Jacob Boehme: His Life and Thought

Jacob Boehme, the German religious mystic of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had an astounding influence on the history of Western philosophy. The impact of his thought left its mark on such men as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, and especially through his ideas concerning creation and evil, he was a power in the speculative theology of the nineteenth century. This fresh study of Jacob Boehme's life and writings not only presents a concrete and vivid picture of Boehme's personal affairs and of the spiritual situation of Protestant Germany more than three hundred years ago; it also demonstrates for the first time the development and growth of Boehme's thought. Utilizing new biographical sources and newly discovered manuscripts, the author has, in addition, analyzed Boehme's speculative system in its mature form after he had worked through his strange symbolic language to a more traditional synthesis. This is an objective examination of Boehme's life and thought. It avoids depicting him either as a heaven-blessed saint or a Baroque Faust. On the basis of the evidence now available, Dr. Stoudt offers a new portrait of Boehme as the proponent of a theology that stresses feeling and intuition instead of reason and intellect. As Paul Tillich states in his Foreword to this volume: John Stoudt's book will be a help to all philosophers and theologians who desire an introduction to one of the most profound and strangest systems of Western thought - strange in comparison to the prevailing method of modern philosophy, profound in comparison with much theism in modern theology.