The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme · 27 of 159 · tr. Franz Hartmann
Chapter 3 (part 7)
171.) When the power of the light becomes revealed it manifests its activity first of all in the Fifth Quality , which is evolved by means of the preceding four as sweet love, or a luminous water-spirit.
"The first three principles are merely qualities conducive to life, the fourth is life itself, but the fifth is the true Spirit.
Whenever this power has been evolved from the fire, it lives within all the others and changes them all into its own sweet nature, so that painfulness and enmity cannot be found therein in any shape whatever." ( Tabulæ Principæ , i.
46.) "The fifth quality is the true love-fire, which in the light separates from the painful fire, and wherein divine love appears as a substantial being.
It has within itself all the powers of divine wisdom; it is the trunk or the centre of the tree of eternal life, wherein God the Father becomes revealed in His Son by means of the speaking Word." ( Grace , iii.
26.) In the Sixth Quality the divine powers, still united, and therefore undifferentiated and not manifest in the fifth, become differentiated and audible.
"The sixth form of eternal nature is intelligent life or sound.
The qualities being all in a state of equilibrium in the light (the fifth), they now rejoice and acquire audibility.
Thereby the desire of the unity enters into a state of (conscious) willing and acting, perceiving and feeling." ( Tabulæ Principæ , i.
48.) "To constitute audible life, or the sound of the powers, hardness and softness, compactness and thinness and motion are required.
To constitute the sixth principle there are therefore required all the other qualities of p.
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The first form furnishes hardness, the second motion; by means of the third division takes place.
The fire changes the harshness of the conceived essence by consuming it into a spiritual being, representing mildness and softness, and this becomes formed into sound, according to the qualities which it contains." ( Mysterium , v.
11.) This sound of course is not to be compared to terrestrial audible sound.
"In the light of God the kingdom of heaven (the consciousness of the spirit), sound is very subtle, sweet, and lovely, so that if compared with terrestrial noise, it is like a perfect stillness.
Nevertheless in the realm of glory it is indeed comprehensible sound, and there is a language which is heard by the angels—a language which is, however, only partaking of the nature of their world." ( Mysterium , v.
19.) The third principle reappears in the seventh , and therein consists the "resurrection of the flesh." " The Seventh Principle is the corporeal comprehension of the other qualities.
It is called ' Essential Wisdom ' or the ' Body of God .' The third principle appears in the seven forms of nature in so far as they have been brought into comprehensibility in the seventh.
This principle or state of being is holy, pure, and good.
It is called the eternal untreated heaven or the kingdom of God, and it is outspoken from the first principle, of the dark fire-world and from the holy light-flaming love-world." ( Grace , iv.
10.) "The seventh form is the state of being wherein all the others manifest their activity, like the soul in the body.
It is called Nature, and also the eternal essential wisdom of God." ( Tabulæ Principæ , i.
49.) "The seventh spirit of God is the body, being born from the other six spirits, and in it all the celestial figures are taking form.
From it arises all beauty, all p.
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If this spirit did not exist God would be imperceptible." ( Aurora , xi.
1.) "Wisdom is the substantiality of the spirit.
The spirit wears it as a garment, and becomes revealed thereby.
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 text describes fire consuming harshness into a spiritual being, reflecting the alchemical transformation of base substance.
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 unfolding of the cosmos from the first principle through seven successive stages, describing how each quality arises and what it produces—a clear cosmogonic account.
The supreme God's radical concealment beyond ordinary knowledge or perception; the Hidden Father.
The passage states 'If this spirit did not exist God would be imperceptible,' asserting that the divine is radically concealed without the mediating form of the seventh principle.
The doctrine that the divine is present within all things and the universe itself, pervading creation rather than remaining solely transcendent above it. Distinct from unity_of_being (the general claim that all existence is one substance, agnostic about whether that substance indwells its parts) and from kingdom_within (the divine present specifically IN THE INDIVIDUAL human, accessible without mediation) — divine_immanence is the general pervading-presence claim applied to all of creation, not a human-specific indwelling.
The fifth quality 'lives within all the others and changes them all into its own sweet nature,' and the seventh is described as the state 'wherein all the others manifest their activity, like the soul in the body.'
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.
[auto] The passage explicitly details the evolution of divine qualities from preceding ones (first four to fifth, sixth, seventh), describing a structured unfolding of divine nature.
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.
Painfulness and enmity are described as absent in the higher qualities, implying evil is a lack rather than a substance.
A non-physical dimension of reality, interpenetrating the physical world, populated by forces, beings, and forms ordinarily imperceptible to physical senses and instruments, that can affect embodied life without being seen — Dion Fortune's 'mind-side of nature,' the astral plane of Western esotericism broadly construed. Distinct from astral_light (a specific transmitting medium or fluid operating within this realm, not the realm itself), pleroma (the divine fullness at the summit of a cosmic hierarchy, not a parallel plane coextensive with ordinary life), and animism (particular indwelling spirits bound to specific natural objects, not the general unseen dimension itself).
The entire passage describes a non-physical dimension of reality—qualities, light-spirits, and a sound 'not to be compared to terrestrial audible sound'—that constitutes a parallel realm of divine being.
The doctrine that the cosmos unfolds as a structured descent of spirit into matter — a directional process traced stage by stage from an unconditioned principle down through successive planes to full materialization — complemented by its own eventual return ('evolution'). Distinct from emanation_hierarchy (the static structure of the resulting levels of the cascade) and cosmogony (a single originating event rather than an ongoing staged process) in naming the directional cosmic PROCESS of descent itself, paired with its own complementary ascent.
The passage describes a structured directional descent from the unconditioned first principle through successive stages (hardness, motion, division, life, spirit, sound, body) to full corporealization in the seventh—exactly the staged descent of spirit into matter.
The absolutely simple, undivided first principle from which all multiplicity and existence flows.
The 'first principle' from which all subsequent qualities are 'evolved by means of the preceding four' functions as the absolutely simple undivided source from which all multiplicity flows.