quest. As soon as
the forth-going Word of God is differentiated into many concrete
expressions and the fundamental Unity of the Abyss is broken up into
particular desires and wills, there is bound to be a clash of
opposites--will and contra-will, strain and tension, light and joy and
beauty, and over against them pain and sorrow and evil. Evil must
appear as soon as there is {178} process of separation,
differentiation, variety, specialization and particularity.[20]
Darkness appears as soon as there is a contraction or narrowing into
concrete desire and will.

Both worlds--the light world and the dark world--are made by desire and
will. Narrowing desires for individual and particular aims, which
sever a being from the total whole of divine goodness, make the kingdom
of darkness, while death to self-will and a yearning desire and will
for all that is expressed in the Heart and Light of God, in the Person
of His Son, make the kingdom of Light. Lucifer--the awful example of
the dark World--fell because he stood in pride and despised the Birth
of the Heart of God and its gentle, universalizing love-spirit; and so
his light went out into darkness. His climbing up into a severed will
was his fall. The more he climbed toward the sundered aim of his own
will and turned away from the Heart of God, the greater was his fall,
for to turn away from the Heart of God is always to fall.[21] There is
no darkness, no evil, in angel or devil or man, except the nature of
that particular being's own will and desire--both darkness and light
are born of desire. The origin of the fall of any creature, therefore,
is not outside that creature, but within it.[22]

The evil in the world is only a possible good spoiled. Beings created
for a holy sport and play, for an ordered harmony, as infinite
harp-strings for a celestial music, set their wilful desires upon
sundered ends, broke the intended harmony, or "temperature," as Boehme
calls it, introduced strife--the _turba magna_--and darkness, and so
spoiled the actual material out of which the kingdoms of nature are
made, for the attitude of will moulds the permanent structure of the
being. Through the whole universe, visible and invisible, as a result,
the dark lines run, and the drama of the whole process of the universe
is the mighty issue between light and darkness, good and evil: Two
universal qualities persist from {179} beginning to end and produce two
kingdoms arrayed against eac