The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme · 26 of 159 · tr. Franz Hartmann
Chapter 3 (part 6)
49.) Thus the light conquers the darkness, but does not destroy it; it merely becomes victorious over it and consumes it in a manner comparable to that of the assimilation of food by the organism which conquers and consumes that food by means of the fire of life.
"When the spiritual fire and light has become ignited in the darkness (it having, however, burned from all eternity), the great mystery of divine power and knowledge becomes eternally revealed therein, because in the fire all the qualities of nature appear exalted into spirituality.
Nature herself remains what she is, but her issue—namely, that which she produces, becomes spiritualised.
In the fire the dark will is consumed, and thereby issues the pure fire-spirit, penetrated by the light-spirit." ( Clavis , ix.
64.) When this great internal revelation 'takes place, the internal senses are then opened to the direct perception of spiritual truth.
There will then be no more necessity for drawing conclusions of any kind in regard to such unknown things, because the spirit perceives that which belongs to its sphere in the same sense as a seeing person sees external things.
"Behold how all life in the external world attracts its food to itself.
Thus you may recognise how life originates from death.
There can be no life unless that from which life is to issue is broken up in its form.
Everything has to enter into the state of anguish to attain the lightning-flash, and without this there will be no ignition." ( Menschwerdung , ii.
5.) This, then, is the beginning of the manifestation of God as the principle of fire and the principle of light.
The Godhead, as such, the will of the Trinity willing to p.
82 enter from the groundlessness into Trinity, is not yet a principle, and has no beginning, but is the beginning itself of itself.
"If a thing becomes that which it has not been before, this does not constitute a principle; a principle is there where a form of life and motion begins, such as has not existed before.
Thus the fire is a principle, and also the light which is born from the fire, but which, nevertheless is not a quality of the fire, but has a life of its own." ( Six Theosophical Points , ii.
1.) In the fire there is represented the division of the two aspects in which God is manifesting Himself—namely, as God and as Nature; also the division between the sweet life in love and the life in wrath.
"As the sun in the terrestrial plane transforms acerbity into concord, so acts the light of God in the forms of eternal nature; This light shines into them and out of them; it ignites them so that they obtain its will and surrender themselves to it entirely.
They then give up their own will and become as if they had no power at all of themselves, and are desirous only for the power of the light." ( Six Theosophical Points , v.
3.) By the union of fire and light the third principle attains substantiality.
"If the Godhead according to the first and second principle is to be regarded only as a spirit and without any conceivable essentiality, there is in it nevertheless the desire to evolve a third principle, wherein rests the spirit of the two first principles, and wherein it will become manifest as an image." ( Six Theosophical Points , i.
25.) "The fire receiving within itself the essence of desire as its food, so that it may burn, renders a joyful spirit and opens the power of the mild essentiality in the light." ( Six Theosophical Points , i.
57.) "The fire, drawing within itself the mild essentiality p.
83 of the light, there issues from it, by means of the wrath of death, the mild spirit that was enclosed therein, and which has within itself the quality of nature." ( Tilk ., i.
The transformation of base substance — outer matter or the inner soul — into a purified, perfected, or 'gold' state; the magnum opus as both laboratory practice and spiritual allegory.
The passage extensively uses alchemical imagery of fire consuming darkness and spiritualizing nature to describe transformation.
The Hermetic axiom that the structure of the cosmos is reflected at every scale — 'as above, so below; as within, so without' — making each level a legible map of the others.
The text draws parallels between external life attracting food and internal spiritual recognition.
John of the Cross's stage of contemplative purgation: a felt absence and aridity of God that strips the soul of attachments to its own consolations en route to deeper union.
The text states everything must enter a state of anguish to attain the lightning-flash and ignition.
Eckhart's Abgeschiedenheit/Gelassenheit — radical letting-go of will, image, and grasping that opens the soul to God; distinct from inner_silence (quietness) and from material renunciation, and adjacent to Sufi tark and Buddhist non-grasping as a practice rather than a metaphysical claim.
Forms are described as giving up their own will and becoming desirous only for the power of the light.
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 text outlines a progression from the Godhead through first, second, and third principles.
Augustinian and Plotinian doctrine that evil has no positive being of its own but is a lack, distortion, or absence of the good — denying ontological dualism while preserving moral seriousness.
Darkness is not destroyed but consumed and assimilated, suggesting it lacks independent being.
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.
Internal senses perceive spiritual truth in the same sense as a seeing person sees external things.
Eckhart's radical reading of Matthew 5:3 — the saint as one who wants nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing, having emptied even the will and the self with which to receive God; distinct from renunciation_of_wealth (material poverty).
Forms become as if they had no power at all of themselves, surrendering entirely to the light.
The doctrine — central to Eastern Orthodox and Maximian theology — that the human person is progressively transformed into a partaker of the divine nature by grace, not merely justified or united in passing ecstasy.
Nature is described as becoming spiritualised and issuing a pure fire-spirit, indicating transformation into divine nature.