7. Jacob Boehme

We have to do here—if one wants to call it that—with a permanently abnormal condition of the soul. But Jacob Boehme experienced this, his “re-birth,” also simply more or less as something which could, according to his conception, take place with a human soul. He did not become, let us say, a visionary or a false idealist through this, nor did he become an arrogant person, but continued to practice his shoemaker's trade in all humility—or, we might say, in all sobriety. And even the experience of the year 1600, the withdrawal into another world, remained to him a phenomenon of which he said to himself: “You have looked into a kingdom of joy, into a kingdom of spiritual reality, but that is a thing of the past.” And he continued to live from day to clay pursuing his trade in his sober manner.