Reflections on Esaias Stiefel's Booklet: On the Threefold State of Man and His New Birth

28. As we see this in fire and light / and have a just form and likeness / where one understands the soul in the likeness with the fire-glow / for it is in itself, as far as it concerns itself purely without the noble image, a fire-eye / existing in the eternal nature of God the Father / introduced by the Spirit of God from the Father's property into the outer created image, which was created from external and inner-heavenly Divine essence: and we understand the noble image in the light / and in the power of the gentle light / which shines forth from dying / as from the consuming torment of the fire. There we see then / how the light dwells in the fire / without feeling of the fire-torment / and how the fire of nature / is like a painful essence / and the light is free from the fire-nature / and yet without the fire is nothing.

29. For the second point, I have shown you in the aforementioned books / how the fire is a magical creative/will-based desire for gentleness / to cool itself / and to fulfill its dry hunger / from which it receives life and shine: and then also / how the light is a great desire for the fire / to awaken its life and power through the fire.

30. For the third / how the light makes a substance in its desire / as gentleness / which originates in the dying in the fire / which gentleness is called the water of eternal life / for it is a sinking through death / and gives perceptibility and substance: and how the fire draws the same substance back into itself / and satiates itself therewith / and out of this drawing-in gives birth to a spirit from itself / which ever goes back into the substance / and now introduces the radiance of fire and light into the substance; Which radiance in the substance of gentleness is called the tincture the transmuting essence/quality / which leads the substance into the highest adornment and color / and thus renovates the essence, as the shape of the dark world for the fire-life / and grades it high / and transmutes it into another / so that from the hostile painful torment of the first principium principle / through the fire / in the noble tincture, the highest kingdom of joy becomes / and thus the worst is the cause of the best: in which