The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme · 16 of 159 · tr. Franz Hartmann
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.
Narratives or doctrines of cosmic origin — how heaven, earth, and the primordial deities first came into being. The Kojiki's deities born alone on the Plain of High Heaven, Voluspo's Ginnungagap, Genesis's tohu wa-bohu, the Timaeus's Demiurge fashioning the Receptacle, the Hesiodic Theogony, the Kalevala's egg-cosmogony, Egyptian Nun-and-Atum. Distinct from emanation_hierarchy (structural-ontological cascade), letters_of_creation (mechanism of creation), and apocatastasis/frashokereti (end-state restoration); cosmogony is temporally-narrative beginning.
The passage narrates the origin of being: 'that which is nothing finds itself to be something' through the primordial will's self-conception and issuance, describing how the divine triad and creation come into being.
A chain of divine beings or principles flowing downward from a single transcendent source (the One or the Father), each level less perfect than the one above.
The passage describes the primordial will issuing forth through the conceived Son into the Spirit, forming a cascading threefold activity from a single source.
The Hermetic doctrine that a masculine-feminine generative principle operates on every plane of being, not only the biological — present at all times as a structural feature of creation itself. Distinct from divine_marriage (a specific reunification event or symbol) and aeons (paired divine beings arranged in syzygies, not a universal structural claim).
The passage centrally develops the doctrine that a masculine-feminine generative principle operates on every plane: Father as active/male, Wisdom as passive/female, Life as male, matter/earth as female.
The human being as a small-scale image of the entire cosmos; the body, soul, and intellect mirroring the structure of the heavens and the divine — distinct from correspondence in that it makes the human the privileged mirror.
[auto] The passage explicitly draws a parallel between the divine structure (Will/Wisdom) and the human mind ('In the same sense the mind of a man...'), establishing the human as a mirror of the divine.
The doctrine that the one Godhead or first principle subsists as three co-equal aspects or persons rather than a bare unity — the Christian Father/Son/Holy Ghost invoked in the recurring liturgical formula 'In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,' but structurally the same pattern as the Egyptian Amen/Ptah/Osiris, the Hindu Brahma/Vishnu/Siva, and the Kabbalistic Chochmah/Binah/Kether triads that esoteric writers explicitly map onto it as instances of one universal law. Distinct from unity_of_being (the general claim that all existence is one substance, agnostic about internal plurality) and divine_simplicity (God as having no parts or divisions at all) in asserting a definite three-aspected differentiation within a single divine essence.
The passage explicitly and centrally articulates the Trinity: '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.'