Chapter 4 (part 5)

90.) These "angels" (good or evil) are living and conscious powers existing in nature. Neither the power of God nor any angel, or devil or creature of any kind, can have any existence outside of Nature, i.e. , outside of the dark fire-ground, the will of God, out of which everything is born. "No created spirit can exist without the fire-world. Even the love of God could not exist, if not the wrath of God, or the world of fire, were existing in Him; for the wrath or the fire of God is a cause of light, strength, power, and omnipotence." (Stief. ii. 4.) "The wrath (the fire) is the root of all things and the origin of all life; in it is the cause of all strength and power, and from it are issuing all the wonders (manifestations of power). Without that fire there would be no consciousness, but everywhere a mere nothing." ( Three Principles , xxi. 14.) p. 97 "No being can be born unless it has within itself the fiery triangle, i.e. , the first three natural forms." ( Grace , ii. 38.) Every form is the product or manifestation of a power which is building up such forms. Without the presence of such a power there could be no manifestation of it; neither can any form exercise or know any power except that which resides therein. Therefore a being incapable of any emotion would be unable to rise above the sphere of emotions; a being without any energy to commit evil would have no energy to accomplish anything good. The foundation from which all powers and ideas spring is eternal; but the created beings as such have a beginning in time. "Everything has been from all eternity, but merely as ideas, and not as corporeally existing things. Only incorporeal spirits existed (as ideas) in eternity, as in a world of magic, where one thing contains the other in potentiality." ( Forty Questions , xix. 7.) "The creation of the angels has a beginning, but not that of the powers whereof they have been created. The latter are co-eternal with the eternal beginning." ( Mysterium , viii. 1.) "In eternity, in eternal Will, there was a nature, but it existed therein only as a spirit, and its essentiality was not manifested except in the mirror of that Will, i.e. , in eternal wisdom ." ( Signature , xiv. 8.) "The mysterium magnum is the chaos wherefrom originates good and evil, light and darkness, life and death. It is the foundation or womb wherefrom are issuing souls and angels and all other kinds of beings, and wherein they are contained as in one common cause, comparable to an image that is contained in a piece of wood before the artist has cut it out." ( Clavis , vi. 23.) In the soul of man exists potentially the whole of the p. 98 universe—heaven and hell, God and the devil, angels and spirits, the whole of the celestial, terrestrial, and infernal kingdoms, with all their powers and essences; but unless these powers become manifested as forms (created beings on the spiritual, astral, or terrestrial plane), they can have no existence recognisable to his internal senses. Creation was an act of the free will of God, and not induced by any inferior cause. The will of God would not be divine if it were not free. It is itself the law, and therefore not subject to " natural law," or the law of mechanics. Creation took place by means of God unfolding His eternal nature, whereby through His active love or desire He caused that which heretofore had been in Him merely as a spirit (subjectively) to become substantial and corporeal (objective).