Leseprobe

101 R ebir th voice of “Wisdom” – Sophia in Greek – speaks with the authority of the Divine. Since Böhme believes that God contains both male and female elements and since the first human was created “in the image of God,” Böhme concludes that the first human being must also have been both male and female. In Böhme’s view, the first human – Adam before the Fall into sin – was androgynous. The unity of the first human – the Urmensch – within himself and with God and the cosmos was lost with the Fall into sin. According to Böhme, Adam turned inward, instead of focusing on God and fell asleep. In doing so, the first human lost the “light body” and angelic powers that God had intended. In Böhme’s view, the Fall into sin is a fall into matter. Adam’s “heavenly body” became mortal, susceptible to disease and the forces of nature. With the heavenly body, the first human had the ability to reproduce without the assistance of another, but as a mortal being, this ability was lost. As a pure spiritual being, the original human had the “Divine Sophia” – the female aspect of God – within, but after the Fall the human being was alone. God thus made for him a material companion, Eve, to replace the female spiritual companion who had “fled” – Sophia. In contrast to traditional interpretations of the story of Creation, which blame Eve for the ruination of paradise, Böhme claims that it was Adam’s turn away fromGod, his sleep, that caused the Fall: “Now we know that Adam was a chaste virgin before his Eve, before his sleep, and afterward he was a man, like an animal, monstrous, and it still causes us shame before God that we have animal organs for reproduction” ( Forty Questions of the Soul , Question 33.5). 87 With the advent of sin, man and woman became two irreconcilable halves: “And Eve was her- self but half of a virgin, because Adam was the other half according to the two tinctures” ( Forty Questions of the Soul , Question 36.4). Böhme claims that it is the goal of all human love to regain the unity that was lost in the Fall, but, in mortal life, humans are doomed to remain separated from one another and from God. According to Böhme, those who are reborn can get back their “perfect,” that is, their complete, androgynous bodies, in heaven. In making such assertions, he is thinking of biblical passages that speak of a “new creature”: “Therefore if any man be in Christ: he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Cor 5:17). Many of Böhme’s readers referred to this as the “bringing back” ( Wiederbringung ), and they meant not just an original, innocent state of humanity, but also the return of the earth itself to a state of paradise. In the Early Modern period, people in general expected the “end of days” to begin soon. According to the biblical Book of Revelations, a time of great suffering would be followed by the Return of Christ, the establishment of Christ’s Kingdom on earth, the resurrection of the dead, and the Last Judgement (Rev 20:1-7) (Fig. 4). The wars, plagues, natural dis- asters and other crises of the period led contempo- raries to believe that these biblical events had already begun. Many placed their hope in biblical passages such as Isaiah 65:17-25: “For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth […] The wolf and the lamb shall feed together […] They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the LORD” (Fig. 5). Böhme and others – including the reformer Martin Luther before him – referred to this dawning new time as the “Morning Dawn.” In doing so, they were thinking about the fight in the Book of Genesis between the patriarch Jacob and an angel, which ended at sunrise. But they also thought of New Testament verses that point to a coming end time: “[…] take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark