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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.
1cance and authority. Thus it is often his own interior drama which he sees reflected on the cosmic screen ; a proceeding which the " theosophic " doctrine of man as the microcosm of the Universe helped him to justify. His unstable temperament, with its alternations between gloom and illumination, its constant sense of struggle, its abrupt escapes into the light — the "powerful contrarium" with which he " stood in perpetual combat" — conditions his picture of the eternal conflict between light and darkness at the very heart of creation ; the crude stuff of striving nature and the formative Spirit of God. The " living running fire" which he feels in his own spirit, is his assurance of the Divine fiery creative energy. Further, the Lutheran Christianity which formed the basis of his religious life contributed many elements to his scheme. Thence came the intense moral dualism, the Pauline opposition between the " darkINTRODUCTION xxiii
2world" of unregenerate nature and the " light- world " of grace, the doctrines of the Trinity and of regeneration, and generally those credal symbols which he often uses in a theosophic sense. He is familiar with the Bible, making constant though sometimes fantastic use of its language and imagery. Finally, the German mystics and hermetic philosophers of the Renaissance, in whom he was deeply read, gave him much of the raw material of his philosophy. Alchemy in his day was still a favourite toy of speculative minds ; being understood partly in the physical, partly in the transcendental sense. The " doctrine of signatures," which is the subject of one of Boehme's later works, was still taken seriously as a guide to practical medicine ; the stuffed crocodile hung in the laboratory, the toad and the spider were carefully distilled. Yet for the spiritual alchemists the quest of the Stone was the quest of an unearthly perxxiv CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME
3fection, and human nature was the true matter of the "great work." This "hermetic science," in which chemistry, magic, and mysticism were strangely combined, plainly made a strong appeal to Boehme ; and its influence upon his work was not always fortunate. But his debt to the more genuinely mystical writers of the sixteenth century, especially the Silesian reformer, Caspar Schwenckfeld, and Valentine Weigel, is of far greater importance. Certainly through Weigel, and perhaps also at first-hand, he became acquainted with Paracelsus, whose doctrine of humanity as the sum of three orders — the natural, the astral, and the divine — he adopts in the Threefold Life of Man and Three Principles of the Divine Essence. Through Weigel, too, he traces his descent from the great German mystics of the fourteenth century ; for the saintly pastor of Zschopau was soaked in the works of Tauler, and edited that pearl of Christian mysticism INTRODUCTION xxv
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.
1cance and authority. Thus it is often his own interior drama which he sees reflected on the cosmic screen ; a proceeding which the " theosophic " doctrine of man as the microcosm of the Universe helped him to justify. His unstable temperament, with its alternations between gloom and illumination, its constant sense of struggle, its abrupt escapes into the light — the "powerful contrarium" with which he " stood in perpetual combat" — conditions his picture of the eternal conflict between light and darkness at the very heart of creation ; the crude stuff of striving nature and the formative Spirit of God. The " living running fire" which he feels in his own spirit, is his assurance of the Divine fiery creative energy. Further, the Lutheran Christianity which formed the basis of his religious life contributed many elements to his scheme. Thence came the intense moral dualism, the Pauline opposition between the " darkINTRODUCTION xxiii
2world" of unregenerate nature and the " light- world " of grace, the doctrines of the Trinity and of regeneration, and generally those credal symbols which he often uses in a theosophic sense. He is familiar with the Bible, making constant though sometimes fantastic use of its language and imagery. Finally, the German mystics and hermetic philosophers of the Renaissance, in whom he was deeply read, gave him much of the raw material of his philosophy. Alchemy in his day was still a favourite toy of speculative minds ; being understood partly in the physical, partly in the transcendental sense. The " doctrine of signatures," which is the subject of one of Boehme's later works, was still taken seriously as a guide to practical medicine ; the stuffed crocodile hung in the laboratory, the toad and the spider were carefully distilled. Yet for the spiritual alchemists the quest of the Stone was the quest of an unearthly perxxiv CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME
3fection, and human nature was the true matter of the "great work." This "hermetic science," in which chemistry, magic, and mysticism were strangely combined, plainly made a strong appeal to Boehme ; and its influence upon his work was not always fortunate. But his debt to the more genuinely mystical writers of the sixteenth century, especially the Silesian reformer, Caspar Schwenckfeld, and Valentine Weigel, is of far greater importance. Certainly through Weigel, and perhaps also at first-hand, he became acquainted with Paracelsus, whose doctrine of humanity as the sum of three orders — the natural, the astral, and the divine — he adopts in the Threefold Life of Man and Three Principles of the Divine Essence. Through Weigel, too, he traces his descent from the great German mystics of the fourteenth century ; for the saintly pastor of Zschopau was soaked in the works of Tauler, and edited that pearl of Christian mysticism INTRODUCTION xxv
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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