To faith spirit has truth, but in this truth the moment of certainty of self is lacking. We have seen that the object of Christianity is the truth, the Spirit; it is given to faith as immediate truth. Faith possesses the truth, but unconsciously, without knowledge, without knowing it as its self-consciousness; and seeing that thought, the Notion, is necessarily in self-consciousness—the unity of opposites with Bruno—this unity is what is pre-eminently lacking to faith. Its moments as particular forms fall apart, more especially the highest moments—good and evil, or God and the Devil. God is, and the Devil likewise; both exist for themselves. But if God is absolute existence, the question may be asked, What absolute existence is this which has not all actuality, and more particularly evil within it? Boehme is hence on one side intent on leading the soul of man to the divine life, on inducing the soul to pay attention to the strife within itself, and make this the object of all its work and efforts; and then in respect of this content he strives to make out how evil is present in good—a question of the present day. But because Boehme does not possess the Notion and is so far back in intellectual culture, there ensues a most frightful and painful struggle between his mind and consciousness and his powers of expression, and the import of this struggle is the profoundest Idea of God which seeks to bring the most absolute opposites into unity, and to bind them together—but not for thinking reason. Thus if we would comprehend the matter, Boehme’s great struggle has been—since to him God is everything—to grasp the negative, evil, the devil, in and from God, to grasp God as absolute; and this struggle characterizes all his writings and brings about the torture of his mind. It requires a great and severe mental effort to bring together in one what in shape and form lie so far asunder; with all the strength that he possesses Boehme brings the two together, and therein shatters all the immediate significance of actuality possessed by both. But when thus he grasps this movement, this essence of spirit in himself, in his inward nature, the determination of the moments simply approaches more nearly to the form of self-consciousness, to the formless, or to the Notion. In the background, indeed, there stands the purest speculative thought, but it does not attain to an adequate representation. Homely, popular modes of conception likewise appear, a free out-spokenness which to us seems too familiar. With the devil, particularly, he has great dealings, and him he frequently addresses. “Come here,” he says, “thou black wretch, what dost thou want? I will give thee a potion.”[123] As Prospero in Shakespeare’s “Tempest”[124] threatens Ariel that he will “rend an oak and peg him in his knotty entrails ... twelve winters,” Boehme’s great mind is confined in the hard knotty oak of the senses—in the gnarled concretion of the