Author Description

This Blue Lutheran Classics edition contains both the full text of Alexander Whyte's "Jakob Böhme, an Appreciation", first published in 1895, and Jakob Böhme's "Dialogues on the Supersensual Life", first published in 1901. A few explanatory footnotes have been added. Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), "the greatest of the mystics, and the father of German philosophy," was a Lutheran mystic and a poetic writer who influenced philosophers such as Schelling and Schopenhauer. "When I read Böhme," Schopenhauer once stated, "I cannot withhold either admiration or emotion." In his brilliant essay Alexander Whyte says that "there is scarcely a single subject in the whole range of theology on which Böhme does not throw a new, an intense, and a brilliant light. In his absolutely original and magnificent doctrine of God, while all the time loyally true to it, Böhme has confessedly transcended the theology of both the Latin and the Reformed Churches; and, absolutely unlettered man though he is, has taken his stand at the very head of the great Greek theologians. [...] God is the Essence of all Essences to Böhme. God is the deepest Ground, the living and the life-giving Root of all existence. At the same time, the Divine Nature is so Divine; It is so high and so deep; It is so unlike all that is not Itself; It is so beyond and above all language, and all thought, and all imagination of man or angel, that universe after universe have had to come into existence, and have had to be filled, each successive universe after its own kind, with all the fulness of God, before that universe of which we form a part, and to which our utmost imagination is confined, could have come into existence, and into recognition of itself."