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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.
1the Theologia Germanica. Boehme, therefore, was far from being an isolated spiritual phenomenon. He was fed from many sources ; but all that he received was fused and remade in the furnace of his own inner life. The result was a new creation, as unique as the White Stone which the alchemist made from his mercury, sulphur, and salt ; but we do it no honour by ignoring the elements from which it sprang. It is v~t- nossiWe to extract from Boehme's vast, prolix, anS4loften difficult works any closed system of phik/Gu^v. Often he repeats himself, sometimes contradicts himself, or hides his meaning behind a haze of inconsistent symbols ; for his writing never wholly lost its inspirational character. But as we study these writings we gradually discern certain guiding lines, certain fixed characters, which help us to find our way through the maze. These, thoroughly grasped, enable us to recognize order and meaning in that xxvi CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME which is often an apparent chaos ; to enjoy and understand something of that revelation which transformed the little Saxon cobbler into a prophet of the Kingdom of God.
2Boehme's map of reality is based, like that of most mystics, on the number three, and has several interesting points of contact with Neoplatonism. The universe in its essence consists of three worlds, which are "none other than God Himself in His wonderful works." Without -^«d beyond Nature is fefoa& Abyss of the Deity, "the Ftfci'a&r Good that is the Eternal One " : a Plotinian definition of the Absolute which may have reached Boehme through Eckhart and his school. The three worlds are the trinity of emanations through which the transcendent Unity achieves selfexpression. Boehme calls them the fireworld, the light-world, and the dark-world. They are not mutually exclusive spheres, but aspects of a whole. By them "we are to understand a threefold Being, or three INTRODUCTION xxvii worlds in one another " ; and all have their part in the production of that outward world of sense in which we live.
3Fire is the eternal energetic Divine will towards creation ; that unresting life, born of a craving, which inspires the natural world of becoming. ' ' What ever is to come to anything must have Fire " : it is the selfexpression of the Father. From the primal fire or fount of generation in its fierceness are born the pair of opposites through which tJe Divine energy is manifested : the 11 dark- world " of conflict, evil, and wrath which is Eternal Nature in itself, and the " light- world " of wisdom and love, which is Eternal Spirit in itself — the Platonic Nous, the Son of Christian theology. The dark-world represents that quality in life which is recalcitrant to all we call divine; " unregenerate nature," which was for Boehme no illusion but a dreadful fact. It is the sphere of undetermined nonmoral striving, and of all " biting, hating, xxviii CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME
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.
1the Theologia Germanica. Boehme, therefore, was far from being an isolated spiritual phenomenon. He was fed from many sources ; but all that he received was fused and remade in the furnace of his own inner life. The result was a new creation, as unique as the White Stone which the alchemist made from his mercury, sulphur, and salt ; but we do it no honour by ignoring the elements from which it sprang. It is v~t- nossiWe to extract from Boehme's vast, prolix, anS4loften difficult works any closed system of phik/Gu^v. Often he repeats himself, sometimes contradicts himself, or hides his meaning behind a haze of inconsistent symbols ; for his writing never wholly lost its inspirational character. But as we study these writings we gradually discern certain guiding lines, certain fixed characters, which help us to find our way through the maze. These, thoroughly grasped, enable us to recognize order and meaning in that xxvi CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME which is often an apparent chaos ; to enjoy and understand something of that revelation which transformed the little Saxon cobbler into a prophet of the Kingdom of God.
2Boehme's map of reality is based, like that of most mystics, on the number three, and has several interesting points of contact with Neoplatonism. The universe in its essence consists of three worlds, which are "none other than God Himself in His wonderful works." Without -^«d beyond Nature is fefoa& Abyss of the Deity, "the Ftfci'a&r Good that is the Eternal One " : a Plotinian definition of the Absolute which may have reached Boehme through Eckhart and his school. The three worlds are the trinity of emanations through which the transcendent Unity achieves selfexpression. Boehme calls them the fireworld, the light-world, and the dark-world. They are not mutually exclusive spheres, but aspects of a whole. By them "we are to understand a threefold Being, or three INTRODUCTION xxvii worlds in one another " ; and all have their part in the production of that outward world of sense in which we live.
3Fire is the eternal energetic Divine will towards creation ; that unresting life, born of a craving, which inspires the natural world of becoming. ' ' What ever is to come to anything must have Fire " : it is the selfexpression of the Father. From the primal fire or fount of generation in its fierceness are born the pair of opposites through which tJe Divine energy is manifested : the 11 dark- world " of conflict, evil, and wrath which is Eternal Nature in itself, and the " light- world " of wisdom and love, which is Eternal Spirit in itself — the Platonic Nous, the Son of Christian theology. The dark-world represents that quality in life which is recalcitrant to all we call divine; " unregenerate nature," which was for Boehme no illusion but a dreadful fact. It is the sphere of undetermined nonmoral striving, and of all " biting, hating, xxviii CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME
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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