Studies on Jacob Böhme

Jacob Boehme is a notoriously forbidding author. He expresses himself in the registers of myth and personal revelation. He forges his metaphors and analogies with the vocabulary of alchemy, which has become incomprehensible to us. He draws his references from the wellspring of Scripture, which we no longer know. He plunges into the heart of the Bottomless Abyss to contemplate the generation of God from within the Godhead, in wrath and anger.Yet this obscurity and strangeness should not discourage us from discovering an author decisive in the development of Western philosophy. For it was from the fundamental intuition of Jacob Boehme—that of the Ungrund—that German Idealism drew its sustenance. Without the theosophical cobbler of Görlitz, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling could never have freed themselves from the mental prisons built by the Hellenes. This paradoxical thought, sung more than argued, enabled them to tear themselves away from the illusory clarity of classical metaphysics. This appropriation of Jacob Boehme’s visions by German Idealism, especially Schelling, introduced will and History into the heart of metaphysics. We know the decisive role of this inoculation in the developments of modernity—its hubris, its deviations, its disasters.But did this appropriation, under the guise of conceptual and scientific transcendence, not miss the singularity of Jacob Boehme? Did it not attempt to reabsorb an irruption, singular and irreducible, which perhaps still contains unheard-of possibilities? Nikolai Berdyaev, because he mastered philosophy from an extra-philosophical standpoint—that of an ardent and indomitable faith—was able to grasp and convey this singularity. In these studies, first published in the émigré journal Put’ (1929–1930) and here translated for the first time from the Russian original, Berdyaev introduces us to the heart of this Vision in clear terms, but from the Seer’s standpoint and in spiritual empathy with him. He introduces us to the urgency of meditating upon Jacob Boehme.About This EditionThis volume presents, for the first time in English, the complete translation of all three texts Berdyaev devoted to Jacob Boehme—including the review of Alexandre Koyré's landmark study and both major essays—directly from the Russian originals as they appeared in Put'. Previous English versions, translated from German intermediaries, offered only the first essay in abridged form; the study on Sophia and the Androgyne has never before appeared in English. The translator has restored the German citations from Böhme's works in scholarly footnotes, allowing readers to consult the original sources. Beyond serving as an unparalleled introduction to Boehme'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.