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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.
1Him is folly; what to us is strong, to Him is weak; what to us is life, to Him is death. This is the mystic truth in its simplest expression: there is really a great deal more to be grasped. The reason why man's thought is the contrary of God's is that God's concept is so vast that before the human mind can apprehend it it must be broken up into two. Thus the actual one thing becomes, for man, two things, as darkness and light, weakness and strength, wisdom and folly. The truth is not that — of these two — God holds one and man the other, but that God apprehends both as one; and man, unable to do this, has to hold God's one as a two, one of which he clings to and rejects the other. One he calls right, the other wrong; one truth, the other falsehood; and so on. Thus in what man holds as right, or true, there is an element, present in God's comprehension of it, which man fails to integrate. Both man's " right " and his " wrong" are imperfect to God, for God's " right" is man's "right" and " wrong" synthesised, or at-oned. The Hegelian triad of "thesis, antithesis and synthesis," is based on this philosophy. Of English writers, no one has more clearly explicated it than the late Prof. G. Boole, in his Laws of Thought — a work now unhappily very rare. Boole was a mathematician, and expressed his philosophy in terms of mathematical notation. Take (he says in effect) any one genus of things, and you can divide it by dichotomy into two
2classes. " Men " can be divided into " white men " and "not white men," or "clever men" and "not clever men." Qualities also can be thus dichotomised. Whatever genus you take and divide thus he calls " universe of thought"; and his formula is: " Universe of thought equals unity." And as (as has been shown) this universe can be divided into contraries, he suggested the following formula as a graphic picturing of the philosophy: x + not x = 1. This will be plainer when we show the practical application of it. As thus: John Smith (we will say) is an orthodox Churchman, and believes that what he holds is right and what William Brown (who is a Nonconformist) holds is wrong. He divides his " universe of thought" (men) into " churchmen and not churchmen"; assuming that the former have all the truth and the latter all the error. This he assumes too easily; unaware that God's Truth is too vast to be all included in the ideas of any single school or party. There is something in the Nonconformist's apprehension which is lacking in his, and something in his which is lacking in the Nonconformist's. This means that in each apprehension there is some truth and some error. Deduct the error of each, and you get two truths, the Churchman's and the Nonconformist's. But, according to Boole's formula, these two equal one; if these two can be united, harmonised, at-oned, then we have the divine Truth. And what becomes of the two errors? Really, that which John Smith regards as William Brown's error is that complementary
3truth to his own truth which he, not seeing as truth, has to regard as error: for truth not rightly understood, not seen in its right relation, is regarded as error. Is there therefore no such thing as error? Certainly. If William Brown asserts that no Churchman can be right, that is an error. If John Smith asserts that no Nonconformist can be right, that is an error. And we may safely generalise that in all our negations there is error, and in our affirmations truth. Therefore it is plain that x + not x = 1, means, "The truth I see and hold, and the truth I yet do not see nor hold, equals the whole, single divine Truth. " The full following up of this idea (which here I have not space to give) would lead to this unexpected conclusion: that if I want to find that complementary truth which I require to make my apprehension approximate as closely as may be to the divine, I must seek it in the opinions of those whom I believe to be most mistaken and wrong. This does not mean that I must abandon my own views and adopt theirs; for that would be to exchange the thesis for the antithesis — both equally short of the full Truth. It means that I must try to detect the idea at the bottom of their tenets, find out what it is they are trying in those tenets to express; and this will be the complementary that I require to integrate with the idea that, in my tenets, I am trying to express. Thus I shall reach the synthesis, which alone is perfect and complete.
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.
1Him is folly; what to us is strong, to Him is weak; what to us is life, to Him is death. This is the mystic truth in its simplest expression: there is really a great deal more to be grasped. The reason why man's thought is the contrary of God's is that God's concept is so vast that before the human mind can apprehend it it must be broken up into two. Thus the actual one thing becomes, for man, two things, as darkness and light, weakness and strength, wisdom and folly. The truth is not that — of these two — God holds one and man the other, but that God apprehends both as one; and man, unable to do this, has to hold God's one as a two, one of which he clings to and rejects the other. One he calls right, the other wrong; one truth, the other falsehood; and so on. Thus in what man holds as right, or true, there is an element, present in God's comprehension of it, which man fails to integrate. Both man's " right " and his " wrong" are imperfect to God, for God's " right" is man's "right" and " wrong" synthesised, or at-oned. The Hegelian triad of "thesis, antithesis and synthesis," is based on this philosophy. Of English writers, no one has more clearly explicated it than the late Prof. G. Boole, in his Laws of Thought — a work now unhappily very rare. Boole was a mathematician, and expressed his philosophy in terms of mathematical notation. Take (he says in effect) any one genus of things, and you can divide it by dichotomy into two
2classes. " Men " can be divided into " white men " and "not white men," or "clever men" and "not clever men." Qualities also can be thus dichotomised. Whatever genus you take and divide thus he calls " universe of thought"; and his formula is: " Universe of thought equals unity." And as (as has been shown) this universe can be divided into contraries, he suggested the following formula as a graphic picturing of the philosophy: x + not x = 1. This will be plainer when we show the practical application of it. As thus: John Smith (we will say) is an orthodox Churchman, and believes that what he holds is right and what William Brown (who is a Nonconformist) holds is wrong. He divides his " universe of thought" (men) into " churchmen and not churchmen"; assuming that the former have all the truth and the latter all the error. This he assumes too easily; unaware that God's Truth is too vast to be all included in the ideas of any single school or party. There is something in the Nonconformist's apprehension which is lacking in his, and something in his which is lacking in the Nonconformist's. This means that in each apprehension there is some truth and some error. Deduct the error of each, and you get two truths, the Churchman's and the Nonconformist's. But, according to Boole's formula, these two equal one; if these two can be united, harmonised, at-oned, then we have the divine Truth. And what becomes of the two errors? Really, that which John Smith regards as William Brown's error is that complementary
3truth to his own truth which he, not seeing as truth, has to regard as error: for truth not rightly understood, not seen in its right relation, is regarded as error. Is there therefore no such thing as error? Certainly. If William Brown asserts that no Churchman can be right, that is an error. If John Smith asserts that no Nonconformist can be right, that is an error. And we may safely generalise that in all our negations there is error, and in our affirmations truth. Therefore it is plain that x + not x = 1, means, "The truth I see and hold, and the truth I yet do not see nor hold, equals the whole, single divine Truth. " The full following up of this idea (which here I have not space to give) would lead to this unexpected conclusion: that if I want to find that complementary truth which I require to make my apprehension approximate as closely as may be to the divine, I must seek it in the opinions of those whom I believe to be most mistaken and wrong. This does not mean that I must abandon my own views and adopt theirs; for that would be to exchange the thesis for the antithesis — both equally short of the full Truth. It means that I must try to detect the idea at the bottom of their tenets, find out what it is they are trying in those tenets to express; and this will be the complementary that I require to integrate with the idea that, in my tenets, I am trying to express. Thus I shall reach the synthesis, which alone is perfect and complete.
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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