Blessing and command

Use in the book

The definition of rainwater introduces the expression through a negation: rainwater is an element and throne that has received no particular blessing or command from almighty God (p. 17, I.017.2). The negation can look surprising in a book that celebrates creation everywhere. Its purpose becomes clear when the definition is unfolded. The question is not whether God made rainwater, but what kind of task God assigned it after the original waters had been distinguished.

On pp. 20-21 the author contrasts rainwater with the waters gathered below the firmament and with earth (I.020.1). Water receives the charge to teem with living creatures; earth receives the charge to bring forth plants. He then invokes the statement that God had not yet caused rain upon the earth. This supplies his textual reason for excluding rainwater from those particular commissions. His inference depends on his way of reading the creation sequence, rather than on an observation that rainwater is chemically pure.¹

The distinction returns with greater precision in the answer to the objection that alchemists cannot create a fly or plant. Water and earth initially possess animal and vegetable nature potentially. The commands spoken in creation give them the operation by which those capacities become the particular living kinds, and give those creatures their own life, law and reproductive order (pp. 129-131, II.129.2, II.130.1, II.130.2). Blessing and command is consequently a bridge between capacity and the established activity of a kind.

This also limits the practitioner. Human beings cannot speak the same creative agency into the elements, alter the Most High’s order or create elements from nothing (p. 131, II.131.1). Their inability to originate living kinds does not, however, settle what art can prepare within an existing natural order. The next paragraph distinguishes creating from preparing and tincturing (pp. 131-132, II.131.2). The paired expression thus defines a boundary of art while helping the author defend its legitimate scope.

Chapter Seven applies that boundary to the selection of waters. The appropriate elements are those which have not received the particular blessing and command (pp. 158-159, II.158.2). Waters that have received it remain universal in themselves, yet their properties have become particular in the relevant order. Their density is an additional difficulty. The argument does not rest on one isolated test: divine assignment, property, location and material condition work together to exclude ordinary terrestrial waters from the universal medicine.

By p. 176 the negation has become an identifying formula for the philosophical subject: this is the true element that received no particular blessing and command (II.176.1). It stands beside the golden chain, the earth above our heads and several Hermetic material names. The formula helps unify that catalogue, but it does not erase the earlier distinction between ordinary rainwater and the precise subject of the art. Both can be considered without the particular commission; resemblance on that point is not identity in every respect.

Places to read

1. Part I · I.017.2; I.020.12The negative clause in the definition and the author’s explanation of its purpose.
2. Part II · II.130.2; II.131.1; II.131.223The generative charge and the limit of human preparation.
3. Part II · II.158.2; II.176.12The criterion applied to waters and to the named subject.

Translation

The edition keeps blessing and command together where the original pairs them. Separating the words into unrelated modern categories would make the first a devotional ornament and the second a physical law. In the argument they jointly name God’s effective particular determination. At II.130.2 the mixed Greek and Latin τὸ operari makes the operative sense explicit.

Particular should remain visible even when an English sentence is compressed. No blessing would be too broad; no command could suggest that the waters possess an independent agency outside the Word. The precise contrast is between a universal creative dependence and a more limited charge within that dependence.

Connections

Genesis matters here as the author’s account of differentiated agency. He reads the commands concerning plants and living creatures together with the absence of a prior rain. The later discussion of the universal and uttered Logos supplies the causal vocabulary for the same distinction: the universal Word sustains all natures, while particular utterances establish particular works. The entry Logos uttered develops that side of the argument.

The expression also connects the theological opening with the practical exclusions in the middle of the book. A reader who begins with Chapter Seven’s rejection of terrestrial waters can return to the definition and discover that the author planted his criterion there from the outset. The change is one of application and elaboration, rather than a sudden abandonment of the early water theory.

Cautions

The source’s appeal to the absence of a rain command is an interpretive inference. It should not be presented as the only possible reading of Genesis, nor converted into a demonstrated account of rainwater’s composition.

A shared lack of a particular command does not authorize mixing rainwater, dew and the Hermetic subject indiscriminately. The failed mixtures on pp. 77-79 remain relevant. The criterion narrows a class of suitable natures; it is not a complete laboratory instruction.

Seegen und Befehl

Seegen und Befehl — Attested source wording; spelling retained. I.017.2; I.020.1.

particular Leben

particular Leben — Attested source wording; spelling retained. II.130.2.

τὸ operari

τὸ operari — Attested source wording; spelling retained. II.130.2.