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

image we also understand / in the inner birth / the birth and the essence of the Holy Trinity.

31. And then for the fourth, I have reported to you in the aforementioned books / how the whole essence of all essences is a perpetual desire / to reveal itself in its desire / and how this desire for revelation is the fiat the creative command/let it be / and the power in the light is the word / and how the word moved the fiat in all shapes of eternal nature / according to the light-world and also the dark world / thereby the desire, according to both worlds' properties, made substance in itself / from which in the essence, good and evil have arisen / according to each world's property: From which essence this outer visible world with stars and elements is created / as an own life / and yet not separated from the Eternal: and then further given for understanding / how the inner spiritual essence revealed itself in its desire / with this outer visible world / as with a likeness.

32. As God then created man / as an image according to His essence / a likeness according to God / He created him from the mother of all essences / and all three worlds.

33. For God wanted to see Himself in an image through man / he was to be a likeness according to God: He created his body from external and also internal essence / as from earthly and heavenly / and blew into him a living breath through His Spirit / that is / Himself / according to the Divine world / and also according to the outer world.

34. For the Spirit of God is the spirit of all life / but distinguished into three principia foundational principles of three worlds: namely / according to the dark world / according to the first principium / according to which God calls Himself an angry zealous God / and a consuming fire / which is the eternal nature: and secondly according to the light world / as according to God's love and gentleness / according to which He is called the Holy Spirit: And thirdly according to the outer world / the air-spirit / with the torment of stars and elements. Thus man has received a threefold life / the spirit of all three worlds.

35. Now it is indeed graspable and well enough known to us / that the Holy Spirit will not have His governance led in the outer earthly flesh / but in the inner heavenly: For with His entering into humanity / He has also introduced the heavenly essence.