to the prohibition: he ceased writing for nearly six years, from 1613 to 1618-1619^[33].

The imposed silence and the resumption of writing

This silence was no recantation: Böhme continued, according to his own later writings, inwardly meditating the questions opened by the Aurora. In 1618, pressed by a circle of friends convinced of the value of his thought — among them physicians, jurists and Silesian nobles — he took up his pen again, this time composing entire treatises rather than a continuous and unfinished meditation^[34]. It is from this resumption that, in scarcely a few years, the bulk of the Böhmian corpus was born: De Tribus Principiis (Of the Three Principles of the Divine Essence, 1619), De Triplici Vita Hominis (Of the Threefold Life of Man, 1619-1620), Vierzig Fragen von der Seele (Forty Questions of the Soul, 1620), De Incarnatione Verbi (Of the Incarnation of the Word, 1620), the Sex Puncta Theosophica and Sex Puncta Mystica (Six Theosophic Points, Six Mystic Points, 1620), the Mysterium Pansophicum (1620), then, in the last years of his life, De Signatura Rerum (1621-1622), De Electione Gratiae (Of Election to Grace, 1623), the Mysterium Magnum (1623) and finally Der Weg zu Christo (The Way to Christ), published 1 January 1624^[35].

Böhme does not construct a deductive system in the manner of a scholastic treatise: his work proceeds by successive intuitions, reformulated and deepened from one book to the next, which makes any synthetic presentation necessarily simplifying. Academic commentators nevertheless agree in isolating several central intuitions, stable from one treatise to another, which form the framework of his theosophy — a term meaning etymologically "wisdom of God" and designating, according to the definition given by the historian of esotericism Antoine Faivre, a spiritual attitude in which God, man and nature are associated in a speculation founded on inner illumination rather than on discursive reason alone^[36].

The Ungrund: the "bottomless ground" before God

In other words, before asking "who is God", Böhme first asks what there is even before God knows himself. This is the most original starting point — and the most foreign to classical scholastic theology — of his entire system. Böhme names Ungrund (literally "bottomless ground", sometimes rendered "bottomless abyss") what he places logically before the Deity itself: an unfathomable nothingness, prior to every distinction, to be confused neither with the Trinitarian God of the Christian faith nor with a pure nothingness in the negative sense^[37]. According to the analysis of the philosopher Sean McGrath, Böhme's most original contribution lies precisely in this conception of the divine will, "radically different from the cognitive notion of volition found in the Aristotelian-inspired scholastic tradition": for Böhme, the will is not a faculty of the divine intellect choosing between possibles, but the primordial drive producing being itself, a principle more fundamental than being^[38].

From this unfathomable Ungrund there is said to emerge, according to the reconstruction proposed by Böhme's commentators, a dialectical movement: the nothingness, lacking everything, "would aspire to be", a root of desire would germinate within it, kindling like a spark that makes being spring from non-being and light from darkness^[39]. From this process there would be born, according to Böhme, the Deity itself — the Trinitarian divinity becoming conscious of its own reality by giving itself a mirror in which to contemplate itself^[40]. This movement, which makes creation a sort of inner necessity of the unfolding of divine consciousness, is precisely what Catholic theology cannot receive without major reservation, as will be seen below.

The philosopher and historian Alexandre Koyré, author of the French reference study on Böhme, insists on an essential point of method for understanding this speculative theogony: it can only be fully understood when replaced in its scientific context. According to his analysis^[41], Böhme's mysticism is inseparable from the new cosmology created by Copernicus.

Böhme was indeed writing at a time when the closed, hierarchised universe of medieval cosmology was cracking under the effect of the Copernican revolution; his theosophy, which makes God a dynamic process and no longer only a static, completed being, partakes of this broader intellectual upheaval, even though Böhme himself never discusses Copernicus in a technical way.

The seven qualities, or "fountain spirits"

To describe how this gestating Deity concretely unfolds, Böhme elaborated the celebrated doctrine of the seven qualities (in German Qualitäten) or "fountain spirits" (Quellgeister), which according to him structure every manifestation, divine as well as natural. The following table summarises their logical sequence as Böhme sets it out principally in the Aurora and the Mysterium Pansophicum:

The first three qualities form what Böhme calls the "world of darkness" or world of anger (Grimm); fire, the fourth quality, constitutes the turning point where the first three are either consumed in anger or transfigured into love; the last three qualities then form the "world of light"^[42]. An explanatory note appended to the old English edition of the Aurora thus sums up the function of these seven principles:

"The seven qualities are sometimes called the qualifying or fountain spirits, which give, model, image or frame the power, virtue, colour, taste, figure, shape... of all things." — Explanatory note appended to the English edition of the Aurora (trans. John Sparrow, 17th century), reprinted on archive.org^[43]

In other words: the seven qualities are, for Böhme, the "fountain spirits" giving form, colour, savour and figure to every created thing — a grid of reading he applies as much to divine theogony as to botany, alchemy or human anatomy. This methodical extension of one and the same sevenfold scheme to fields as disparate as theology, chemistry and psychology is one of the distinctive marks — and one of the principal reading difficulties — of the whole Böhmian oeuvre.

The signature of things: nature as God's language

From this doctrine of the seven qualities Böhme drew his most lastingly influential theory on Western thought: that of the signature of things (Signatura Rerum), set out in the treatise of the same name written in 1621-1622. According to this doctrine, each creature bears imprinted in itself, in its form, colour, scent or behaviour, the visible trace of its invisible spiritual essence — a conception prolonging and theologising a vocabulary already widespread among the physicians and botanists of his time, heirs of Paracelsus, for whom the outward form of a plant "signed" its curative virtues. Böhme opens his treatise with an assertion that would become one of his most quoted formulas:

"Everything has its mouth to manifestation; and this is the language of nature, whence everything speaks out of its property, and continually manifests, declares, and sets forth itself for what it is good or profitable; for each thing manifests its mother, which thus gives the essence and the will to the form." — Jakob Böhme, De Signatura Rerum (1622), chap. I, English trans. John Ellistone, 17th century^[44]

For Böhme, the whole of nature is thus a text to be deciphered, a second Scripture parallel to the Bible, in which God continues to speak through the visible forms of the created world. This conception, seductive in its poetic coherence, departs however from the Catholic theology of revelation, which clearly distinguishes natural revelation (accessible to reason from God's works, cf. Romans 1:20) from supernatural revelation, entrusted exclusively to Scripture and to the living Tradition of the Church, and which refrains from making nature itself a channel of continuous, personal doctrinal revelation, even reserved to a small number of the illumined.

Sophia, the divine Virgin, and the fall of Adam

One of the most original — and most problematic from the Catholic point of view — features of Böhmian theosophy is the introduction, within his very reflection on the Trinity, of a figure he names Sophia, divine Wisdom, conceived as a sort of "virgin" or mirror in which the Deity contemplates its own image even before the creation of the material world. In Böhme this is in no way the Virgin Mary of the Catholic faith, nor even a person distinct from the Trinity in the dogmatic sense: Sophia designates rather a mirror-wisdom, a speculative feminine principle internal to the process by which God renders himself manifest to himself^[45].

This Sophia plays a decisive role in Böhme's anthropology: according to him, Adam, before the fall, is said to have been an androgynous being, inwardly united with this divine Wisdom, sharing in its light and virginal purity. The fall is said to consist precisely in the loss of this union with Sophia, replaced by sexual division and by the birth of Eve drawn from Adam's side — an episode Böhme re-reads not as the origin but as the consequence of a fall already inwardly accomplished^[46]. The restoration of this lost union then becomes, in Böhmian spirituality, the very stake of the "new birth" (Wiedergeburt), a theme on which he insists at length in Der Weg zu Christo — one of his treatises closest, in tone, to the ordinary Lutheran piety of his time, centred on repentance, conversion of heart and mystical union with Christ rather than on theogonic speculation.

It is precisely this introduction of Sophia into the economy of salvation, perceived by some of his contemporaries as encroaching on the place of the second person of the Trinity, that would earn Böhme his second and last persecution in 1624, as will be seen below.

Evil, anger and the coincidence of opposites

The most debated point in the whole of Böhmian theosophy concerns the origin of evil. Where classical Catholic theology defines evil as a privation — an absence of due good, not a positive reality created by God — Böhme seeks to account for it by a radically different route, which he himself presents as an authentic theodicy, that is an attempt to justify both the existence of God and that of evil^[47]. According to the reconstruction proposed by the historian of esotericism Pierre Deghaye, Böhme establishes "the pre-existence of evil in relation to Adam's sin", which he interprets no longer as the cause of evil but as one of its historical consequences: "evil is not in God, but it is in the nature which reveals him and without which he would remain for ever unknowable"^[48].

Concretely, Böhme locates the origin of evil in an abyss (Abgrund) which God is said to have himself created, into whose darkness the fallen angel, Lucifer, is said to have been cast — "God originally creates darkness, which is the abyss into which the fallen angel will be cast", writes Deghaye synthesising Böhmian thought, before specifying the scenario that follows: "God punished the fallen angel by creating the world in order to shut him up in it, and man was in turn created to serve as his gaoler"^[49]. Man, in turn corrupted by Lucifer, then drags the whole of nature into his own fall. This coincidence of opposites — light and darkness, love and anger, the "yes" (Ja) and the "no" (Nein) — runs through the whole Böhmian system: nothing, according to him, can manifest itself without its contrary; it is from the tension between the two poles that all reality springs, including, in a sense, the reality of God himself rendering himself manifest through this opposition.

Böhme moreover explicitly rejects the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination — the election of some to grace and the reprobation of others to damnation even before their birth. For him, "God's call is addressed to all, as is Satan's"; only those who freely answer this call become, by their answer, true "children of God"^[50]. On this precise point — the universality of the divine call and the responsibility of human freedom in answering grace — Böhme's position joins, without knowing or explicitly willing it, the traditional Catholic teaching against Calvinist determinism, even if the theogonic premises founding it in him remain very far removed from the Catholic theology of grace.

Der Weg zu Christo attacked

The unexpected success of Der Weg zu Christo, published with authorisation on 1 January 1624 — the only work printed in Böhme's lifetime with the approval of the authorities — brutally rekindled the controversy. Pastor Richter, still in office, resumed his attacks, this time insisting particularly on the introduction of Sophia into Böhme's exposition, which he judged threatening to orthodox Trinitarian doctrine as understood by the confessional Lutheranism of his time^[51]. Böhme himself relates, in a letter of 2 April 1624, that Richter "cursed me and my little book, and condemned the book to the fire"^[52]. It is in the Invective Richter then had published against him that the famous formula appears, mocking in the same breath his lack of theological training and his artisan's trade:

"There are as many blasphemies [...] as there are lines; it smells of shoemaker's pitch." — Gregorius Richter, Invective against Böhme (1624), passage reported by Hans Lassen Martensen, Jacob Boehme: His Life and Teaching, or Studies in Theosophy, trans. T. Rhys Evans, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1885, p. 13^[53]

On 26 March 1624, the town council of Görlitz summoned Böhme and, under pressure from the clergy, ordered him to leave the town, specifying that the Elector of Saxony would be informed in case of refusal^[54]. Böhme then wrote an Apology against Gregor Richter in his defence, then left Görlitz in early May for Dresden, where he hoped to obtain an audience with the Elector to clear his honour.

The journey to Dresden

At Dresden, Böhme was received with unexpected consideration by several physicians, theologians and nobles of the court, including the physician and alchemist Benedikt Hinckelmann, who lodged him^[55]. Several witnesses of the time report that he was examined by professors and members of the electoral clergy without any formal condemnation being pronounced against him — but without his obtaining either the princely audience he hoped for, or a public and official rehabilitation. He returned empty-handed at the end of June 1624 and settled with friends, first at Schweinhaus, then at Seifersdorf, where he rejoined his biographer Abraham von Frankenberg. It is there that he began writing his 177 Theosophic Questions, a work he would leave unfinished^[56].

A tried end of life and a disputed burial

In autumn 1624, exhausted by the journey and by the strain of the preceding months, Böhme contracted a severe intestinal illness. Urgently brought back to Görlitz on 7 November, he had, before receiving the last sacraments, to submit to a long catechetical examination demanded by a clergy still suspicious of him^[57]. He died on 17 November 1624, at forty-nine^[58]. Richter's successor, Pastor Nicolaus Thomas, first refused him Christian burial; another ecclesiastic, Elias Dietrich, finally consented with ill grace^[59]. According to biographical tradition, the crowd is said to have broken the cross adorning his tomb shortly after the funeral — a sign, were one needed, of the persistent distrust Böhme aroused in his own town until his death.

Böhme never left his Lutheran confession and always presented himself as a faithful Christian, desirous of serving the Church rather than combating it. It remains that his theosophy, taken as a whole, contains elements the Catholic Church cannot receive without grave reservation. The New Catholic Encyclopedia (2nd ed., Gale / Catholic University of America, 2003), which devotes a notice to Böhme under the entry "Böhme, Jakob", thus sums up the twofold observation Catholic theology makes on his work:

"When he identified God with heaven, hell, and the material world he was approaching pantheism." "[In attempting to explain good and evil,] he posited a sort of dualism in the divine nature." — New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., Gale / Catholic University of America, 2003, art. "Böhme, Jakob"^[60]

The same notice nevertheless recognises, in the same breath, that Böhme "clung to the traditional doctrine of the Trinity, Incarnation, Redemption, and the Sacraments"^[61] — a nuanced judgement, clearly distinguishing the pious man, still attached to the fundamental truths of Christianity, from the speculative system he built around them.

Pantheism and emanationism: what the Church cannot receive

The first point of friction concerns the relation between God and the world. As early as the 19th century, the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907-1912), in its article devoted to the Reformation, lists Böhme without hesitation among the representatives of a "mystical pantheism", teaching that "the external revelation of God in the Bible could be recognized only through an internal light"^[62]. This caution is not peculiar to the 19th century: the Catholic magisterium constantly condemns every doctrine identifying God with the world or making the world a necessary emanation of the divine substance. The Catechism of the Catholic Church recalls it in terms applying directly to Böhmian theogony:

"Some philosophers have said that everything is God, that the world is God, or that the development of the world is the development of God (pantheism). Others have said that the world is a necessary emanation arising from God and returning to him." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 285^[63]

The Catechism immediately opposes to these conceptions the Catholic doctrine of creation: "God creates freely 'out of nothing'"^[64], and "the eternal God gave a beginning to all that exists outside of himself; he alone is Creator"^[65]. Yet this is precisely the point Böhmian theogony renders ambiguous: in Böhme, the Deity itself "is born" or "unfolds" from the Ungrund according to a process which, even presented as free, resembles an inner organic development more than an absolutely sovereign and gratuitous creative decision. The creation of the material world, in this scheme, appears less as a free act of divine Omnipotence than as an almost necessary stage of God's self-manifestation to himself — which is exactly what the Catholic doctrine of creation ex nihilo excludes.

A dualism within the divine nature: the problem of evil in God

The second point, graver still in the eyes of Catholic theology, concerns the location of evil. By situating the origin of "anger" (Grimm) and "darkness" within the very process by which the Deity manifests itself to itself, Böhme introduces, whether or not it was his intention, a form of duality within the divine nature — as if God bore in himself, even before creation and Lucifer's fall, a dark pole necessary to his own self-consciousness. This conception clashes head-on with two pillars of classical Catholic theology: divine simplicity — God is composed of no parts, no inner tension, no pole contrary to another — and the Johannine affirmation that "God is light, and in him is no darkness" (1 Jn 1:5). Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose doctrine of divine simplicity (Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 3) remains the classical reference of Catholic theology on this point, absolutely excludes all composition, including dialectical composition, within the divine being: God is pure act, with no unactualised potency, no share of darkness to overcome or integrate. Catholic theology defines evil, on the contrary, as a privation — an absence of due good in a nature that ought to possess it — and not as a positive reality, even located in an "abyss" prior to creation. In this sense, the Böhmian theodicy, however original and generous in its intention to "justify God", takes a path the Catholic Church cannot follow without compromising the absolute unity and purity of the divine nature.

What Böhme keeps of the Christian faith

It would however be unjust to reduce Böhme to these doctrinal deviations. All his life he presented himself — and was received by a non-negligible part of the clergy and scholars of his time — as a sincere Christian, desirous above all of helping his readers convert and unite themselves to Christ. Der Weg zu Christo, his only work published in his lifetime with authorisation, is moreover, in tone, much closer to a spiritual treatise of practical piety — on repentance, resignation, the new birth — than to the theogonic speculation dominating the Aurora or the Mysterium Magnum. Böhme never formally broke with the Lutheran Church; he asked for and received the last sacraments on his deathbed, despite the persistent distrust of the Görlitz clergy; and the New Catholic Encyclopedia itself stresses his genuine attachment to the Trinity, the Incarnation, Redemption and the sacraments^[66]. The fairest Catholic judgement on Böhme is therefore neither a blanket condemnation nor an unqualified rehabilitation, but a precise discernment: an often authentic piety and a real intuition of divine mercy, carried by a speculative system several of whose key pieces — the Ungrund prior to the Deity, inner duality in God, Sophia mingled with the Trinitarian economy — remain incompatible with the Catholic doctrine of God, of creation and of evil.

Few 17th-century religious authors have known so vast and so diverse a posterity as Jakob Böhme. His works, gathered and edited after his death, crossed confessional and linguistic borders to irrigate currents as different as Lutheran Pietism, English mysticism, French esotericism and German philosophical Idealism.

The English "Behmenists" and the Pietist movements

In England, Böhme's translations — notably those of John Sparrow and John Ellistone in the 17th century — gave birth to a movement of direct disciples nicknamed the Behmenists, active notably within the Philadelphian Society founded by Jane Leade and John Pordage at the end of the 17th century^[67]. Unlike Böhme, these English disciples often adhered to apocatastasis, the doctrine of the final and universal salvation of all creatures, including demons — a position Böhme himself never professed and which the Catholic Church has always reprobated. In Germany, Böhmian influence spread within the Pietist movement through the theologian Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, who associated the doctrine of the seven qualities with the ten Sefirot of Jewish Kabbalah, and Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, founder of the Moravian Brethren community, who took up several elements of Böhmian theosophy in his own theology of the heart^[68].

Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin and French esotericism

It is in France, from 1800 onwards, that Böhme's diffusion took a decisive turn with the translations of the philosopher Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, known as "the Unknown Philosopher", who published his French version of the Aurora in 1800, then, in the following years, those of Des trois principes de l'essence divine (1802), De la triple vie de l'homme (1809), the Quarante questions sur l'âme (1807) and the Six points théosophiques (1806)^[69]. These translations made Böhme one of the major sources of the French Christian esoteric current Saint-Martin helped found, Martinism — a current Ignispedia treats more broadly in its panorama of Western esotericism, where Böhme occupies but one chapter among twenty-five centuries of spiritual history, without the biographical and doctrinal detail the present article devotes to him.

Hegel, Schelling and Franz von Baader

At the turn of the 19th century, Böhme knew a first-rate philosophical reception among the representatives of German Idealism. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, devotes to Böhme a development in which he designates him by the Latin title of philosophus teutonicus and affirms:

"It was, in fact, through him that Philosophy first appeared in Germany with a character peculiar to itself." — G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, section devoted to Jacob Böhme, English trans. Haldane and Simson^[70]

This judgement — that it was through Böhme, according to Hegel, that philosophy appeared in Germany with a truly distinctive character — coming from the most systematic of German Idealist philosophers, lastingly established Böhme's status as an obligatory forerunner of every history of German philosophy, even though Hegel otherwise criticises the disorder and lack of conceptual rigour of his writing. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, for his part, discovered Böhme through his friend the Catholic philosopher Franz Xaver von Baader, and drew direct inspiration from him for his Philosophy and Religion (1804) then for his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), in which the question of the origin of evil in God — a central theme of Böhmian theosophy — becomes one of the central problems of Schelling's late Idealism^[71].

Franz von Baader himself, a Catholic philosopher and theologian appointed in 1826 professor of philosophy and speculative theology at the University of Munich, devoted a large part of his work to commenting on Böhme's doctrine, in the hope of building a "speculative dogmatics" capable, in his view, of reconciling Böhmian theosophy with Catholic dogma and making it prevail over the then-dominant purely philosophical Idealism in Germany^[72]. This attempt by Baader, although testifying to an attentive and generous Catholic reading of Böhme, never received magisterial approval and remains, to this day, considered by Catholic theology as a personal and speculative enterprise rather than an accomplished doctrinal reconciliation — the difficulties set out above (Ungrund, divine duality, Sophia) remaining, in substance, unresolved by Baader's re-reading.

Nicolas Berdiaev and the Russian philosophy of freedom

In the 20th century, it was the Russian religious philosopher Nicolas Berdiaev, exiled in France after the Bolshevik revolution, who gave Böhme his most resounding reception in Orthodox thought. Berdiaev himself translated the Mysterium Magnum into French and prefaced it with two substantial studies, one on the Ungrund and freedom, the other on the doctrine of Sophia and the androgyne^[73]. Berdiaev went so far as to affirm that Böhme must be recognised as one of the greatest Christian gnostics — immediately specifying that he used this term not in the sense of the Gnostic heresies of the first centuries, but to designate a knowledge founded on inner revelation, proceeding by myths and symbols rather than by concepts^[74]. It is in the Böhmian Ungrund that Berdiaev drew the central intuition of his own philosophy: that of an uncreated freedom, logically prior to being itself and to God as he manifests himself — an audacious thesis, largely personal to Berdiaev, pushing speculation on the anteriority of freedom to divine being even further than Böhme himself, and no more received by the Catholic magisterium than the Böhmian theogony inspiring it.

The modern theosophical and occultist appropriation

At the end of the 19th century, Böhme was also claimed by the modern theosophical movement founded by Helena Blavatsky, which saw in him one of the rare Western representatives of a universal esoteric wisdom supposed to precede and encompass all religious traditions. The theosophist Franz Hartmann devoted to him in 1891 a general presentation, The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme, the God-taught Philosopher, still widely circulated today^[75]. This appropriation, peculiar to the theosophical current of which Helena Blavatsky is the principal animator, must be carefully distinguished from the Catholic reading of Böhme set out above: where Baader or even Berdiaev each sought, in their own way, to maintain a real Christological and Trinitarian anchoring in their re-reading of Böhme, the modern theosophical movement tends to instrumentalise his figure in the service of a universalist religious syncretism which Böhme, a Lutheran Christian until his death, would very probably not have recognised as faithful to his own project. In this occultist drift is found one of the points of vigilance Ignispedia develops more broadly in its article on Western esotericism: the constant temptation, among the late heirs of a genuinely believing religious figure, to slide him towards a universalist esoteric framework foreign to his original intentions.

Böhme finally influenced, more diffusely, several North American religious currents born of German Pietist emigration — the Ephrata Cloister community founded by Conrad Beissel in Pennsylvania, or the Harmony Society of George Rapp — as well as several English-speaking writers and poets of the 18th and 19th centuries, foremost among them William Blake, who admired the illustrations the engraver Dionysius Andreas Freher had devoted to Böhme's works, and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who praises Böhme in his Biographia Literaria^[76].

• Western esotericism — panorama of twenty-five centuries of esoteric history, from ancient gnosis to the New Age, and Catholic discernment
• Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) — another 17th-century figure marginalised by his own religious community for doctrinal positions judged heretical