The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme · 56 of 159 · tr. Franz Hartmann
Chapter 6 (part 9)
Thus he was in possession of divine and terrestrial essentiality; but the terrestrial one was in the divine one like consumed or impotent (latent).
The substance or the matter from which the body was made or created contained itself also the first principle within itself, but it was not stirring therein." ( Menschwerdung , i.
3, 15.) "As God resides within Himself and penetrates through all His works, incomprehensible to the latter, and without His being affected by anything, likewise His image (man) originated from the pure element.
He also was created in this world; but the kingdom of this world was not to comprehend him, but he was to rule powerfully in this world by means of the essences from the pure element." ( Three Principles , xxii.
15.) The expression that God created man from a clod of clay is not to be taken in any other sense than that God, by means of desire, drew together all the terrestrial qualities.
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139 "If Moses says that God created man out of a clod of clay, and that he breathed into him the living breath, this is not to be understood as if God had acted in a personal manner—standing there like a man and taking up a lump of earth and making a body out of it; but the Fiat , that is to say, the desire of the Word , was contained within the eternally-perceived model of man, which stood in the mirror of wisdom, and it drew the Ens (the principle) of all the qualities of the earth (matter) into a body, and this was the quintessence made out of the four elements." ( Grace , v.
27.) But the essence of the soul, being rooted in that whole, did not become manifest in man before God awakened it by the breath of His word.
1 "The sourcive spirits within the whole could not become immediately ignited by the soul, for the soul was only as a seed within the whole, hidden away with the heart of God in His heaven, until the Creator expanded the whole by His breath.
Then the sourcive spirits ignited the soul, and then body and soul were living at once.
The soul truly possessed her life before the body existed; but it was within the heart of God, hidden within the whole in heaven, and was nothing but a holy seed, a centre of power in God." ( Aurora , xxvi.
126.) Neither does at this present day the soul of man manifest divine life as long as the Spirit of God is only moving upon the surface and does not stir within the depths.
Footnotes 123:1 "Lucifer" is to be regarded not as a separate being within this world, but as a power penetrating the whole of the visible universe, in the same sense as that universe may now be regarded as being the body of universal spiritual man.
123:2 In other words, the tendency of the spiritual principle is to spiritualise and illumine everything by becoming active therein.
123:3 In the same sense the power of a seed to develop into a tree may remain latent for many years until the conditions present themselves for its manifestation.
123:4 Thus the fire of passion is subdued in man by the "water" of eternal life distilled from humility, which baptizes the soul and tranquillises the turbulent elements.
124:1 This goes to show the intimate relations existing between the spiritual and the material worlds.
There is a "spiritual" and a "material" water, both of which are merely manifestations of the one element.
125:1 The same takes place within the heart of man when his mind becomes illumined by the light of divine wisdom that arises from the divine centre in him.
125:2 The seventh "day" for our planet is always and nevertheless it has not yet arrived, because the six days belong to time and the seventh to eternity.
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 uses alchemical imagery such as quintessence made from four elements and fire subdued by water.
Eckhart's signature doctrine that the Father eternally begets the Son in the ground of the soul; the human interior as the actual site of the divine generative act, distinct from inner_light's static indwelling.
The soul is awakened by the breath of His word and the desire of the Word was contained within the model of man.
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.
There are intimate relations between spiritual and material worlds which are merely manifestations of the one element.
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.
Man is the image of God originating from the pure element and the universe is the body of universal spiritual man.
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.
The spiritual principle tends to spiritualise and illumine everything by becoming active therein.