According to Behmen, Stephen, when he saw the heavens opened, and Christ at the right hand of God, was not spiritually translated into any distant upper region,—‘he had penetrated into the inmost birth—into the heaven which is everywhere.’—Aurora, cap. xix. § 48. Similarly, he declares that he had not ascended into heaven, and seen with the eye of the flesh the creative processes he describes, but that his knowledge comes from the opening within him of the gate to the inner heavenly world, so that the divine sun arose and shone within his heart, giving him infallible inward certainty concerning everything he announces. If an angel from heaven had told him such things, he must have doubted. It might have been Satan in a garb of light: it would have been an external testimony: it would have been beyond his comprehension; but this light and impulse from within precludes all doubt. The holy Soul is one spirit with God, though still a creature; sees as the angels see, and far more, since they discern only heavenly things, but man has experience both of heaven and hell, standing as he does midway between the two.—Aurora, cap. xi. §§ 68-72 and cap. xii. § 117. Comp. also cap. xxv. §§ 46-48.
[241]. The initiate mind saith this and saith that, as it circles around the unspeakable Depth. Thou art the bringer-forth, thou too the offspring; thou the illuminer, thou the illuminate; thou art the manifest, thou art the hidden one,—hid by thy glories. One, and yet all things, one in thyself alone, yet throughout all things!
[242]. Von den drei Principien des Göttlichen Wesens, cap. vii. §§ 22, &c., cap. ix. 30, et passim. Aurora, cap. ii. § 41; cap. xxiii. 61-82. Compare Aurora, cap. xx. §§ 49, &c. Drei Princip. cap. vii. 25. Aurora, cap. x. § 58. Also cap. iii. throughout. There he describes the way in which every natural object—wood, stone, or plant, contains three principles,—the image, or impress of the divine Trinity; first, the Power (Krafft) whereby it possesses a body proper to itself; secondly, the sap (Safft) or heart; thirdly, the peculiar virtue, smell, or taste proceeding from it; this is its spirit (§ 47). So, in the soul of man, do Power, and Light, and a Spirit of Understanding—the offspring of both—correspond to the three persons of the Trinity (§ 42).
[243]. See [Note] on p. [120].
[244]. See [Note] on p. [121].
[245]. Here I am much indebted to the masterly discussion of the theory in question, contained in Müller’s Lehre von der Sünde, Buch ii. cap. 4.
[246]. Aurora, cap. ix. § 42; cap. xviii. § 10-15; cap. xxiii. §§ 92, &c. The remarks in the text, concerning Behmen’s position as between theism and pantheism, are only true if the word theism be there understood as equivalent to deism. For theism, understanding by it belief in a personal deity, does not remove God from the universe. Theism ought to represent the true mean between the deism which relegates a divine Mechanician far from the work of his hands, and the pantheism which submerges him beneath it.
[247]. Aurora, cap. iv. §§ 10, 11. Comp. § 15, and also cap. xxi. § 37.
[248]. Aurora, cap. v. § 4; cap. xvii. § 16.
[249]. Aurora., § 27; cap. xiv. § 104; cap. x. §§ 42, 65; xix. § 50.