The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme · 133 of 159 · tr. Franz Hartmann
Chapter 13 (part 1)
p.
263 CHAPTER XIII.
REGENERATION.
"Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not of those things?" — John iii.
10.
"Whoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me."— Luke ix.
23.
No man can attain spiritual self-knowledge without being spiritual, because it is not intellectual man that knows the Spirit, but the divine Spirit that attains self-knowledge in man.
"Christ said, 'Unless you become like children, you will not see the kingdom of God.' And again He says (John iii.), 'Unless a person is born of the water and Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God; for that which is born from the flesh is flesh, and what is born from the Spirit is spirit.' It is clearly shown in the Bible that the carnal natural man does not conceive of the Spirit of God.
That Spirit is to him a foolishness, and he cannot comprehend it." "It is self-evident, and requires no further proof, that we are all made up of flesh and blood, and that we are mortal.
Nevertheless, we are taught that we are temples of the Holy Spirit who dwells in us.
We are also taught that Christ must take a form in us, and that He will give us His flesh as our nutriment and His blood for us to drink.
He says that he who does not eat the flesh of the Son of Man will have no eternal life.
Therefore we ought to seriously consider what kind of a man is within our own self similar to God and capable of becoming divine." ( Regeneration , i.) p.
264 "For that which is made of mortal flesh will again return to earth.
In it dwells the vanity of this world.
It is desirous for that which is not of God, and it cannot be said to be a temple of the Holy Spirit.
Much less can there take place a spiritual regeneration of this terrestrial flesh, because it dies and becomes dissolved, and is a dwelling for sins.
But the true Christian is born out of Christ, and that which is regenerated is a temple of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us." ( Regeneration , i.) For the purpose of understanding the process of the spiritual regeneration of man it is useless to cling to a merely historical belief in a Christ supposed to have died for the purpose of paying our debts to an angry God, but it is necessary to eat of the flesh and drink of the blood of the living Christ within ourselves; that is to say that we must allow our soul to become filled with the divine substantiality of the body of Christ, and experience the paradisiacal power of Christ therein.
"To produce a true Christian it is not sufficient to he satisfied with a merely historical or scientific belief in a Son of God who is said to have once lived upon the earth.
It is not that we are to be rewarded by some external God attributing righteousness to us on account of our confessing such a belief, but the recognition of divine truth must be born within us and received by us in a child-like manner.
As the flesh is bound to die, so the life and the will of our sinful nature must die, and we must become like a child that knows nothing, but clings (instinctively) to the mother who gave it birth.
And thus the will of the Christian must die to its own self-willing and self-assertion, and become like a child in Christ.
Then, if the will and desire of the soul is directed only to its source, there will arise from the Spirit of Christ a new will and obedience in divine justice, out of the death of the self-will, and not the sinful will." ( Regeneration , i.) p.
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 metaphor of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ within signifies an internal transformation process.
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.
[auto] The text states that the recognition of divine truth must be born within us and Christ must take a form in us.
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.
[auto] The passage instructs that the will of the Christian must die to its own self-willing and self-assertion.
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 will must die to its own self-willing and the life of our sinful nature must die.
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 being is described as a temple of the Holy Spirit where Christ takes form, mirroring the divine structure.
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 state of becoming like a child that knows nothing aligns with the concept of spiritual poverty.
The recognition of one's own true divine nature as the primary path to liberation; 'know thyself' as soteriology.
[auto] The passage explicitly states that spiritual self-knowledge is unattainable without being spiritual and that the divine Spirit attains self-knowledge in 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.
[auto] The text asks what kind of man is within us capable of becoming divine and states the regenerated person is a temple of the Holy Spirit.