Although the religious framework of Voss is obviously subsidiary to its interest as a novel, it does throw light on one difficult subject, White's pessimism and the limits of that pessimism; the curious vision in the book of a bleak, yet in a sense self-curing world…. The continued irony and even distaste shown about the social world and 'the flesh', even after they have been embraced, makes it doubtful that coming to terms with the physical, or social salvation, are really what Voss is about. However, the problem of Voss is clearly not its quality of disgust. (pp. 119-20)

The oddity about Voss is that the gloomy landscape is not accompanied by the almost inevitable corollary, the insistence that human life must be penetrated from outside by divine Grace to have any meaning. The encounter between Voss and Laura takes place within the dark world. It is not a penetration of it from outside. The way to salvation appears almost spontaneously from the collision of two temperaments in the world we know.

Clearly Voss and Laura interact on each other. What is the exact nature of that interaction?…

Far more important than any similarity is the difference between Voss and Laura. Their spiritual ailments are radically unalike. The terrible moment for Laura is not the realisation of her pride. It is her sense of her lack of spiritual aspiration, of the thin and impoverished view of life she holds. Voss's attack on atheism … and his association with the wind … and star images appears to identify him with the spirituality which challenges Laura. Simultaneously he is himself being attacked….

In this dichotomy the parallels with the thought of Jacob Boehme … are striking. A central similarity between his and White's spiritual view is an emphasis on the spiritual androgyny of man. (p. 120)

The encounter between Voss and Laura is reminiscent of the meeting of the dark and the light and the 'lightning flash' produced by their interaction: a concept at the very heart of Boehme's view of the spiritual life. Edward Taylor in his Jacob Boehme's Philosophy Unfolded summarises the process in one of its aspects:

1) The Darkness in us which longeth after the light is the First Principle.

2) The Vertue of the Light, whereby we see intellectually, is the Second Principle.

3) The Longing Power that proceedeth from the Mind, and that attracteth or impregnateth itself whence groweth the material body, is the Third Principle.

The early picture of Laura given in Voss corresponds to the first principle in Boehme's triad. She sits in a room darkened, with closed shutters, in which 'masses of mellow wood tended to daunt the intruding light.'… The room is the image of her mind, intellectually lonely, despite an apparent self-sufficiency. She is not so much a smug rationalist as a woman whose longing for meaning has been frustrated…. It is this stagnant mind which Voss disrupts, challenges and fertilises. (pp. 120-21)

Voss and Laura, in conflict with each, are halves of the original spiritual androgyny. They are also incarnations of man's double fall; through pride in the case of Voss and through inability to imagine spirituality or sustain a high spiritual state, in the case of Laura.

The third Behmenist principle, 'that attracteth or impregnateth itself, whence groweth the material body' has a strong affinity with the child Mercy. Although physically Mercy is the child of Rose Portion, it is made clear that she takes her life from the interaction of Voss and Laura…. The influence of the Cabbala on Patrick White has been noted and it is natural to suggest a similarity between the Voss-Laura relationship and the sacred marriage of tif ereth and malkuth, the male and female aspects of God. However, given the violence of their struggle there seems somewhat more similarity between Voss and Laura's relationship and the interaction of light and dark principles in Boehme than with the 'sacred marriage' of the Cabbala. The stages of the 'sacred marriage' … are radically different from the relationship of Voss and Laura. They begin with a harmony between judgement and mercy, proceed with a conjunction of masculine and feminine, and culminate in the rescue of the Shekhinah. There is nothing here suggestive of the interacting of Voss and Laura on each other and nothing corresponding to the 'outbirth' of Mercy from their union. One might, perhaps, also suggest that Boehme is much more part of the common Western intellectual heritage than the somewhat esoteric cabbalistic teachings with which White has been connected. The line from Boehme to Hegel and Nietzche is an easy one to draw. He is not a thinker on the margins but a living influence for several centuries. What the Behmenist current in Voss tends to do is to provide a model for White's somewhat paradoxical view of the world; dark and yet capable of redemption from within by the spontaneous conflict of spiritual principles. (pp. 121-22)