Potentiality in God
Potentiality in God
Potentiality in God
f-listory Regel was to acknowledge his Where Luther was content simply
to own deep indebtedness to the teutonicus accept 1he presence in God of
both vhïl.osophus. Schopenhauer's appeal to wrath and love, Boehme
gave a meta-the creative force of the will owes much physlcal basis and
interpretation of to Boehme. English literature alone these "realities of
faith," read now as would furnish an impressive catalogue contradiction-
; rather than as contrasts.
i111111111m1n111111111111111111111111111111111111111111n1111111111111111
45
bling blocl{ whîch his "sîmplicity as an of the dead; and of eternal life.
author" would constitute for his read-This shall arise in the depth,
ers.2 Luther had reminded himself that in utter simplicity. Why not in
the heighth, in art? In order that such qucstions are rcserve<l for the holy
no man might dare to boast that
he himself had done it, and that Boehmr> Mat.es that originally it had
thereby the devil's pride might be never entcred his mind that one so
disclosed and brought to nothing, 7
simple should be writing for anyone He invites his reader to read his
book but himself. 3 He wrote to provide him-with care, that he may
share in the se1f a "memorial" of God's rnarvelous dawning of the new
day and be ready workings. Only contrary to his will for the eternal,
heavenly wedding. God's wcre copies made and circulated." He love
would have men walk in the pure, labored undcr the incongntity that he
luminous, and <leep knowledge of God. 8
qualifications: but in His eeonomy had that is: God, the world, a.nd man.
Al-God not often uscd unlettcrE worlcmen ready in his earliest work, the
Aurora, to correct the falsifying lit-erati1 The which was bcgun on New
Year's Day, mean people of the carth had oftcn 1612, but recording a
mystic sunrise confounded the wise - suraunt indocti which had been
gcstating for twelve et raph1.,nt cadum.
could not comprehend "the deep births Luther had, indeed, purged lust
for of God in their essence-. "0 He was money, idolatry, bribery, and
deceit thrown into a deep agony of pcrplex-from the churches in
Germany. As "a ity.10 Why do contradictions pervade poor, despised
friar" he had withstood everything? Wh , do the godless enjoy learned
scribcs and powerful ecclcsîas-prosperity as great as that of the godly?
tics.
rain and snow" and in everything he found good and evil, love and
wrath, What is still concealed? The
true teaching
and meta-
the "philosophin" and the deep physical ultimacy. 12 Should the re be
ground of God; the heavenly pleas-any qucstion regarding the gnostic
ure; the rcvelation of the creation character of Boehme's speculation -
of the angels; the revelation of the speculari in its original, positive sense
horrible fall of the devil; from
46
or evil is made vislble. Thus the essence of all essences is a continu-In this
light my spirit suddenly
flre desires light, in order that it all creatures, even b1 the herbs
for lts burning or llfe, and light he is, and how he is, and what
desires flre, otherwlse there would hls wlll Is, And suddunly in that he no
light, and lt would have
. Boehme flnds "two qualities, one ent in "two almighties" in the Delty .
good and one bad, whkh are in one But he wished to point to the
dynamlc another as one thing in thls world, actlvity in the divine life
itself.
in all powers, in the stars and the ele ments, and no creature in the flesh,
DIALEOTIO WITHIN THE SELF
in the natural life, can substst without This gigantlc conflict wlthln the
tät.,, Thus must contradlctory qualities Position, can the will - which is,
inR
realize lts
one thing, "qualifi,Ciret unter einander own individuality. Only the man
who wie ein Ding." 18
has asserted himself in seeking his own Boehme builds the opposltlon be-
egotistlcal satlsfactions, then has been tween God's wrath and Hls love to
ex-reintegrated into the purposes of God treme limits1 or, rather, to the
point by being rebom through faith, can where no limit.ation or
proportion re-possess the harmonious wlll to effect main. Each opposes
the other as omni-God.'s inclusive plan under allen con-potent:
POTENTIALITY IN GOD
•••
47
to resist it, it goes continually of itself outwards, and returns not again
into THE DIALECTlC OF DIVINE BIRTl[
itself." 26 The divine depth must be re-In his probing of the hidden mys-
flected in the mirror of the logos, so tery of being Boehme saw both being
that the divine can see it.self, become and the possibility of not being.
The an object standing over agai.nst itself affirmation of the presence of
being as subject, so that the divine might always has its counterpart in
aware-know itself - as lwmo /eiber comes to ness of its absence.
Description of the know who he is only by expending bis divine being
required, for Boehme, de-efforts on something outside him. So lineation
of the theogonie process by God can enjoy the richness and variety which
three persons derive from the of His own internal life only through One
and the natural world sterns from the three centers of the Trinity -
the Trinity. I t is not the Father who be-austere and angry as Father,
laving and gets the Son from all eternity, but the compassionate as Son,
fashioning, shap-One "begetteth himself in himself, from ing, completing
as Holy Spirit. 21 And eternity to etemity." 22 The origin of the
formation of the physical world the Supreme Spirit is characterized by is
not a creatio ere nih,i'!Jo, an act by Boehme as an "eternal stillness."
(e.ine which God posits something 1outside euJige StilW <ohne Wesen)
.23 Were it Himself, but rather creation from
• PHILOSOPHY TODAY •
48
tion of form.
But as there is nothing that can give anything, according]y the crav-
Boehme's "No-thing," which is the ing itself is the giving of it, which
power of being, must be distinguished yet also is a nothing, or merely
from the nondialectical not11ing, the a desirous seeking. 28
ofiK öv. The ofiK óv is crete rather than potentially concrete, the idea of
not-existing. I t is 1 nothing"
to receive form rather than remain in the most complete sense of the
term fo1mless, to become something, an
ticle which
41 Some-thing" the
trast to
"No-thing"
"Some-thing"
o K óv is a non-
thing." The craving, Boehme says, is being existing outside of God and
bears
lts
qualified negation
gaunt emptiness yet embrace8 the rich-of being, complete
"other," into a greater fulness - which which sees, and yet conducts noth-
nevertheless adds nothing to what was ing in the seeing wherewlth it
sees;
for seeing is without essence . .
already present.
ture is a will, like an eye wherein cease when the formless has acquired
Nature is bidden; like a bidden fire
POTENTIALITY IN GOD
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49
tions for which this divine life is not responsible; God is not tainted by
the God manifests himself to himself
divine:
self. The presence of the unfathomable, The reader shou.J.d know that
tirneless will within this amysterium in Yes and No all things oonstst,
magnum" reveals Boehme's voluntar-whether it be divine, or demonie,
ism.
earthly, or whatever m a y be
God strives to actualize the vision nam ed. The One, as the Yes, is
of his splendor as reflected in the mir-pure power and life, and is the
r-0r. His will reacts upon the products truth of God, or God Himself. He
of his imagination and craves to ac-wculd be unknowable in Himself,
tualize them. For the divine psychology and the re would be no joy, or
exal-tation, or feeling, in Hirn without must conform in a supereninent
way the No. The No is the counter-to its image in man."' 8 Nature, which
stroke of the Yes, or the Truth,
had been excluded from God in the in order that the Truth might be
Hebrew encounter with the surround-manifest and a something, in
which
which the
active, feeling, willing, and somepresent within the Godhead, rather than
thing to be loved. And yet one
the pure actuality of St. Thomas' con-cannot say that the Yes is separat-
ception of God. For St. Thomas there ed from the No and that they are
can be no potentiality in God because two things distinct from one an-
God supremely and eternally is every-other for they are but One Thing,
thing he may become, hut for Boehme ginnings (Principia) and form two
the etemal will in God continually gives Centra, since each works and
wills rise to all that is: will is the source in itself. Without these two,
which of self-actuation in both God and in stand in perpetual conflict, all
man. St. Augustine had, indeed, rraised things would be a Nothing, and
"this extremely difficult question of breaks off after the answer to the fif-
how, in view of bis etemity, God oould teenth in a series of 177 questions
into produce new things without any novelty the sources of revelation,
deserves ex-of wil]. "H He recognized tbe problem, tended quotation and
careful examina-hut feTI back upon faith rather than tion. Evidently in
the marvelous quar-
• PHILOSOPHY TODAY •
50
bold originality.
REFERENCES
kins, 1924. I, p. 1.
27. Cf. Hans Lassen Martenson, Jacob Boehme: 12. Ibid., 19, 5 and 6; p.
265. Hans Grunsky His Life and Teaching, trans. T. Rhys Evans.
identifies "the great deep o f this world"
P. 19ft'.
31. Cf. John J. Stoudt, Sunrise to Eternity. Phila-15. Ibid., 19, 13-14; p.
266-67.
36. The ConfessiPns of Jacob Boehme. Compiled 19. Gegen Tilke Il, 2,
142-43; Säm#lfrhe SdJriften and edited by W. Scott Palmer. New York:
IX, p. 132.
POTENTIALITY IN GOD
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51