The evil in God

Boehme’s claim to private experience of cosmic revelation launched theosophy as a surrogate/displacement of Biblical authority. He drew upon ancient traditions of secret knowledge, Kabbalistic and neo-Platonic, and was successor to individual inquirers such as Sebastian Franck and Paracelsus. Drawing on alchemy for analogues of good and evil, he locates both in God, Lucifer and Jesus being divine brothers. Lucifer, hard, cold, bitter, seeks Jesus, soft, warm, sweet-flowing, for a compound of these opposites. A pseudo-science cobbled from Boehme’s acquaintance with cognoscenti in his parish compensates for the failing orthodoxy it has weakened. My argument draws upon a Lutheran pastor’s lengthy devastation of Boehme’s pretensions as dangerously un-Christian. That attack includes this book’s motif, “Isn’t this a refined, quiet and gradual way of passing from God’s Word to atheism?” I also intuit Nietzsche’s awareness of Boehme’s prophetic dynamic, the conjunction of good and evil, derived from medieval German mysticism. Nietzsche follows what I call Boehme’s metaphysics of suffering, the ontological struggle of self-overcoming, for which the central text is Also sprach Zarathustra .