The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme · 127 of 159 · tr. Franz Hartmann
Chapter 12 (part 7)
All this He gave up entirely into the Father's hands as being the end of nature, the great mystery of the Father; but not so that it should be dead, but so that the Spirit of God should be therein all its life, and the divine regimen exist in the personality of Christ." ( Signature , xii.
1.) Neither did the external being of the Redeemer become lost by His corporeal death, but it entered thereby into its true and exalted substantiality.
1 "When Christ died He did not throw away the body which had been in His possession while upon the earth, or left it to be consumed by the four elements, thus keeping (or taking up) a body entirely foreign (to the terrestrial form); but He merely laid aside the suffering (the external consciousness) of this world, and clothed Himself in immortality, so that His body might live in divine power, and not in the spirit of this world." ( Three Principles , xxv.
53.) "Christ assumed indeed earthly substance, but in His death—that is to say, as He overcame death—the divine being caused the earthly state to disappear and took away from it its supremacy.
Not that Christ had laid aside something (which He did not), but so that the external being was conquered and, so to speak, consumed." ( Menschwerdung , i.
8, 11.) "The true essentiality in Christ did not take away the earthly consciousness, but entered into the latter as its lord and conqueror.
The true life was to be led first p.
256 into death and the wrath of God.
This took place on the Cross, on which occasion death became destroyed and the wrath imprisoned and extinguished by love, and thus conquered." ( Menschwerdung , ix.
16.) "When Jesus broke up death in (His) humanity and took away the sense of self, He did then not throw away the human quality wherein dwelt death and the wrath of God, but He now accepted them to the fullest extent; that is to say, He only now took the external realm within the interior one." ( Signature , xi.
41.) "The external active and feeling life, wherein the wrath of God was burning, died, but not in such a way that it would have become a nothing, but it descended into nothing; that is to say, in this case, into the will of God, into His acting and feeling.
Thereby it became free of the will of the external world, which will is evil and good, and it lived no longer within the world and the constellations with the four elements, but after the nature of the Father and within the pure and divine element.
Thus the true human life came to occupy again the position which had been lost by Adam, and entered again into Paradise." ( Signature , xii.
5.) The earthly being of the Redeemer was sanctified by His celestial blood, and thereby it was prepared for the resurrection.
1 "When Christ poured out His celestial blood, then the fiery desire kindled in humanity became transformed into a love-desire, and out of the anguish of death there was born a joy and strength of divine power." ( Signature , xi.
5.) "When the Son of God poured out His holy blood in Christ, then did the poison of the wrath in Adam's p.
257 flesh, soul, and spirit, which He took upon Himself, become sanctified and transformed into love.
Thus the enmity ceased then and there, and God became Immanuel; that is to say, man with God and God with man.
Then the flesh of Adam became tinctured and prepared for the resurrection." 1 ( Stiefel , ii.
209.) By the power of the glorification at which the Redeemer arrived through His entering into death He overcame the power of hell, so that now the life again issued from death.
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 text uses distinct alchemical terminology such as 'tinctured', 'transformed', 'celestial blood', and the sanctification of poison into love to describe spiritual transformation.
In Western Hermetic Qabalah, the specific harmonizing cosmic force symbolised by Tiphareth, the central Sephira of the Tree of Life — the equilibriating, compensating, healing, redeeming, and purifying factor of the universe, recognised by the occultist as one power among the hierarchy of supreme cosmic forces rather than assigned the exclusive position it holds for the Christian mystic. Distinct from logos (the ordering principle through which the universe was created, not this specific mediating/healing Sephirotic force) and trinity (a claim about the Godhead's internal three-personed structure, not a single emanation's function within a tenfold system).
The entire passage is structured around Christ as the cosmic harmonizing and redeeming force who transforms death into life, wrath into love, and the external into the interior, functioning as the equilibriating and purifying principle of the universe.
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.
Christ 'laid aside the suffering (the external consciousness) of this world', indicating a letting go of worldly attachments.
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 external life 'descended into nothing... into the will of God', describing a self-effacement into divine will.
The doctrine that the divine or a spiritual principle takes on a specific, bounded material or bodily form — descending from an unconditioned state into individual, corporeal existence — as a discrete act rather than a diffuse pervading presence. The Christian Word made flesh, the Hindu avatara, the Egyptian pharaoh as living Horus, the Vajrayana tulku. Distinct from divine_immanence (the general claim that the divine pervades all of creation diffusely, not a specific embodiment-event) and separation_from_source (the felt exile FROM origin, the opposite motion) in describing a specific, individuated descent INTO a particular body or form.
The passage explicitly describes Christ assuming earthly substance, the divine entering a specific bounded bodily form, and the subsequent transformation of that form through death and resurrection as a discrete act.
The Hermetic doctrine that apparent opposites are identical in nature but differ in degree — two extremes of the same scale (hot/cold, love/hate) — such that one pole can be shifted toward its opposite by a change of degree ('mental transmutation'). Distinct from opposites_transcended (a completion-state marking the path's end, not this doctrine's active technique) and magical_equilibrium (balance held BETWEEN two forces, not identity-by-degree of what looks like two forces).
The passage's core mechanism operates on paired opposites—death/life, wrath/love, external/interior, earthly/divine—where one pole is conquered and transformed into its opposite, demonstrating identity-by-degree rather than mere opposition.
The soul's journey back to its divine origin, reversing the fall into matter through stages of purification or illumination.
The text describes the true human life entering 'again into Paradise' and occupying the position lost by Adam, indicating a return to the 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.
[auto] The passage explicitly describes the transformation of Adam's flesh into a state prepared for resurrection and the union of man with God (Immanuel), central to the doctrine of deification.
The doctrine that the one Godhead or first principle subsists as three co-equal aspects or persons rather than a bare unity — the Christian Father/Son/Holy Ghost invoked in the recurring liturgical formula 'In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,' but structurally the same pattern as the Egyptian Amen/Ptah/Osiris, the Hindu Brahma/Vishnu/Siva, and the Kabbalistic Chochmah/Binah/Kether triads that esoteric writers explicitly map onto it as instances of one universal law. Distinct from unity_of_being (the general claim that all existence is one substance, agnostic about internal plurality) and divine_simplicity (God as having no parts or divisions at all) in asserting a definite three-aspected differentiation within a single divine essence.
The passage explicitly invokes the Father, the Son (Christ), and the Spirit of God as three co-operating divine aspects working together in the redemption, with the Spirit being the life within and the Father the source.