The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme · 121 of 159 · tr. Franz Hartmann
Chapter 12 (part 1)
p.
242 CHAPTER XII.
REDEMPTION.
"God lives also in man.
Therefore if we are but seeking and loving our own (true) self, we then love God.
That which we do to each other we are doing to God.
He who seeks and finds his brother and sister has sought and found God.
We are in Him all one body with many members, each of which has its own functions." ( Threefold Life , xi.
106.) It was the will of God, by means of becoming Himself human, to reinstate man, who in consequence of his sin had become degenerated into an earthly being, into the glorious state in which he had been created originally.
As this statement, on account of the old theological ideas which it is liable to awaken in the mind, will probably be misunderstood, we will attempt to express its meaning in different terms.
God, the will of eternal wisdom, willed that His wisdom should become manifest in a human form, because the universal man, having become absorbed by the attractions of the sensual plane, had lost that divine state of consciousness which renders possible the perception of divine truth.
As it is only the truth in man that can know universal truth, and as this principle of truth had become inactive in him, it was necessary that the Christ (the Truth, the Life, and the Light) should become active in him, and by rendering man truthful, self-conscious, and living within the light, reinstate him in his former position which he occupied in the macrocosmos before he sank into materiality and degradation 1 .
p.
243 "The spirit of this world has captured the body 1 and rendered it earthly, so as to cause body and soul to be corrupted.
Thus we are no longer in possession of the pure element necessary for the formation of a (pure) body, but au outgrowth of the four elements in combination with the influence of the stars.
This body does not belong unto the Godhead.
God does not unfold Himself within an unclean body, but only in holy (regenerated, interior) man, in the pure image which He created in the beginning.
There was then nothing else to be done than to regenerate that image by means of the heart and light of God." ( Three Principles , xxiii.
21.) "Man must again go out of the spirit of the planets and elements and enter into a new birth, into the life of God.
This the soul cannot accomplish by her own power, and therefore the life of God out of love and mercy came to us into the flesh and took our human soul again unto itself, into the divine life, into the power of the light; so that in this life we may enter into a new birth and penetrate unto God." ( Threefold Life , i, 17.) "To the human spirit (as such) it was impossible to issue from the torment of anguish and enter into the region of heaven, and therefore God had to come again into humanity and aid the human spirit in bursting the doors of the darkness, so that it may enter within them (clothed) in divine power." 2 ( Threefold Life , xxi.
21.) p.
244 "Christ came for the purpose of healing the injury which Adam had suffered when he died relatively to the celestial kingdom.
He came to awaken the inner man who had disappeared in Adam, and to regenerate him in His power, and to bruise for ever the serpent's head of wrath and falsehood, (that is to say) to kill the (selfish) terrestrial will." ( Stiefel , ii.
168.) To effect this reconstitution the direct action of God upon humanity would not have been sufficient.
Without the incarnation a real union of God and man, and a resurrection of the latter from death, would not have been possible.
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.
The text references the 'universal man' and his position in the 'macrocosmos' before sinking into materiality.
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 goal is to regenerate the image of man and enter into the divine life, transforming the human into a partaker of God.