"Nothing is God" - Boehme

{Excerpt from Karl Jaspers' The Great Philosophers Volume III , Harcourt Brace 1993, p.120-121 on Jakob Boehme}


What is God before creation? "The Nothing is GOd" and "God has made all things out of the Nothing and is the self-same Nothing.

But this Nothing is a strange Nothing. It is not Nothing altogether. What then? God Himself is "the seeing and feeling of the Nothing... and is called a Nothing (even though it is a God himself) for the reason that it is incomprehensible and ineffable. "

This Nothing is touched by us in thinking when we think of God. God is the "unground." The unground is an eternal Nothing." There, within the eternity of the unground, there is nothing but stillness, an eternal quiety, no beginning and no end, no searching or finding, or anything that would be a possibility. The unground "is first and foremost a magia [invocatory thought].

In the unground there is an eternal will. We recognize "that the eternal beginning in the ungrouned is an eternal will in itself, whose primal state no creature is to know (for) the Nothing is a desire for Something." The desire in the Nothing makes, "in itself, the will into something.... With the free joy of the Nothing (God) leads himself to desire; for in the Nothing there is an eternal will to revelation.... Will in free joy is named God."

"The will in the unground is like an eye in which nature lies hidden; like a hidden fire that does not burn, that is there and also is not." The eye "is a will... yearning for revelation, in order to find the Nothing." Its "seeing is in itself, for there is nothing before it that would be deeper."

Unground, primal will, the unseeing eye, themselves Nothing, yet they do not remain in the Nothing. They become manifest:

A "will is as flimsy as a Nothing, therefore it is desirous, it wants to be something so that it may be manifest in itself."