ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical perspective that highlights process thought's rich theological, philosophical and literary inheritance. By necessity, therefore, it seeks to present a broad overview of similar concepts and ideas. The starting point will be the thought of the German mystic Jacob Boehme who is justifiably seen by Charles Hartshorne as the founder of a dipolar theology. Boehme's influence also permeates into Romantic poetic literature, of which William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are prime representatives. Like any seminal philosophy, Whitehead's thought is both reactionary and revolutionary: he is reacting against the static, mechanical Newtonian world and proclaiming notions of becoming, creativity and novelty as central cosmological principles. Drawing on the analogy between the macro- and microcosm, Schelling asserts there to be an intimate link between the freedom of God and that of created humanity. Boehme is an opaque but nevertheless momentous thinker.
