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
theologian 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 unmanifested
Godhead is boldly represented in the English translations of Boehme by
the word _Abyss_, in a sense altogether unexplained by its Biblical use.
In the _Theologia Germanica_ this tendency to regard God as the
_substantia_, the underlying 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 procession 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 _Quellgeister_.
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
technica_), we find that Boeh