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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.
1form, or quality, would then — but then only — appear as these evil things. If this idea is clearly grasped, most of the obscurity of Boehme's system will disappear, and all will be lucid. For, according to him, any quality is the surface appearance of an unseen, hidden power or spirit which, so long as it remains as invisible spirit, is unknown, has no name, no consciously cognised quality. But it is possible to bring it up out of the hiddenness, and then it appears as a definite quality; and then, for the first time, it gets a name; and is either love or hate, darkness or light, falsehood or truth, according to the nature of the spirit of which it is the manifestation.
2But why should God permit any spirit to be which, when manifested, must appear as these evil qualities? Boehme's reply is that contrariety is the very condition and basis of manifestation; and that, apart from the existence of a contrary, manifestation could not be. For a single will does nothing new; and had the will of the Still Rest not been met and crossed by a contrary will, the Still Rest had been the ceaseless condition, and manifestation would not have taken place. And there is very much to be said for this presentation of the case. Contraries do exist for us; and we must either suppose that they exist against the will of God (which is hard to believe, for "Who hath resisted His will?"), or that they exist by His will, and subserve some necessary purpose, as Boehme asserts. We know, too, that it is through
3opposition that consciousness is effected. Where there is no opposition, no work can be consciously done. If things had no weight to resist our strength, we should never know we possessed strength. If we could never do wrong, we should never know that we could do right. Abstract terms are nothing to us, apart for some concrete embodiment. Strength is unknown to us apart from the strong thing, showing its strength in what it does. Colours would be unknown were there no " bodies " that were red or blue or green. So "strong," "powerful," "good," "thick," "heavy," "light," "dark," " hard," "soft," "sweet," "bitter," etc., etc. are all adjectives — that is, they are qualities of things which we only know through the things of which they are the qualities. We know that we cannot conceive of pure, abstract spirit apart from some visible or cognisable thing in and through which it manifests; but this is part of the predication, for if we could know it, it would be manifested and not hidden. We know that God is Spirit, and that God is unknowable and incognisable apart from His self-revelation of Himself in His Son, who is His manifestation.
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.
1form, or quality, would then — but then only — appear as these evil things. If this idea is clearly grasped, most of the obscurity of Boehme's system will disappear, and all will be lucid. For, according to him, any quality is the surface appearance of an unseen, hidden power or spirit which, so long as it remains as invisible spirit, is unknown, has no name, no consciously cognised quality. But it is possible to bring it up out of the hiddenness, and then it appears as a definite quality; and then, for the first time, it gets a name; and is either love or hate, darkness or light, falsehood or truth, according to the nature of the spirit of which it is the manifestation.
2But why should God permit any spirit to be which, when manifested, must appear as these evil qualities? Boehme's reply is that contrariety is the very condition and basis of manifestation; and that, apart from the existence of a contrary, manifestation could not be. For a single will does nothing new; and had the will of the Still Rest not been met and crossed by a contrary will, the Still Rest had been the ceaseless condition, and manifestation would not have taken place. And there is very much to be said for this presentation of the case. Contraries do exist for us; and we must either suppose that they exist against the will of God (which is hard to believe, for "Who hath resisted His will?"), or that they exist by His will, and subserve some necessary purpose, as Boehme asserts. We know, too, that it is through
3opposition that consciousness is effected. Where there is no opposition, no work can be consciously done. If things had no weight to resist our strength, we should never know we possessed strength. If we could never do wrong, we should never know that we could do right. Abstract terms are nothing to us, apart for some concrete embodiment. Strength is unknown to us apart from the strong thing, showing its strength in what it does. Colours would be unknown were there no " bodies " that were red or blue or green. So "strong," "powerful," "good," "thick," "heavy," "light," "dark," " hard," "soft," "sweet," "bitter," etc., etc. are all adjectives — that is, they are qualities of things which we only know through the things of which they are the qualities. We know that we cannot conceive of pure, abstract spirit apart from some visible or cognisable thing in and through which it manifests; but this is part of the predication, for if we could know it, it would be manifested and not hidden. We know that God is Spirit, and that God is unknowable and incognisable apart from His self-revelation of Himself in His Son, who is His manifestation.
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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