Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 19

All these seven qualities, or "fountain-spirits," or fundamental tendencies, are in every part and parcel of the universe, and each particular thing or being finds his true place in the vast drama or play of the universe, according to which "quality" is prepotent, and marks the thing or being with its "signature." They const.i.tute in their eternal nature what Boehme calls _The Three Principles_ that underlie all reality of every order. The first principle is the substratum or essence of these first three "qualities," the nature-tendencies at the level of forces, which he generally calls the _fire-principle_, _i.e._ the dark fire, before the "flash" has come.

The second principle is the substratum or essence of the last three "qualities"--the tendencies toward unity, harmony, order, love, which he calls the _light-principle_. The third principle produces the union or synthesis of the other two--the principle of realization in body and form, the triumph over opposition of these two opposing principles in the exhibition of the real, the actual, the living, the conscious, where dark and light are both joined, but are dominated by another irreducible principle. To these three fundamental principles correspond the three supreme divine aspects: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.[30]

We are here, of course, far from a scientific account of the processes and evolution of the universe. Boehme {184} is no scientific genius and he did not dream that every item and event of the world of phenomena could be causally explained, without reference to any deeper abysmal world of Spirit. His mission is rather that of the prophet who "has eyes of his own." He is endeavouring to tell us, often no doubt in very laborious fashion, sometimes as "one who is tunnelling through long tracts of darkness," that this outside world which we see and describe is a parable, a pictorial drama, suggesting, hinting, revealing an inside world of Spirit and Will; that every slightest fragment of the seen is big with significance as a revelation of an unseen realm, which again is an egress from the unimaginable Splendour of G.o.d. He believes, like Paracelsus, that everything in Nature--plants, metals, and stars--"can be fundamentally searched out and comprehended" by the inward way of approach, can be read like an open book by the children of the Spirit who have caught the secret clue that leads in, and who have the key that unlocks the inner realm.[31]

Obviously his "inner way of approach" works more successfully when applied to _man_ than when applied to plants and metals and stars--and when he writes of man, whether in the first or in the third person, he does often seem to have "eyes of his own," and to "hold the key that unlocks."

It is an elemental idea with him that man is "a little world"--a microcosm--and expresses in himself all the properties of the great world--the macrocosm.[32] "As you find man to be," he writes, "just so is eternity. Consider man in body and soul, in good and evil, in light and darkness, in joy and sorrow, in power and weakness, in life and death--all is in man, both heaven and earth, stars and elements.

Nothing can be named that is not man."[33] Every man's life is inwardly bottomless and opens from within into all the immeasurable depth of G.o.d. Eternity springs through time and reveals itself in every person, for the foundation property of the soul {185} of every man is essentially eternal, spiritual, and abysmal--it is a little drop out of the Fountain of the Life of G.o.d, it is a little sparkle of the Divine Splendour.[34] G.o.d is spoken of again and again as "man's native country," his true "origin and home"--"The soul of man is always seeking after its native country, out of which it has wandered, seeking to return home again to its rest in G.o.d."[25] "The soul of man," he says again, "has come out from the eternal Father, out from the Divine Centre, but this soul--with this high origin and this n.o.ble mark--stands always at the opening of two gates."[36] Two worlds, two mighty cosmic principles, make their appeal to his will. Two kingdoms wrestle in him, two natures strive for the mastery in his life, and he makes his world, his nature, his life, his eternal destiny by his choices: "Whatsoever thou buildest and sowest here in thy spirit, be it words, works, or thought, that will be thy eternal house."[37] "The good or evil that men do, by acts of will, enters into and forms the soul and so moulds its permanent habitation."[38] Adam once, and every man after him also once, has belonged, in the centre of the soul, to G.o.d, and whether it be Adam or some far-off descendant of him, each is the creator of his own real world, and settles for himself the atmosphere in which he shall live and the inner "tincture" of his abiding nature. "Adam fell"--and any man's name can here be subst.i.tuted for "Adam"--"because, though he was a spark of G.o.d's eternal essence, he broke himself off and sundered himself from the universal Will--by contraction--and withdrew into self-seeking, and centred himself in selfishness. He broke the perfect temperature--or harmonious balance of qualities--and turned his will toward the dark world and the light in him grew dim."[39] To follow the dark world is to be Lucifer or fallen Adam, to follow the light world completely is to be Christ[40]--and before every soul the two {186} gates stand open.[41] In a powerful and penetrating pa.s.sage he says: "We should take heed and beget that which is good out of ourselves. If we make an angel of ourselves we are that; if we make a devil of ourselves, we are that."[42]

This last sentence is a good introduction to Boehme's conception of "the next world"--"the great beyond." He was as completely free of the crude idea that heaven is a shining locality in the sky, and h.e.l.l a yawning pit of fire below the earth, as the most exact scientific scholar of the modern world is likely to be. He had grasped the essential and enduring character of man's spiritual nature so firmly that he ceased to have any further interest in the mythological aspects in which vivid and pictorial imagination has invested the unseen world.

"G.o.d's presence itself," he says, "is heaven, and if G.o.d did but put away the veiling shadows, which now curtain thy sight, thou wouldst see, even where thou now art, the Face of G.o.d and the heavenly gate.

G.o.d is so near that at any moment a holy Birth [a Birth into the Life of G.o.d] may be accomplished in thy heart,"[43] and, again, in the same book he writes: "If man's eyes were opened he would see G.o.d everywhere, for heaven is everywhere for those who are in the innermost Birth.

When Stephen saw heaven opened and Jesus at the right hand of G.o.d, his spirit did not swing itself aloft into some heaven in the sky, but it rather penetrated into the innermost Birth where heaven always is.

Thou must not think that G.o.d is a Being who is off in an upper heaven, or that when the soul departs it goes many hundred thousands of miles aloft. It does not need to do that, for as soon as it has entered the innermost Birth it is in heaven already with G.o.d--_near and far in G.o.d is one thing_."[44]

The "next world"--"the beyond"--therefore, must not be thought of in terms of s.p.a.ce and time, of here and there, of now and then, as a place to which we shall journey at the momentous moment of death: "the soul {187} needeth no going forth."[45] As soon as the external veil of flesh dissolves, each person is in his own country and has all the time been in it. There is nothing nearer to you than heaven and h.e.l.l. To whichever of them you _incline_ and toward whichever of them you tend--that is most near you, and every man has in himself the key.[46]

Heaven and h.e.l.l are everywhere throughout the whole world. You need not seek them far off.

It is always the nature of "Anti-Christ" and "Babel" and "opinion-peddlers" to seek G.o.d and heaven and h.e.l.l above the stars or under the deep. There is only one "place" to look for G.o.d and that is in one's own soul, there is only one "region" in which to find heaven or h.e.l.l, and that is in the nature and character of the person's own desire and will: "Even though the devil should go many millions of miles, desiring to see heaven and enter into it, yet he would still be in h.e.l.l and could not see heaven at all."[47] The soul, Boehme says in substance, hath heaven or h.e.l.l in itself. Heaven is the turning of the will into G.o.d's love; h.e.l.l is the turning of the will into hate. Now when the body falls away the heavenly soul is thoroughly penetrated with the Love and Light of G.o.d, even as fire penetrates and enlightens white-hot iron, whereby it loses its darkness--this is heaven and this is the right hand of G.o.d. The soul that dwells in falsehood, l.u.s.t, pride, envy, and anger carries h.e.l.l in itself and cannot reach the Light and Love of G.o.d. Though it should go a thousand miles or a thousand times ten thousand miles--even climb beyond the s.p.a.ces of the stars and the bounds of the universe--it would still remain in the same property and source of darkness as before.[48] The "next world"--"the world beyond"--is {188} just _this_ world, as it is in each one of us, with its essential spirit and nature and character clearly revealed and fulfilled. G.o.d creates and maintains no h.e.l.l of ever-lasting torture; He builds and supports no heaven of endless glory. They are both formed out of the soul's own substance as it turns toward light or darkness, toward love or hate--in short, as "it keeps house," to use one of his vivid words, with the eternal nature of things.

Something like this, then, was the universe which Boehme--with those "azure-grey eyes that lighted up like the windows of Solomon's Temple"--saw there in Gorlitz, as he pegged his shoes. "Open your eyes," he once said, "and the whole world is full of G.o.d."[49] But he is not a pantheist, in the usual sense of that word, blurring away the lines between good and evil, or the boundaries which mark off self from self, and self from G.o.d. There is forever, to be sure, a hidden essence or substance in the soul which is from G.o.d, and which remains to the end unlost and unspoiled--something to which G.o.d can speak and to which His Light and Grace can make appeal; but I am indestructibly a real I, and G.o.d is in His true nature no vague Abyss--He eternally utters Himself as Person: "The first Abysmal G.o.d without beginning begets a comprehensible will which is Son. Thus the Abyss which in itself is an indescribable Nothing [nothing in particular] forms itself into Something [definite] through the Birth of a Son, and so is Spirit."[50] In G.o.d Himself there is only Good, only triumphing eternal Joy,[51] but as soon as finite processes appear, as soon as anything is differentiated into actuality, the potentialities of darkness and light appear, the possibilities of good and evil are there: "_All things consist in Yes or No. In order to have anything definite made manifest there must be a contrary therein--a Yes and a No._"[52] The universe, therefore, though it came forth out of the eternal Mother and remains still, in its deepest origin and being, rooted in the substance of G.o.d, is a {189} battleground of strife, an endless Armageddon. Both within and without the world is woven of mixed strands, a warp of darkness and a woof of light, and all beings possessed of will are thus actors in a mighty drama of eternal significance, with exits, not only at the end of the Fifth Act but throughout the play, through two gates into two worlds which are both all the time present here and now.

[1] _Aurora_, xxi. 60-62.

[2] Swinburne, _Erechtheus_.

[3] See _Fifteenth Epistle_, 25.

[4] _Fifth Epistle_, 50.

[5] Like Paracelsus, he uses "sulphur" in a symbolic way to represent an active energy of the universe and a form of will in man. In a similar way, "mercury" stands for intelligence and spirit, and "salt"

is the symbol for substance. No one could find in a chemist's shop the salt or sulphur that Boehme talks about!

[6] There is a fine saying about Dante in the Ottimo Commento: "I, the writer, heard Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to say other than he would, but that many a time and oft he had made words say for him what they were not wont to say for other poets."

[7] _Sig. re._ ix. 1-3. Paracelsus said, "Everything is the product of one creative effort," and, "There is nothing corporeal that does not possess a soul."

[8] _The Supersensual Life_, p. 44.

[9] Paracelsus and others used the term _Mysterium magnum_ to denote the original, but unoriginated, matter out of which all things were made. "Mysterium" is anything out of which something germinally contained in it can be developed.

[10] _Mysterium magnum_, xxix. 1-2.

[11] _Forty Questions_, i. 57.

[12] _Sig. re._ ii. 4-15, and iii. 1-10.

[13] _The Threefold Life of Man_, iii. 2.

[14] _Aurora_, iii. 35-39.

[15] _Ibid._ vi. 6-8; _Clavis_, 18-29.

[16] _Sig. re._ xvi. i.

[17] _Aurora_, xiii. 48-57; _Myst. mag._ viii. 31; _The Three Principles_, iv. 66.

[18] _Sig. re._ xv. 38.

[19] _Myst. mag._ viii. 27.

[20] _Myst. mag._ xxix. 1-10.

[21] _The Three Principles_, iv. 68-74; _The Threefold Life_, iv. 33.

[22] _Myst. mag._ ix. 3-8.

[23] _Aurora_, Preface 84.

[24] Christopher Walton, _Notes and Materials for a Biography of Wm.

Law_ (London, 1854), 55.

[25] The great pa.s.sages in which Boehme expounds the seven qualities are found in the _Aurora_, chaps. viii.-xi.; _Sig. re._ chap. xiv.; _The Clavis_, 54-132; though they are more or less definitely stated or implied in nearly everything he wrote. Seven "qualities" or "principles" or "sources" appear and reappear in ever shifting forms throughout the entire literature of Gnosticism, alchemy, and nature-mysticism.

[26] _Aurora_, viii. 32-35.

[27] Some of Boehme's enthusiastic friends insist that Sir Isaac Newton, who was an admirer of Boehme, "ploughed with Boehme's heifer,"

_i.e._ got his suggestion of the law of universal gravitation from the philosopher of Gorlitz. See Walton, _Notes_, p. 46 and _pa.s.sim_.

[28] _Sig. re._ iv. _pa.s.sim_.

[29] _Sig. re._ xiii.

[30] For fuller treatment of this point see Boutroux, _Historical Studies in Philosophy_, chapter on "Jacob Boehme, the German Philosopher," pp. 199-201.

[31] _Third Epistle_, 33.

[32] _Twenty-fourth Epistle_, 7; _Sig. re._ i.

[33] _The Threefold Life_, vi. 47.

[34] _The Three Princ._ xiv. 89; _First Epistle_, 42.

[35] _The Three Princ._ x. 26; xvi. 50.

[36] _Ibid._ x. 13.