Böhme’s Ungrund and the Impossibility of Absolute Predication
Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), the mystic shoemaker of Görlitz, occupies a nebulous and precarious position in the canon of European thought. Too mystical for the philosophers and too philosophical for the mystics, his corpus remains a powder keg of obscure metaphors, heterodox cosmology, and incendiary speculations on the nature of God and being. Though later thinkers—most famously Hegel and Schelling—would draw liberally from Böhme’s conceptual inkpot, it is in the penumbras of his metaphysical architecture that we discover subtle but catastrophic operations undermining the very structure of rational predication. At the center of this implosion lies his enigmatic notion of the Ungrund, or “no-ground,” a proto-ontological cipher which demands the dissolution of all determinate attribution—not through negation, but through paradoxical excess.
Traditionally, metaphysicians are inclined toward a fundamental substratum upon which the edifices of properties, essences, and categories may rest. Whether one calls it “ousia,” “substance,” “being-itself,” or “God,” the metaphysical impulse is toward stabilization. Böhme, however, seizes the metaphysical taproot with fiery hand and inverts it. That which gives rise to being—the first act of ontological trembling—is not itself being, but Ungrund: a nothing that is not nothing, an abyss prior to any ratio or identity. In the first chapter of his _Mysterium Magnum_, Böhme articulates this abyssal principle with an intensity bordering on the delirious: “It is a will, but has no ground of its willing; it has neither cause nor counsel; it willeth only what it willeth.”¹ Such words disrupt not only the logic of classical theism but the entire edifice of predicative logic.
By conceptualizing Ungrund as the ungrounded will that wills itself in absolute freedom, Böhme withdraws being from the sphere of linguistic constitution. To say “it is” of the Ungrund is already to trespass upon its primary quality: the impossibility of “is-ness.” It is a prior, dark freedom, deeper than being, which cannot be localized through any genus or species, cannot be subjected to the Aristotelian categories, and which mocks even apophatic theology in its riotous refusal of difference. The theological via negativa posits what God is not; the Ungrund posits what not even God is not.
This is the radical pivot: Böhme’s cosmology asserts that God Himself—specifically, the revealed Trinity—is an evolutionary emergence within the Ungrund’s infinite abyssality. Accordingly, even God is not primordial; He unfolds _from_ the Ungrund, fashioned through a self-contraction (_angst_) of the eternal will—what Böhme calls the “eternal nature.”² This subtly undermines the entire Christian Neoplatonist edifice (Augustine, Eriugena, Pseudo-Dionysius), wherein God, changeless and perfect, precedes all becoming. Here, God becomes—He is the outcome, not the origin. The Ungrund refuses even the tautological safety of “God is God,” for such circularity presupposes identity, and identity itself already presumes a ground.
This fissure between will and identity runs parallel to the Kantian problematic of the noumenon, but where Kant—arrogantly or modestly—barred man from access to the thing-in-itself, Böhme invites the soul to _become_ the abyss it seeks to understand. In his text _The Signature of All Things_, he writes that “man can find in himself the image of eternity, if he but turn inward and confront the will before the will becomes a thought.”³ This enigmatic expression stages an encounter on the edge of metaphysical language, a place where intention exists before the categories of understanding—where will stands prior to logos. It is this pre-categorical kernel that renders Böhme’s metaphysic so dangerous, for it implies that the deepest truths of existence are not susceptible to rational distillation but are lived dramatically within the soul’s own inward contractions and dilations.
Indeed, the implications of the Ungrund are epochal. If the foundation of all is a groundless chasm, then statements about essence, being, and even God are always already belated. They occur after the fall into language, after the rupture of the originary unity in obscurity. To predicate is to comport oneself as if the world were already in place, insinuating a stability which Böhme denies. Thus, every theological declaration risks idolatry—not merely of the image, but of the very syntactical structure of subject and predicate. “God is love,” says St. John. But in the light of the Ungrund, such a phrase is inverted; God is _become_ love through the struggle of His own pre-cosmic desire to know Himself through generation. Love is not the predicate of God; rather, God is the product of love’s abyssal emergence from ungraspable freedom.
Modern philosophical theology, rooted as it is in ontology and phenomenology, fails to grasp this proto-expressionism at the heart of Böhme’s speculation. Schelling approximates it when he speaks in his _Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom_ of a dark ground in God, a non-God within God—but even he domesticates the wildness of Böhme’s original insight.⁴ Böhme’s God is not merely self-differentiated or dialectically resolved; He is born of pain, explosiveness, the warfare of primal qualities (Bitterniß, Herbigkeit, Süßigkeit, and Feuer), and only achieves selfhood in the quiet triumph of the Son principle.
From this we must conclude that the Ungrund, far from being an abstract concept, is the catastrophic silence which undergirds all logos. In its face, neither God, nor Nature, nor Mind can claim the final word. Philosophy, therefore, begins not in wonder (as Aristotle asserted), nor in doubt (as Descartes hoped), but in abyss. To philosophize, said Nietzsche, is to live dangerously; to mystically philosophize, as Böhme has done, is to live without ground.
Thus, the subtle but significant detail—often elided by those who would paint Böhme as a mere theosophical eccentric—is the radical ontological ambiguity his Ungrund entails. It undermines all affirmative and negative theology, all metaphysics of presence, all stable constructions of the Subject. It is not merely that you cannot say what God is; it is that you cannot even say He is at all, except retroactively, poetically, and tragically.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
ontology, Böhme, mysticism, negative theology, Ungrund, will, abyss