BOEHME (BEHMEN, BEEM, BEHMONT, etc.), JAKOB German mystic, was born at Alt-Seidenberg in Upper Lusatia. After attending the town school of Seidenberg, he entered the shoemaking trade in 1589. In 1612 he gave up business and wrote Aurora, oder die Morgenrote im Auf gang. Gregory Richter, the pastor primarius of Gorlitz, denounced the work as heretical and the municipal council seized the manu script and charged Boehme to abstain from such writings. How ever, in 1618, Boehme began to produce a number of treatises, expository and polemical, but only a few selections on repentance, resignation, etc. were published as Der iVeg zu Christo (1624) before clerical hostility was renewed. On his return from a visit to Dresden, he died on Nov. 17, 1624.
Boehme claimed that his speculative power came by a direct divine illumination which enabled him to see the root of all mys teries, the Ungrund or Urgrund whence issue all contrasts and discordant principles, hardness and softness, severity and mild ness, love and sorrow, heaven and hell. These contrasts he at tempted to describe in their issue and to reconcile in their eternal result, an attempt often obscured by his puzzling phraseology, largely borrowed from the school of Paracelsus.
Boehme's speculations began with a study of God in Himself (Aurora), passed through a study of the manifestation of God in the structure of the world; and of man (Die Drei Principien gottlichen Wesens; Vona dreifachen Leben der Menschen; Von der Menschzverdung Christi; Von der Geburt and Bezeichnung aller Wesen), and culminated in his exposition of the life of God in the soul of man (Von der Gnadenwahl; Mysterium Magnum, Von Christi Testamenten).
God who is at once Alles and Nichts, because to think of His nature we must abstract from creatures, is characterized by will whose desire to become manifest results firstly in knowledge of Himself and secondly in the production of creatures. This pro duction is not a creation, for out of nothing nothing comes; it is rather a generation from the eternal divine nature wherein all things dwell latently. The properties through which the divine energy operates in the procession of spiritual and corporeal beings from the Ungrund or Abyss, are firstly, Contraction, Diffusion, and their resultant, the Agony of the unmanifested Godhead. The transition is made; by an act of will the divine Spirit comes to light and immediately the manifested life appears as Love, Ex pression and their resultant Visible Variety. Hence the world is a manifestation of God who is both transcendent and immanent.
To account for evil, Boehme resorts neither to dualism nor to a repudiation of its existence. His consciousness of the difficulty is obvious from the progressive changes in his attempted solution of the problem. In the Aurora nothing save good proceeds from the Ungrund, though is good that abides and good that falls—Christ and Lucifer. In the later works, the antithesis is directly generated, being given as factors of life and movement from the one creative source, the bottomless abyss. In the last writings, evil is a direct outcome of the primary principle of divine manifestation—it is the wrath side of God. Corresponding to these solutions, Boehme has different moral ends for the world's history. In the first stage it is created in remedy of a decline; in the second, for the adjustment of the balances of forces; in the third, to exhibit the eternal victory of good over evil, of love over wrath.
Fallen man has three factors, spirit, soul and body, spirit being the principle of light, soul of darkness, and body, which belongs to the world of sense, the resultant of spirit and soul. Man as pires, to a knowledge of God because all things tend towards their source, but a re-birth is necessary before he can have true self knowledge, the sine qua non for a knowledge of God.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Boehme's works were published by H. Betke Bibliography.-Boehme's works were published by H. Betke (1675) ; by J. G. Gichtel (1682) ; by K. W. Schiebler (Leipzig, 1831 1847) . Between 1644 and 1662 they were translated by John Ellistone and John Sparrow, assisted by Durand Hotham and Humphrey Blunden. (At that time regular societies of Behmenists existed in Eng land but later they merged into the Quaker movement.) In 1762-84 the translation was re-edited by George Ward and Thomas Langcake. J. Hamberger, Die Lehre des deutschen Philosophen J. Boehmes (1844) ; Alb. Peip, J. Boehme der deutsche Philosoph (186o) ; von Harless, J. Boehme and die Alchimisten (end ed. 1882) ; Erdmann, Hist. of Philosophy (Eng. trans. W. S. Hough, 1893) . See also the Memoirs by Abraham von Frankenberg (d. 1652) trans. F. Okely (187o) ; H. A. Fechner, J. Boehme, sein Leben and seine Schriften (1857) ; H. L. Martensen, J. Boehme, Theosophiske Studier (1881; Eng. trans. 1885) ; P. Deussen, J. Boehme, fiber sein Leben and seine Philosophie (Kiel, 1897) ; P. Hankamer, Jakob Bohme (Bonn, 1924) ; H. Bornkamm, Luther u. Bohme (Bonn, 1925).