Fetching
One moment.
Fetching
One moment.
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.
11. Seeing then there are two Magics in one another, there are also two Magicians who lead them, viz. two spirits. One is God's Spirit, and the other the Reason-spirit, in which the devil ensconces himself. In God's Spirit is the love of unity. And man cannot better prove or try himself than by giving serious attention to what his desire and longing impel him: the same he hath for a leader, and its child he is. Nevertheless, he now has power to break and change that will; for he is magical and possesses the power. 2. But there must be real earnestness; for he must subdue the astral spirit which rules in him. To do this, a sober calm life is necessary, with continual abandonment to God's will. For, to subdue the astral influence, no wisdom nor art will avail; but sobriety of life, with continual withdrawal from the influxes. The elements continually introduce the astral craving into his will. Therefore it is not so easy a thing to become a child of God ; it requires great labour, with much travail and suffering. 3. Antichrist indeed may call himself a child of God. But Christ says: They shall not all enter into the kingdom of heaven who say : Lord, Lord, have we not in thy name cast out devils and done mighty works? But he saith unto them: Away 173 THE NINTH TEXT 173
2from me, ye stinking goats, I know you not (Matt. vii. 21-23) . Ye have done this by means of false magic, and have never become known in my spirit and will. Ye are in your spiritual figure goats, tyrants, covetous muckworms, proud arrogants, voluptuaries. Ye have carried my name on your tongue, but sacrificed your heart to pleasure, to the itch of the flesh, and are generated in the turha. Ye must be proved by fire. And thus to every kingdom its fruit comes home. 4. Therefore, thou brave world, look at thyself in these writings, which the eternal Ground hath set before thee, and meditate on it further and more deeply. Else thou wilt be caught in thy turha. There thou shalt with thy substance pass through the fire of God; and whatsoever is a work out of God's will shall remain in the fire. 5. But whatsoever is done in the will of God shall stand to the honour and glory of God, and for the eternal joy of the image of man. 6. Now think what thou doest. For Babel is already in flames, and begins to burn. There is no longer possible any quenching, nor any remedy. She has been recognized as evil ; her kingdom goeth to the end. Hallelujah. THEOSCOPIA OR THE HIGHLY PRECIOUS GATE OF THE DIVINE INTUITION SHOWING WHAT MYSTERIUM MAGNUM IS, AND HOW ALL IS FROM, THROUGH AND IN GOD; HOW GOD IS SO NEAR ALL THINGS, AND FILLS ALL Written in the year 1622 BY JACOB BOHME CHAPTER I
3What God is; and how we shall recognize his divine nature in his manifestation. 1. Reason says: I hear much mention made of God, that there is a God who has created all things, also upholds and supports all things; but I have not yet seen any, nor heard from the Hps of any, that hath seen God, or that could tell where God dwells or is, or how he is. For when Reason looks upon the existence of this world, and considers that it fares with the righteous as with the wicked, and how all things are mortal and frail; also how the riffhteous man sees no deliverer to release him from the anxiety and adversity of the wicked man, and so must go down with fear in misery to the grave : then it thinks, all things happen by chance ; there is no God who interests himself in the sufferer, seeing he lets him that hopes in him be in misery, and therein go down to the grave ; neither has any been heard of who has returned from corruption, and said he has been with God. 2. Answer. Reason is a natural life, whose ground lies in a temporal beginning and end, and cannot enter into the supernatural ground wherein God is understood. For though Reason thus views itself in this world, and in its viewing finds no other ground, yet it finds in itself a desire after a higher ground, wherein it might rest. 177 178 ON THE DIVINE INTUITION
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.
11. Seeing then there are two Magics in one another, there are also two Magicians who lead them, viz. two spirits. One is God's Spirit, and the other the Reason-spirit, in which the devil ensconces himself. In God's Spirit is the love of unity. And man cannot better prove or try himself than by giving serious attention to what his desire and longing impel him: the same he hath for a leader, and its child he is. Nevertheless, he now has power to break and change that will; for he is magical and possesses the power. 2. But there must be real earnestness; for he must subdue the astral spirit which rules in him. To do this, a sober calm life is necessary, with continual abandonment to God's will. For, to subdue the astral influence, no wisdom nor art will avail; but sobriety of life, with continual withdrawal from the influxes. The elements continually introduce the astral craving into his will. Therefore it is not so easy a thing to become a child of God ; it requires great labour, with much travail and suffering. 3. Antichrist indeed may call himself a child of God. But Christ says: They shall not all enter into the kingdom of heaven who say : Lord, Lord, have we not in thy name cast out devils and done mighty works? But he saith unto them: Away 173 THE NINTH TEXT 173
2from me, ye stinking goats, I know you not (Matt. vii. 21-23) . Ye have done this by means of false magic, and have never become known in my spirit and will. Ye are in your spiritual figure goats, tyrants, covetous muckworms, proud arrogants, voluptuaries. Ye have carried my name on your tongue, but sacrificed your heart to pleasure, to the itch of the flesh, and are generated in the turha. Ye must be proved by fire. And thus to every kingdom its fruit comes home. 4. Therefore, thou brave world, look at thyself in these writings, which the eternal Ground hath set before thee, and meditate on it further and more deeply. Else thou wilt be caught in thy turha. There thou shalt with thy substance pass through the fire of God; and whatsoever is a work out of God's will shall remain in the fire. 5. But whatsoever is done in the will of God shall stand to the honour and glory of God, and for the eternal joy of the image of man. 6. Now think what thou doest. For Babel is already in flames, and begins to burn. There is no longer possible any quenching, nor any remedy. She has been recognized as evil ; her kingdom goeth to the end. Hallelujah. THEOSCOPIA OR THE HIGHLY PRECIOUS GATE OF THE DIVINE INTUITION SHOWING WHAT MYSTERIUM MAGNUM IS, AND HOW ALL IS FROM, THROUGH AND IN GOD; HOW GOD IS SO NEAR ALL THINGS, AND FILLS ALL Written in the year 1622 BY JACOB BOHME CHAPTER I
3What God is; and how we shall recognize his divine nature in his manifestation. 1. Reason says: I hear much mention made of God, that there is a God who has created all things, also upholds and supports all things; but I have not yet seen any, nor heard from the Hps of any, that hath seen God, or that could tell where God dwells or is, or how he is. For when Reason looks upon the existence of this world, and considers that it fares with the righteous as with the wicked, and how all things are mortal and frail; also how the riffhteous man sees no deliverer to release him from the anxiety and adversity of the wicked man, and so must go down with fear in misery to the grave : then it thinks, all things happen by chance ; there is no God who interests himself in the sufferer, seeing he lets him that hopes in him be in misery, and therein go down to the grave ; neither has any been heard of who has returned from corruption, and said he has been with God. 2. Answer. Reason is a natural life, whose ground lies in a temporal beginning and end, and cannot enter into the supernatural ground wherein God is understood. For though Reason thus views itself in this world, and in its viewing finds no other ground, yet it finds in itself a desire after a higher ground, wherein it might rest. 177 178 ON THE DIVINE INTUITION
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.
No commentary for this page.