Mysterium Magnum Vol One Jacob Boehme Christian Mysticism 2007 HC Facsimile Ed
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Jacob Boehme was born in 1575. He received little if any formal
education and was apprenticed to a shoemaker at Goerlitz in Saxony. From
an early age he seems to have been devoted to the study of the Bible as
well as to have had a growing, inner, sense of the reality of God.
Walking one day in the fields, when he was twenty-five years old, the
mystery of creation was suddenly opened to him, of which he later said
that "in one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been
many years at the university . . . and thereupon I turned my heart to
praise God for it." As experiences of this kind came more frequently, he
puzzled much as to why such knowledge should be given to him, of all
men, who sought only the love of God and was quite unlearned in the
ordinary sense. Some ten years later he began to record what he
received, as a help to his own memory, and thus was born The Aurora, his
first book, finished in 1612. From then on he found both friends and
enemies of his work. Due to persecution in his hometown, Boehme later
settled in Dresden, where he died in 1624. Mysterium Magnum, written by
Boehme the year before he died and at a time when his powers of
expression had developed to their full, is perhaps central to his work
in some thirty-one or thirty-two original volumes. Taking the general
form of an interpretation of Genesis, it far outstrips such apparent
confines, touching among other matters upon the meaning of the New
Testament and, from the first sentence, leading to the heart of the
universal experience of all mystics: When we consider the visible world
with its essence, and consider the life of the creatures, then we find
therein the likeness of the invisible, spiritual world, which is hidden
in the visible world as the soul in the body; and we see thereby that
the hidden God is nigh unto all and through all, and yet wholly hidden
to the visible essence. Among those who have acknowledged the spiritual
stature of Boehme are Hegel, William Law, St. Martin (le Philosophe
Inconnu), Dean Inge, and Nicolas Berdyaev.