Jakob Böhme

And I'm just going to do a side note.

For those of you who are kind of interested in that whole period of time in Genesis, there's a great two-volume work called Mysterium Magnum by Jacob Bohm, the mystic, that really breaks this down.

For those of you who really want to just, you know, go into the meat and potatoes, you can have some fun with it there.

I also fail to understand the following sentence.

This means that God can and must be sought only within and through our human experience.

Where, says Jacob Böhme, will you seek for God? Seek him in your soul, which has proceeded out of the eternal nature, the living fountain of forces wherein divine working stands.

4.

But on the other hand, such limitation as this is no argument for agnosticism.

Elizabeth Fry in that of prison reform.

Brother Lawrence assures us that he did his cooking the better for doing it in the presence of God.

Jacob Böhme was a hard-working cobbler and afterwards as a writer showed amazing powers of composition.

The perpetual journeyings and activities of Wesley reproduced in smaller compass the career of St. Paul.

This means that God can and must be sought only within and through our human experience.

Where, says Jacob Böhme, will you seek for God? Seek him in your soul, which has proceeded out of the eternal nature, the living fountain of forces wherein divine working stands.

4.

But on the other hand, such limitation as this is no argument for agnosticism.

Elizabeth Fry in that of prison reform.

Brother Lawrence assures us that he did his cooking the better for doing it in the presence of God.

Jacob Böhme was a hard-working cobbler and afterwards as a writer showed amazing powers of composition.

The perpetual journeyings and activities of Wesley reproduced in smaller compass the career of St. Paul.

Um, but it's, it's, as is pretty obvious from the spelling, it's cognate with the English word ground.

Um, um, and I believe he is referring to, um, Jakob Böhme here, um, who like talks about this kind of ground within God, uh, God sort of like realizing himself out of a ground.

Um, and then, yeah, there's also, as, as Angus mentioned, this kind of, uh, word play with, um, abgrund, which means like abyss, um, but, you know, has Grund as a component.

And then he sort of references here this, he says, a residue of the mythological vision of chaos and the abyss or vague social memory of marshy lands before culture.

You have fascinating figures like Benjamin Fondin, like Chestov, like Berdiev, who are going to shape French thought between the wars.

And you have Kojeb and you have Coiret, who also started with religion, who wrote a book on a famous Gnostic, Jacob Bohm, whom Barthes quotes in his last seminars.

So these are all the threads I want to explore.

And also I want to devote a part to kind of forgotten, neglected Jewish thinkers between the war, who kind of recovered their religious and cultural roots.

In particular, there's a fellow called Ferdinand Bauer who was writing in the 19th century.

He was, I think, a clergyman, and he does refer to certain Christian mystics, Jacob Bohm, as Gnostic.

He argues that they... have fallen into the trap of pursuing spiritual liberation in terms of knowledge that transcends religious practice and is not really grounded in specific religious doctrine.

And so at a certain point, their spirituality becomes abstract enough, abstracted enough that it can be labeled as Gnostic.

If you have to commence your daily duties at a very early hour, and are thus debarred from giving the early morning to systematic meditation, try to give an hour at night, and should this, by the length and laboriousness of your daily task be denied you, you need not despair, for you may turn your thoughts upward in holy meditation in the intervals of your work, or in those few idle minutes which you now waste in aimlessness, and should your work be of that kind which becomes by practice automatic, you may meditate while engaged upon it.

That eminent Christian saint and philosopher, Jacob Boehme, realized his vast knowledge of divine things whilst working long hours as a shoemaker.

In every life there is time to think, and the busiest, the most laborious, is not shut out from aspiration and meditation.

Spiritual meditation and self-discipline are inseparable.