The Fairest Child in the House?

In my imagination I have already read all of Boehme's writings and made a compilation of the riches of all his references to Babel. Wow, that was fast! This one is especially well fleshed.

Now whereas the children of God have divers and manifold gifts in writing, speaking, and judging; and they have not all one manner of expression, phrase and style; whereupon self-reason afterward doth by artificial conclusions draw out of them what maketh for its own turn, and frameth a Babel to itself; whence such a multitude and wearisome heap of opinions are risen; so that men out of their writings have forged and invented diverse conjectures and ways unto God, and men must be forced to go in those ways, whereby such controversies and unchristian contentions are arisen; that men for the present look only upon the strife of words, and disputes about the letter, and those which, according to the reason and principles, do overcome by verbal jangling, and exchanging Scripture for Scripture, are applauded; but this is nothing but Babel, a mother of spiritual whoredom, where reason entereth not in at the door of Christ through Christ's spirit; but presseth in of itself and climbeth up by its own might, strength and pride, being yet a stranger, or unregenerated, and would always fain be the fairest child in the house; men must honour and adore it.

The usage of the word whoredom reminds me to consider the term as a representation of a tendency for unconscious and unconsidered self-betrayal en-masse, not as any kind of condemnation of sensuality.

As for "but presseth in of itself and climbeth up by its own might, strength and pride, being yet a stranger, or unregenerated, and would always fain be the fairest child in the house; men must honour and adore it," this beautifully represents what Buddhists call self-grasping thought, or the habit of twisting one's intellectual representations into a sort of psychic armoring that some might call narcissism. Compare to Mannheim's idea presented in an earlier post;"It is a more worthy intellectual task perhaps to learn to think dynamically and relationally rather that statically. In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those person who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest."

A working answer... absolutes only when absolutely necessary, no intellectual striving. Only beautiful dreams and dragonfly eyes.