Jacob Boehme
German Christian mystic and theosopher (1575–1624), born near Görlitz in Silesia, a shoemaker by trade with no formal education beyond parish schooling, whose life and work were marked by a series of overwhelming visionary experiences. The first, around 1600, occurred while contemplating sunlight reflected in a pewter dish, a moment in which he felt the inner unity of all creation and the ultimate secrets of nature suddenly revealed to him; a second, deeper experience in 1610 led him to write Aurora, or The Rising Dawn (1612), a treatise which, circulated in manuscript without his consent, brought him the immediate persecution of the local pastor Gregor Richter and an official ban on writing, which he secretly disobeyed for years until his death. In works such as The Six Theosophic Points, Mysterium Magnum and The Way to Christ, he developed a mystical worldview of extraordinary originality and obscurity, expressed in dense language full of neologisms and alchemical and astrological imagery: God is a bottomless abyss (Ungrund), prior to all determination and even to himself, who generates and articulates himself through a dialectical process of contraction and expansion, of darkness and light; and evil —embodied in the fall of Lucifer and of Adam— is not a mere absence of good but a necessary principle ('the No' or 'the Wrath') without which divine light could neither manifest itself, know itself, nor enjoy its own goodness. Scorned and marginalised by the official Lutheran theologians of his time, who regarded him as a dangerous heretic, his subsequent influence was immense and unexpected: on German Pietism, on the idealism of Hegel and Schelling (who saw in him an anticipation of speculative dialectic), on English Romantic poets and visionaries such as William Blake, and on esoteric and theosophical currents down to the present day.