DESPERATE VICES

Jakob Böhme - Centrum Naturae, “Theosophia Revelata”, 1730. Böhme derives the actual living God as well as the material world from a cyclical process of Self-Generation, motivated by the Divinity’s desire for Self-Manifestation. The initial impulse to Generation comes from a longing for Self-Awareness in the original undifferentiated Oneness, or Nothing (also described as the desire of the “Ungrund” to give itself a “Grund”).The result of this desire is the first principle of the Divinity, called “Centrum Naturae”. It as a dark, devouring Fire that results from the wheel of Angst. The entire system of the Universe is developed through binary oppositions: Darkness giving birth to Light, desire generating the understanding, the irrational providing the underpinning to the rational, formal and ordered, the will of the Grund, placed in a relationship of opposition and interdependence with the will to love. All these together constitute the living God. Ungrund is the original undifferentiated Oneness, devoid of all predicates and unaware of itself, that precedes even the desire for Self-Generation. Like a living personal God at the end of the process, the Ungrund, too, contains all the opposites within itself, but as absolute Indifference, not as absolute Identity. From absolute Indifference, through Realization of Potentiality by means of binary Opposition, to the fully actualized Being of absolute Identity.