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.
1of the original Hebrew and Greek, and so by the variety of the idiom of the several speeches, the sense is the more explained, as the literal expositions out of some of those translations into anyone tongue not varying the phrase, being compared with another, will manifest: they have also taken pains to interpret the meaning of the words, some from one ground and reason, some from another, collected, by the understandings of several builders of one sect or other in religion; causing differences of opinion in all churches of dissenting brethren, each party having several reasons for the divers meanings of the same text of Scripture, but the ground of the mistake is from the working of
2the faculty of reason upon the subject that is spoken of; the faculty of understanding upon the inward ideas represented in the mind is the same in all men, and if it concludes upon outward observation it is called reason, in Greek, logos, which signifies verbum, sermo, ratio, the word, speech, reason, things meant by these are either expressed by the tongue or letters or imprinted in thoughts either from without by the senses, or from within, from God, by the understanding: the certain meaning of the words of Scripture being the jewel locked up in them, not now attainable from the Apostles by conference with them, since their decease, therefore now we should apply ourselves to the things they spoke of, which are to be inquired after in mind, and the knowledge of them to be received from God by prayer, who will open the understanding, for there is a spirit in man, and the inspiration 1 of the Almighty gives understanding (Job xxxii. 8), and he will then teach us as he did the Apostles: and as he did this author, who by the command of the Holy Spirit wrote his deep knowledge given to him of God, and has therin pointed out the way to us wherein we may understand what in us is divine and what natural, the new man, and the old: which is the aim and scope of the whole Bible: these new things and old are those that the scribe learned in the Kingdom of Heaven, brings out of his treasury, neither can any knowledge be wanting to him who enjoys Christ, for in him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
31 Or, breathing in, as Gen. ii.7. A man would wonder why Paul should pronounce so great a curse upon those that teach any other gospel, than the Galatians had received, saying, though we [himself or another Apostle] or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel besides that which we have preached upon you, and utters the same, if any preach any other gospel than what you have received, let him be accursed (Gal. i. 8);
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.
1of the original Hebrew and Greek, and so by the variety of the idiom of the several speeches, the sense is the more explained, as the literal expositions out of some of those translations into anyone tongue not varying the phrase, being compared with another, will manifest: they have also taken pains to interpret the meaning of the words, some from one ground and reason, some from another, collected, by the understandings of several builders of one sect or other in religion; causing differences of opinion in all churches of dissenting brethren, each party having several reasons for the divers meanings of the same text of Scripture, but the ground of the mistake is from the working of
2the faculty of reason upon the subject that is spoken of; the faculty of understanding upon the inward ideas represented in the mind is the same in all men, and if it concludes upon outward observation it is called reason, in Greek, logos, which signifies verbum, sermo, ratio, the word, speech, reason, things meant by these are either expressed by the tongue or letters or imprinted in thoughts either from without by the senses, or from within, from God, by the understanding: the certain meaning of the words of Scripture being the jewel locked up in them, not now attainable from the Apostles by conference with them, since their decease, therefore now we should apply ourselves to the things they spoke of, which are to be inquired after in mind, and the knowledge of them to be received from God by prayer, who will open the understanding, for there is a spirit in man, and the inspiration 1 of the Almighty gives understanding (Job xxxii. 8), and he will then teach us as he did the Apostles: and as he did this author, who by the command of the Holy Spirit wrote his deep knowledge given to him of God, and has therin pointed out the way to us wherein we may understand what in us is divine and what natural, the new man, and the old: which is the aim and scope of the whole Bible: these new things and old are those that the scribe learned in the Kingdom of Heaven, brings out of his treasury, neither can any knowledge be wanting to him who enjoys Christ, for in him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
31 Or, breathing in, as Gen. ii.7. A man would wonder why Paul should pronounce so great a curse upon those that teach any other gospel, than the Galatians had received, saying, though we [himself or another Apostle] or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel besides that which we have preached upon you, and utters the same, if any preach any other gospel than what you have received, let him be accursed (Gal. i. 8);
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.