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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.
1and striking and arrogant self-will among men and beasts." The light-world is the sphere of all determined goodness and beauty ; the state of being towards which the fiery impulse of becoming should tend. It is the Word, or " Heart of God," as distinguished from His Will, and holds within itself all those values which we speak of as divine. In the Light is " the eternal original of all powers, colours, and virtues." Here again, we perceive the Platonic ancestry of one of Boehme's most characteristic ideas. In and through this Light the crude strivings of the fiery lifeforce are sublimated ; its titanic zest is transformed into "the desire of love and joy." The Dark is necessary to it, because " nothing without opposition can become manifest to itself." The outer world in which we dwell according to the body is the creation of the Fire and the Light. Ignoring the separate existence of the dark- world, which INTRODUCTION xxix
2is then looked upon as one aspect of the Fire, Boehme sometimes speaks of this physical order as the third Divine Principle, or sphere of the Holy Spirit, the " Lord and Giver of Life " ; who is thus assigned a position very close to the Plotinian Psyche, or "soul of the world." This outer world, he says, is "both evil and good, both terrible and lovely," since in it love and wrath strive together. "The Nature-life works unto Fire, and the Spirit-life unto Light." The business alike of universal and of human life, the essence of its " salvation," is the bringing of the Light out of its fiery origin — spiritual beauty out of the raw stuff of energetic nature. This perpetual shooting up of life from nature-dark to spiritlight is sometimes called by Boehme the "new birth of Christ" and sometimes the "growing up of the Lily." It is happening all the while ; the triumphant selfrealization of the perfection of God. He xxx CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME sees the universe as a vast alchemic process, a seething pot, perpetually distilling the base metals into celestial gold.
3As with the cosmos, so with its microcosm man. He, too, is in process of becoming. The " great work" of the hermetists must be accomplished in him, and he must accept its " anguish " — the conflict of the fire and the light. " Man must be at war with himself, if he wishes to be a heavenly citizen." The combat is inevitable, and the victory is possible, because we have the essence of all three worlds within us, and are " made of all the powers of God." The eternal Light 11 glimmers " in every consciousness. "When I see a right man," says Boehme, " there I see three worlds standing.'* Hence human life is "a hinge between light and darkness ; to whichever it gives itself up, in that same does it burn." Its possibilities of adventure are infinite. The arc through which it may swing is as wide INTRODUCTION xxxi
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.
1and striking and arrogant self-will among men and beasts." The light-world is the sphere of all determined goodness and beauty ; the state of being towards which the fiery impulse of becoming should tend. It is the Word, or " Heart of God," as distinguished from His Will, and holds within itself all those values which we speak of as divine. In the Light is " the eternal original of all powers, colours, and virtues." Here again, we perceive the Platonic ancestry of one of Boehme's most characteristic ideas. In and through this Light the crude strivings of the fiery lifeforce are sublimated ; its titanic zest is transformed into "the desire of love and joy." The Dark is necessary to it, because " nothing without opposition can become manifest to itself." The outer world in which we dwell according to the body is the creation of the Fire and the Light. Ignoring the separate existence of the dark- world, which INTRODUCTION xxix
2is then looked upon as one aspect of the Fire, Boehme sometimes speaks of this physical order as the third Divine Principle, or sphere of the Holy Spirit, the " Lord and Giver of Life " ; who is thus assigned a position very close to the Plotinian Psyche, or "soul of the world." This outer world, he says, is "both evil and good, both terrible and lovely," since in it love and wrath strive together. "The Nature-life works unto Fire, and the Spirit-life unto Light." The business alike of universal and of human life, the essence of its " salvation," is the bringing of the Light out of its fiery origin — spiritual beauty out of the raw stuff of energetic nature. This perpetual shooting up of life from nature-dark to spiritlight is sometimes called by Boehme the "new birth of Christ" and sometimes the "growing up of the Lily." It is happening all the while ; the triumphant selfrealization of the perfection of God. He xxx CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME sees the universe as a vast alchemic process, a seething pot, perpetually distilling the base metals into celestial gold.
3As with the cosmos, so with its microcosm man. He, too, is in process of becoming. The " great work" of the hermetists must be accomplished in him, and he must accept its " anguish " — the conflict of the fire and the light. " Man must be at war with himself, if he wishes to be a heavenly citizen." The combat is inevitable, and the victory is possible, because we have the essence of all three worlds within us, and are " made of all the powers of God." The eternal Light 11 glimmers " in every consciousness. "When I see a right man," says Boehme, " there I see three worlds standing.'* Hence human life is "a hinge between light and darkness ; to whichever it gives itself up, in that same does it burn." Its possibilities of adventure are infinite. The arc through which it may swing is as wide INTRODUCTION xxxi
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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