Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/871

Rh conviction &quot;olme Gift und Grimm kein Leben,&quot; or rise I with the belief that &quot; the being of all beings is a wrestling power,&quot; or soar with the persuasion that Love &quot; in its height is as high as God.&quot; The mystical poet of Silesia, Joh. Angelas, discerned where Boehme s truest power lay when he sang—

&quot; Im &quot;Wasscr lebt der Fisch, die Pflanze in der Erden, Dei Vogel in der Luft, die Sonn am Firmalnent, Der Salamander muss im Feu r erhalten werden, Und Gottes Herz ist Jakob Bohme s Element.&quot;

The three periods of Boehme s authorship constitute three distinct stages in the development of his philosophy. He himself marks a threefold division of his subject matter : 1. , i.e., the pursuit of the divine Soj)kia, a study of God in himself ; this was attempted in the Aurora. 2., i.e., in the largest sense, cosmology, the manifestation of the divine in the structure of the world and of man ; hereto belong, with others, Die drei Prin- cipien gottlichen Wesens ; Vom dreifachen Leben der Menschen , Von der Menschiverdung Christ i ; Von der GAurt und Bezeichnung aller Wesen (known as Signatura Rerum). 3, i.e., in Scougall s phrase, &quot;the life of God in the soul of man.&quot; Of the speculative writings under this head the most important are Von der Gnadcmvald ; Mysterium Magnum (a spiritual commentary on Genesis); Von Christi Testamenten (the Sacraments). Although Boehme s philosophy is essentially theological, and his theology essentially philosophical, one would hardly describe him as a philosophical theologian ; and, indeed, his position is not one in which either the philosopher or the theologian finds it easy to make himself completely at home. The philosopher finds no trace in Boehme of a conception of God which rests its own validity on an accord with the highest canons of reason or of morals ; it is in the actual not in the ideal that Boehme seeks God, whom he discovers as the spring of natural powers and forces, rather than as the goal of advancing thought. The theo logian is staggered by a language which breaks the fixed association of theological phrases, and strangely reversing the usual point of view, characteristically pictures God as underneath rather than above. Nature rises out of Him ; we sink into Him. The Ungrund of the unmariifested Godhead is boldly represented in the English translations of Boehme by the word Abyss, in a sense altogether un explained by its Biblical use. In the Theologla Germanica this tendency to regard God as the substantia, the underly ing ground of all things, is accepted as a foundation for piety ; the same view, when offered in the colder logic of Spinoza, is sometimes set aside as atheistical. The proces sion of spiritual forces and natural phenomena out of the Ungrund is described by Boehme in terms of a threefold manifestation, commended no doubt by the constitution of the Christian Trinity, but exhibited in a form derived from the school of Paracelsus. From Weigel he learned a purely idealistic explanation of the universe, according to which it is not the resultant of material forces, but the expression of spiritual principles. These two explanations were fused in his mind till they issued forth as equivalent forms of one and the same thought. Further, Schwenkfeld supplied him with the germs of a transcendental exegesis, whereby the Christian Scriptures and the dogmata of Lutheran orthodoxy were opened up in harmony with his new-found views. Thus equipped, Boehme s own genius did the rest. A primary effort of Boehme s philosophy is to show how material powers are substantially one with moral forces. This is the object with which he draws out the dogmatic scheme which dictates the arrangement of his seven Quellgeistw. Translating Boehme s thought out of the uncouth dialect of material symbols (as to which one doubts sometimes whether he means them as concrete instances, or as pictorial illustrations, or as a mere memoria technical) we find that Boehme conceives of the correlation of two triads of forces. Each triad consists of a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis ; and the two are connected by an important link, In the hidden life of the Godhead, which is at once Niclits and Alles, exists the original triad, viz., Attraction, Diffusion, and their resultant, the Agony of the unmanifested Godhead. The transition is made ; by an act of will the divine Spirit comes to Light ; and imme diately the manifested life appears in the triad of Love, Expression, and their resultant, Visible Variety. As the action of contraries and their resultant are explained the relations of soul, body, and spirit ; of good, evil, and free will ; of the spheres of the angels, of Lucifer, acd of this world. It is a more difficult problem to account on this philosophy for the introduction of evil. Boehme does not resort to dualism, nor has he the smallest sympathy with a pantheistic repudiation of the fact of sin. That the difficulty presses him is clear from the progressive changes in his attempted solution of the problem. In the Aurora nothing s.ave good proceeds from the Ungrund, though there is good that abides and good that falls Christ and Lucifer. In the second stage of his writing the antithesis is directly generated as such ; good and its contrary are coincidently given from the one creative source, as factors of life and movement ; while in the third period evil is a direct outcome of the primary principle of divine manifes tation it is the wrath side of God. Corresponding to this change we trace a significant variation in the moral end contemplated by Boehme as the object of this world s life and history. In the first stage the world is created in remedy of a decline ; in the second, for the adjustment of a balance of forces ; in the third, to exhibit the eternal victory of good over evil, of love over wrath.

