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

64. For the soul is a fire-eye and is the greatest life; it wills to have a being in which its fire might burn. But because it was turned into this world in the fall of Adam, the kingdom of the stars and elements has also moved into it as a lodging, and they often introduce a strange turba destructive/discordant force. If now the heavens are not pure before God, how then will that which is ruled by the outer heaven be pure, like the outer life that is driven only in the regimen of the outer heaven?

65. The incorruptible, as the new man, cannot put on the corruptible, as the outer flesh, for the turba is within it. This will only happen at the judgment of God, when the turba is taken from the outer mysterium.

66. But that the author says it is not possible that a reborn person can sin; in that one understands that he does not understand the mysterium of the soul sufficiently. It was indeed possible in Adam, when his outer man was still pure and unspotted. For if one wishes to investigate where sin originates, one must look at the foundation.

67. The new body does not work sin, but the soul imagines into wickedness and leads sin into itself. If then the true likeness according to God originates from the soul, the heavenly essence is infected by the poison taken in by the soul.

68. Sin does not touch the heart of God as the center of the new body, but the essence is infected, just as if one were to pour earth into beautiful water. The flesh of the new man and the spirit of God are not one thing. The spirit of God remains standing within him even if Adam decays, just as that also happened in Adam.

69. What falls away from the light-world, the fire-world catches. If it is grim essence, it is devoured in the fire and falls into the dark world in eternal death. When the new body is infected, it loses its divine life. Nothing is lost to the Godhead except its mirror of wonders. For the body is not God; it is only highly graded by the noble tincture alchemical principle of life/color through the spirit, with the splendor of the holy heaven, so that the colors of the divine kingdom of joy appear within it. But if it is darkened, then the tincture rises in another quality. All according to that in which the soul-fire burns