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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.
113. For such a [beast] the Serpent's craft did awaken and stir up in Eve, in her awakened bestial, monstrous property; that now almost every man carries a beast in the body, which does plague, molest and burden the poor captive soul, whereby it does make itself also monstrous, and amuse itselfon the beast, and brings itself into a bestial figure; which, so long as it has this image and figure in it, cannot see or feel the kingdom of God. It must be again transmuted into an angel's form, or else there is no remedy for it; therefore says Christ, Unless you be born anew, you shall not see the kingdom of God. 14. The enclosed body of the heavenly part must be again born anew in the water of the heaven, viz. in the pure element's water, in the matrix of the water, and in the spirit of Christ out of the heavenly essence; that the soul's holy part of the angelical world may be revived and quickened, and live and work in its disappeared, and again new-born, body in the divine heavenly essence; and therein receive its food from the divine power of the second Principle. Otherwise the heavenly image, which God created in Adam, is not capable of the kingdom of God; and without the same also it cannot possess it. No glistering shows of devout hypocrisy, flattery [seeming
2holiness, or soothing the mind with an outward application of Christ's merits] or tickling consolations, do avail anything; it must be born [anew] or [be] quite forlorn; for the pearl-tree is withered in Adam and Eve, it must re-obtain divine essence, and die to the beast; or else it cannot spring forth and bear fruit for the soul to eat. 15. Now when Adam and Eve were awakened in the bestial property the beast stood then naked and bare; for before, the heaven's image did wholly penetrate the outward man, and clothed it with divine power; for the beast was not afore manifest. This property lay hidden in the temperature, as likewise it is so, outside the creature; but now, when the image of the heavenly essence did disappear, then the beast, viz. the bestial property, was manifest; so that now the poor soul, which was from the first Principle, stood forth encompassed with this beast, wholly naked and bare.
316. But if the beast had been manifest in the beginning of man, then it had also brought its clothing along with it from its essence, as other beasts did. But the man was not created unto the bestial life; and though God knew that it would so come to pass (for which end he created so many kinds and sorts of beasts for his food and raiment), yet he created man in and unto the true image of God out of the heavenly essence; so that if this image fell he might again bring it, through a new motion and regeneration, into its first state, as it is brought to pass in Christ. 17. The scope and eye-mark of our writing is, to search out the image of God; how it was created, and how it is corrupted, and how it shall come again into its first estate: thereby to understand aright the new birth out of Christ, and to know the inward and outward man, even what the mortal and immortal [man] is, and how he is become mortal; and what he is to do that he may come again into his first estate. The Twenty-Second Chapter Of the Original of Actual Sin, and the Awakening of God's Anger in the Human Property 1. THE Scripture says, God has made all things by his Word, and without the same, nothing was made which was made. Out of his expressed Word (which was essential in the Verbum Fiat) all things came forth into formings: first into an ens, or desire of a property, and out of the same property into a compaction of Sulphur, Mercury and Salt, as into a formed nature;
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.
113. For such a [beast] the Serpent's craft did awaken and stir up in Eve, in her awakened bestial, monstrous property; that now almost every man carries a beast in the body, which does plague, molest and burden the poor captive soul, whereby it does make itself also monstrous, and amuse itselfon the beast, and brings itself into a bestial figure; which, so long as it has this image and figure in it, cannot see or feel the kingdom of God. It must be again transmuted into an angel's form, or else there is no remedy for it; therefore says Christ, Unless you be born anew, you shall not see the kingdom of God. 14. The enclosed body of the heavenly part must be again born anew in the water of the heaven, viz. in the pure element's water, in the matrix of the water, and in the spirit of Christ out of the heavenly essence; that the soul's holy part of the angelical world may be revived and quickened, and live and work in its disappeared, and again new-born, body in the divine heavenly essence; and therein receive its food from the divine power of the second Principle. Otherwise the heavenly image, which God created in Adam, is not capable of the kingdom of God; and without the same also it cannot possess it. No glistering shows of devout hypocrisy, flattery [seeming
2holiness, or soothing the mind with an outward application of Christ's merits] or tickling consolations, do avail anything; it must be born [anew] or [be] quite forlorn; for the pearl-tree is withered in Adam and Eve, it must re-obtain divine essence, and die to the beast; or else it cannot spring forth and bear fruit for the soul to eat. 15. Now when Adam and Eve were awakened in the bestial property the beast stood then naked and bare; for before, the heaven's image did wholly penetrate the outward man, and clothed it with divine power; for the beast was not afore manifest. This property lay hidden in the temperature, as likewise it is so, outside the creature; but now, when the image of the heavenly essence did disappear, then the beast, viz. the bestial property, was manifest; so that now the poor soul, which was from the first Principle, stood forth encompassed with this beast, wholly naked and bare.
316. But if the beast had been manifest in the beginning of man, then it had also brought its clothing along with it from its essence, as other beasts did. But the man was not created unto the bestial life; and though God knew that it would so come to pass (for which end he created so many kinds and sorts of beasts for his food and raiment), yet he created man in and unto the true image of God out of the heavenly essence; so that if this image fell he might again bring it, through a new motion and regeneration, into its first state, as it is brought to pass in Christ. 17. The scope and eye-mark of our writing is, to search out the image of God; how it was created, and how it is corrupted, and how it shall come again into its first estate: thereby to understand aright the new birth out of Christ, and to know the inward and outward man, even what the mortal and immortal [man] is, and how he is become mortal; and what he is to do that he may come again into his first estate. The Twenty-Second Chapter Of the Original of Actual Sin, and the Awakening of God's Anger in the Human Property 1. THE Scripture says, God has made all things by his Word, and without the same, nothing was made which was made. Out of his expressed Word (which was essential in the Verbum Fiat) all things came forth into formings: first into an ens, or desire of a property, and out of the same property into a compaction of Sulphur, Mercury and Salt, as into a formed nature;
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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