Part 10

With such a view in the background, Jacob Boehme’s conceptions as to the being of the whole world built themselves up in his mind, so that he makes the orderly world emerge in a series of steps from the “fathomless abyss.” This world builds itself up in seven natural forms. In dark astringency the Root-Being receives form, dumbly shut up within itself and motionless. This astringency Boehme grasps under the symbol of Salt. In employing such designations he leans upon Paracelsus, who had borrowed from chemical processes his names for the processes of Nature. By swallowing up its opposite, the first nature-form passes over into the form of the second; the astringent, the motionless, takes on movement; Power and Life enter into it. Quicksilver (Mercury) is the symbol for this second form. In the struggle of Rest and Motion, of Death with Life, the third form of Nature unveils itself (Sulphur). This Life battling within itself, becomes manifest to itself; it lives thenceforward no longer an outer battle of its members; there quivers through it as it were a unifying glowing flash, itself lighting up its own being (Fire). This fourth form of Nature rises to the fifth, the living battle of the parts resting in themselves (Water). On this level, as upon the first, there is present an inner astringency and dumbness; only it is not an absolute rest, a silence of the inner opposites, but an interior movement of the opposites. It is not the motionless resting in itself, but the moved, that which has been kindled by the fire-flash of the fourth stage. Upon the sixth level, the Root-Being itself becomes aware of itself as such inner life. Living beings endowed with senses represent this form of Nature. Jacob Boehme calls it the “Clang” or Call, and in so doing adopts the sense-perception of sound as the symbol for sense-perception in general. The seventh form of Nature is the Spirit, raising itself on the basis of its sense-perceptions (Wisdom). He finds himself again as himself, as the Root-Being, within the world that has grown up out of the “fathomless abyss,” shaping itself out of the harmonious and the discordant. “The Holy Ghost brings the Glory of this Majesty into the being, wherein the Godhead stands revealed.”

It is with such views that Jacob Boehme seeks to fathom that world which for him, according to the knowledge of his time, was reckoned as the actual world of fact. For him all is fact which is so regarded by the natural science of his time and by the Bible. His way of conceiving things is one thing, his world of facts quite another. One can imagine the former applied to a totally different knowledge of facts. And thus there appears before our eyes a Jacob Boehme as he might stand at the parting of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Such a one would not saturate with his way of conceiving things the six days’ creation work of the Bible and the fight of the angels and the devils, but Lyell’s geological knowledge and the facts of Haeckel’s _The History of Creation_. He who can penetrate into the spirit of Jacob Boehme’s writings must arrive at this conviction.[18]

[18] We may here name the most important of Boehme’s writings: _Die Morgenröthe im Aufgang_; _Die drei Prinzipien göttlichen Lebens oder über das dreifache Leben des Menschen_; _Das umgewandte Auge_; _“Signatura rerum” oder von der Geburt und Bezeichnung aller Wesen_; _Das “Mysterium Magnum_.”

GIORDANO BRUNO AND ANGELUS SILESIUS

In the first decennium of the sixteenth century, the scientific genius of Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) thinks out in the castle of Heilsberg, in Prussia, an intellectual structure which compels the men of subsequent epochs to look up to the starry heavens with other conceptions than those which their forefathers in antiquity and the Middle Ages had. To them the earth was their dwelling-place, at rest in the centre of the Universe. The stars, however, were for them beings of a perfect nature, whose motion took place in circles because the circle is the representative of perfection.

In that which the stars showed to human senses they beheld something of the nature of soul, something spiritual. It was one kind of speech that the things and processes upon earth spoke to man; quite another, that of the shining stars, beyond the moon in the pure æther, which seemed like some spiritual nature filling space. Nicholas of Cusa had already formed other ideas.

Through Copernicus, earth became for man a brother-being in face of the other heavenly bodies, a star moving like others. All the difference that earth has to show for man he could now reduce to this: that earth is his dwelling-place. He was no longer forced to think differently about the events of this earth and those of the rest of universal space. The world of his senses had expanded itself into the most remote spaces. He was compelled henceforth to allow that which penetrated his eye from the æther to count as sense-world just as much as the things of earth. He could no longer seek in the æther in sensuous fashion for the Spirit.

Whoever, henceforth, strove after higher knowledge, must needs come to an understanding with this expanded world of the senses. In earlier centuries, the brooding mind of man stood before a world of facts. Now he was confronted with a new task. No longer could the things of earth only express this nature from within man’s inner being. This inner nature of his was called on to embrace the spirit of a sense-world, which fills the All of Space everywhere alike.

The thinker of Nola, PHILOTHEO GIORDANO BRUNO (1548-1600) found himself faced by such a problem. The senses have conquered the universe of space; henceforth the Spirit is no more to be found in space. Thus man was guided from without to seek henceforward for the Spirit there alone where from out of profound inner experiences those glorious thinkers sought it, whose ranks our previous expositions have led before us. These thinkers drew upon a view of the world to which, later on, the advance of natural knowledge forces humanity. The sun of those ideas, which later should shine upon a new view of Nature, with them still stands below the horizon; but their light already appears as the early dawn at a time when men’s thoughts of Nature itself still lay in the darkness of night.

The sixteenth century gave the heavenly spaces to natural science for the sense-world to which it rightfully belongs; by the end of the nineteenth century, this science had advanced so far that, even within the phenomena of plant, animal, and human life, it could assign to the world of sensible facts that which belongs to it. Neither, then, in the æther above, nor in the development of living creatures, can this natural science henceforth seek for anything but sensible, matter-of-fact processes. As the thinker in the sixteenth century had to say: “The earth is a star among other stars, subject to the same laws as other stars”; so must the thinker of the nineteenth century say: “Man, whatever may be his origin and his future, is for anthropology only a mammal, and further, that mammal whose organisation, needs and diseases are the most complex, whose brain, with its marvellous capacities, has reached the highest level of development.”[19]

[19] Paul Topinard: _Anthropologie_, Leipzig, 1888, p. 528.

From such a standpoint, attained through natural science, there can no longer occur any confusion between the spiritual and the sensible, provided man understands himself rightly. Developed natural science makes it impossible to seek in Nature for a Spirit conceived of after the fashion of something material, just as healthy thinking makes it impossible to seek for the reason of the forward movement of the clock-hand, not in mechanical laws (the Spirit of inorganic Nature), but in a special Daimon, supposed to bring about the movements of the hands. Ernst Haeckel was quite right in rejecting, as a scientist, the gross conception of a God conceived of in material fashion. “In the higher and more abstract forms of religion, the bodily appearance is abandoned and God is worshipped as pure Spirit, devoid of body. ‘God is a Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.’ But, nevertheless, the soul-activity of this pure Spirit remains quite the same as that of the anthropomorphic personal God. In reality, even this immaterial Spirit is not thought of as bodiless, but as invisible, like a gas. We thus arrive at the paradoxical conception of God as a gaseous vertebrate.”[20]

[20] Haeckel, _Riddle of the Universe_.

In reality, the matter-of-fact, sensible existence of something spiritual may be assumed only when immediate sensible experience shows something spiritual, and only such a degree of the spiritual may be assumed as can be perceived in this manner. That first rate thinker, B. Carneri, ventured to say (in his book: _Empfindung und Bewusstsein_, p. 15): “The dictum: No spirit without matter, but also no matter without spirit,--would entitle us to extend the question to the plant also, nay, even to any block of stone taken at random, wherein there seems very little to speak in favour of these correlative conceptions.” Spiritual occurrences as matters of fact are the results of various doings of an organism; the Spirit of the world is not present in the world in a material sense, but precisely after a spiritual fashion. Man’s soul is a sum of processes in which Spirit appears most immediately as fact. In the form of such a soul, however, Spirit is present in man only. And it implies that one misunderstands Spirit, that one commits the worst sin against Spirit, to seek for Spirit in the form of Soul elsewhere than in man, to imagine other beings thus ensouled as man is. Whoever does this, only shows that he has not experienced Spirit within himself; he has only experienced that outer form of appearance of Spirit, the Soul, which reigns in him. But that is just the same as though one regarded a circle drawn with a pencil as the real, mathematically ideal circle. Whoever experiences in himself nothing other than the soul-form of the Spirit, feels himself thereupon driven to assume also such a soul-form in non-human things, in order that thereby he may not need to remain rooted in the materiality of the gross senses. Instead of thinking of the Root-Being of the world as Spirit, he thinks of it as World-Soul, and postulates a general ensoulment of Nature.

Giordano Bruno, upon whom the new Copernican view of Nature forced itself, could grasp Spirit in the world, from which it had been expelled in its old form, in no other manner than as World-Soul. On plunging into Bruno’s writings (especially his deeply thoughtful book: _De Rerum Principiis et Elementis et Causis_) one gets the impression that he thought of things as ensouled, although in varying degree. He has not, in reality, experienced in himself the Spirit, therefore he conceives Spirit after the fashion of the human soul, wherein alone he has encountered it. When he speaks of Spirit, he conceives of it in the following way: “The universal reason is the inmost, most effective and most special capacity, and a potential part of the World-Soul; it is something one and identical, which fills the All, illuminates the universe and instructs Nature how to bring forth her species as they ought to be.” In these sentences Spirit, it is true, is not described as a “gaseous vertebrate,” but it is described as a being that is like to the human soul. “Let now a thing be as small and tiny as you please, it yet has within it a portion of spiritual substance, which, when it finds a substratum adapted thereto, reaches out to become a plant, an animal, and organises itself to any body you choose that is ordinarily called ensouled. For Spirit is to be found in all things, and there does not exist even the tiniest little body which does not embrace in itself such a share thereof as causes it to come to life.”

Because Giordano Bruno had not really experienced the Spirit, as Spirit, in himself, he could therefore confuse the life of the Spirit with the external mechanical processes, wherewith Raymond Lully (1235-1315) wanted to unveil the secrets of the Spirit in his so-called “Great Art” (_Ars Magna_). A recent philosopher, Franz Brentano, describes this “Great Art” thus: “Concepts were to be inscribed upon concentric, separately revolving discs, and then the most varied combinations produced by turning them about.” Whatever chance brings up in the turning of these discs, was shaped into a judgment about the highest truths. And Giordano Bruno, in his manifold wanderings through Europe, made his appearance at various seats of learning as a teacher of this “Great Art.” He possessed the daring courage to think of the stars as worlds, perfectly analogous to our earth; he widened the outlook of scientific thinking beyond the confines of earth; he thought of the heavenly bodies no longer as bodily spirits; but he still thought of them as soul-like spirits. One must not be unjust towards the man whom the Catholic Church caused to pay with death the penalty for his advanced way of thinking. It required something gigantic to harness the whole space of heaven in the same view of the universe which hitherto had been applied only to things upon earth, even though Bruno did still think of the sensible as soul-like.

* * * * *

In the seventeenth century there appeared Johann Scheffler, called ANGELUS SILESIUS (1624-1677), a personality in whom there once more shone forth, in mighty harmony of soul, what Tauler, Weigel, Jacob Boehme, and others, had prepared. Gathered, as it were, into a spiritual focus and shining with enhanced light-giving power, the ideas of the thinkers named make their appearance in his book: “Cherubinischer Wandersmann. Geistreiche Sinn- und Schlussreime.” And everything that Angelus Silesius utters appears as such an immediate, inevitable, natural revelation of his personality, that it is as though this man had been called by a special providence to embody wisdom in a personal form. The simple, matter-of-course way in which he lives wisdom, attains its expression by being set forth in sayings which, even in respect of their art and their form, are worthy of admiration. He hovers like some spiritual being over all earthly existence; and what he says is like the breath of another world, freed beforehand from all that is gross and impure, wherefrom human wisdom generally only toilsomely works itself free.

He only is truly a knower, in the sense of Angelus Silesius, who brings the eye of the All to vision in himself; he alone sees his action in the true light who feels that this action is wrought in him by the hand of the All: “God is in me the fire, and I in him the light; are we not in most intimate communion one with another?”--“I am as rich as God; there can be no grain of dust that I--believe me, man,--have not in common with Him.”--“God loves me above Himself; if I love Him above myself: I so give Him as much as He gives me from Himself.”--“The bird flies in the air, the stone rests on the earth; in water lives the fish, my spirit in God’s own hand.”--“Art thou born of God, then bloometh God in thee; and His Godhead is thy sap and thy adornment.”--“Halt! whither runnest thou? Heaven is in thee: seekest thou God otherwhere, thou missest Him ever and ever.”

For one who thus feels himself in the All, every separation ceases between self and another being; he no longer feels himself as a single individual; rather does he feel all that there is of him as a part of the world, his own proper being, indeed, as that World-Whole itself. “The world, it holds thee not; thou art thyself the world that holds thee, in thee, with thee, so strongly captive bound.”--“Man has never perfect bliss before that unity has swallowed up other-ness.”--“Man is all things; if aught is lacking to him, then in truth he knoweth not his own riches.”

As a sense-being, man is a thing among other things, and his sense-organs bring to him, as a sensible individuality, sense-news of the things in space and time outside of him; but when Spirit speaks in man, then there remains no without and no within; nothing is here and nothing is there that is spiritual; nothing is earlier and nothing is later; space and time have vanished in the contemplation of the All-Spirit. Only so long as man looks forth as an individual, is he here and the thing there; and only so long as he looks forth as an individual, is this earlier, and this later. “Man, if thou swingest thy spirit over time and place, so each moment canst thou be in eternity.”--“I am myself eternity when I leave time behind, and self in God and God in self together grasp.”--“The rose that here thine outer eye doth see, it so hath bloomed in God from all eternity.”--“In centre set thyself, so see’st thou all at once: what then and now occurred, here and in heaven’s realm.”--“So long for thee, my friend, in mind lies place and time: so long graspest thou not what’s God, nor what eternity.”--“When man from manifoldness withdraws, and inward turns to God, so cometh he to unity.” The summit has thus been climbed, whereon man steps forth beyond his individual “I” and abolishes every opposition between the world and himself. A higher life begins for him. The inner experience that comes over him appears to him as the death of the old and a resurrection in a new life. “When thou dost raise thyself above thyself and lettest God o’errule; then in thy spirit happens ascension into heaven.”--“The body in the spirit must arise, the spirit, too, in God: if thou in him, my man, will live for ever blessed.”--“So much mine ‘I’ in me doth ’minish and decrease; so much therefore to power cometh the Lord’s own ‘I.’”

From such a point of view, man recognises his meaning and the meaning of all things in the realm of eternal necessity. The natural All appears to him immediately as the Divine Spirit. The thought of a divine All-Spirit, who could still have being and sub-existence over and beside the things of the world, vanishes away as a superseded conception. This All-Spirit appears so outpoured into things, so becomes one in being with the things, that it could no longer be thought at all, if even one single member were thought away from its being. “Naught is but I and thou; and if we twain were not; then is God no more God, and heaven falleth in.”--Man feels himself as a necessary link in the world-chain. His doing has no longer aught of arbitrariness or of individuality in it. What he does is necessary in the whole, in the world-chain, which would fall to pieces if this his doing were to fall out from it. “God may not make without me a single little worm: if I with him uphold it not, straightway must it burst asunder.”--“I know that without me God can no moment live: if I come to naught, he needs must give up the ghost.”--Upon this height, man for the first time sees things in their real being. He no longer needs to ascribe from outside to the smallest thing, to the grossly sensible, a spiritual entity. For just as this minutest thing is, in all its smallness and gross sensibility, it is a link in the Whole. “No grain of dust is so vile, no mote can be so small: the wise man seeth God most gloriously therein.”--“In a mustard seed, if thou wilt understand it, is the image of all things above and beneath.”

Man feels himself free upon this height. For constraint is there only where a thing can constrain from without. But when all that is without has flowed into the within, when the opposition between “I and world,” “Without and Within,” “Nature and Spirit,” has disappeared, man then feels all that impels him as his own impulse. “Shut me, as strongly as thou wilt, in a thousand irons: I still will be quite free and unfettered.”--“So far as my will is dead, so far must God do what I will; I myself prescribe to him the pattern and the goal.”--At this point cease all moral obligations, coming from without: man becomes to himself measure and goal. He is subject to no law; for the law, too, has become his being. “For the wicked is the law; were there no command written, still would the pious love God and their neighbour.”

Thus, on the higher level of knowledge, the innocence of Nature is given back to man. He fulfils the tasks that are set him in the feeling of an external necessity. He says to himself: Through this iron necessity it is given into thy hand to withdraw from this very iron necessity the link which has been allotted to thee. “Ye men, learn but from the meadow flower: how ye shall please God and be beautiful as well.”--“The rose exists without why and because, she blooms because she blooms; she takes no heed of herself, asks not if men see her.” The man who has arisen upon the higher level feels in himself the eternal, necessary pressure of the All, as does the meadow flower; he acts, as the meadow flower blooms. The feeling of his moral responsibility grows in all his doing into the immeasurable. For that which he does not do is withdrawn from the All, is a slaying of that All, so far as the possibility of such a slaying lies with him. “What is it, not to sin? Thou need’st not question long: go, the dumb flowers will tell it thee.”--“All must be slain. If thou slayest not thyself for God, then at last eternal death shall slay thee for the enemy.”

AFTERWORD

Nearly two and a half centuries have passed since Angelus Silesius gathered up the profound wisdom of his predecessors in his _Cherubinean Wanderer_. These centuries have brought rich insights into Nature. Goethe opened a vast perspective to natural science. He sought to follow up the eternal, unchangeable laws of Nature’s working, to that summit where, with like necessity, they cause man to come into being, just as on a lower level they bring forth the stone.[21] Lamarck, Darwin, Haeckel, and others, have laboured further in the direction of this way of conceiving things. The “question of all questions,” that in regard to the natural origin of man, found its answer in the nineteenth century; and other related problems in the realm of natural events have also found their solutions. To-day men comprehend that it is not necessary to step outside of the realm of the actual and the sensible in order to understand the serial succession of beings, right up to man, in its development in a purely natural manner.

[21] Cp. my book: _Goethe’s Weltanschauung_, Weimar, 1897.

And, further, J. G. Fichte’s penetration has thrown light into the being of the human ego, and shown the soul of man where to seek itself and what it is.[22] Hegel has extended the realm of thought over all the provinces of being, and striven to grasp in thought the entire sensible existence of Nature, as also the loftiest creations of the human spirit.[23]

[22] Cp. ante, and the section upon Fichte in my book: _Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert_, vol. i., Berlin, S. Cronbach.

[23] Cp. my presentation of Hegel in _Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert_, vol. i.