orce his spiritual insight into a language which for us has
become largely an antique rubbish heap.[5] If he {174} had possessed
the marvellous power that Dante had to compel words to express what his
soul saw, he might have fused these artificial symbolisms with the fire
of his spirit, and given them an eternal value as the Florentine did
with the equally dry and stubborn terminology of scholasticism, but
that gift he did not have.[6] We must not blame him too much for his
obscurities and for his large regions of rubbish and confusion, but be
thankful for the luminous patches, and try to seize the meaning and the
message where it breaks through and gets revealed.

The outward, visible, temporal world, he declares, is "a spiration, or
outbreathing, or egress" of an eternal spiritual World and this inner,
spiritual World "couches within" our visible world and is its ground
and mother, and the outward world is from husk to core a parable or
figure of the inward and eternal World. "The whole outward visible
world, with all its being, is a 'signature' or figure of the inward,
spiritual World, and everything has a character that fits an internal
reality and process, and the internal is in the external."[7] As he
expresses the same idea in another book: "The visible world is a
manifestation of the inward spiritual World, and it is an image or
figure of eternity, whereby eternity has made itself visible."[8]

But there is a still deeper Source of things than this inward spiritual
World, which is after all a manifested and organized World, and Boehme
begins his account with That which is before beginnings--the
unoriginated Mother of all Worlds and of All that is, visible and
invisible. This infinite Mother of all births, this eternal Matrix, he
calls the _Ungrund_, "Abyss," or the "Great {175} Mystery,"[9] or the
"Eternal Stillness." Here we are beyond beginnings, beyond time,
beyond "nature," and we can say nothing in the language of reason that
is true or adequate. The eternal divine Abyss is its own origin and
explanation; it presupposes nothing but itself; there is nothing beyond
it, nothing outside it--there is, in fact, no "beyond" and
"outside"--it is "neither near nor far off."[10] It is an absolute
Peace, an indivisible Unity, an undifferentiated One--an Abysmal Deep,
which no Name can adequately name and which can be described in no
words of time and space, of here and now.

But we must not make the common b