3 

The Change in the Philosophical
Situation Brought about by the
Reformation: Paracelsus’s New
Natural Philosophy and the
“No” in Jakob Böhme’s God

From a philosophical point of view (the only one that concerns us here) Martin Luther’s Reformation was both an advance and a retreat. Throwing off the authority of the Catholic Church and of Scholastic philosophy allowed new free spaces to open. A few medieval thinkers had already taken advantage of them, but they were now generally available to every individual Christian. At the same time, however, this increase in autonomy could be justified only by binding every Christian directly to the divine word. Unmediated recourse to the Bible was objectively plausible, for if the Catholic Church traced its authority back to the God who became a man, while at the same time reserving for itself a monopoly on the interpretation of Christ’s words, the circular nature of this grounding was only too obvious: Christ legitimates the Church, but the Church declares what Christ actually taught. It is rather astonishing that it was so long before the call for independent access to the word of God became historically potent. External factors were indispensable: on the one hand, the Church’s loss of moral credibility as a result of the behavior of the Renaissance popes and bishops; on the other hand, the German princes’ perception that the Reformation offered them an opportunity to throw off the emperor’s dominion. Luther could prevail, or even survive, only because his sovereign supported him, and not for religious reasons alone.

In his great study Die europäischen Revolutionen (The European revolutions), Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888–1973), one of the last German universal scholars in the humanities and social sciences, spoke of a “princely revolution” in connection with the Reformation. The formation of religiously autonomous small states with their own local universities (whereas the University of Paris had been a European university) and an officialdom devoted to the sovereign and enjoying great prestige was one of the most important results of the German Reformation. In the seventeenth century, as in the Middle Ages, England got along with only two universities, but this did not in the least hinder its rise to become the economically and politically most advanced nation in Europe, while Germany had about forty universities, despite its late adoption of the institution. Princes and professors/pastors/officials were the pillars of the new order, and while the princes disappeared in 1918, Germany is still basically, even in its Catholic areas, a professors-and-officials state such as exists nowhere else in the world. Although on most questions Lutheranism occupies a middle position between the Catholic Church and the Reformed denominations that freed themselves from medieval ideas much more decisively than Luther did, there is one issue on which Calvinism stands closer to Catholic doctrine than to Lutheranism, namely the right of resistance, to which both Catholicism and Calvinism cling. Luther, by contrast, radically rejects this right, and however much he believes he is authorized by Scripture to reject the right to resist (Romans 13), seen from the outside it is clear that this rejection was the price he had to pay for the protection of the princes. The peculiar combination of an emotional commitment to freedom of conscience with an insistence on subservience, even to unjust rule, long remained one of the distinguishing marks of Lutheranism in Germany. (Characteristically, a defense of the right to resistance—by corporative groups, not individuals—is found in the Calvinist Johannes Althusius (1563–1638), whose conception of a federal corporative state with subsidiarity deviates sharply from the thinking of Jean Bodin, who justified French absolutism, and legitimated the Netherlands’ battle for freedom).

But this half-autonomy did not characterize Lutheranism solely with respect to politics. Luther’s masterful translation, which made the Scriptures freely accessible and raised the new High German language to the level of other European languages, at the same time shackled interpretation to the letter of the Bible. The old doctrine of the fourfold meaning of Scripture had led to far-fetched interpretations that no longer had anything to do with the text; that was now over. But at the same time the four-fold doctrine had allowed exegetes to further develop the tradition in the sincere belief that they were remaining true to its real meaning; and now that, too, was over. Or rather, it became significantly harder to continue in that tradition. It could not be wholly abandoned because, first of all, Scripture was needed to legitimate the new economic and social order, which differed even more radically than that of the Middle Ages from the order praised in the Sermon on the Mount; and second, because for more than two hundred years Lutheranism strove to avoid recognizing that between the Christologies of the Gospels (which deviate from one another) and that of the Credo there are enormous differences—Calvin himself had Michael Servetus burned at the stake because of his discovery that the doctrine of the Trinity had hardly any basis in the New Testament. In order to understand the true meaning of the Bible, it became necessary to devise new hermeneutic techniques that left behind those of the Middle Ages; the study of Hebrew and Greek now received a religious consecration, so to speak. The emergence of the methods of modern humanistic studies was decisively encouraged by Lutheranism, even if at the price of a repression of theology’s philosophical validation. The latter affected Melanchthon less than it did Luther himself, for Luther had an unphilosophical mind, and was thus hardly a great theologian (and certainly no saint). But he had what people call “character,” and, for better or for worse, through the creativity of his religious as well as his linguistic achievements he contributed more than almost anyone else to the separation of the German nation from the common European family. Because Luther did not collaborate in Calvin’s and Zwingli’s further innovations, German Protestantism (along with that in the Scandinavian countries) persisted in an intermediate position between the old and the new worlds of which the Romanic and the Anglo-American countries are the leading examples.

Certainly the appeal to the subjective certainty of faith helped people shake off heteronomous authorities and thus to acquire great personal integrity. But unfounded certainties do not become truths just because someone totally relies upon them. Indeed, the obsession with one’s own justification could lead to a spiritual narrowness of the kind that characterized Lutheranism until the rise of Pietism. Luther’s antihumanistic streak led to the view that he had kept alive for another two centuries the Middle Ages that the Renaissance had already vanquished; but this overlooks the fact that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were intellectually significantly more multifaceted than were the first two centuries of Lutheranism. Certainly Christian anti-Judaism, in its full abomination, goes back to the Middle Ages; but the higher clergy and the emperor had repeatedly tried to restrain it. Luther, on the other hand, expressed the vox populi directly, and gave—especially in “Von den Juden und ihren Lügen” (“On Jews and their Lies”)—anti-Judaism a consecration that continued to be influential through its transformation into modern anti-Semitism from the end of the nineteenth century to 1945 (consider just Veit Harlan’s film, Jud Süß). The belief held by most medieval theologians, that no non-Christian could be saved, is hardly tolerable, but then what can we say about the teaching of the Wittenberg professor Abraham Calov, who maintained that no Catholic, and not even a Reformed Christian, could be saved—indeed, that even Lutherans who, like Georg Calixt, did not follow him on the last issue, were to be damned as heretics? God’s plan for salvation shrinks to the area around Wittenberg. The revolt against orthodox Lutheranism that, prepared by Pietism, began at the end of the eighteenth century and produced classical German philosophy, preserved one trait of Lutheranism: the unconditional will to sincerity and the refusal to profess things in which one no longer believed. And paradoxically, the lighter ballast of Scholastic tradition facilitated a new beginning in philosophy that was denied to Catholicism, which, although philosophically more interested, was controlled by the hierarchy.

In the sixteenth century a spiritualist tradition was already being established that was partly inspired by the Reformation, and partly broke with the latter’s dogmas and hence was prosecuted by Lutheranism. Its main representatives were Hans Denck, Sebastian Franck, and Kaspar Schwenckfeld, for whom it was the spirit that was now crucial and no longer the Scriptures. (In Thomas Müntzer [1489–1525] this is connected with a revolt against corporative society and violent action on behalf of the peasants in the Peasant War, for which he paid with his life.) The natural philosopher Theophrastus Bombastus of Hohenheim, called Paracelsus (1493–1541), who around 1516 received a doctoral degree in medicine, probably from Ferrara, also belongs to this line of thought. He must be mentioned in this book because despite his many travels throughout the Mediterranean world, he not only wrote his numerous works in German (often only the titles are in Latin), but in 1527 even gave lectures in German at the faculty of medicine in Basel (which was one of the reasons he was expelled)—long before the legal philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), who at the end of the seventeenth century was the first successfully to introduce lectures in German at a university. The young Goethe read Paracelsus, and it is plausible that a few of Paracelsus’s essential traits, along with traits of the skeptical magician Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486–1535), were incorporated into the character of Goethe’s Faust. The symbolic figure of the German essence, Faust was inspired by Paracelsus’s contemporary Dr. Johann Georg Faust, to whom Paracelsus was, however, vastly superior in intellect.

If we try to classify Paracelsus’s philosophical-scientific ideas, we find that they belong, like most of the innovative ideas of the sixteenth century, to the time of fermentation between the collapse of Scholastic science and the emergence of the new science in the seventeenth century. The polemic against traditional medicine, especially the humoral pathology that derived from books rather than from direct experience, is conducted in a churlish manner reminiscent of Luther and with bombastic self-praise. He was responsible for significant individual discoveries, for example concerning the influence of external factors on health, and programmatic ideas, but Paracelsus by no means grounded his assertions through a precise experimental method (nor did he contribute to the mathematicizing and quantifying of the natural sciences). He did not yet distinguish astrology and magic from genuine science; and he claimed that the doctrine of signatures, to which Jakob Böhme also adhered, made it possible to infer the inner qualities of natural substances from their external appearance. Although the Renaissance worldview begins by grasping nature as a largely self-enclosed causal web, its holism is detrimental to the isolation of individual causal factors, without which scientific progress is not possible. Paracelsus’s Paragranum teaches four pillars of medicine: philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and proprietas (a kind of ethics of medicine). Elements pointing to the future are here interwoven with others that are unscientific by modern standards. Alongside an important call for founding medicine in chemistry and mineralogy, we find the idea that the human microcosm corresponds to the macrocosm, that is, that individual organs correspond, for instance, to the planets. In his reflections on natural philosophy Paracelsus assumes, in addition to the four classical elements, three principles (sulfur, mercury, and salt), which he interprets as an expression of the divine Trinity. (Joachim Jungius [1587–1657], one of the founders of modern scientific thinking in Germany, argued against both the four classical and the three alchemical principles.) According to Paracelsus, God manifests himself in the forces of nature, so that all sciences are particles of theology. Free will is not possible; even the villain can act only because God authorizes him to do so. The highest achievement is the abandonment of one’s own will in God.

Paracelsus’s religious ideas are especially fascinating. He was buried as a Catholic, but his criticism of the institutionalized Church—indeed, of all religious confessions—is severe. He believes in a Church in the Holy Spirit, which has no dwelling, rejects any forceful conversion as “the Devil’s,” teaches the salvation of all children, even those that have not been baptized, and praises, in an appendix to the early drafts of a commentary on Matthew, “the islands of naked people”—he thinks it would have been better if the European ships that came to these islands had sunk and left the pagans unconverted, because the natives will quickly forget Christ and only the knavery will remain. In his political ideas Paracelsus stood close to the radical wing of the spiritualists, whose exemplar was Thomas Müntzer. But in “De magnificis et superbis” (On the magnificent and the proud), in which he proposes that Paul’s theory of political authority should be understood as applying only to his own time, he also warns expressly against rebellion, which can lead to significantly more evils than existed before. As a Christian ideal, however, Paracelsus advocates a far-reaching equality of estates and active intervention on behalf of the poor. Nobility is not established by God; rights to land are always lent only by the emperor; everyone has a duty to work; property without labor is theft; a father should bequeath to his children only work equipment. He rejects the death penalty; only defensive wars are morally permissible.

The honorary title of the first epoch-making German philosopher of the modern period belongs to Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), who was early on considered the teutonicus philosophus par excellence. To make clear German culture’s relative backwardness and at the same time its special potential for religious philosophy, a glance at the neighboring countries is instructive: French philosophy shines in the late sixteenth century through the person of the highly cultured skeptical essayist Michel de Montaigne, and in the first half of the seventeenth century through René Descartes, who sought to provide an unshakeable foundation for metaphysics and science; in England, the statesman Francis Bacon developed the methodological bases of the modern empirical sciences. By contrast, his contemporary Böhme, who came from what was then the most stimulating German cultural area, Silesia, was a cobbler who had never studied and therefore could not write Latin, but who had experienced mystical visions and wanted to provide a deeper foundation for his traditional Lutheran piety (inspired by the Bible) through a philosophical account of the development of God, nature, and redemption through Christ. He might well be called, after the well-known naïve painter, the Henri Rousseau of philosophy—a naïve thinker who in fact read, in addition to the Bible, Paracelsus and other Renaissance spiritualists, yet articulated in an enormously expressive and creative language that was hardly influenced by the philosophical tradition his fascination with nature and his religious anxieties and hopes, producing a simultaneously confused and magnificent image of reality. Böhme’s urge toward speculation drove him beyond the ecclesiastical Lutheranism that persecuted him pitilessly in Görlitz even after his death, although he considered himself a pious Lutheran and stood closer to the Middle Ages than to German idealism. His interpretation of the history of Creation in the Mysterium Magnum (Great mystery) is at bottom closer to the commentaries on the six-days’ work produced in the Middle Ages than it is to Nicholas of Cusa’s De genesi; his descriptions of the horrors of Hell, for instance in the sixth point of the Sex puncta theosophica, oder von sechs Theosophischen Puncten hohe und tiefe Gründung (Sex puncta theosophica, or high and deep foundation of six theosophic points; English title: Six Theosophic Points), make us think of Hieronymus Bosch transferred inwardly, so to speak. His Christology, too, is traditional, indeed, his veneration of Wisdom as the virginal-female side of God expresses elements of Catholic rather than Lutheran religiousness. Böhme’s originality soon won him a group of admirers, and after his death his influence extended to the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and even England (to my knowledge, no other thinker was translated from German into English in the seventeenth century). Around 1670 the important Cambridge Platonist Henry More wrote a treatise against Böhme, the Philosophiae teutonicae censura (Critique of German philosophy). Around 1800, Böhme was rediscovered not only by the German idealists, but also by William Blake.

Böhme’s first work, Aurora oder Morgenröte im Aufgang (Aurora or the rising of dawn, 1612; English title: The Aurora) was preceded by a long phase of fermentation, on which he reports in the twelfth of the Theosophische Sendbriefe (Theosophic epistles): “Although I dealt with it twelve years, and I was pregnant with it in myself, and there was a strong urge in me, before I could bring it into the outside: until it afterward fell on me like a driving rain.” Böhme boasts that he has not learned from books, “but rather from my own book, which was opened in me.” This book has, he says, “only three sheets, and they are the three principles of eternity; in them I can find everything that Moses and the Prophets, and also Christ and the Apostles said.” He declares expressly that he passes his time “in weakness and childishness, in the simplicity of Christ,” as if in a pleasance.

Böhme sought a theosophy, that is, a knowledge of God that would make possible an understanding of nature on the basis of God’s Trinitarian being. To be sure, he is not a rational theologian—instead of arguing rigorously, he often turns against reason in the name of the spirit. His conceptual world mixes categorically different levels—metaphysical principles, categories of natural philosophy, and especially alchemy, angels, and devils; his numerous works are full of repetitions. But in the later works he achieves more systematic stringency; his last book, which unfortunately he was not able to complete before he died, Quaestiones theosophicae, oder Betrachtung göttlicher Offenbarung (Quaestiones theosophicae, or Contemplation of Divine Revelation) is perhaps his most rigorous. Despite all his defects, Böhme incontestably raises with unprecedented courage a question that traditional theology likes to shun: Whence come suffering and evil into the world? The classical answer, as we find it in Aquinas, is the doctrine of privation: the bad and the evil are a lack of being. But suffering and malevolence certainly seem to be more than mere lacks, and if God is the creator of everything, then they must also have their ground in him. Böhme considers unavoidable the recognition of a negative principle in God himself, and on the basis of the cooperation of the positive and negative principles (in his last work, these are called, in an abstract manner, the “Yes” and the “No”), he tries to understand God’s manifestation in the external world, which is nothing more or less than the unfolding of the divine being and constitutes Böhme’s third principle, which binds together the Yes and the No. His crucial idea here is that without opposition nothing becomes apparent. God “would be unknowable in himself, and in him there would be no joy or significance or sensibility without the No,” we read in the third of the 177 originally planned theosophical questions. Although in God the positive and negative principles represent only two centers of a single unity, the separation of the two has a consequence. It yields Heaven and Hell, which are called “love-fire” and “wrath-fire”: “In the love-fire they are one, but as separated they are two.” But unlike later dialecticians, whom he anticipates more than almost anyone before him, Böhme does not see a necessary process in the fall of the angels and the fall of man, but rather interprets them, as Origen did long before him, as results of the free will of the angels and of man. By giving the No priority over the Yes and seeking to be a lord in the No, Lucifer separates himself from God and gives himself over to the wrath-fire. God, who in the light is an Ichts (“being”), is in Hell a Nichts (“nothing”), that is, not present. It is true that the Devil’s wrath is an expression of the negative divine principle, but it should not be thought that God’s wrath hardens him from the outside; instead, wrath is his inner essence. “Reason speaks much about God and his omnipotence, but it understands little about God and his essence, what and how he is: it detaches the soul entirely from God, as if it were only a separate being . . . ; and that is the great harm of the blindness due to which people quarrel and dispute and never arrive at what is truly fundamental.” The reunion of Yes and No takes place through Christ, and Böhme attributes his own insights to the spirit of Christ.

The Silesian noble and mystic Abraham von Franckenberg, with whom Böhme corresponded, drew Böhme’s writings to the attention of Johannes Scheffler (1624–1677), who is famous under the name Angelus Silesius (“the angel from Silesia”), and who was then studying in Leiden. Oddly enough, Böhme’s work contributed to Scheffler’s conversion to Catholicism. Far more important than the fanatical anti-Protestant works that he then wrote, are his epigrams in alexandrine verse collected in a volume that was entitled, from its second edition on, Cherubinischer Wandersmann (The Cherubinic Pilgrim). These epigrams are not only one of the most important examples of the German baroque lyric but also express, with unsurpassed concision and often in paradoxical ways, central ideas of the Christian mystics, including Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, in particular the identification of the soul devoted to God with God himself. “Ich bin so groß wie Gott, er ist als ich so klein; / Er kann nicht über mich, ich unter ihm nicht sein” (“I am as great as God, he is as small as I; / He cannot be over me, I cannot be under him”).