Chapter 2 (part 3)

This other will is the sensitivity and conceivability of the primordial will, by means of which that which is nothing finds itself to be something. By so doing the inconceivable causeless will issues by means of that which it has eternally found, and enters into a state of eternal meditation about its own self. The first causeless will is called the eternal Father; the conceived and generated will of the groundlessness is its inborn Son; the issue of the fathomless will by means of the conceived Son is the Spirit. Thus the one will of the Absolute, by means of the first eternal and beginningless conception, manifests a threefold activity, but nevertheless remains only one undifferentiated will." ( Grace , i. 5–12.) This eternal mirroring, or God beholding Himself within Himself, may be called divine imagination. It is as infinite as the triune Spirit, beholding itself in that infinite mirror of divine wisdom, but it remains a merely passive power in regard to the active will. In the same sense the mind of a man is not the man himself, and the imagination of a man is or should be subject to his will; while a man without the power to think or imagine is unthinkable, and could not exist as a human being. "The first activity in God is divine contemplation or wisdom, by means of which the Spirit of God, with the outbreathed powers, plays as with one uniform power. This internal imagination is neither great nor little; it has neither beginning nor an end, but it is infinite, and its formative power is without limits." ( Grace , i. 14.) God, in His aspect as the father or creative will, is therefore the active or male element in creation; while divine wisdom, the mother, is the passive productive principle, having no will whatever of her own, but p. 63 acting entirely according to the will of the father in her. It is true that the will of the father could produce nothing if it were not for the presence of the mother in whom the forms are evolved—or, to express it in other words, He could not create anything if He had not the wisdom to do so; but all the wisdom in the world creates nothing unless it is made active by the will. "Wisdom stands before God like a mirror or reflection, wherein the Godhead sees its own self and all the great wonders of eternity, which have neither a beginning nor an end in time, but whose beginning and end is eternal. Wisdom is a revelation of the holy Trinity; but this is not to be understood as if she were revealing herself to God by her own power or choice, but the divine centre, the heart and essence of God, becomes revealed in her. She is like a mirror of the Godhead, and like any other mirror, she merely holds still; she does not produce an image, but merely conceives it." ( Menschwerdung , i. 1, 12.) That which the father eternally desires to give, the mother eternally desires to receive. Life is male, the earth, or "matter," is female. The earth does not cause a seed to grow, but the seed planted into the earth carries within itself the power to grow; the earth merely furnishes the material which the life in the seed extracts from the earth. Likewise the mother does not create the child, but merely furnishes the materials required by the creative spirit existing within the child, and which, before it is born, attracts from the organism of the mother that which it needs, comparable to the way in which, after the child is born, it draws its nutriment from the mother's breast. 1 p. 64 "Wisdom is the outspoken word of divine power, knowledge, and sanctity, an antithesis of the unfathomable unity in essentiality, wherein the Holy Spirit forms and imagines.