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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.
1it thereinto. It shall at the end of this time be released from the loaded vanity of Nature, and be brought into a crystalline, clear Nature. Then will be evident why God has shut it up in a time, and subjected it to pain [in the disposition] for suffering: Namely, that through the natural pain the eternal power might be brought into forms, shape and separability for perceptibility; and that creatures, viz. a creatui-ely Hf e, might be revealed therein in this time, and so be a play in the counterstroke to the divine wisdom. For through folly wisdom becomes manifest, because folly attributes power to its own self, and yet rests upon a [another] foundation and beginning, and has an end. 34. Thus the endless life is displayed to view through folly, in order that therein a praise might arise to the honour of God, and that the eternal and permanent might become known in the mortal.
235. And thus the first question put by Reason is answered, in that it supposes all things happen by chance, and that there is no God, seeing he suffers the righteous man to be in pain, fear and tribulation, and brings him at last to the grave, like the wicked man; so that it seems as if God interested himself in nothing, or as if there were no God, since Reason sees not, knows nor feels him. Therefore it is declared to it, that it (Reason) is in its own hfe only a counterstroke to the right life ; and if it find in itself no hunger or desire after that from which in the beginning it arose, that it is in its own life only a foolishness and play, wherein wisdom brings its wonders to pass. 188 ON THE DIVINE INTUITION
336. For Reason sees in the wise man also such a folly according to the outward nature, and sees how God abandons this folly of the wise, that it must stand in shame and reproach before the self-willed, foolish subtlety, which nevertheless knows not its end. Therefore foohsh Reason supposes there is no deliverer, and knows not how the wise man is dehvered in himself and freed from the inherited folly by inmiergence of his own wiU. For his own will, through the pain and opposition of the godless, enters into its breaking and into its willing nothing, and sinks again into its first origin, as into God's will, and therein is born anew. And that God is not served by the coarse, mortal flesh, that he should introduce deliverance into the animal, self-willed life ; but that to him the matter lies in this, that selfwiU should break, and sink again into God. Thus is the inward good nature comprehended in God's will; and on the mortal body is the more pain laid, that the individual, natural will may not enter again into a desire of its own for selfhood, and set itself up as a ruler over the inward gi'ound, and destroy the true image of God.
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.
1it thereinto. It shall at the end of this time be released from the loaded vanity of Nature, and be brought into a crystalline, clear Nature. Then will be evident why God has shut it up in a time, and subjected it to pain [in the disposition] for suffering: Namely, that through the natural pain the eternal power might be brought into forms, shape and separability for perceptibility; and that creatures, viz. a creatui-ely Hf e, might be revealed therein in this time, and so be a play in the counterstroke to the divine wisdom. For through folly wisdom becomes manifest, because folly attributes power to its own self, and yet rests upon a [another] foundation and beginning, and has an end. 34. Thus the endless life is displayed to view through folly, in order that therein a praise might arise to the honour of God, and that the eternal and permanent might become known in the mortal.
235. And thus the first question put by Reason is answered, in that it supposes all things happen by chance, and that there is no God, seeing he suffers the righteous man to be in pain, fear and tribulation, and brings him at last to the grave, like the wicked man; so that it seems as if God interested himself in nothing, or as if there were no God, since Reason sees not, knows nor feels him. Therefore it is declared to it, that it (Reason) is in its own hfe only a counterstroke to the right life ; and if it find in itself no hunger or desire after that from which in the beginning it arose, that it is in its own life only a foolishness and play, wherein wisdom brings its wonders to pass. 188 ON THE DIVINE INTUITION
336. For Reason sees in the wise man also such a folly according to the outward nature, and sees how God abandons this folly of the wise, that it must stand in shame and reproach before the self-willed, foolish subtlety, which nevertheless knows not its end. Therefore foohsh Reason supposes there is no deliverer, and knows not how the wise man is dehvered in himself and freed from the inherited folly by inmiergence of his own wiU. For his own will, through the pain and opposition of the godless, enters into its breaking and into its willing nothing, and sinks again into its first origin, as into God's will, and therein is born anew. And that God is not served by the coarse, mortal flesh, that he should introduce deliverance into the animal, self-willed life ; but that to him the matter lies in this, that selfwiU should break, and sink again into God. Thus is the inward good nature comprehended in God's will; and on the mortal body is the more pain laid, that the individual, natural will may not enter again into a desire of its own for selfhood, and set itself up as a ruler over the inward gi'ound, and destroy the true image of God.
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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