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.
152. A prisoner is comforted only by his release, until he place his will in hope, and compose himself with patience; and so at last his restlessness falls into hope, into the temperament, and he learns in such hope to become humble. Then, if one tells him of his release, he rejoices. 53. Therefore, ye physicians, observe it, that is your pearl, if you can understand this, the meaning is internal and external. CHAPTER IV Of the In and Out. How the eternal will of God carries itself outicards and into perceptihility, inwards and again into the One. Here may he understood to what end the being of this world was created, and zehat purpose the creaturely ground serves. Further, to what end joy and sorrow have become manifest; and how God is so near all things. 1. John i. 11-13 runs thus: He (Jesus Christ) came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name : which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. 2. In these words we have precious ground of divine revelation, viz. the eternal In and Out. For they speak of this, how the hidden divine eternal Word of the divine power of the Unity came forth into the emanated, natural, creaturely, image-Hke Word, viz. into humanity, into his own.
23. For the emanated, image-like creaturely Word is the ever-speaking Word's property. And it is thereby clearly signified that his own, or the averse, image-like, particular will, received him 219 220 ON THE DIVINE INTUITION not. This individual, image-like will had arisen from its own ground, viz. from flesh and blood of the self-ful nature of man and woman, that is, in the separator of the emanated will, where the eternal will had confined itself in ownership, and would go forth and rule in personal power and might. 4. This received not the eternal Word (which, as an outflow of divine grace, again came forth to the averse will), for it would be an individual lord. But the will which has turned round, so that it has been born anew in the divine outflow of love, to that gave he power to become God's child. For it is not the natural, individual will can inherit the divine childship, but only that which, united with the Unity, is one with all things, in which God himself works and wills. 5. Wherein we clearly understand how the inward ground has extroverted itself and made itself visible, and is a peculiar possession of God, as an efflux of divine power and wiU. THE END. Date Due
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.
152. A prisoner is comforted only by his release, until he place his will in hope, and compose himself with patience; and so at last his restlessness falls into hope, into the temperament, and he learns in such hope to become humble. Then, if one tells him of his release, he rejoices. 53. Therefore, ye physicians, observe it, that is your pearl, if you can understand this, the meaning is internal and external. CHAPTER IV Of the In and Out. How the eternal will of God carries itself outicards and into perceptihility, inwards and again into the One. Here may he understood to what end the being of this world was created, and zehat purpose the creaturely ground serves. Further, to what end joy and sorrow have become manifest; and how God is so near all things. 1. John i. 11-13 runs thus: He (Jesus Christ) came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name : which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. 2. In these words we have precious ground of divine revelation, viz. the eternal In and Out. For they speak of this, how the hidden divine eternal Word of the divine power of the Unity came forth into the emanated, natural, creaturely, image-Hke Word, viz. into humanity, into his own.
23. For the emanated, image-like creaturely Word is the ever-speaking Word's property. And it is thereby clearly signified that his own, or the averse, image-like, particular will, received him 219 220 ON THE DIVINE INTUITION not. This individual, image-like will had arisen from its own ground, viz. from flesh and blood of the self-ful nature of man and woman, that is, in the separator of the emanated will, where the eternal will had confined itself in ownership, and would go forth and rule in personal power and might. 4. This received not the eternal Word (which, as an outflow of divine grace, again came forth to the averse will), for it would be an individual lord. But the will which has turned round, so that it has been born anew in the divine outflow of love, to that gave he power to become God's child. For it is not the natural, individual will can inherit the divine childship, but only that which, united with the Unity, is one with all things, in which God himself works and wills. 5. Wherein we clearly understand how the inward ground has extroverted itself and made itself visible, and is a peculiar possession of God, as an efflux of divine power and wiU. THE END. Date Due
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.