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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.
132. But if we go out from the will of this world, and enter into God, then the spirit of God ruleth in us, and establisheth us for his children; and then also the garland of paradise is set upon the soul; and then it becometh a child without understanding as to this world, for it loseth the master [or ruler] of this world, who formerly ruled it and led it in reason. 33. O Man! Consider who leadeth and driveth thee; for eternally without end is very long: temporal honour and goods are but dross and dung in the sight of God: it all falleth into the grave with thee, and cometh to nothing: But to be in the will of God is eternal riches and honour: there, there is no more care; but our mother careth for us, in whose bosom we live as children. 34. Thy temporal honour is thy snare [pitfall], and thy misery in divine hope [and confidence] is thy garden of roses: Patience is a precious herb; 0 how gloriously wilt thou be crowned! What is brighter than the sun? And yet thou shalt bo, far brighter, thou wilt obtain a garland in Ternario Sancto, [viz. in the angelical world, in the eternal essentiality, before the Holy Trinity]. 35. Or dost thou suppose again, that we speak historically? No, we speak the very life, in our
2own knowledge [or experience]; not in an opinion from the mouth of another, but from our own mouth: we see with our own eyes; which we boast not of, for the power is the mother's; but we exhort thee, to enter into the bosom of the mother, and learn also to see with thy own eyes: so long as you suffer yourselves to be rocked in a cradle, and desire the eyes of others, [which are strange eyes in respect of your own], you are blind. But if you rise up from the cradle, and go to the mother, then you shall see the mother and her children. 36. O how good it is to see with one's own eyes. One that is blind, and seeth not the light of this world, is accounted as one that is asleep and dreameth: for he heareth of the pomp of the world, but he knoweth it not: he apprehendeth it by hearsay, and many times thinketh it is better, or worse, than it is, because he seeth it not, and so imagineth it by that which is said; but he that seeth the light, he speaketh according to the truth, for he apprehendeth the thing as it is. 37. So also I say, we are all asleep in the outward man; we lie in the cradle, and suffer ourselves to be rocked asleep by reason; we see with the eyes of the dissimulation of our hypocrites, who hang bells and baubles about our ears and cradles, that we may be lulled asleep, or at least play with their baubles; that they may be lords and masters in the house.
338. O blind reason ! Rise up from thy cradle: art thou not a child of the mother, and an heir to the goods; and, moreover, a child and lord of the house: why sufferest thou thy servants thus to use thee? Christ saith, / am the Light of the World, he that followeth me, shall have the light of the eternal life. He doth not direct us to the flattering hypocrites, murderers, and contenders; but only to himself: we should see (with the inward eyes) in his light, and so we should see him, for he is the light: when we see him, then we walk in th light: He is the Morning Star, and is generated in us, and riseth in us, and shineth in our Bodily Darkness. 39. O how great a triumph is there in the soul, when he ariseth! then a man seeth with his own eyes, and knoweth that he is in a strange lodging. Concerning which we will here write, what we see and know in the light. 40. We are children of the eternity: But this world is an out-birth out of the eternal; and its palpability taketh its original in the anger, the eternal nature is its root. But that which is an out-birth is corruptible, because it hath not been from eternity: and it must all return into the eternal essences, [out of which it was born]. 41. The stars are out of the centre of nature, they are the essences of the seven forms of nature, and from each form there goeth another [form], all from [caused by] the wrestling wheel of nature; and therefore they are so various and numberless, in our
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.
132. But if we go out from the will of this world, and enter into God, then the spirit of God ruleth in us, and establisheth us for his children; and then also the garland of paradise is set upon the soul; and then it becometh a child without understanding as to this world, for it loseth the master [or ruler] of this world, who formerly ruled it and led it in reason. 33. O Man! Consider who leadeth and driveth thee; for eternally without end is very long: temporal honour and goods are but dross and dung in the sight of God: it all falleth into the grave with thee, and cometh to nothing: But to be in the will of God is eternal riches and honour: there, there is no more care; but our mother careth for us, in whose bosom we live as children. 34. Thy temporal honour is thy snare [pitfall], and thy misery in divine hope [and confidence] is thy garden of roses: Patience is a precious herb; 0 how gloriously wilt thou be crowned! What is brighter than the sun? And yet thou shalt bo, far brighter, thou wilt obtain a garland in Ternario Sancto, [viz. in the angelical world, in the eternal essentiality, before the Holy Trinity]. 35. Or dost thou suppose again, that we speak historically? No, we speak the very life, in our
2own knowledge [or experience]; not in an opinion from the mouth of another, but from our own mouth: we see with our own eyes; which we boast not of, for the power is the mother's; but we exhort thee, to enter into the bosom of the mother, and learn also to see with thy own eyes: so long as you suffer yourselves to be rocked in a cradle, and desire the eyes of others, [which are strange eyes in respect of your own], you are blind. But if you rise up from the cradle, and go to the mother, then you shall see the mother and her children. 36. O how good it is to see with one's own eyes. One that is blind, and seeth not the light of this world, is accounted as one that is asleep and dreameth: for he heareth of the pomp of the world, but he knoweth it not: he apprehendeth it by hearsay, and many times thinketh it is better, or worse, than it is, because he seeth it not, and so imagineth it by that which is said; but he that seeth the light, he speaketh according to the truth, for he apprehendeth the thing as it is. 37. So also I say, we are all asleep in the outward man; we lie in the cradle, and suffer ourselves to be rocked asleep by reason; we see with the eyes of the dissimulation of our hypocrites, who hang bells and baubles about our ears and cradles, that we may be lulled asleep, or at least play with their baubles; that they may be lords and masters in the house.
338. O blind reason ! Rise up from thy cradle: art thou not a child of the mother, and an heir to the goods; and, moreover, a child and lord of the house: why sufferest thou thy servants thus to use thee? Christ saith, / am the Light of the World, he that followeth me, shall have the light of the eternal life. He doth not direct us to the flattering hypocrites, murderers, and contenders; but only to himself: we should see (with the inward eyes) in his light, and so we should see him, for he is the light: when we see him, then we walk in th light: He is the Morning Star, and is generated in us, and riseth in us, and shineth in our Bodily Darkness. 39. O how great a triumph is there in the soul, when he ariseth! then a man seeth with his own eyes, and knoweth that he is in a strange lodging. Concerning which we will here write, what we see and know in the light. 40. We are children of the eternity: But this world is an out-birth out of the eternal; and its palpability taketh its original in the anger, the eternal nature is its root. But that which is an out-birth is corruptible, because it hath not been from eternity: and it must all return into the eternal essences, [out of which it was born]. 41. The stars are out of the centre of nature, they are the essences of the seven forms of nature, and from each form there goeth another [form], all from [caused by] the wrestling wheel of nature; and therefore they are so various and numberless, in our
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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