Theosophical Heart-Devotions Directed to the Highest Sole Jehovah

u [have cared for me], and how you also especially have cared for me from youth on. Ah, my God, are your gifts here in this world so lovely—even though, for the sake of our sin, they stand everywhere mixed with the thorns and thistles of the curse A reference to Genesis 3:17-18, where God curses the ground after the Fall of Man.. Oh, how sweet your love and goodness should taste to us if we could enjoy them as a completely pure and heavenly food, separated from the feeling of earthly pleasure and the attractiveness of the creatures. Ah, this very thing—yes, this was one of those glorious beatitudes in which man found himself before the Fall in paradisiacal innocence. Your goodness and love had indeed then richly set before us all kinds of beautiful fruits from the external world to enjoy; but the life of our free spirit original: "freyer Geist." In Pietist thought, this refers to the higher soul that is meant to remain unattached to material things. did not consist in such earthly foods during those blessed times. The spirit of nature original: "Natur-Geist." The lower part of the human constitution that governs physical life and bodily needs. could well nourish itself from them, but without stain and without the descending craving and desire of our free spirit—which would not allow itself to be drawn down at all by the loveliness of earthly creatures nor be bound in love to the earthly.

Oh, what a dominion over the creatures this was! Here, food was taken from external nature, but the free spirit of man stood completely indifferent toward external nature, and truly did not know what was evil or good, pleasant or foul-tasting within it. The creature could not take him captive with its loveliness, but simply had to serve as food for the outer person. But the true food of his spirit, which nourished him, which pastured him, and in which he delighted, was your unspeakable love of God, my God and Father, and a constant feeling of a heavenly pleasure in your divine light. Ah, in this heavenly food consists not only the true life of the free spirit, but also the outer person would have always partaken in it