with God’s knowing (conscientia).  The relation between the known and the knower is threefold.  Cognition is incomplete and lacks the free co-operation of the knower when God merely pervades (durchwohnt) the creature, as is the case with the devil’s timorous and reluctant knowledge of God.  A higher stage is reached when the known is present to the knower and dwells with him (beiwohnt).  Cognition becomes really free and perfect when God dwells in (inwohnt) the creature, in which case the finite reason yields itself freely and in admiration to the divine reason, lets the latter speak in itself, and feels its rule, not as foreign, but as its own. (Baader maintains a like threefoldness in the practical sphere:  the creature is either the object or, rather, the passive recipient, or the organ, or the representative of the divine action, i.e., in the first case, God alone works; in the second, he co-operates with the creature; in the third, the creature works with the forces and in the name of God.  Joyful obedience, conscious of its grounds, is the highest freedom).  Knowing and loving, thought and volition, knowledge and faith, philosophy and dogma are as little to be abstractly divided as thing and self, being and thought, object and subject.  True freedom and genuine speculation are neither blind traditional belief nor doubting, God-estranged thinking, but the free recognition of authority, and self-attained conviction of the truth of the Church doctrine.

Baader distinguishes a twofold creation of the world and a double process of development (an esoteric and an exoteric revelation) of God himself.  The creation of the ideal world, as a free act of love, is a non-deducible fact; the theogonic process, on the contrary, is a necessary event by which God becomes a unity returning from division to itself, and so a living God.  The eternal self-generation of God is a twofold birth:  in the immanent or logical process the unsearchable will (Father) gives birth to the comprehensible will (Son) to unite with it as Spirit; the place of this self-revelation is wisdom or the Idea.  In the emanent or real process, since desire or nature is added to the Idea and is overcome by it, these three moments become actual persons.  In the creation of the—­at first immaterial—­world, in which God unites, not with his essence, but with his image only, the same two powers, desire and wisdom, operate as the principles of matter and form.  The materialization of the world is a consequence of the fall.  Evil consists in the elevation of selfhood, which springs from desire, into self-seeking.  Lucifer fell because of pride, and man, yielding to Lucifer’s temptation, from baseness, by falling in love with nature beneath him.  By the creation of matter God has out of pity preserved the world, which was corrupted by the fall, from the descent into hell, and at the same time has given man occasion for moral endeavor.  The appearance of Christ, the personification of the moral law, is the beginning of reconciliation, which man appropriates through the sacrament.  Nature participates in the redemption, as in the corruption.