Baron d’Holbach was a noble from the Rhineland-Palatinate. By way of his mother, he was heir to the fortune of the late Prince-Bishop’s tax collector, and by way of his father, the owner of ten square-miles of vineyards. His uncle raised him, one Messire François-Adam, Baron d’Holbach, Seigneur de Heeze, Leende and other Places, who’d made his own fortune speculating on the Paris Stock Exchange.
It was his third year after opening the salon at his personal estate in rue Royale, butte Saint-Roche; the third year after both his father and his uncle died. A mixture of wealth, lavish accommodations, and academic connections from Leiden University had placed the Baron at the nexus of the Enlightenment in France and thus throughout Europe, and though he had never become its greatest philosopher or thinker, he had been the movement’s most gracious and enthusiastic host. Philosophers, scientists, and politicians from the continent and beyond were admitted on Sundays and Thursdays to discuss and debate their discoveries and theories. Many of them were allowed to stay in the guest rooms for weeks on end, drawing on the Baron’s vast library of over three thousand volumes in order to inform their papers, pamphlets, and books.
The salon of d’Holbach’s Coterie was arguably the radical vanguard of Western intellectualism, sowing the seeds of the academic revolutions to come.
In this fabulous place, a hemorrhaging of wealth and wine, they called themselves philosophes—distinct from philosophers because they believed that critical thought applied to all subjects. Reason was their sole tool of education, and letters were exchanged freely across all boundaries. Organized religion in particular was abhorred, and most men of the Enlightenment were deists, nodding towards a natural God but denying the authority of His alleged churches.
Only a few of these philosophes spent late nights drunk under the stars, whispering over dim lamps about the system of nature—about atheism, materialism, and determinism. Each element was considered by itself, with adherents arguing for one or two at a time but rarely for all three at once. The Baron found himself prime among these, believing that there must be some element which connected the disparate but parsimonious philosophies.
It would be almost two decades before he wrote and published a book on the subject. For the intervening twenty years, he would cooperate with figures of the Enlightenment to edit and organize The Encyclopaedia or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts. It was the first single reference book containing succinct, technically detailed articles about all the subjects adored by the philosophes. Working out of the Baron’s draft rooms and studies, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert edited, revised, and approved translations of the work. For the first time since Aristotle, the Baron imagined they were bringing together all the knowledge of mankind under a single title. They believed they would transform the world.
For a time, the Encyclopaedia would seem like the most important thing the Baron ever participated in. Even his own books, including The System of Nature, would pale in comparison to the social, political, and economic accomplishment of creating and publishing a combined body of knowledge in a time when less than a twentieth of the population could read, and the echoes of feudal politics distorted the tenuous lines of communication across borders and boundaries.
Yet the Baron lived long enough to see the impact of his efforts disappear. The world evolved. Paradigms were overthrown. The subtlety of every subject was greater than they could’ve imagined, and their confidence had been unfounded. Day by day and year by year, every single word in the Encyclopaedia became obsolete. Even history, the supposedly immutable record of the past, was discovered to be as sturdy as sand castles by the sea.
Their best ideas were crude from the perspective of two centuries gone by. The Baron supposed this was the course of progress. If it even arrived, it didn’t build upon the past. Progress reviewed it, rejected it, and sculpted something finer.
Only one event actually mattered in the long run. Only one passing moment still mattered, because it preserved the Baron, and only the living could truly change the world. He didn’t recognize its importance for thirty years.
In the winter of 1753, the Baron was enjoying a Saturday afternoon alone in the southwest hall of rue Royale, butte Saint-Roche. It was the side of the estate opposite of the high north wind, with the bulk of the building in front of the blizzard and a heavy fire roaring in an old cooking hearth. The heavy pots had been pulled aside to let the heat radiate freely from the masonry and into the open air. Servants came by every half hour to tend to the fire, but for most of the day, the Baron was alone, drinking and eating thin slices of dry cheese while reading a stack of letters sent from his chateau at Grandval.
His first wife was staying there until the end of the month or the foul weather broke, whichever came last, and the Baron easily tolerated her absence because she sent poems spiced with hints of eroticism—a mood which he would indulge on her return.
The sun was nearly down when a servant came to him with a message from a caller. “Baron, there is a cobbler asking after you at the north doors.”
The Baron folded up a letter and set it on the pile. “Those heaped with snow?”
“Yes, Baron.”
“I don’t need my shoes repaired. Send him on his way, and pay him a quarter écu for the trouble of climbing the butte roads to see me.”
“Baron, my apologies,” the servant said, “I have misspoken. The cobbler is not here to repair shoes, though he says it’s his trade. He’s very old and wears only leather in this storm. He calls upon you only to speak.”
“I see. Does he look hungry?” the Baron asked.
“Yes. Like a starving bird, he is frail.”
“Send him here to the hall and warm some water for a bath. Have the mistress prepare a bed for the evening, and make sure I have another plate at dinner. He’ll join us.”
“Yes, Baron,” the servant said.
“Did he give you his name?”
“Yes, he called himself Jakob Böhme.”
“The dead theologian?” the Baron asked, amused.
“I’m not familiar with the name, Baron. Is he an impostor?”
“No, there are many Jakobs and many Böhmes. Send him up.” Jakob Böhme was a German mystic who’d died nearly a century before the Baron was born. It was absurd that anyone would take his name and pretend to be a hundred and eighty years old.
The ancient man the servant led into the hall was surprisingly similar to the portrait of Jakob that the Baron had seen in Edesheim. Originally painted in Gorlitz, the picture in his memory was of a thin, long-faced man with bulging fish-eyes, a broad forehead shining between sheets of thin brown hair which reached to his shoulders, wrinkles as deep as carvings in wood, and a pinch of a mustache like barber sweepings pasted beneath his nose. The figure that entered the hall was spotted, mostly toothless, and even more deeply wrinkled—but he had the same sheets of hair, now shock white, and the same wisp of stache like tufts of cotton.
“Monsieur Jakob Böhme, let me introduce you to the master of the house, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach. Baron, this is Jakob Böhme, the cobbler.”
The Baron was in a leather chair beside a stand covered in opened letters. He gestured to a wooden chair closer to the fire. “Warm yourself. Would you like wine and cheese?”
“I’m not hungry anymore,” Jakob said, settling into a warm chair with a shudder, “but you are a good master for offering a man of my station such fine fare.” His rough leather coat was already running with melted snow, but he didn’t seem to mind the soaked hide.
“Are you cold?” the Baron asked.
“I have steeled myself against the freezing weather.” He looked out a distant window at the growing darkness outside the hall. “The condition ends. There’s so little time left.”
“Till sundown?” the Baron asked.
“I am very old,” the man explained, though the Baron didn’t exactly follow his meaning.
“Do you mind if I have more wine?”
“Please, enjoy yourself, master. I’d never deny a man pleasure in his own home.”
“You can call me Baron,” d’Holbach corrected, more out of preference than any rebuke for a forgotten station. He filled a glass goblet and sipped the bitter, astringent liquid. It was a strong red wine, drier than most vintages. It’d been laid down less than five years ago, still too young by most standards, but fine for drinking alone.
Jakob grinned, empty gums gaping between cracked, scabbed lips. Somewhere deep in the recesses of his mouth, dark molars still held the shape of his jaw. “Baron d’Holbach, I have been told that your coterie is a place of great wisdom.”
“Thank you, but don’t give me too much credit. It’s my wealth and a master chef that draw them here. Not my wisdom.”
“I hear better things about you on the summer winds,” Jakob said. “The trees and the sunlight sing your praises, Baron.”
The Baron laughed. Insanity never frightened him. “The sunlight sings?”
“I’ve heard the sun ever since I saw the structure of God in the light of a pewter dish. You may not be the most brilliant or most charismatic, but you have the strongest conviction. Among your coterie, you lead because confidence is the only strength they respect.”
“Is that so? And who says I have conviction?”
“Even if the wind didn’t whisper it, I would know already. I am mad, mad, mad, but you aren’t shaken. Nothing I could say would disturb your heart.”
“I don’t know about that,” the Baron said, “but I hope it’s true.”
“It is!” Jakob grinned emptily. “I can hear it, the iron in your soul.”
“If you know me so well, then you know I don’t believe in souls.” The Baron sipped his wine and waited. The guest was already proving to be an admirable speaker, and he had at least passing knowledge of the original Jakob Böhme’s books.
“Yes, yes! Exactly, Baron. You are resolute. Down to the bones, you believe in reason.”
“I’m flattered, Monsieur Böhme. I pride myself on such matters.”
Jakob laughed. “I wish to test your reason against some facts I’ve learned.”
“I will do my best,” the Baron said, “but I make no promises. You’re a puzzling man. Well-educated, yes? Though a cobbler, you speak like a man of the court.”
“I’m the opposite of a court man,” Jakob said. “They would call me a sinner and a slob, though I have spent my fair share of time at the feet of kings.” He scooted forward in his chair. “I will tell you three things, each more fantastic than the last. I wish to hear your thoughts.”
“Please.” The Baron ate a slice of hard cheese off a plate and took a deep draught of the wine. He could feel it in his sinuses, in the fore of his head. Drinking was freedom and fault at once. He would be more willing to entertain Jakob’s nonsense.
“The first then. You’ve heard of me, but you believe I perished long before you were born. I am the famous Jakob Böhme, the Mystic, and I’m almost two hundred years old. When I was young and truly insane, my friends took the truths I wrote in my journals and published them without my permission. I thought them traitors at the time, though I could barely express myself through the madness I’d chosen. The Catholics would’ve skewered me with a pole, but the Lutherans were willing to exile me because I’d intended to keep my secrets to myself.”
Jakob waited for the Baron to respond. It was clearly a fantastic story, but what was the challenge in picking that element apart? To refute the logic of a thing by denying its foundations was easy. To destroy something by showing that it had no logic was the real challenge.
“Assume a man might live for two centuries,” the Baron said.
“For every three days of a prestige, one day of life,” Jakob muttered, “but that means nothing to you, Baron. Assume it. What do you say?”
“How do I know you’re that Jakob Böhme?”
“I know myself, and over the last century I’ve come to resist the madness of my wish. I remember myself again. I’ve heard the many voices of our divided God, and I’ve learned His story. He was once the Abyss, unified and formless but for one desire—to know Himself. He knows no other beginning, and nothing like himself, and also no end.”
“This is your God?” the Baron asked.
“This is the Divine, may He be one or many.”
The Baron drained the rest of his glass. “Go on.”
“For Him, time is measured against the original division. He rendered himself unto two halves, light and dark.” He split his hands apart, waving each one in turn. “Positive and negative. From this duality, He formed a pattern of interlacing being, ever dividing and multiplying in complexity, creating more and more information—collecting more and more knowledge about Himself. The world grew in this tension! It became a reflection of Him, both good and evil at once, though it was not Him—it only lived between his halves.”
“The world is between those halves,” the Baron mused.
“Yes! The good chose to stand apart in order to learn about Himself. The evil lusted to return to the unified state, but if it were allowed to cross the gulf—” Jakob clapped his hands together. “He would crush the stars and sun and moon and world. Eschaton.”
“This sounds vaguely like an explanation for change. Like Heraclitus of Ephesus, who believed that there was a logos—a universal understanding that formed the soul of reality.”
Jakob’s scabbed lips split into another wild grin, stretching their leather far enough to draw specks of blood. “Yes, he must’ve made the wish to hear all the voices of God! Change is the conflict between His wrath, God the Father, and His peace, Jesus Christ the Son. You can even see it in the Bible, Baron. The Old Testament is filled with hate and war, touched with reflection and peace. The New Testament is filled with love and salvation, touched by sin and betrayal. Through these two halves, the history of the world was made—the Holy Spirit, I call it. It’s the grand design crafted by the interaction of Father and Son across time.”
“You know Jakob Böhme’s theology,” the Baron admitted, “but I could’ve given you a similar review, and I don’t believe a word of it.”
“You’re an atheist, but you aren’t a fool. You’ll listen and remember the words of others, even if you refuse to believe. But look at me—am I not the image of myself? Would you believe—if it were possible men could live two hundred years—that this look and these words were mine?”
“If those things were true, then yes, that would be enough to convince a reasonable man.”
“So that is your standard of reason? With those assumptions, I might be Böhme?”
“If we make strange assumptions, yes,” the Baron agreed.
“This is the same standard I bring to my own theology,” Jakob said. “Revelation is only inspiration. To know truth, one must observe the world.”
“You’ve observed something to make you believe in God?”
“Yes, but I have an unfair advantage.” He blew his breath out of the gap between his gums. “I can hear them constantly, the aspects of the Divine. They talk to us, tell us how to increase the complexity of their tension. They instruct the weave of the Holy Spirit, though we cannot see the pattern. I’m afraid even they are blind to their ultimate purpose. They are still learning, God and his Son. There is so much to learn about oneself, that one could live forever and never finish.”
“That’s true enough. You couldn’t finish because you’d be forever changing,” the Baron said. “This is more Heraclitus. Even the dead continue to decay. Memories of them evolve when they’re recalled, and nothing about anything stays exactly the same.”
“You can only learn about the past,” Jakob said.
“Correct, Monsieur Böhme.”
“Baron, I cannot show you now because I have only enough prestige for one more wish, but will you trust me? I’m about to tell you something true, and someday you should go out into the world and witness it for yourself. Not tomorrow, not twenty years from now, but someday.”
“Please, continue. I find this fascinating.” The Baron poured the rest of the bottle in his glass and took another drink. “Do you mean a wish like a miracle?”
“Yes! The Divine chooses to reflect certain desires of man in exchange for man’s reflection of the Divine desires. Thus, God’s many aspects will grant the wishes of certain men. Like a science, it is reproducible, knowable, and beautifully simple. You don’t need faith—you only need will, and God acts on your behalf.”
“You can reliably wish for miracles?” The Baron swirled the remaining wine in his glass and sniffed the astringent and fruity fumes. “Is it a miracle then, if it’s reliable?”
Jakob laughed, a raspy sound. “Well said, Baron! Let us be done with miracles—throw aside faith! We only need reason now. Don’t you understand?”
“No,” the Baron replied with a grin. “Tell me though.”
“By witnessing wishes come true, God reveals Himself to us. He allows us to assume a place of importance in the process of His self-discovery. He grants us this power because we, like Him, are formed in the Divine image. We are infused by the essence of a soul.”
“Is this the second fact in your list of three?” the Baron asked, recalling that this Mystic had promised him two more truths to consider.
Jakob beamed with pride, a bundle of lively wrinkles. “Yes, Baron! Good, good! Consider that we can prove the existence of God by witnessing His interventions. By hearing His requests! That is a fact. God is real, and we can study His works.”
“Have you considered that the things you see might be natural, not divine? I see material nature everywhere, but I can’t explain even a tenth of it yet. My reason wouldn’t compel me to abandon this materialism simply because you’ve found more unexplained events.”
Jakob laughed. “Is this your standard of reason?”
“What do you mean?” the Baron asked.
“Would it be impossible to show you something that convinced you of a Divine foundation for reality? Is your system of nature so flawless that no crack or doubt can enter you?”
“Maybe so,” the Baron said. “I prefer to think that it’s not my duty to believe. Rather, it’s my duty to disbelieve that which is unnecessary and contradictory.”
“You suppose the Divine is like that?”
“I do. God is a philosophically useless concept.”
“My God isn’t,” Jakob said. “He is only a product of reason. Reason alone is all a man like you should ever need to see the truth.”
“What’s the third fact then?” the Baron asked. “Is it the truth that will convince me?”
Jakob brightened, the leather of his skin wrinkling up like a smashed date. “Of course, of course. I’ve placed a condition on myself to reach this day, Baron. I had to find a man of perfect conviction, a man married to reason. You’re that man! I will prove that God is real, and someday you’ll reason it out. You’ll believe what I believe because it is the inevitable conclusion.”
“That seems unlikely,” the Baron said, his voice not disdainful but filled with pleasure. This ancient cobbler was the most interesting guest he’d entertained all month.
“You will bring an end to the tension between reason and faith, Baron. You will play a key role in this endless search for God’s self-knowledge. Once your strict mind has come to terms with what I am about to do, we will find the truth. Do you understand?”
“No.” The Baron drained his wine. “Not yet, I suppose.”
“I am going to increase the complexity of the world through you.”
“What will you do?” the Baron asked warily.
“I’ll make a wish on your behalf. Would you accept it?”
“Is this like a prayer?”
“It’s better. Prayers are just words. Wishes are real.”
“Go ahead then,” the Baron said. “Wish upon my brow. I accept it.”
“Good! Good! I wish that you, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, will neither age nor fall to illness and injury until the day you believe in the existence of the Divine.” Jakob suddenly twitched in his chair, then sagged. His breathing instantly became deep and ragged. “It’s all gone,” he muttered. “I’m done with it. Oceans, spent. Finally.”
The Baron shouted back through the hall. “Water for this man!”
“No, no, this is good,” Jakob said. “My borrowed vitality is finally coming to an end.”
“Vitality?” the Baron asked. He picked up the plate of cheese. “You must eat and drink. There’ll be a warm bath soon.”
Jakob waved the Baron back. “Please, no. This is what I expected. Respect my words, Baron. This is what I wanted.”
The Baron sat back slowly but didn’t set down the plate. A servant came running with a glass of cool clear water, which had been drawn from the well that morning. Despite his protests, Jakob drank greedily, letting water spill over his lips and run in beads and rivulets over his leather coat. The servant took the glass when he was done. Jakob collapsed back in his chair and started to laugh. “This is good,” he said.
“What is good?”
“I have worked hard for decades to preserve my life while collecting this prestige. I have learned to live with madness, to push it under until I am sane again. I’ve struggled for decades to find someone worthy of it, and then I found you. d’Holbach’s coterie—hah! Perfect, Baron.”
“You collected prestige?”
“It’s like silver,” Jakob said, “but I spent it on you.”
“What was that wish for?”
“Ah! You will live and thrive until you’ve reconciled the truth of the world with the strength of your reason. There’s no trick. You won’t trigger this condition on a technicality. You must, deep down, believe that you understand the Divine. You must believe as I believe.”
“And if I don’t?” the Baron asked.
“Then my wish will remain until you do.”
“I won’t believe in any divinity. I can tell you this now.”
“I’ve done this twice before, and neither time has it failed. You are simply the last, Baron, and the most challenging. It’ll only take a moment, but someday, that moment will come.” Jakob closed his eyes. “I don’t want to trouble you any longer. I’ve somewhere to go now.”
“In the dark?” the Baron asked. “At least let me find you a better coat and lantern.”
Jakob Böhme nodded slowly, as if he were about to sleep. “You are a good man, Baron, a virtuous atheist.”
The Baron set down his cheese and went to the back of the hall, towards the room where his servants would be loitering. He asked them to find a coat while he retrieved a lantern. They were generally pleased with d’Holbach’s charity and set about their search immediately for one of the older, unused garments in the mansion. The Baron took a lantern from the kitchen that he favored for trips to the well. It was sturdy and had a deep reserve of oil.
When he returned to the hall, Jakob Böhme had already disappeared.
Author’s Note:
A mystic arrived, then vanished. He wished to spread faith, even to the most rational philosopher in Europe.
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