"Living spirit is embodied spirit: this Schelling had learned from Jacob Boehme, whose scandalously anthropomorphic imaginings of a yearning, craving, and troublesomely incarnate God gave Schelling a richly affective rhetorical and conceptual framework with which both to enliven or corporealize a European philosophical scene otherwise completely lacking in "depth, fullness, and vitality" ( "Ages" 89), and to read the body of philosophy after Descartes symptomatically for these absences."