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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.
112. You must understand it thus: The eternal Virgin of Wisdom, stood in paradise as a figure, in which all the wonders of God were known, and was in its figure an image in itself, but without substance like to man: and in that virgin God created the matrix of the earth, so that it was a visible palpable image in substance, wherein heaven, earth, stars, and elements, stood in substance, and all whatsoever liveth and moveth was in this one image. The matrix of the earth could not overpower it, [viz. the image man], much less could the outward elements do it; because it was higher in degree than them all: It had received the neverfading substantiality with the virgin: The virgin was not brought into the image; but the matrix of the earth was brought into the virgin-like image; for the virgin is eternally uncreated and ungenerated: It is the wisdom of God and a [reflection, antitype, and] image of the Deity in Ternario Sancto, in the Holy Ternary, according to the Number Three, and all the eternal wonders of the eternal centre of nature, and is known in the Majesty in the wonders of God; for it is that which bringeth forth to light the hidden things of the deep of the Deity: Thus, beloved man [mankind], you see what you are. 13. Now, saith Moses, And God breathed into him the living breath into his nostrils, and then
2man became a living soul. This is the ground, O ye universities, and high schools! dance about this as much as you can, shew yourselves here Doctors, Masters, or Batchelors [in Arts]: If ye be what you please to conceit yourselves to be, why then are you blind in this? Why will you be called doctors, when in the ground you are yet scarce school-boys? What do you understand by that [inspiration or] breathing-in? Doth not Moses tell you, that God breathed into man the breath of life? What do you understand here? Do you understand it to be only air? That is not solely the breath of God: for he breathed the air into his nostrils: but the breath of God cannot be breathed in from without, for God himself is the fullness of all things, and is present there already before-hand, where any outward thing cometh [to pass].
314. Now therefore, that you may rightly and fundamentally, and also certainly come to understand it, look upon what we have before mentioned; viz. How God longed after the visible substance of his similitude and image; and the image of the virgin, wherein his wonders stood, hath thus caused it, so that the one imagination embraced and conceived the other; though indeed God is without substance and longing [lusting] ; [for his longing is only Majesty and liberty]: But the centre of nature, upon the cross of the wonders, longed [lusted] after the image which was beheld in the virgin, where the spirit of God goeth forth into the wisdom, so that the wisdom causeth substantiality. 15. Behold! God's breathing-in was thus: The spirit of God moveth on the waters, and rideth on the wings of the wind, as the Scripture speaketh: that [spirit] had then comprehended the dominion of this world with the word Fiat, and breathed it into Adam's nostrils: Now, the spirit breathed in the air from without, and itself forth from within into the centre of the heart; for it dwelleth not outwardly, Tout in the centre of nature, and goeth forth from within out of the Deity into the outward, and openeth [or discloseth] an image [manifested in a being] according to itself; understand, according to the centre of nature.
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.
112. You must understand it thus: The eternal Virgin of Wisdom, stood in paradise as a figure, in which all the wonders of God were known, and was in its figure an image in itself, but without substance like to man: and in that virgin God created the matrix of the earth, so that it was a visible palpable image in substance, wherein heaven, earth, stars, and elements, stood in substance, and all whatsoever liveth and moveth was in this one image. The matrix of the earth could not overpower it, [viz. the image man], much less could the outward elements do it; because it was higher in degree than them all: It had received the neverfading substantiality with the virgin: The virgin was not brought into the image; but the matrix of the earth was brought into the virgin-like image; for the virgin is eternally uncreated and ungenerated: It is the wisdom of God and a [reflection, antitype, and] image of the Deity in Ternario Sancto, in the Holy Ternary, according to the Number Three, and all the eternal wonders of the eternal centre of nature, and is known in the Majesty in the wonders of God; for it is that which bringeth forth to light the hidden things of the deep of the Deity: Thus, beloved man [mankind], you see what you are. 13. Now, saith Moses, And God breathed into him the living breath into his nostrils, and then
2man became a living soul. This is the ground, O ye universities, and high schools! dance about this as much as you can, shew yourselves here Doctors, Masters, or Batchelors [in Arts]: If ye be what you please to conceit yourselves to be, why then are you blind in this? Why will you be called doctors, when in the ground you are yet scarce school-boys? What do you understand by that [inspiration or] breathing-in? Doth not Moses tell you, that God breathed into man the breath of life? What do you understand here? Do you understand it to be only air? That is not solely the breath of God: for he breathed the air into his nostrils: but the breath of God cannot be breathed in from without, for God himself is the fullness of all things, and is present there already before-hand, where any outward thing cometh [to pass].
314. Now therefore, that you may rightly and fundamentally, and also certainly come to understand it, look upon what we have before mentioned; viz. How God longed after the visible substance of his similitude and image; and the image of the virgin, wherein his wonders stood, hath thus caused it, so that the one imagination embraced and conceived the other; though indeed God is without substance and longing [lusting] ; [for his longing is only Majesty and liberty]: But the centre of nature, upon the cross of the wonders, longed [lusted] after the image which was beheld in the virgin, where the spirit of God goeth forth into the wisdom, so that the wisdom causeth substantiality. 15. Behold! God's breathing-in was thus: The spirit of God moveth on the waters, and rideth on the wings of the wind, as the Scripture speaketh: that [spirit] had then comprehended the dominion of this world with the word Fiat, and breathed it into Adam's nostrils: Now, the spirit breathed in the air from without, and itself forth from within into the centre of the heart; for it dwelleth not outwardly, Tout in the centre of nature, and goeth forth from within out of the Deity into the outward, and openeth [or discloseth] an image [manifested in a being] according to itself; understand, according to the centre of nature.
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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