German philosophy before Leibniz

In a pamphlet entitled Aurora seu initia scientiae generalis, Leibniz contrasts the barbaric and primitive practice of drawing fire from the friction of pieces of wood with the learned practice of borrowing from the sun’s rays. “On the one hand, first thick, earthly matter, then heat, then light; on the other hand, first light, then heat; finally, through it, the fusion of the hardest materials.” The title of the pamphlet, like the symbolism of fire and light, is borrowed from Jacob Boehme: we are here in a universe of thought quite different from that of Descartes and Malebranche; we cannot ignore it in order to understand Leibniz.

Germany has already appeared to us, with Eckart and Nicholas of Cusa, as the country of speculative mysticism in opposition to the religious or contemplative mysticism of the Latin countries. This mysticism, which is expressed in popular language, is represented at the end of the 16th century by Valentin Weigel (1533-1588), whose works were not published until 1618, and at the beginning of the 17th century by Jacob Boehme (1575-1624). Without doubt one can say of all German mystics what his most recent historian says of Boehme[1]: “It is not gnosis that Boehme sought, it is salvation; knowledge would have been given to him only as an addition, and he would even have been greatly astonished by it.” » But, if they first want to save themselves, the conditions in which they pose the problem of salvation lead them to those broad metaphysical constructions from which the Romantics would later take their models. For Weigel and Boehme are both hostile to the Lutheran thesis of salvation by faith, that is to say, of a salvation which, resting on the merits of Christ, comes to us from outside; it is through an intimate and effective transformation, a true rebirth, that man achieves salvation; this rebirth implies a representation of God and human nature which constitutes a true theosophy.

This theosophy, in Weigel, is based on the idea that God is originally without action, without will, without personality, and that, in creating, he reveals himself in some way to himself and makes all his attributes manifest. The creature, insofar as it contains nothingness, has the possibility of distancing itself from God, of turning its will in on itself; it is the fall, that of Lucifer, of Adam, the true hell which is interior to each fallen man. Weigel’s originality seems to have been in the description of two modes of knowledge corresponding, one, to the state of the fallen creature (natural knowledge), the other, to the state of the creature saved and brought back to its origin (supernatural knowledge). In the first, the object (Gegenwurf) is passive with regard to the man who knows it: “Knowledge and judgment are not in the object, but in the man who judges what is before him.” The external object is only the occasion of this judgment; but “no object can judge itself,” a thousand truths, no wisdom comes from the outside. It is the opposite in supernatural knowledge; here the object, which is God, is entirely active, and man has nothing to do but wait in silence; and yet this knowledge, too, is interior; for God is in us, and it is only the knowledge that God takes of himself by using man as an organ; the salvation of man is therefore like the last stage of the act in which God knows himself: supernatural knowledge is a transformation of being.