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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.
1what of another nature from the spirit of this world, of which it maketh a lookingglass wherein it begins to speculate with its outward imagination. Thus it goeth out from the Spirit of God and is often bemired in the dirt of the world, if the Virgin of Divine Wisdom doth not call it back again to repent and return to its first love. Then, if the soul washeth itself anew in the water of eternal life, through earnest repentance, it becometh renewed again in the love-fire of God's meekness and in the Holy Spirit, as a new child ; and beginneth again to drink of that water and recovereth at length its life in God. There is no temperament in which the Devil's will and suggestions may be more clearly discovered, if the soul be once enlightened, than in the melancholy, as the tempted, who have resolutely and successfully stormed his stronghold, very well know. O how subtilly and maliciously doth the 144 CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME
2Devil spread his nets for such a soul, as a fowler for the birds ! Oftentimes he terrifieth it in its prayers, especially in the night, when it is dark, injecting his suggestions into it and filling it with fearful apprehensions that the wrath of God is ready to seize and destroy it. Thus he maketh a show as if he had power over the soul of the man, and it was his property, whereas he hath not power to touch a hair of his head. Unless the soul itself despaireth, and by that means giveth itself up to him, he dareth not spiritually and really to seize or even touch it. He hath more than one temptation for the melancholy soul. For, if he cannot persuade it absolutely to despair and so to give itself up to him that way, he bringeth it, when over-burthened with fears and sad apprehensions about its present state and future doom, and impatient under the weight thereof, to thoughts and designs of self-murder, He dareth not destroy a CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME 145 man ; the man himself must do that. For the soul hath freedom. If it resisteth the Devil and will not do as he counselleth, then, however he may tempt, yet hath he not power to touch even the outward and sinful body.
3The trouble of mind here spoken of is rather a subject of God's pity than of wrath. He will not break the bruised reed, nor extinguish the smoking flax. Our Lord Jesus Christ, in his blessed call and promise, saith, Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, so shall ye find rest unto your souls. This yoke of Christ is no other than the Cross of nature and providence. This is the yoke which a man is required to take up and carry after Christ with patience, and with full submission thereto. Then the affliction, whatever it be, is so far from 10 i46 CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME hurting the soul that it doeth it much good. For while it standeth in the house of sorrow it is not in the house of sin, or in the pride, pomp, and pleasure of the world. God holdeth it with tribulation, as with a father's restraint, from the sinful pleasure of this world. The troubled soul is apt to perplex and torment itself because it cannot open by its desire the spring of divine joy in the heart. It sigheth, lamenteth, and feareth that God will have nothing to do with it, because it cannot feel the comfort of his visible presence.
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
1what of another nature from the spirit of this world, of which it maketh a lookingglass wherein it begins to speculate with its outward imagination. Thus it goeth out from the Spirit of God and is often bemired in the dirt of the world, if the Virgin of Divine Wisdom doth not call it back again to repent and return to its first love. Then, if the soul washeth itself anew in the water of eternal life, through earnest repentance, it becometh renewed again in the love-fire of God's meekness and in the Holy Spirit, as a new child ; and beginneth again to drink of that water and recovereth at length its life in God. There is no temperament in which the Devil's will and suggestions may be more clearly discovered, if the soul be once enlightened, than in the melancholy, as the tempted, who have resolutely and successfully stormed his stronghold, very well know. O how subtilly and maliciously doth the 144 CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME
2Devil spread his nets for such a soul, as a fowler for the birds ! Oftentimes he terrifieth it in its prayers, especially in the night, when it is dark, injecting his suggestions into it and filling it with fearful apprehensions that the wrath of God is ready to seize and destroy it. Thus he maketh a show as if he had power over the soul of the man, and it was his property, whereas he hath not power to touch a hair of his head. Unless the soul itself despaireth, and by that means giveth itself up to him, he dareth not spiritually and really to seize or even touch it. He hath more than one temptation for the melancholy soul. For, if he cannot persuade it absolutely to despair and so to give itself up to him that way, he bringeth it, when over-burthened with fears and sad apprehensions about its present state and future doom, and impatient under the weight thereof, to thoughts and designs of self-murder, He dareth not destroy a CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME 145 man ; the man himself must do that. For the soul hath freedom. If it resisteth the Devil and will not do as he counselleth, then, however he may tempt, yet hath he not power to touch even the outward and sinful body.
3The trouble of mind here spoken of is rather a subject of God's pity than of wrath. He will not break the bruised reed, nor extinguish the smoking flax. Our Lord Jesus Christ, in his blessed call and promise, saith, Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, so shall ye find rest unto your souls. This yoke of Christ is no other than the Cross of nature and providence. This is the yoke which a man is required to take up and carry after Christ with patience, and with full submission thereto. Then the affliction, whatever it be, is so far from 10 i46 CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME hurting the soul that it doeth it much good. For while it standeth in the house of sorrow it is not in the house of sin, or in the pride, pomp, and pleasure of the world. God holdeth it with tribulation, as with a father's restraint, from the sinful pleasure of this world. The troubled soul is apt to perplex and torment itself because it cannot open by its desire the spring of divine joy in the heart. It sigheth, lamenteth, and feareth that God will have nothing to do with it, because it cannot feel the comfort of his visible presence.
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
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