THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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building — by no means with clear condemnation. So that, as in Brueghel's picture, there was the opportunity of portraying the safe stronghold of Lucifer not just as a
fragment but as an unfortunately thwarted monument of an aspiration to create like God. An aspiration which, as Jakob Böhme teaches at the same time, admittedly has
an ‘arrogant outcome’, but also a great goal and one which does not even need to remain a fragment. The arrogance itself is condemned by Böhme, but not the drive
within it towards light and the heights: ‘When they’ (the luciferian spirits) ‘rose in sharp inflammatory revolt, they acted against Natural Right as God their Father acted,
and this was a source against the whole Godhead. For they inflamed the body and gave birth to a highly triumphant son, hard, rough, dark and cold, burning with
bitterness, and fiery … So that the inflamed bride now stood like a proud beast and now thought she was above God, there was nothing to equal her … They’ (the
luciferian spirits) ‘no longer wanted the old order, but they wanted to be higher than the whole Godhead and thought they wanted to have their dominion over the whole
Godhead, over every kingdom’ (Aurora: On the origin of sin). But in fire there is the light or: man reborn becomes Lucifer's heir by ‘mastering the wrath of God, and a
miraculous structure of free will emerges from him, who controls the world instead of the outcast Lucifer.’ The building of the tower is also purified in this way, indeed
through the soul­spirit of Christ in place of Lucifer it turns into the house of the world with heaven as the attained property: ‘The whole of matter was to be a pleasurehouse
for spiritual bodies, and everything was to arise and develop in accordance with the pleasure of their spirit so that they should never ever have displeasure in any
figure, but their soul­spirit was to be in the midst of all formation’ (Aurora: On the soul­spirit). Thus subjective mysticism here attacked and adopted the old rebel motif,
sky­blue motif, in the princely absolutism of the Christian man himself, in dialectical ambivalence between Lucifer and Christ, between the house that reaches to heaven
and the Ascension of Christ. And the building of the tower half symbolized the infernal judge pointing upwards, and half a Jacob's ladder of defiance; this is precisely
the case in Brueghel's picture, with the architect as a rival of God, and unmistakable wishful building. The tents of Jacob do not stand on this side though, and the leap
from Brueghel's defiant tower to the other architectural archetype cited above: Solomon's temple, operative in the devout Assisi frescoes, seems a large one.
Nevertheless, both are united by a spiritual wishful excess or the architecture of black magic on the one hand, and of white magic on the other. The