The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme · 123 of 159 · tr. Franz Hartmann
Chapter 12 (part 3)
He willingly surrendered Himself to the wrath (to the suffering caused by the lower principles that had been awakened to consciousness in consequence of the sin), and He extinguished it by His love.
He came from God into this world and took our soul into Himself, so that He might take us out of the earthly state into Himself and lead us thus into God.
He regenerated us within Himself, so that we would become capable of living again in God, and that we should put our will into Him.
In Him He led us to the Father, into our first home; that is to say, into the Paradise which Adam had left." ( Menschwerdung , i.
11.
6.) "The Word took our own flesh and blood into the divine essentiality, and broke the power which held us imprisoned in the wrath of death and fury.
It broke that power on the Cross; that is to say, in the centre of nature (the fourth natural form, whose symbol is the Cross), and ignited again in our soul (that had become dark) the burning white light-fire." ( Menschwerdung , ii.
6, 9.) "Christ sacrificed our human image to the wrath of His Father, to be swallowed up in death, and introduced His life into death; but He manifested His love in that life which death had devoured, and thus He brought that life out of death by means of His love (with which p.
247 it had become one and immortal).
As a seed sown into the earth must die (as such and relatively to its form) within the earth, and as by means of this dying a new body grows, so the corrupted body of Adam had to be sacrificed to death and to the wrath, and out of the death and wrath issued the body of the love of God ." ( Mysterium , xxviii.
17.) The conquest of the power of death took place, in a certain sense, already at the time of the overcoming of the temptation of the Redeemer, which, like that of Adam, was caused by the envy of the devil, but in which the devil was conquered by the Lord.
1 "Adam was to take possession of the kingly throne of Lucifer, because the latter had turned away from God.
From this results the great envy and the spite of the devil against mankind.
From this also originates the temptation of Christ in the wilderness, because Christ was to take possession of the throne which the devil claimed, to break his power, and to become his judge who was to reject him eternally." ( Grace , vi.
13.) "All that which had seduced Adam; and wherein he became imprisoned as in the death of darkness, was offered to the Saviour at the time of temptation." ( Signature , vii.
46.) "The temptation is the hard fight in the garden of Eden, in which Adam fell; but the new warrior came out of it victorious, and remained conqueror." ( Three Principles , xii.
91.) "When Christ withstood the temptation in the place of Adam, then the newly introduced celestial Ens broke the sword in the death of the external body of Christ, and by means of the holy substance it brought the external body, which He had taken up in Mary and out of her p.
248 seed, through that sword of the wrath and into the holy state.
In this very power the external body became raised from the dead, and conquered both, death and the fiery sword." ( Mysterium , xxiv.
24.) The first factor in the temptation was that Christ was requested to take earthly food instead of celestial nutriment, and that He should thereby gratify the desire of His body.
1 "After the Spirit of God had led Christ into the wilderness, then was the devil permitted to approach Him in the kingdom of wrath and to tempt the second Adam as he had tempted the first one.
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 uses the metaphor of a seed dying in the earth to grow a new body and the sacrifice of the corrupted body to issue the body of love.
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 Word takes human flesh into divine essentiality and regenerates the soul within Himself.
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 Cross is identified as the symbol of the fourth natural form in the centre of nature.
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.
The text instructs that we should put our will into Him to be regenerated.
Final, collective cosmic judgment as an event in which the wicked are sentenced and the cosmos restored; distinct from psychopomp_journey (individual passage at death) and emphasising verdict where Zoroastrian frashokereti emphasises restoration.
Christ is described as becoming the judge who will reject the devil eternally.
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.
Wrath is described as suffering caused by lower principles awakened by sin rather than a positive divine creation.
Sufi self-effacement in God — the via by which the lover is unmade as a separate ego and recovered as God's act; specifies the practice/event rather than mystical_union's resulting state.
The text describes sacrificing the human image to wrath and being swallowed up in death to bring forth new life.
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 human soul is taken into Christ to lead humanity into God, mirroring the divine structure.
The felt condition of exile from one's divine origin — Rumi's reed flute torn from its bed, Plotinus's 'we have forgotten,' the Gnostic forgetfulness; the affective wound that complements return_to_source and gives the return its motive.
The text identifies the human condition as an earthly state and imprisonment in wrath from which one must be led out.
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.
[auto] The text emphasizes regeneration within Christ so that humans become capable of living in God and issuing as the body of the love of God.