The Fall into Self-Knowledge
The dialogue opens with the Devil presenting the Soul with the promise of mastery: eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and you will rule all things by your own power. The Soul accepts — not from dramatic rebellion but from the subtler temptation of wanting to understand creatures on their own terms, without God. Böhme's account of the Fall is less about disobedience than about a redirection of desire: the Will, which had been oriented toward God, turns toward Nature and the Creatures, and in that turning awakens the fiery root of creaturely selfhood.
The consequences arrive in sequence: first pride, then covetousness, then envy, then anger. Each vice is not an arbitrary moral failing but a structural consequence of the will's displacement. Having severed itself from the divine source, the soul must now generate its own worth, its own security, and its own power — and the machinery for doing so is precisely these consuming passions.
The Moment of Recognition
Midway through the journey, Christ meets the Soul and the divine light is momentarily manifested in it. What follows is not comfort but terror. The Soul, suddenly able to see itself clearly, recognises that it is an ugly, misshapen monster — not in the eyes of a judging God but in its own perception of what it has become. The judgment is not external condemnation but the shock of self-recognition in the presence of what one was meant to be.
Now when the Spark of the Love of God, or the Divine Light, was accordingly manifested in the Soul, it presently saw itself with its will and works to be in Hell, in the Wrath of God, and found it was an ugly, misshapen monster in the Divine Presence and the Kingdom of Heaven: at which it was so affrighted, that it fell into the greatest anguish possible, for the Judgment of God was manifested in it.
Repentance and the Return of the Paradisaical Image
The rest of the dialogue tracks the Soul's long struggle through repentance. The Devil actively interferes, scattering its prayers, inflaming its earthly lusts, and whispering that God has abandoned it. An enlightened Soul appears — a kind of spiritual guide — and names what has happened and what must be undone. The advice it gives is the same as the master's counsel in Dialogue I: forsake the own will; let the creaturely self die.
For if thy Will might penetrate into God, it would be anointed with the highest Power and Strength of God, in the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ; and that unction would break in pieces the monster which thou carriest about thee; and thy first Image of Paradise would revive in the Centre; which would destroy the Devil's Power therein, and thou wouldst become an Angel again.
The promise here is not restoration to a prior innocence but something more radical: the recovery of the paradisaical image. This image is not destroyed by the fall — it is buried, overlaid by the monstrous form of the self-will — and when the will at last penetrates into God, the divine unction breaks open that overlay and the original form reappears. The Soul becomes, in Böhme's phrase, an Angel again: not by travelling anywhere but by shedding what was never truly its own.
Dialogue IV has a different translator and history from the first three; it was taken by the eighteenth-century editors from an independent Bristol translation. Its allegorical format — Soul, Devil, Christ, Enlightened Soul — differs from the Socratic dialogues of I–III but arrives at the same destination. Böhme's phrase 'thy first Image of Paradise would revive' echoes his concept of the 'tincture' or original divine signature in the soul, developed in The Signature of All Things.
Related Concepts
