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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.
1led you from God into opinions, and there you go astray; they have stirred you up to contention and wars, so that you have murdered one another, and wasted your native countries: They have bereaved you of body and soul, also of your goods and wits, and made you believe you did God good service in it, when you became enemies to those that are not of your opinion; and yet you are all thus blind [even on both sides] .
220. Behold! these are the curates over your souls, your spirituality, the clergy: Look upon Popery, whence hath that sprung? From the devil at Rome: He hath caused Asia, Africa, Assyria, Persia, and Greece, to depart from his deceit; for the Antichristian priest-devil hath blinded the whole world, and brought them into vain traditions and opinions, and turned them away from that unanimous love: He hath placed more holiness in one order and opinion than in another, and hath sold the highest degree of [sacerdotal] orders for money: That order which had much, and rich livings and revenues, must give much to the Chief Devil, that he might be fat, and a lord upon earth: The simple lay-people were persuaded these orders were holiness, and so worshipped before the dragon in the Revelation, and sought for pardon, absolution, and forgiveness of sins from thence: O how the common people were tied to them! Whomsoever spoke against it, was accounted a heretic, and the people burnt them with fire: Thus did the simple people do, and were persuaded they did God good service in it. 21. O thou simple holiness [devotion]! Thou art not guilty in so doing; neither shall it be imputed or accounted to you at the Last Day, (for you went
3on blindly in it); and though on that day the holy Martyrs shall be set before your eyes, yet you have been zealous for God in blindness: The Blessed Martyrs (who have seen the light of God) will not therefore cast you out of their congregation, seeing you knew not [what you did], but were blindly led on to do it. 22. Yet, behold and observe what a zealous will, or earnest desire can do, if one enters into the will of God with his whole desire; and although he knoweth not what he doth, and is zealous in a strange opinion, and yet his heart is directed into God, and believeth in ignorance, very stedfastly, that it is pleasing to God, in such an opinion many great wonders and works have been done in the midst of the Antichristian kingdom, for there is not any thing impossible to a strong faith. 23. Into these wonders hath Antichrist insinuated himself, and hath made almost as many opinions [tenets and sects] as there are days in the year, among which, in the believers, who have so in blindness believed in their opinion, even wonders and miracles have been done, and the Antichrist hath ascribed it to the opinion: whereas the opinion could not make a fly to stir, but the firm and strong
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.
1led you from God into opinions, and there you go astray; they have stirred you up to contention and wars, so that you have murdered one another, and wasted your native countries: They have bereaved you of body and soul, also of your goods and wits, and made you believe you did God good service in it, when you became enemies to those that are not of your opinion; and yet you are all thus blind [even on both sides] .
220. Behold! these are the curates over your souls, your spirituality, the clergy: Look upon Popery, whence hath that sprung? From the devil at Rome: He hath caused Asia, Africa, Assyria, Persia, and Greece, to depart from his deceit; for the Antichristian priest-devil hath blinded the whole world, and brought them into vain traditions and opinions, and turned them away from that unanimous love: He hath placed more holiness in one order and opinion than in another, and hath sold the highest degree of [sacerdotal] orders for money: That order which had much, and rich livings and revenues, must give much to the Chief Devil, that he might be fat, and a lord upon earth: The simple lay-people were persuaded these orders were holiness, and so worshipped before the dragon in the Revelation, and sought for pardon, absolution, and forgiveness of sins from thence: O how the common people were tied to them! Whomsoever spoke against it, was accounted a heretic, and the people burnt them with fire: Thus did the simple people do, and were persuaded they did God good service in it. 21. O thou simple holiness [devotion]! Thou art not guilty in so doing; neither shall it be imputed or accounted to you at the Last Day, (for you went
3on blindly in it); and though on that day the holy Martyrs shall be set before your eyes, yet you have been zealous for God in blindness: The Blessed Martyrs (who have seen the light of God) will not therefore cast you out of their congregation, seeing you knew not [what you did], but were blindly led on to do it. 22. Yet, behold and observe what a zealous will, or earnest desire can do, if one enters into the will of God with his whole desire; and although he knoweth not what he doth, and is zealous in a strange opinion, and yet his heart is directed into God, and believeth in ignorance, very stedfastly, that it is pleasing to God, in such an opinion many great wonders and works have been done in the midst of the Antichristian kingdom, for there is not any thing impossible to a strong faith. 23. Into these wonders hath Antichrist insinuated himself, and hath made almost as many opinions [tenets and sects] as there are days in the year, among which, in the believers, who have so in blindness believed in their opinion, even wonders and miracles have been done, and the Antichrist hath ascribed it to the opinion: whereas the opinion could not make a fly to stir, but the firm and strong
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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