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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.
130. And we are to understand with the second day's work the manifestation of the internal heavenly and the external heavenly essence, viz. the manifestation of the water-source, understand, the essence of the seven properties, viz. the corporality, or the laboratory 2) of the other six; wherein the soul or spirit of the outward world works and rules in the external. This working 3) in the most external or inferior heaven next the earth is ascribed unto the moon, for it is the manifestation of the lunar property; not of the star 1) which was first created into the external on the fourth day to be a governor therein, but this same property [is] in the inanimate outward life, viz. in the vegetative life: the vegetative life was opened on the third day. 1 Conceived or formed. 2 Operate or work-house. 3 Or operation. 31. And when God had ordained the water into sundry places upon the earth, then he moved the external expressed word in the vegetative life. Now Moses says, God spoke, Let the earth put forth herbs, and grass yielding seed, and fruitful trees; each bearing fruit according to his kind; and let each have its seed in itself: and when it came to pass, out of the evening and morning was the third day (Gen. i. 11, 12). Of the third day of the creation
232. In the original of the eternal nature, which is an eternal original, the manifestation of the six days' works is very clearly to be found; how the eternal Word has unfolded them out of the invisible spiritual [property] and brought them into the visible: also the form thereof is to be found in the planetary orb, if any has skill to apprehend it. 33. for in the eternal nature's birth there is an eternal day. Whatsoever God has manifested and made visible in six diversalls, 2) which are called days' works, that stands in the eternal nature in six distinct degrees in the essence, viz. in the seventh property, in which the six degrees of nature work, and yet also do eternally rest from working; they are themselves the working, which they give in to the seventh, as into their own peculiar rest, wherein their perfection and manifestation consists. 1 Star or planet called the moon. 2 Or distinctions. 34. And we are to understand nothing else by the creation, save that the Verbum Fiat has amassed the spiritual birth, and introduced it into a visible external dominion and essence. For we see it very clearly in the writings of Moses (albeit we have a glass besides to see),
3that when God the first day had created the gross part into a mass, that he extracted the fine part out of the same first day's work, and severed and amassed the waters, viz. the spiritual essence, and produced it out of the first day, viz. out of the holy power, into a time; that is, out of the eternal day into an inchoative day. 35. Now the third accomplishment of the third day's work is the moving growing life, in which on the first day the light of nature did shine in the essence of the ens, after an external manner: it shone likewise now through the second day, viz. through the water and the heaven. And in this shining light the expressed Word did move itself in the essence, and wrought effectually; and even then the power of the expressed Word from the light of the inward nature did pullulate, and spring forth, through the external nature, out of the heaven through the earth. [And so] now the potentate who was a king and great prince has lost his domination, for the essence of the wrath was captivated in the light of nature, and he with it. And so he lies between time and eternity, imprisoned in the darkness, until the judgement 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.
130. And we are to understand with the second day's work the manifestation of the internal heavenly and the external heavenly essence, viz. the manifestation of the water-source, understand, the essence of the seven properties, viz. the corporality, or the laboratory 2) of the other six; wherein the soul or spirit of the outward world works and rules in the external. This working 3) in the most external or inferior heaven next the earth is ascribed unto the moon, for it is the manifestation of the lunar property; not of the star 1) which was first created into the external on the fourth day to be a governor therein, but this same property [is] in the inanimate outward life, viz. in the vegetative life: the vegetative life was opened on the third day. 1 Conceived or formed. 2 Operate or work-house. 3 Or operation. 31. And when God had ordained the water into sundry places upon the earth, then he moved the external expressed word in the vegetative life. Now Moses says, God spoke, Let the earth put forth herbs, and grass yielding seed, and fruitful trees; each bearing fruit according to his kind; and let each have its seed in itself: and when it came to pass, out of the evening and morning was the third day (Gen. i. 11, 12). Of the third day of the creation
232. In the original of the eternal nature, which is an eternal original, the manifestation of the six days' works is very clearly to be found; how the eternal Word has unfolded them out of the invisible spiritual [property] and brought them into the visible: also the form thereof is to be found in the planetary orb, if any has skill to apprehend it. 33. for in the eternal nature's birth there is an eternal day. Whatsoever God has manifested and made visible in six diversalls, 2) which are called days' works, that stands in the eternal nature in six distinct degrees in the essence, viz. in the seventh property, in which the six degrees of nature work, and yet also do eternally rest from working; they are themselves the working, which they give in to the seventh, as into their own peculiar rest, wherein their perfection and manifestation consists. 1 Star or planet called the moon. 2 Or distinctions. 34. And we are to understand nothing else by the creation, save that the Verbum Fiat has amassed the spiritual birth, and introduced it into a visible external dominion and essence. For we see it very clearly in the writings of Moses (albeit we have a glass besides to see),
3that when God the first day had created the gross part into a mass, that he extracted the fine part out of the same first day's work, and severed and amassed the waters, viz. the spiritual essence, and produced it out of the first day, viz. out of the holy power, into a time; that is, out of the eternal day into an inchoative day. 35. Now the third accomplishment of the third day's work is the moving growing life, in which on the first day the light of nature did shine in the essence of the ens, after an external manner: it shone likewise now through the second day, viz. through the water and the heaven. And in this shining light the expressed Word did move itself in the essence, and wrought effectually; and even then the power of the expressed Word from the light of the inward nature did pullulate, and spring forth, through the external nature, out of the heaven through the earth. [And so] now the potentate who was a king and great prince has lost his domination, for the essence of the wrath was captivated in the light of nature, and he with it. And so he lies between time and eternity, imprisoned in the darkness, until the judgement 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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