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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.
19. Therefore understand us well here what Hell and the dark World, or the Anger of God is; of which the holy Scripture speaks plainly, that there is an Hell; that is, a Gulf of Desperation, or Pit void of the Hope of God and all Good. Now we are not to understand it to be any local Place apart, but it is the first Ground to the Eternal Nature; the Place is between the Kingdom of God and this World, and makes a peculiar Principle, dwelling in itself, and has neither Place, nor local Abode; and it is every where, but inhabiting itself only, and yet it gives Essence to the Light and Outward- world; that is, it is the Cause to the Source, viz. the Fire, and is the whole Being of all God's Beings. 10. In the Darkness he is an angry zealous God; and in the Fire Spirit a consuming Fire; and in the Light he is a merciful Loving God; and in the Power of the Light he is especially, above all other Properties, called God. And yet it is all but God manifested; who manifests himself through the Eternal Nature in ingredient Properties. Else, if I would say what God is in his Depth, then I must say that he is wholly without Nature and Properties; being an Understanding, and Original, of all Beings; the Beings are his Manifestation; and thereof we have only Ability to write, and not of the unmanifested God, who also were not known to himself without his Manifestation. The Original of Life Jupiter
211. The sixth Property of Nature, and of all Beings, arises also out of all the Rest, and is manifest in the Fire through the Light in the Lovedesire; it is Nature's Understanding, Voice, Sound, Speech, and all whatsoever sounds, both in Things with Life and without Life; its true Original is from the astringent Desire or Impression of the first, second, and third Form, whence the Motion and Hardness arise: The Essence of the Coagulation is consumed in the Fire, and from the Devouring proceeds such a Spirit, both according to the Property of the Light, in the Love, and according to the annoying hateful Source, and anxious Property, in the Darkness; and this we are thus to understand. 12. Each Spirit desires Essence after its Likeness. Now there proceeds forth no more but one Spirit from the Fire (which is a spiritual Understanding, that is, the Manifestation of the Understanding of the Abyss or God) which does re-conceive itself in the Love-desire, and forms itself in the Properties of the Powers. And this mutual Intercourse, Consent, and intimate intire Assimulation one with another, is the pleasant Taste of Love.
313. But that which is conceived in the Love-desire, where the Desire does again coagulate the Powers, and introduce them into Forms, viz. into a substantial Spirit, where the Powers are able manifestly to move and act, that (I say) is now the natural and creatural Understanding which was in the Word, as it is said, 'In him was the Life, and that Life was the Light of Men' [John 1]. 14. This Harmony of Hearing, Seeing, Feeling, Tasting, and Smelling, is the true intellective Life; for when one Power enters into another, then they embrace each other in the Sound, and when they penetrate each other, they mutually awaken and know each other; and in this Knowledge consists the true understanding, which is innumerable, immense, and abyssal, according to the Nature of the Eternal Wisdom, viz. of the ONE, which is ALL. 15. Therefore one only Will, if it has divine Light in it, may draw out of this fountain, and behold the Infinity, from which Contemplation this Pen has wrote. 16. Now there belong to the manifest Life or Sound of the Powers, Hardness and Softness, Thickness and Thinness, and a Motion; for without Motion all is still. And yet there can be no clear Sound without the Fire's Essence, for the Fire first makes the Sound in the Hardness and Softness.
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.
19. Therefore understand us well here what Hell and the dark World, or the Anger of God is; of which the holy Scripture speaks plainly, that there is an Hell; that is, a Gulf of Desperation, or Pit void of the Hope of God and all Good. Now we are not to understand it to be any local Place apart, but it is the first Ground to the Eternal Nature; the Place is between the Kingdom of God and this World, and makes a peculiar Principle, dwelling in itself, and has neither Place, nor local Abode; and it is every where, but inhabiting itself only, and yet it gives Essence to the Light and Outward- world; that is, it is the Cause to the Source, viz. the Fire, and is the whole Being of all God's Beings. 10. In the Darkness he is an angry zealous God; and in the Fire Spirit a consuming Fire; and in the Light he is a merciful Loving God; and in the Power of the Light he is especially, above all other Properties, called God. And yet it is all but God manifested; who manifests himself through the Eternal Nature in ingredient Properties. Else, if I would say what God is in his Depth, then I must say that he is wholly without Nature and Properties; being an Understanding, and Original, of all Beings; the Beings are his Manifestation; and thereof we have only Ability to write, and not of the unmanifested God, who also were not known to himself without his Manifestation. The Original of Life Jupiter
211. The sixth Property of Nature, and of all Beings, arises also out of all the Rest, and is manifest in the Fire through the Light in the Lovedesire; it is Nature's Understanding, Voice, Sound, Speech, and all whatsoever sounds, both in Things with Life and without Life; its true Original is from the astringent Desire or Impression of the first, second, and third Form, whence the Motion and Hardness arise: The Essence of the Coagulation is consumed in the Fire, and from the Devouring proceeds such a Spirit, both according to the Property of the Light, in the Love, and according to the annoying hateful Source, and anxious Property, in the Darkness; and this we are thus to understand. 12. Each Spirit desires Essence after its Likeness. Now there proceeds forth no more but one Spirit from the Fire (which is a spiritual Understanding, that is, the Manifestation of the Understanding of the Abyss or God) which does re-conceive itself in the Love-desire, and forms itself in the Properties of the Powers. And this mutual Intercourse, Consent, and intimate intire Assimulation one with another, is the pleasant Taste of Love.
313. But that which is conceived in the Love-desire, where the Desire does again coagulate the Powers, and introduce them into Forms, viz. into a substantial Spirit, where the Powers are able manifestly to move and act, that (I say) is now the natural and creatural Understanding which was in the Word, as it is said, 'In him was the Life, and that Life was the Light of Men' [John 1]. 14. This Harmony of Hearing, Seeing, Feeling, Tasting, and Smelling, is the true intellective Life; for when one Power enters into another, then they embrace each other in the Sound, and when they penetrate each other, they mutually awaken and know each other; and in this Knowledge consists the true understanding, which is innumerable, immense, and abyssal, according to the Nature of the Eternal Wisdom, viz. of the ONE, which is ALL. 15. Therefore one only Will, if it has divine Light in it, may draw out of this fountain, and behold the Infinity, from which Contemplation this Pen has wrote. 16. Now there belong to the manifest Life or Sound of the Powers, Hardness and Softness, Thickness and Thinness, and a Motion; for without Motion all is still. And yet there can be no clear Sound without the Fire's Essence, for the Fire first makes the Sound in the Hardness and Softness.
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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