THE ABYSS AND THE ETERNAL WILL.
THE IMAGINATION AND THE ETERNAL IDEA.
THE POTENTIAL TRINITY.
The Abyss
THE first link in Bohme's theosophic train of thought is the unit which he designates as the Abyss, where all as yet is in indifference.
Here as yet there is no ground, cause, or basis, no centre, no principle, nothing defining or defined, because ground, cause or basis, can only appear when the different, the definite appears.
Here there is neither light nor darkness, light nor fire, neither good nor evil ; here there is neither height nor depth, great nor small, thick nor thin.
Here is everything and nothing. For all is stillness, in which nothing actual stirs.
In this stillness lies the whole Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, who have not yet come forth.
Bohme " must speak in diabolical fashion as if God had a beginning, or else he cannot instruct us ; " here lies the whole creation, with everything that is in heaven or upon earth.
This abyss, which is everything and nothing, Bohme often designates as the " mysterium magnum" and also as the Eternal Chaos, with regard to which it must be observed that chaos, in Theosophy, does not signify disorder and confusion, but a complex "plêrôma", which has not yet developed itself.
An egg, for example, from which a bird comes forth, is called in Theosophy, the chaos of the bird.
The Ethernal Will
But in the recesses of this abyss, this mysterium magnum, there is a bottomless unoriginated Will, which Will, however, we are not to explore more closely, because it would disturb us, and fill us with confusion.
We can readily comprehend that it would disturb us to search into this Night of Indifference, to seek conditions and varieties where no such things exist.
On the other hand, it is precisely this Will which Bohme desires to explore when it steps out of the night, determines itself to its own manifestation, and assigns to itself progressive conditions or determinations.
In connection with this Will, Bohme also often speaks of a great, enormous Eye, in which all marvels, all shapes, colours, and figures lie concealed.
But this Eye sees nothing, because it only looks out into an undefined, illimitable infinity, where it meets with no object.
The Mirror
" A Will is thin or obscure, as it were nothing ; therefore, it is desirous, it willeth to be somewhat, that it might be manifest in itself."
But still, this Will demands or desires only itself, for there is nothing else for it to desire ; it seeks to possess itself and its "plêrôma", and to manifest itself in itself.
The first thing it does is to fashion for itself a Mirror, in which it can behold itself.
Of what quality, now, is this Mirror ?
One would be most readily disposed to think of it as a reason-mirror, a thought-mirror ; and there are those whom this mirror has reminded of the eternal, universally valid, and necessary laws of thought, without which God cannot see Himself and His real side, the ontological determinations which form the main subject of Hegel's logic.
Or one might, per oppositionem, think of Kant, whose entire theoretic philosophy is a doctrine of the mirror, certainly only a miniature mirror in comparison with Bohme's, viz. : the doctrine of the forms of thought and intuition in which not God but man beholds himself and the whole world of experience (with which Kant combines the thought or " thing unthinkable," that the mirror can never show us things as they are in themselves, but only their surface or phenomenon, which, indeed, certainly applies to the earthly, material mirrors we have upon our walls).
We cannot, however, pronounce any of these explanations to be satisfactory. Bohme's mirror is not only a reason-mirror, a thought-mirror, but also a mirror of imagination and of fancy, a combination of reason and imagination ; and, if philosophical parallels be demanded, one must immediately think of Schelling's intellectual intuition, transferred to God.
Bohme's mirror shows infinitely more than mere logical forms.
To the imaginative Eye that looks into the mirror, it reveals the whole "plêrôma", shapes, colours, and figures ; indeed as we shall find in the sequel, it reflects an image of the Triune God Himself.
There is nothing either in heaven or upon earth which did not, at the beginning, become manifest in this mirror.
The Wisdom or Sophia or Eternal Idea
Bohme designates this mirror as God's visibility, or as the eternal Wisdom, the eternal Idea.
And he also calls this idea a Maiden.
One must be prepared for very frequent shiftings of metaphor and symbol in Bohme !
What just now was a mirror, is now a maiden who stands, in the dawn of eternity, before the God who gives Himself up to Self-manifestation, and who, so to speak, allures Him to manifest Himself, by showing Him the exceeding riches of His glory.
The eternal Idea, or Sophia, is described as a maiden, because it engenders nothing, but only receives and reflects the image.
Although co-eternal with God, it is not God of God, but simply the friend of God.
It is, however, impersonal and selfless, because it is only an' instrument for God's manifestation.
We shall see in the sequel that it furnishes a contrast to the eternal Nature (which is also God's instrument, although subordinate to the idea), and that it will manifest itself to us, in union with the eternal nature, as the Glory of God, wherein the mirroring first finds its consummation.
" For the nothing causes the willing that it is desirous, and the desiring is an Imagination wherein the Will in the Looking-glass of Wisdom discovers itself, and so it imagines out of the abyss into itself, and makes to itself in the imagination a ground in itself, and impregnates itself with the Imagination out of the Wisdom, viz. : out of the virgin-like looking-glass, which, there, is a mother without generating, without willing." "If the looking-glass of Wisdom were not, then could no fire or light be generated ; it all takes its original from the looking-glass of Deity." " Incarn. Christ.," II., cc. ii., iii.
The Plan in the Mirror
The mirror in God is not complete at the outset, but fashions itself during the very process of mirroring.
What first takes place is only this, that there arises an abstract outline of that which, in the sequel, is to become full of vivid life and wealth of colour.
The bottomless incomprehensible Will, which only is one, is nothing and yet everything, apprehends and discovers itself, and the unity beholds itself as trinity, and the trinity beholds itself as unity.
Thus, the first only Will, without beginning, which is neither evil nor good, generates in itself the one eternal good as a comprehensible Will, which is the Son of the abysmal, bottomless will, wherein this primal Will apprehends and finds itself, and which is co-eternal with the unoriginated Will (God of God) ("Election," I., c. x.).
And the unsearchable bottomless Will goes forth through its eternally found or invented Will, and brings itself into an eternal Visibility of itself.
And that first bottomless Will is called Father, and the second, the conceived or generated Will, is called Son.
And the exit of the bottomless Will, through the conceived Ens, or Being, or Son, is called Spirit, for it drives out the conceived Ens, or Being, forth from itself into a moving or life of the Will, as a life of the Father and the Son ; but that which is gone forth, or, as Bohme also calls it, the fourth effect (or operation), is called the Wisdom or Visibility of God, wherein Father, Son, and Spirit (not one individual of these, but the whole triad) ever behold and discover themselves.
Bohme develops this more fully by saying that all the energies or forces of the Father are concentrated in the Son; but the Spirit breathes them forth and diffuses them, "just as when the sun's rays shed themselves out of the sun's magick fire, and manifest the power, virtue, or influence of the sun."
In the Divine Visibility or Wisdom, the Spirit of God plays with the radiated powers as with one single power (wherein the multiplicity is consequently restored to unity).
The Wisdom is neither great nor small, has neither beginning nor end, but is infinite, and its form is inexpressible.
It stands before God as a Virgin, is still and speechless (and, therefore, must not be confounded with the Son, who is the Word).
Nor is it to be confounded with the Spirit, for it is passive, while the Spirit is active.
In this mirror the Holy Trinity beholds itself and all the wonders of eternity (the riches of the Glory of God), which have neither beginning nor end.
Three Operations and Three Persons ( Potencial Trinity )
BUT in all that has been hitherto considered, in this first mirroring, we have not yet reached the Living God.
" It is a life, and still it is no life, a figure of life and an image of life" (" Six Theosoph. Points," I., vii.).
God beholds Himself thus far only as a potentiality of becoming Trinitarian, and He beholds in the mirror only a wealth of potential glories or miracles, which are not yet realized.
He is also absorbed in an immediate mystic contemplation, wherein the distinctions are only self-entangled, but are not yet actual and separate contrasts, on which account, moreover, Bohme expressly asserts that as yet there are only three operations, but not three Persons, which means, in clearer language, that, hitherto, we have no real self-consciousness.
For real Trinity and real thinking Self-consciousness are inseparable conceptions.
Here are no Divine attributes, for attributes can be found only where there is another, a contrasted, by which they can be qualified.
Here as yet everything is only a Magia, the simple mirrored image without reality.
This mirroring, which is a life and yet no life, a Spirit and yet no Spirit, is consequently as yet no actual personal self-consciousness ; it is but a dim and dreamy self-consciousness.
The Maiden stands before God as if in a vision, a morning-dream of Eternity, which prophetically reveals to Him what He can become, what He can make Himself.
Ethernal Nature
How then does God become the living and actual Triune?
According to Bohme, this happens only by means of the eternal Nature, which, as a medium of manifestation, provides a contrast to the Maiden, the eternal Idea.
When God, in the tranquil delight of contemplation, beholds Himself and His wonders, as the Maiden displays them to Him in the mirror, the Will grows eager, and desires that what it sees in the mirror shall become something more than an image, shall become actual, as when an artist longs to realize the vision, the image that reveals itself to him in his inward soul.
And not only does the Will become eager, but the Wisdom, Sophia, surges about it, and yearns for the manifestation of the marvels of Wisdom, although she herself is all these marvels.
In this union of the joy of contemplation and of desire, of imagination and desire, the eternal nature hidden in God is aroused, and now comes forward as the contrast or Contrarium of the Idea.
The generation of the eternal Nature depends upon the magic of the desire, and is the power of summoning non-existence into existence, without the use of material means.
All effective magic depends upon desire and imagination, and whatever is born and comes into being arises, in the last resort, from desire and imagination.
The Imagination
It is one of Bohme's most characteristic features that he interprets Spirit even the absolute Spirit of God as desire and imagination, will and fancy.
He is here in diametrical opposition to those who entirely exclude fancy from God.
A God, destitute of fancy, who is only pure reason, pure thought, bare and blank intelligence, is, for Bohme, an abstract being and not an actual living Spirit.
And undoubtedly, a God destitute of fancy could not have produced a world like the world we know, like the world in which Bohme lived and had his intuitions, inasmuch as this world, both in nature and history, is moulded and everywhere influenced by fancy, is actively pervaded by the principium individnationis, which manifests itself in an inexhaustible wealth of individual forms that are incapable of being merged in general conceptions.
But there could not have been Fancy in God unless there were Nature in God, and Bohme, by the very fact that he speaks of a mirror of Imagination, already points to Nature as a potency in God Himself.
For Fancy is precisely, in the form of ideality, the connecting link between Spirit and Nature.
Precisely because God is the unity of Spirit and Nature, not merely reason, but also fancy, must be ascribed to Him, which fancy, however, is certainly to be conceived of as illuminated and irradiated by Wisdom.
According to Bohme, the Will is the inmost thing in man, the principle of our personality; and, Fancy the form-fashioning and image-shaping energy, not excluding but presupposing reason and wisdom, is the necessary complement of the Will.
It is impossible to will, or to hate, or to love the purely abstract, but only that which presents itself in an image and shape.
No act of the Will is possible without imagination.
A Will must have an object ; but an object that is posited by the Will lies in the future, must be pictured by the imagination, and must hover before it.
A Will must determine itself according to motives, love or hatred, hope or fear, good or evil, and all of these things are imaginations.
The difference between human characters depends upon this, wherein do they set their imagination or their desire, their aspiration, their will, which is inseparable from the imagination ?
" Where thy treasure is, where thy spiritual and volitional image is, there also will thy heart be ! "
Now, if man is created in the image of God, it follows, from Bohme's train of thought, that a corresponding relation must also be found in God (on the scale, however, of eternity and absolute perfection).
The Spirituous Potency
Consequently, the Nature which is hidden t in God is aroused and bursts into activity, [through the medium of] desire and imagination.
This eternal Nature must not be interpreted as Matter in God. For matter is nothing original, but is simply a product.
We grasp Bohme's meaning more accurately when (with St. Martin and Franz Baader) we define Nature as a spirituous potency.
This spirituous potency is impersonal and selfless, yet, according to Bohme, it is a Will that has issued forth and separated itself from unity, a Will that multiplies itself in an infinite plenitude of powers, a living fountain of forces, that pour forth in an infinity of many thousand times ten thousand particular wills.
For life consists of many wills.
Each of the forces in the eternal Nature has its own will, and each of these wills is against the other.
And life would be sheer hostility, unless all these powers of life gained a gracious Lord, under whose control they may abide, and who is able to break their strength and their will.
But in Nature there is merely a blind, not a self-conscious Will.
The Obscuration
With the bursting forth of the eternal Nature there occurs an obscuration, which furnishes a contrast to the pure light and spirituality.
But this obscuration is a necessary condition, in order that the light may succeed in manifesting its splendour.
We may also say that, with the eternal Nature, the thick presents itself in contrast to the thin.
The thin is mere ideality, pure spirituality ; the thick is Nature, the condition in virtue of which the thin, viz., the Spirit, can gain life and fulness, sap and power.
And now, for the first time, we get actual contrasts and actual manifestations.
The Contrasts
Bohme is never weary of enforcing the necessity of contrasts in order to life and manifestation.
All things, not merely earthly and diabolic, but also heavenly and Divine, consist of Yes and No.
The Eternal Will of Unity is the eternal Yes ; but this Yes cannot be manifested without the eternal No, which provides a contradiction to the Unity, and posits multiplicity and variety.
And yet we cannot affirm that the Yes and No are sundered, that they are two things by the side of one another.
They are only one thing, but they separate themselves into two beginnings, into two centra, each of which wills and energizes within itself.
The eternal Will must pass out of itself, and lead itself into particularity, otherwise there were no shape or intelligibility, and all powers would be simply one power.
Intelligence is based upon multiplicity and variety, wherein the one property beholds and tests the other.
A thing has nothing in itself that it can will, unless it doubles itself.
It cannot perceive itself in mere unity ; it can perceive itself only in duality.
Where there is no contrast, there is only a perpetual issuing forth, but no ingoing and retrocession into self.
