THIS IS NOT A WORK BY BOEHME, and a reader should know that before the first page of text. It is "COMPILED AND EDITED BY W. SCOTT PALMER, WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY EVELYN UNDERHILL, NEW YORK, ALFRED A. KNOPF, 1920" — autobiographical passages gathered out of Boehme's writings and arranged as a life. Every sentence is his; the book is Palmer's.
Jacob Boehme — the works in English
The Confessions of Jacob Boehme
Open to all
Jacob Boehme — the works in English, and one in Frencheditor’s preface to the volume
Eleven books by a shoemaker of Görlitz who wrote, by his own account, because he could not help it. Ten of them stand here in the seventeenth-century English of John Sparrow, who translated Boehme within a generation of his death and whose prose is itself now four hundred years old; where that English has drifted out of reach, the facing pane carries a modern register — the same text with archaic inflection and spelling normalised by rule, never paraphrased. Nothing is reworded, and where no register appears beside a passage it is because the rules found nothing to change.
The eleventh book is not in English at all, and it is the reason this note exists.
Des trois principes de l'essence divine, printed at Paris in 1802, is the same work as Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence, which stands here as the second book — the same twenty-seven chapters in the same order, opening `Du premier principe de l'essence divine` against Sparrow's `Of the first Principle of the Divine Essence`. Its translator was Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, who gave the last years of his life to putting Boehme into French, and who has a shelf of his own in this Lycaeum.
That makes a closed circuit inside this archive, and it is worth naming plainly. Saint-Martin translates Boehme. La Iniciación, printed in Montevideo a hundred and forty years later, traces its own descent through Saint-Martin. A reader can therefore follow one thread from a German mystic of 1619, through the French philosopher who carried him into another language, to a Spanish-language monthly of the 1940s that claimed them both — and read every step of it in the original.
The two are shelved as one work rather than two because that is what they are. They are not set as facing panes: an English translation of 1619 and a French translation of 1802 are two independent readings of a lost German original, and pairing them line by line would assert a correspondence neither translator ever claimed.
page 1
THE CONFESSIONS OF
JACOB BOEHME
THE
CONFESSIONS OF
JACOB BOEHME
COMPILED AND EDITED BY
W. SCOTT PALMER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
EVELYN UNDERHILL
NEW YORK
ALFRED A. KNOPF
p. 1920
H .67
NOTE BY THE EDITOR
ONE day last winter, in a moment which I must confess to have been idle, I took up Dr. Alexander Whyte's " Appreciation " of Behmen as, following William Law, he calls him. There I found the following passage :
" While we have nothing that can properly be called a biography of Jacob Behmen, we have ample amends made to us in those priceless morsels of autobiography that lie scattered so plentifully up and down all his books. And nothing could be more charming than just those incidental and unstudied utterances of Behmen about himself. Into the very depths of a passage of the profoundest speculation Behmen will all of a sudden vl CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME throw a few verses of the most childlike and heart-winning confidences about his own mental history and his own spiritual experience. And thus it is that, without at all intending it, Behmen has left behind him a complete history of his great mind and his holy heart in those outbursts of diffidence, depreciation, explanation, and self-defence, of which his philosophical and theological, as well as his apologetic and experimental, books are all so full. It were an immense service done to our best literature if some of Behmen's students would go through all Behmen's books, so as to make a complete collection and composition of the best of these autobiographic passages. ... It would then be seen by all, what few, till then, will believe, that Jacob Behmen's mind and heart and spiritual experience all combine to give him a foremost place among the most classical masters in that great field,"
NOTE BY THE EDITOR vii
I turned at once to the massive volumes of English translation which the eighteenth century has bequeathed to us. My copy has the name of Maurice on the titlepage — Frederick Denison Maurice — for whom Boehme was, he said, "a generative thinker," and on the fly-leaf there is John Sterling, whose granddaughter gave me the books. There I found, where before I had looked for the doctrine only, the man himself. I determined to do my best to extract from the formless mass of writings what was necessary to show that man.
The old translation was known to be as faithful as could fairly be hoped for, and nothing better existed or could now be made. Twentieth-century English would not do. So I used my own copy and followed it very closely. No translation is as sacred as an original, and I have therefore allowed myself to make small changes in the interests of clearness and accuracy, viii CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME while carefully respecting both the style of the translator and the mind and meaning of the author.
My task has been in the main one of rigorous omission ; I have kept only what was precious for my purpose. Everything that did not reveal the man himself I have rejected ; but some of his doctrine is eminently the man, and this I have retained. The outcome, I believe, is a spiritual autobiography which, although it is by a writer who was born nearly three hundred and fifty years ago and has been read and studied by thousands, has never been seen in its continuity before.
W. S. P.
Im Wasser lebt der Fisch, die Pflanze in der Erden,
Der Vogel in der Luft, die Sonn' am Firmament,
Der Salamander muss im Feu'r erhalten werden,
Und Gottes Herz ist Jakob Boehmes Element.
Angelus of Silesia,
INTRODUCTION
I
page 1
THE CONFESSIONS OF
JACOB BOEHME
THE
CONFESSIONS OF
JACOB BOEHME
COMPILED AND EDITED BY
W. SCOTT PALMER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
EVELYN UNDERHILL
NEW YORK
ALFRED A. KNOPF
p. 1920
H .67
NOTE BY THE EDITOR
ONE day last winter, in a moment which I must confess to have been idle, I took up Dr. Alexander Whyte's " Appreciation " of Behmen as, following William Law, he calls him. There I found the following passage :
" While we have nothing that can properly be called a biography of Jacob Behmen, we have ample amends made to us in those priceless morsels of autobiography that lie scattered so plentifully up and down all his books. And nothing could be more charming than just those incidental and unstudied utterances of Behmen about himself. Into the very depths of a passage of the profoundest speculation Behmen will all of a sudden vl CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME throw a few verses of the most childlike and heart-winning confidences about his own mental history and his own spiritual experience. And thus it is that, without at all intending it, Behmen has left behind him a complete history of his great mind and his holy heart in those outbursts of diffidence, depreciation, explanation, and self-defence, of which his philosophical and theological, as well as his apologetic and experimental, books are all so full. It were an immense service done to our best literature if some of Behmen's students would go through all Behmen's books, so as to make a complete collection and composition of the best of these autobiographic passages. ... It would then be seen by all, what few, till then, will believe, that Jacob Behmen's mind and heart and spiritual experience all combine to give him a foremost place among the most classical masters in that great field,"
NOTE BY THE EDITOR vii
I turned at once to the massive volumes of English translation which the eighteenth century has bequeathed to us. My copy has the name of Maurice on the titlepage — Frederick Denison Maurice — for whom Boehme was, he said, "a generative thinker," and on the fly-leaf there is John Sterling, whose granddaughter gave me the books. There I found, where before I had looked for the doctrine only, the man himself. I determined to do my best to extract from the formless mass of writings what was necessary to show that man.
The old translation was known to be as faithful as could fairly be hoped for, and nothing better existed or could now be made. Twenties-century English would not do. So I used my own copy and followed it very closely. No translation is as sacred as an original, and I have therefore allowed myself to make small changes in the interests of clearness and accuracy, viii CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME while carefully respecting both the style of the translator and the mind and meaning of the author.
My task has been in the main one of rigorous omission ; I have kept only what was precious for my purpose. Everything that did not reveal the man himself I have rejected ; but some of his doctrine is eminently the man, and this I have retained. The outcome, I believe, is a spiritual autobiography which, although it is by a writer who was born nearly three hundred and fifty years ago and has been read and studied by thousands, has never been seen in its continuity before.
W. S. P.
Im Wasser lebt der Fisch, die Pflanze in der Erden,
Der Vogel in der Luft, die Sonn' am Firmament,
Der Salamander muss im Feu'r erhalten werden,
Und Gottes Herz ist Jakob Boehmes Element.
Angelus of Silesia,
INTRODUCTION
I
The editor tells you exactly why it exists, and the origin is almost accidental: "ONE day last winter, in a moment which I must confess to have been idle, I took up Dr. Alexander Whyte's 'Appreciation' of Behmen ... There I found the following passage: 'While we have nothing that can properly be called a biography of Jac[ob Boehme]...'" The absence of a biography is the book's premise. Palmer read that there was none and assembled one from the man's own words.
answers The Way to Christ
Two editors, 1894 in Canterbury and 1920 in New York, independently open their Boehme by saying the biographical materials are scanty — and only the second does something about it. That both reached for the same observation is a fact about the record rather than about either editor: for three centuries Boehme has been read through a life nobody could write.
shares an observation with The Way to Christ
Evelyn Underhill, who introduces this volume, is reported to be the author of "Mysticism" (1911), the study that did more than any other to make the Christian mystics readable to a general English audience. The volume gives only her name. The claim rests on outside bibliography and is marked reported for that reason — but if it holds, it places this compilation at the centre of the early-twentieth-century revival that put Boehme back into English hands.