7. Jacob Boehme

If, from this characterization of his nature, we try to penetrate more into his train of thought, into the spiritual nature of Jacob Boehme, it must be said that for modern man, who lives only in the cultural life of our time, much indeed must be unintelligible, not only in the content of Jacob Boehme's works, but also in his whole manner of presentation. At first the presentation appears completely chaotic. To be sure, one becomes slowly accustomed to it. But then there still remains for many persons something that is a hard nut to crack. We find that he has very peculiar definitions of words—quite unintelligible for the modern mind. Thus we find that in his explanation of the world he again and again uses words such as “salt,” “mercury” and “sulphur.” And if he wishes to analyse what “sul” signifies, what “phur” signifies, and finds all sorts of deep thoughts therein, then these modern minds must say to themselves that one cannot do anything with this, for what can be the significance of offering explanations about a universal principle by explaining the syllables of a word individually, such as “sul” and “phur”? That is quite alien to the modern mind.