A celebrated German mystic, born at Görlitz; of an imaginatively meditative turn from boyhood as a neat-herd, and afterwards in his stall as a shoemaker; spent his whole life in meditation on divine things; saw in the Bible a revelation of these as in no other book; seemed to have eyes given him to see visions of these things himself, for which he felt he had no organ to express, and which he conveyed to others in mystical, apocalyptical speech; a thinker very fascinating to all minds of the seer class. He was subject to persecution, as all of his stamp are, by the men of the letter, and bore up with the meekness which all men of his elevation of character ever do—"quiet, gentle, and modest," as they all are to the very core, in his way of thinking; and his philosophy would seem to have anticipated the secret of Hegel, who acknowledges him as one of the fathers of German philosophy. He left writings which embody a scheme of mystical theology, setting forth the trinity in unity of the Hegelian system, that is, viewing the divine as it is in itself, as it comes out in nature, and as it returns to itself in the human soul (1575-1624).