Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence

We shall now endeavour to present and bring out distinctly, and into clear light, the eternal truths that

THE THREE PRINCIPLES

are to be found in his system, quite apart from the quaint and variegated forms of half -understood or misunderstood traditions wherewith he clothed his thoughts.

The fundamental conception of Jacob Boehme's philosophy might be characterized as Pantheo-dualistic ; that is to say, he attempts to harmonize the undeniable claim of Pantheism that God is not to be known out of and apart from Nature, but in it and through it ; with the equally undeniable fact of dualism, i.e. the evident opposition in this divine world of good and evil. Let us try to elucidate these ideas.

Pantheism is — here the very word points out the explanation— the counterpart of Theism, and, as can readily be shewn, the unavoidable result of the same. By the term Theism we understand the belief — well known to us from our youth — in a personal anthropomorphic God, who, at a definite period of time, has created the world out of nothing, by a special act of His will. Such a conception was possible and bearable in the dark Middle Ages, which followed after scholastic subtleties, but were blind to the facts of nature. Here below, so they reasoned, is the earth upon which man has his being, and up above in the blue heavens, behind the clouds, lives the Good Lord. Then came Copernicus, who proved that what we call heaven is nothing else but the infinite space which surrounds us on every side, wherein nothing is to be found beyond fixed stars like our sun, and planets like our earth, with all that they contain. In doing away with the old idea of Heaven, Copernicus had, without knowing or wishing it, taken away God. In the new astronomical system, there was no room left for Him. In the same way, a creation of the world out of nothing was no longer admissible after natural research had begun, and when it became more and more clearly recognized that, since matter does not vanish into nothingness, neither can it originate from nothingness, but must have been from all eternity.

If, in such circumstances, the idea of God was to be

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held fast, there was nothing to do but shift from the Theistic theory to the Pantheistic ; remove God into nature itself, since there was no room for Him without, and consider the universe as His Self-manifestation. Following up the various stages of development of the new philosophy, we observe how, in the conceptions of thinkers, God melts away more and more into the universe; how the Theism of Descartes is gradually modified by Geuliner and Malebranche, until, in the completely Pantheistic system of Spinoza, it reaches its last unavoidable consequence. This identification of nature and God, or God and nature (which comes to the very same thing), is expressed in the well known words of Goethe : —

" Was waV ein Gott, der nur von aussen stiesse,
Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse !
Ihm ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen,
Natur in Sich, Sich in Natur zu hegen,
So dass, was in Ihm lebt und vebt und ist,
Nie Seine Kraft, nie Seinen Geist vermisst"

What were a God, who did, but from without,
Upon its course, the Universe impel !
Him it behoves within His world to move,
Nature in Him, He in Nature to dwell :
So that in Him, what lives and moves and is,
May never miss His Spirit nor His Power.

Our Jacob Boehme was filled with this great knowledge of Pantheism long before Goethe, indeed long before Descartes and Spinoza. In Aurora, ch. xxiii., he writes: —