Jakob Böhme was a shoemaker in Görlitz, a small town in Silesia. He had no university education, no ecclesiastical authority, no credential but his own experience. Yet in 1600, gazing at a pewter dish reflecting sunlight, he received a vision that would pour forth in thirty books over the next twenty-four years.
"I saw and knew the Being of all beings," he wrote. "I saw the abyss and the ground of all things. I recognized the birth of the Holy Trinity. I saw the origin and descent of the world and all creatures."
The authorities suppressed his first book, Aurora, and forbade him to write more. For seven years he obeyed. Then the vision overwhelmed him again, and he could not remain silent.
"God is in all things.
Not in the way water is in a vessel,
But as fire is in iron when it glows.
The iron does not become fire,
Yet it radiates with the fire's light."
Böhme taught that reality emerges through the interplay of Yes and No, light and dark, expansion and contraction. "Without opposition, there would be no revelation. The darkness is not the enemy of light but its necessary condition. In the Ungrund — the groundless ground before all creation — there is neither Yes nor No. Creation begins when God says Yes to Himself."
Of the path to knowledge, he wrote: "Reason cannot reach the heights. It can analyze and measure, but it cannot see. Only the eye of the soul, opened by suffering and grace, perceives the divine signatures written in all things."
"I write not for the scholars
Who will mock what they cannot understand.
I write for the simple in heart,
For those who hunger and thirst,
For those whom the world has broken open."
The clergy called him a heretic. The university professors called him a fool. But seekers traveled from across Europe to sit with the shoemaker of Görlitz. He received them in his workshop, surrounded by leather and tools, and spoke of the divine birth happening in every soul.
"The divine Word speaks eternally," Böhme declared. "Most hear nothing because they are filled with the noise of their own thoughts. Empty yourself, and you will hear what was always being spoken."
Teaching 13
The highest wisdom may come to the humblest person. It requires no credentials, only an open heart. The shoemaker may see what the professor misses. Truth speaks to those willing to receive it.