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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.
180. There is not any who does good in selfhood and own will, unless that he forsake in the own (appropriating) will all whatsoever he has, except the infant's shirt; that he must keep for his own and give it to none, for it is the covering of his shame. The other is all common, and he is only a servant and steward of the same, a guardian and distributor to every one in his place. 81. Whosoever suffers the poor and miserable to be in want and distress under his charge, and gathers into his mind temporal goods for his own property, he is no Christian, but a child of the Serpent; for he suffers his under branches to wither, and keeps away his sap and power from them, and will not work forth fruits by his fellowbranches.
282. We do not hereby mean the wicked idle crew which will only suck, and not work and bring forth fruit themselves in the tree, that they should be pampered to exercise pleasure and vanity; but we speak of the twigs which stand in the tree, and co-operate, and would fain grow and bear fruit, from whom the great branches of this world do withdraw the sap, and hold it in themselves, that they, as lean overdript twigs, do wither, by and under their charge. Such are the rich potentates and nobles; with them the spirit of zeal does here speak; so far as they do keep and hold their sap within themselves, and suffer their small branches to dry up and wither, and wholly withdraw the sap from them. They are branches on the tree of the Serpent, which is grown up in the curse of God's anger, and is reserved for the fire of God's anger; says the Spirit of Wonders. The Twenty-Third Chapter How God re-called Adam and his Eve when they were entered into Sin and Vanity, and awakened in the Serpent's Ens; and laid upon them the Order of this toilsome laborious world, and ordained the Serpent-Bruiser for a Help (or Saviour) to them 1. Now when Adam and Eve had eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and were become monstrous by the Serpent, Moses writes of it thus: Their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons (Gen. iii. 7).
3Here the soul did even now know the monstrous image, and was ashamed of it; that such a gross beast, with gross flesh and hard bones, should awaken [or show itself] with a bestial worm's carcass of vanity in their tender delicate body; and they would have covered the same from the eyes of God, and for shame crept behind the trees. So very ashamed were they of the souldeformity of the beast; for the bestial ens had swallowed up the heavenly, and got the upper hand, which before they had not known; now they could not tell for shame what they should do. 2. The Serpent's craft would not here cover the shame, but did lay it only more open, and accused them, as revolting, faithless rebels; for God's anger did awake in them, and arraigned them now before the severe judgement, to devour them into itself; as into the dark world, as happened to Lucifer. 3. And this is the place [state, condition] whereby the earth trembled in the death of Christ, and the rocks clove in sunder: Here God's anger shut up in death the holy ens of the heavenly humanity; which Christ, when he destroyed death on the Cross, did again open; at which the wrath, in the curse of the earth and rocks, shook and trembled. 4. And here was the sore combat before God's anger, in which combat Christ, in the Garden (when he prayed, and was to overcome
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.
180. There is not any who does good in selfhood and own will, unless that he forsake in the own (appropriating) will all whatsoever he has, except the infant's shirt; that he must keep for his own and give it to none, for it is the covering of his shame. The other is all common, and he is only a servant and steward of the same, a guardian and distributor to every one in his place. 81. Whosoever suffers the poor and miserable to be in want and distress under his charge, and gathers into his mind temporal goods for his own property, he is no Christian, but a child of the Serpent; for he suffers his under branches to wither, and keeps away his sap and power from them, and will not work forth fruits by his fellowbranches.
282. We do not hereby mean the wicked idle crew which will only suck, and not work and bring forth fruit themselves in the tree, that they should be pampered to exercise pleasure and vanity; but we speak of the twigs which stand in the tree, and co-operate, and would fain grow and bear fruit, from whom the great branches of this world do withdraw the sap, and hold it in themselves, that they, as lean overdript twigs, do wither, by and under their charge. Such are the rich potentates and nobles; with them the spirit of zeal does here speak; so far as they do keep and hold their sap within themselves, and suffer their small branches to dry up and wither, and wholly withdraw the sap from them. They are branches on the tree of the Serpent, which is grown up in the curse of God's anger, and is reserved for the fire of God's anger; says the Spirit of Wonders. The Twenty-Third Chapter How God re-called Adam and his Eve when they were entered into Sin and Vanity, and awakened in the Serpent's Ens; and laid upon them the Order of this toilsome laborious world, and ordained the Serpent-Bruiser for a Help (or Saviour) to them 1. Now when Adam and Eve had eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and were become monstrous by the Serpent, Moses writes of it thus: Their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons (Gen. iii. 7).
3Here the soul did even now know the monstrous image, and was ashamed of it; that such a gross beast, with gross flesh and hard bones, should awaken [or show itself] with a bestial worm's carcass of vanity in their tender delicate body; and they would have covered the same from the eyes of God, and for shame crept behind the trees. So very ashamed were they of the souldeformity of the beast; for the bestial ens had swallowed up the heavenly, and got the upper hand, which before they had not known; now they could not tell for shame what they should do. 2. The Serpent's craft would not here cover the shame, but did lay it only more open, and accused them, as revolting, faithless rebels; for God's anger did awake in them, and arraigned them now before the severe judgement, to devour them into itself; as into the dark world, as happened to Lucifer. 3. And this is the place [state, condition] whereby the earth trembled in the death of Christ, and the rocks clove in sunder: Here God's anger shut up in death the holy ens of the heavenly humanity; which Christ, when he destroyed death on the Cross, did again open; at which the wrath, in the curse of the earth and rocks, shook and trembled. 4. And here was the sore combat before God's anger, in which combat Christ, in the Garden (when he prayed, and was to overcome
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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