Leseprobe

11 C e c i l i a Mu r a t o r i THE COBB L ER WHO D I D NOT S T I CK TO H I S T RADE THE L I F E OF THE PH I LOSOPHER J ACOB BÖHME On July 26, 1613, the mayor of the city of Görlitz, Bartolomäus Scultetus, penned a note in which he reported that “Jacob Boehme, a cobbler” had been brought to the city hall to be questioned regarding his enthusiastic beliefs. 1 The city magistrates had become aware of a potentially dangerous book, cir- culating in manuscript form, and had confiscated the original copy written by the author, the shoemaker Jacob Böhme. Two days later, on Sunday, the Chief Pastor of Görlitz, Gregor Richter, gave a fiery sermon in the church of Peter and Paul, accusing Böhme of spreading fanatical ideas. The book in question was titled Morgenröte im Aufgang (literally The Morning Redness Rising , known as Aurora already among his contemporaries), and it had been written the previ- ous year, 1612, within the space of only a fewmonths. At the time it was confiscated, it was still incomplete, and Böhme never returned to finish it (Fig. 1). Jacob Böhme was 38 at the time. He had arrived in the city of Görlitz (now in Saxony) from his birth- place, the nearby village of Alt-Seidenberg, in 1592. A few years later, in 1599, he bought a cobbler’s stand on the marketplace in Görlitz, acquired the citizen- ship of the city, and married the daughter of a butcher, Katharina Kuntzschmann, with whom he would have four sons. In Görlitz he had thus become “Jacob Böhme the cobbler,” as Scultetus’ note also identifies him: Jacob Böhme was a common name in Görlitz, and therefore the indication of the profes- sion was needed to distinguish between several namesakes. But in the case of Jacob Böhme, the label of “fanatical cobbler” came to signify much more than the profession he practiced for some years. For his opponents, like Richter, the fact that he was a cobbler was the proof that he was unskilled to deal with higher, theological matters, such as those that 1 Title page in: Jacob Böhme, Morgenröte im Aufgang ( Morning Redness Rising ) – Aurora 1612, Autograph manuscript, Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelf. 62 Noviss. 4°, fol. 3r