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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.
12. Adam was a man and also a woman, and yet none of them [distinct], but a virgin, full of chastity, modesty and purity, viz. the image of God. He had both the tinctures of the fire and the light in him; in the conjunction of which the own love, viz. the virginal centre, stood, viz. the fair Paradisical rose-garden of delight, wherein he loved himself. As we also, in the resurrection of the dead, shall be such; as Christ tells us, that we shall neither marry, nor be given in marriage, but be like the angels of God. 3. Such a man, as Adam was before his Eve, shall arise and again enter into, and eternally possess Paradise; not a man, or a woman, but as the Scripture says, they are virgins, and follow God, and the Lamb, they are like to the angels of God, yet not only pure spirit, as the angels, but in heavenly bodies, in which the spiritual angelical body inhabites. 4. Seeing then Adam was created in Paradise to the life eternal in the image of God; and God himself breathed his life and spirit into him; therefore we can well describe him, how he was in his innocency, and how he fell, and what he is now, and shall again be at last.
25. If God had created him unto [or for] the earthly, corruptible, miserable, naked, sick, bestial, toilsome life, then he had not brought him into Paradise; if God had desired [or willed] the bestial copulation and propagation, then he would instantly, in the beginning, have created man and woman, and both sexes had come forth in the Verbum Fiat, into the division of both tinctures, as it was in the other earthly creatures. 6. Every creature brings its clothing from its mother's body; but man comes miserable, naked and bare, in deepest poverty, and unability; and is able to do nothing; and in his arrival to this world he is the poorest, miserablest, forlornest, and most shiftless creature amongst all kinds, which cannot at all help himself; which does sufficiently show unto us that he was not created of God unto this misery, but in [unto] his perfection, as all other creatures were; which [perfection] the first man fooled away [or lost] by false lust; whereupon God afterwards, in his sleep, did first figurise him in the outward Fiat to the natural life in man and woman, according to the property of all earthly creatures; and hung upon him the worms'-carcass, with the bestial members for propagation, of which the poor soul is to this day ashamed, that it must bear a bestial form on the body.
37. Two fixed and steadfast essences were in Adam, viz. the spiritual body from [or of] the love-essentiality of the inward heaven, which was God's temple; and the outward body, viz. the limus of the earth, which was the mansion and habitation of the inward spiritual body, which in no wise was manifest according to the vanity of the earth, for it was a limus, an extract of the good part of the earth; which at the Last judgement shall be severed in the earth from the vanity of the curse, and the corruption of the devil. 8. These two essences, viz. the inward heavenly, and the outward heavenly, were mutually espoused to each other, and formed into one body [text, Corpus], wherein was the most holy tincture of the divine fire and light, viz. the great joyful love-desire, which did inflame the essence, so that both essences did very earnestly and ardently desire each other in the love-desire, and loved one another: the inward loved the outward as its manifestation and sensation, and the outward loved the inward as its greatest sweetness and joyfulness, as its precious pearl and most beloved spouse and consort. And yet they were not two bodies, but only one; but of a twofold essence, viz. one inward, heavenly, holy; and one from the essence of time; which were espoused and betrothed to each other to an eternal [being] *. * Or eternally
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.
12. Adam was a man and also a woman, and yet none of them [distinct], but a virgin, full of chastity, modesty and purity, viz. the image of God. He had both the tinctures of the fire and the light in him; in the conjunction of which the own love, viz. the virginal centre, stood, viz. the fair Paradisical rose-garden of delight, wherein he loved himself. As we also, in the resurrection of the dead, shall be such; as Christ tells us, that we shall neither marry, nor be given in marriage, but be like the angels of God. 3. Such a man, as Adam was before his Eve, shall arise and again enter into, and eternally possess Paradise; not a man, or a woman, but as the Scripture says, they are virgins, and follow God, and the Lamb, they are like to the angels of God, yet not only pure spirit, as the angels, but in heavenly bodies, in which the spiritual angelical body inhabites. 4. Seeing then Adam was created in Paradise to the life eternal in the image of God; and God himself breathed his life and spirit into him; therefore we can well describe him, how he was in his innocency, and how he fell, and what he is now, and shall again be at last.
25. If God had created him unto [or for] the earthly, corruptible, miserable, naked, sick, bestial, toilsome life, then he had not brought him into Paradise; if God had desired [or willed] the bestial copulation and propagation, then he would instantly, in the beginning, have created man and woman, and both sexes had come forth in the Verbum Fiat, into the division of both tinctures, as it was in the other earthly creatures. 6. Every creature brings its clothing from its mother's body; but man comes miserable, naked and bare, in deepest poverty, and unability; and is able to do nothing; and in his arrival to this world he is the poorest, miserablest, forlornest, and most shiftless creature amongst all kinds, which cannot at all help himself; which does sufficiently show unto us that he was not created of God unto this misery, but in [unto] his perfection, as all other creatures were; which [perfection] the first man fooled away [or lost] by false lust; whereupon God afterwards, in his sleep, did first figurise him in the outward Fiat to the natural life in man and woman, according to the property of all earthly creatures; and hung upon him the worms'-carcass, with the bestial members for propagation, of which the poor soul is to this day ashamed, that it must bear a bestial form on the body.
37. Two fixed and steadfast essences were in Adam, viz. the spiritual body from [or of] the love-essentiality of the inward heaven, which was God's temple; and the outward body, viz. the limus of the earth, which was the mansion and habitation of the inward spiritual body, which in no wise was manifest according to the vanity of the earth, for it was a limus, an extract of the good part of the earth; which at the Last judgement shall be severed in the earth from the vanity of the curse, and the corruption of the devil. 8. These two essences, viz. the inward heavenly, and the outward heavenly, were mutually espoused to each other, and formed into one body [text, Corpus], wherein was the most holy tincture of the divine fire and light, viz. the great joyful love-desire, which did inflame the essence, so that both essences did very earnestly and ardently desire each other in the love-desire, and loved one another: the inward loved the outward as its manifestation and sensation, and the outward loved the inward as its greatest sweetness and joyfulness, as its precious pearl and most beloved spouse and consort. And yet they were not two bodies, but only one; but of a twofold essence, viz. one inward, heavenly, holy; and one from the essence of time; which were espoused and betrothed to each other to an eternal [being] *. * Or eternally
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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