The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme · 126 of 159 · tr. Franz Hartmann
Chapter 12 (part 6)
253 and shedding of blood.
Adam's body died on the Cross, and Christ, born of Jesus and the sanctified seed of the woman, tinctured (blessed) him with His dear blood of love." ( Stiefel , ii.
494.) "The inner man Christ took our sins upon Him, and left the body, whereon He had laid the curse of God, hanging at the Cross as a curse of God.
Thus He died, and in His death He spilt His blood, the blood of the holy man, into the essence of the external man, wherein death resided.
But when this holy blood entered into death (with the external essence), then became death terrified at this holy life, and the wrath became terrified by the love, and went down into its own poison, as if killed or annihilated." ( Stiefel , ii.
205.) By means of this spiritual death the Lord was to sacrifice entirely to His celestial Father not only the human self-will (this having been already accomplished at the temptation), but also His holy love-will.
1 "When the speaking Word of God in human quality arrested itself in the Redeemer, then the essentiality which had died in Adam, but became alive again in the Christ, called out together with the soul, 'My God!
my God!
why hast Thou forsaken me?' This means that the wrath of God had entered through the quality of the soul into the image of the divine essentiality, and it had absorbed within itself the image of God, because it was this image that was to bruise within the fiery soul the head of the wrath of God, and to change its fiery p.
254 power into the eternal sun-life.
As a candle dies in the burning, and as from this dying issues light and power, so out of the dying and death of Christ there was to arise the eternal divine sun in human quality.
Thus there was to die in this case not only the selfhood of human quality, i.e.
, the self-will of the soul relatively to (its desire to) live in the power of the fire, and to be lost in the image of love, but this very image of love had to enter itself into the wrath of death, so that all would sink down in death, and by means of death and perfect humility, and in the will and mercy of God, become raised again in paradisiacal substantiality, so that the Spirit of God might be all in all." ( Signature , xi.
87.) In consequence of this sacrifice of the whole of His will, the human soul-life of the Redeemer did not become annihilated, but it entered thereby entirely into the divine will.
1 "The humanity of Christ gave itself up as a sacrifice to the wrath of the Father, entering entirely into His fire-essence; but the love-spirit of God defeated the wrathful essence of the fire, so that it could not consume humanity (the human quality).
It merely took away from humanity its self-will, and brought it again into the first universal will, wherefrom the will was (originally) given to man.
Thus that same will came again into the will of the Father as into its first root (fountain or origin)." ( Mysterium , xxxix.
24.) "The doctrine that Christ died a natural death in His human quality must not be understood as if meaning that His created soul had died, and still less that He had perished in His aspect as a divine being, or relatively to His celestial essentiality and celestial tincture.
He only died relatively to His selfhood, i.e.
, relatively to the will p.
255 and regimen of the external world which ruled in man.
He died relatively to the self-will and to the self-powers of the created self hood.
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.
[auto] The passage uses explicit alchemical terminology such as 'tinctured', 'fire-essence', and describes death transforming into 'eternal divine sun-life'.
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 'Speaking Word of God' arresting itself in the Redeemer parallels the concept of divine generation within.
John of the Cross's stage of contemplative purgation: a felt absence and aridity of God that strips the soul of attachments to its own consolations en route to deeper union.
The cry 'My God! my God! why hast Thou forsaken me?' reflects the experience of divine absence and wrath entering the soul.
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 sacrifice of the 'human self-will' and 'perfect humility' aligns with the practice of letting go of the ego's will.
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.
Christ is described as dying relatively to His selfhood and self-will, a form of ego-death or annihilation.
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.
Human quality and will are presented as mirroring the divine essentiality and the Father's will.
Eckhart's radical reading of Matthew 5:3 — the saint as one who wants nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing, having emptied even the will and the self with which to receive God; distinct from renunciation_of_wealth (material poverty).
The sacrifice of self-will and 'perfect humility' reflects the emptying of the self to receive God.
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 cry of forsakenness and the death in Adam represent the condition of exile from divine origin.
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.
Humanity is described as being 'raised again in paradisiacal substantiality' and entering the divine will.