But it could very easily happen that God’s light in the human heart poured into the evening light and was then consumed, or at least so mingled with it that in the end one no longer knew what was natural light and what God’s light within the person.
Then God made a firmament between the two waters, which signify the two kinds of knowledge about which I have now given sufficient explanation, and now divided the two waters.
But the firmament is the actual heaven within the human heart and expresses itself in true, living faith, but never, ever in an empty and vain brooding of the understanding.
For this reason I now call for you the one who has the mightiest and most doubt-free faith a rock, and set him as a new firmament between heaven and hell, and no dark power of hell will ever be able to overcome this firmament.
When such a firmament is established within the person and faith becomes mightier and mightier, from such faith the nothingness of the concerns of natural understanding becomes ever more clearly visible; natural understanding then places itself under faith’s dominion, and thus within the person, out of his evening and his ever-brighter morning, arises the second and already far brighter day.
In such a state of the second day, the person now already sees what alone must prove itself eternally as fully true; but there is still no proper order within him. He still continually mingles the natural with the purely spiritual, often spiritualizes nature too much and thereby also beholds material things in the spirit, and is therefore not yet decisively ready for any proper deed.
He resembles a world of nothing but water, surrounded on all sides by air filled with light; yet in the end he cannot become clear as to whether his water world arose from the light-filled air surrounding it, or whether the latter arose from the water world. That is, within himself he does not yet know clearly enough whether his spiritual knowledge developed from his natural understanding, or whether the latter might have developed from spiritual knowledge perhaps already secretly present within the person and thus also working entirely in secret at the beginning. Or, to speak still more tangibly, he does not know whether faith arises from knowledge or knowledge from faith, and what difference there is between the two.
In brief, he does not yet know what was there first, the hen or the egg, or whether the seed or the tree!
Then God comes again and helps the person onward, when the person had done enough for such a second day of his spiritual formation out of the strength bestowed upon him and thus his own; and this further help consists in the light within the person being increased and thereby, like the sun in spring, beginning to fertilize all the seeds placed in the human heart, not only through its heightened shining but through the warmth brought about precisely by that heightened shining.
But such warmth is called love and is at the same time the soil in which the seeds begin to put forth their shoots and roots.
And look, this is what is written in Moses: God had commanded the waters to gather in certain secluded places, so that one might thereby see the dry and firm soil from which alone the seeds can grow into living and enlivening fruit.
And it says: and God called the dry land earth, and the water now gathered into certain places sea.
Question: for whom had God named it thus? For Himself He truly would not have needed to; for it would surely be a little too ridiculous to wish to attribute to the highest divine Wisdom that It should have taken a quite particular pleasure in having perhaps succeeded, like a person, in calling the dry land earth and the water separated into certain places sea.
But surely God could not have given these names to the dry land and the separated water for anyone else either, since at such a time of creation there could as yet have been no being apart from Him who would have understood Him!
Such a statement by Moses cannot therefore possibly have a material sense, but only a purely spiritual one, and bears a relation to the former creation of worlds only in a sense of correspondence working backwards from the spiritual, that is, from the spiritual into the material, which surely only an angel’s wisdom can fathom. But directly, as it stands, it has only a purely spiritual sense and indicates how first an individual person on his own, and likewise all humanity, is formed from time to time and from period to period out of its originally necessary natural condition into the ever-purer spiritual.
Accordingly, the person is separated even in his natural part; the kinds of knowledge have their place, which is the person’s sea, and the love arising from that knowledge, as soil capable of bearing fruits, is constantly washed around by the sea as the entirety of the knowledge of proper light, and strengthened anew to bring forth all kinds of noblest fruits ever more abundantly.