Even within this Abysmal Depth, that underlies all that comes to being, there is eternal process--eternal movement toward Personality and Character: "God is the eternal Seeker and Finder of Himself."[11] "In the { 176} Stillness an eternal Will arises, a longing desire for manifestation, the eye of eternity turns upon itself and discovers itself"[12]--in a word there is within the infinite Divine Deep an eternal process of self-consciousness and personality, which Boehme expresses in the words, "The Father eternally generates the Son." "God hath no beginning and there is nothing sooner than He, but His Word hath a bottomless, unfathomable origin in Him and an eternal end: which is not rightly called _end_, but Person, _i.e._ the Heart of the Father, for it is generated in the eternal Centre."[13] This inner process toward Personality is often called by Boehme "the eternal Virgin" who brings to birth God as Person, or sometimes "the Mirror," in which God sees Himself revealed as will and wisdom and goodness.
In the greatest artistic creation of the modern world--"The Sistine Madonna"--Raphael has with almost infinite pictorial power of genius tried to express in visible form this Birth of God. Behind curtains which hang suspended from nowhere and stretch across the universe, dividing the visible from the invisible, the world of Nature from the world of holy mystery, the infinite, immeasurable and abysmal God is pictured as defined and personal in the face and figure of a little Child, in which the artist suggests in symbolism the infinite depth and joy and potency of Divinity breaking forth out of mystery into form. It is precisely this birth of God into visibility that Boehme is endeavouring to tell. "The Son," however, Boehme says, "is not divided or sundered from the Father, as two persons side by side--there are not two Gods. The Son is the heart of the Father--God as Person--the outspringing Joy of the total triumphing Reality,[14] and through this eternal movement toward self-consciousness and Personality, God becomes Spirit, an out-going energy of purpose, a dynamic activity, bursting forth into infinite manifestation and differentiation--a forth-breathed or expressed Word.[15] Through { 177} this eternal process of self-differentiation and outgoing activity, the inner spiritual universe comes into being--as an intermediate Nature or world, between the ineffable Abyss of God on the one hand, and our world of material, visible things on the other hand." "The process of the whole creation," he says, "is nothing else but a manifestation of the deep and unsearchable God, and yet creation is not God but rather like an apple which springs from the power of the tree and grows upon the tree, and yet is not the tree--even so all things have sprung forth out of the central divine Desire."[16]