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.
110. And we see very clearly that each kind is created out of a sundry ens, each out of a different degree; and how each kind lives in its mother, whence it has taken its original; and that it cannot live in another degree. As the beasts upon the earth, which are a limus of the earth and air: therein they live; and thence they take their food and nourishment; for the Fiat extracted them out of the earth's property and amassed them in the fifth manifestation of the essence, as a sulphur of the fifth ens, whereon the four depend. 11. The birds were created in the sulphur of the air, therefore they fly in their mother; also the fishes in the sulphur of the water; and the worms in the sulphur of the earth. Thus each thing lives in its mother whence it was taken in the beginning, and the contrary is its death. 12. And the essence and life of this time is nothing else but a contemplation of the inward spiritual world; what the possibility of eternity has in it, and what kind of spiritual play is in the ens of the inward spiritual world, accordingly it came forth into a creatural being, out of good and evil, into a time; and that, through the divine motion.
213. And hereby the kingdom and dominion of the prince of the place of this world was taken from him, for the ens has introduced itself into another Principle, wherein he cannot be; for he was not made a creature in this Principle, and he has no life therein, save only in the property of the awakened wrath in the vanity. The Fifteenth Chapter Of the Sixth Day's Work of the Creation 1. The sixth day in the creation is Friday, on which Venus rules the first hour of the day; which does rightly signify unto us the order of the degrees, how the eternal-speaking Word has manifested itself with nature, through the time; how the spirit has brought forth the six properties of nature into six degrees or days into a working life, and yet has introduced them all again into the seventh, viz. into the rest, or into the mansion wherein they should work; denoting that all whatsoever that they should work, manifest and produce out of the wonders of the eternal wisdom should reenter into the one, viz. into the rest; which is the seventh property; viz. a house of the working life, wherein it should stand as a figure to the contemplation of the great glory of God.
32. Now, when God had educed the five days of nature through five properties or degrees, into five constellations, (all which are not indeed constellations, but a fountain of an astral property), viz. into a sundry peculiar heaven, as it might be given and expressed to the understanding, then he did, on the sixth day, educe out of the Jovial property, viz. out of the fifth constellation, the sixth, viz. he produced out of the Jovial power the fiery love-desire; wherewith he rules through all the constellations. Whence it is that each life does long after its likeness; that is, it again desires such a creature as each life has in it. 3. Each life desires, in this Venus-property, to generate again such a creature as it is in itself: Hence arises the strong ardent imagination and fiery desire, that the properties do again desire into one, viz. into the fountain whence they proceeded; for in the same they may generate the assimulate of themselves. 4. Now when God had educed this fiery love-desire out of the centre through all the properties, then nature was now desirous (in this love-property) of the likeness of God, viz. [of] a similitude according to and in the generation of the holy love-desire; that so this holy constellation of the love-desire might also be creaturised and figurised.
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.
110. And we see very clearly that each kind is created out of a sundry ens, each out of a different degree; and how each kind lives in its mother, whence it has taken its original; and that it cannot live in another degree. As the beasts upon the earth, which are a limus of the earth and air: therein they live; and thence they take their food and nourishment; for the Fiat extracted them out of the earth's property and amassed them in the fifth manifestation of the essence, as a sulphur of the fifth ens, whereon the four depend. 11. The birds were created in the sulphur of the air, therefore they fly in their mother; also the fishes in the sulphur of the water; and the worms in the sulphur of the earth. Thus each thing lives in its mother whence it was taken in the beginning, and the contrary is its death. 12. And the essence and life of this time is nothing else but a contemplation of the inward spiritual world; what the possibility of eternity has in it, and what kind of spiritual play is in the ens of the inward spiritual world, accordingly it came forth into a creatural being, out of good and evil, into a time; and that, through the divine motion.
213. And hereby the kingdom and dominion of the prince of the place of this world was taken from him, for the ens has introduced itself into another Principle, wherein he cannot be; for he was not made a creature in this Principle, and he has no life therein, save only in the property of the awakened wrath in the vanity. The Fifteenth Chapter Of the Sixth Day's Work of the Creation 1. The sixth day in the creation is Friday, on which Venus rules the first hour of the day; which does rightly signify unto us the order of the degrees, how the eternal-speaking Word has manifested itself with nature, through the time; how the spirit has brought forth the six properties of nature into six degrees or days into a working life, and yet has introduced them all again into the seventh, viz. into the rest, or into the mansion wherein they should work; denoting that all whatsoever that they should work, manifest and produce out of the wonders of the eternal wisdom should reenter into the one, viz. into the rest; which is the seventh property; viz. a house of the working life, wherein it should stand as a figure to the contemplation of the great glory of God.
32. Now, when God had educed the five days of nature through five properties or degrees, into five constellations, (all which are not indeed constellations, but a fountain of an astral property), viz. into a sundry peculiar heaven, as it might be given and expressed to the understanding, then he did, on the sixth day, educe out of the Jovial property, viz. out of the fifth constellation, the sixth, viz. he produced out of the Jovial power the fiery love-desire; wherewith he rules through all the constellations. Whence it is that each life does long after its likeness; that is, it again desires such a creature as each life has in it. 3. Each life desires, in this Venus-property, to generate again such a creature as it is in itself: Hence arises the strong ardent imagination and fiery desire, that the properties do again desire into one, viz. into the fountain whence they proceeded; for in the same they may generate the assimulate of themselves. 4. Now when God had educed this fiery love-desire out of the centre through all the properties, then nature was now desirous (in this love-property) of the likeness of God, viz. [of] a similitude according to and in the generation of the holy love-desire; that so this holy constellation of the love-desire might also be creaturised and figurised.
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.