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.
17. That is to say, when the children of the saints in Hebron, viz. in the city of human ownhood, do die unto the self-full outward natural life or selfhood, then the true resigned life will no longer stand in a strange field or strange essence, but in its own, from whence it is originally arisen. But seeing it has lost this same life's field in Adam, and rooted itself into a strange field, viz. into the Serpent's field of falsehood, the life cannot take unto itself again, of due right, the first true field, but it must buy it. This is even the figure, that Christ has bought it for his blood of the heavenly essentiality (for the holy tincture), understand [he has thus purchased it] of the eternal nature, wherein God's anger, viz. the wrath of God in the centre of nature, was manifest, and had devoured this field in the human property into itself as its own. For out of the centre of nature the Word of the human property was brought into a formation: this, the children of self had taken into possession; therefore says the spirit, the children of lies had this field for their own possession. 1 Our Text, Kirjath-arba.
28. This signifies, that God's children must wholly forsake the nature-right in this field of the formed life or word; for they have lost the natural right in it; but in Christ they must buy it again of the Father of nature: They must take Christ for their ransom; and give the Father four hundred shekels of silver for the same. And these are the four centres in the spiritual body's property, which are born in the holy tincture, viz. in Christ's property. 9. The first shekel is the true magical fire; the second is the light or love-desire; the third is the holy sound of the mental tongue; the fourth is the formed or conceived ens out of the other properties, where the holy life is formed, and stands in an essence. This is the pure silver without any spot or foulness; under which the spirit of Moses points, that Abraham, in Christ, has given to the children of lies,
3viz. to Ephron; understand to the Father, or the Father's property, [for his cave of Machpelah] for his twofold pit, viz. for the centre of the Father's nature according to eternity, and for the centre of the temporal nature; in both which the divine lubet 1 has brought itself out of the property of both centres, into an ens, and into the creature of the humanity; which human creature has broken itselfofffrom the universal being, and put itself into a selfishness; therefore it must be again rooted into the universal. For which end it must be tinctured with the most holy ens, and engrafted in; which the spirit does here compare to pure silver, and so secretly intimates in the figure. 10. When Abraham conversed upon the earth he desired to buy no field for his own possession. But now, when he was to bury his Sarah, he would have the sepulchre hereditary and peculiar; and howed himself before the children of the land (Gen. xxiii. 7); and entreated them for it;
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.
17. That is to say, when the children of the saints in Hebron, viz. in the city of human ownhood, do die unto the self-full outward natural life or selfhood, then the true resigned life will no longer stand in a strange field or strange essence, but in its own, from whence it is originally arisen. But seeing it has lost this same life's field in Adam, and rooted itself into a strange field, viz. into the Serpent's field of falsehood, the life cannot take unto itself again, of due right, the first true field, but it must buy it. This is even the figure, that Christ has bought it for his blood of the heavenly essentiality (for the holy tincture), understand [he has thus purchased it] of the eternal nature, wherein God's anger, viz. the wrath of God in the centre of nature, was manifest, and had devoured this field in the human property into itself as its own. For out of the centre of nature the Word of the human property was brought into a formation: this, the children of self had taken into possession; therefore says the spirit, the children of lies had this field for their own possession. 1 Our Text, Kirjath-arba.
28. This signifies, that God's children must wholly forsake the nature-right in this field of the formed life or word; for they have lost the natural right in it; but in Christ they must buy it again of the Father of nature: They must take Christ for their ransom; and give the Father four hundred shekels of silver for the same. And these are the four centres in the spiritual body's property, which are born in the holy tincture, viz. in Christ's property. 9. The first shekel is the true magical fire; the second is the light or love-desire; the third is the holy sound of the mental tongue; the fourth is the formed or conceived ens out of the other properties, where the holy life is formed, and stands in an essence. This is the pure silver without any spot or foulness; under which the spirit of Moses points, that Abraham, in Christ, has given to the children of lies,
3viz. to Ephron; understand to the Father, or the Father's property, [for his cave of Machpelah] for his twofold pit, viz. for the centre of the Father's nature according to eternity, and for the centre of the temporal nature; in both which the divine lubet 1 has brought itself out of the property of both centres, into an ens, and into the creature of the humanity; which human creature has broken itselfofffrom the universal being, and put itself into a selfishness; therefore it must be again rooted into the universal. For which end it must be tinctured with the most holy ens, and engrafted in; which the spirit does here compare to pure silver, and so secretly intimates in the figure. 10. When Abraham conversed upon the earth he desired to buy no field for his own possession. But now, when he was to bury his Sarah, he would have the sepulchre hereditary and peculiar; and howed himself before the children of the land (Gen. xxiii. 7); and entreated them for it;
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.