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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.
11 Or, dwells through the soul. 2 Note what the Fiat is. 6. Understand, a spiritual essence. And this same spiritual essence is the inward new man, viz. a new house or habitation of the soul, in which it dwells according to the inward heavenly world; the name of which essence is Sophia, viz. the Bride of Christ, Christ's humanity; in which the glorious Jacob's Star of the dear and precious name, Jesus, is a shining light, whereby the soul sees and knows God. 7. The soul is not changed into the Deity, viz. into [Lahai-roi] the fountain of the living and seeing, for it is the eternal and temporal nature's. But the Deity is not nature's, but the will to nature, and manifests itself through the soul's nature. As the fire manifests itself through the iron, where then the iron seems as if it were mere fire, and yet it keeps its own nature, and the fire also its own, and the one does only dwell in the other, and one is the manifestation of the other. The iron has no power over the fire, only the fire gives itself to the iron, and the iron gives its ens to the fire, and so both are changed into one, and yet remain two essences: So likewise it is to be understood with the soul and the Deity.
28. And as the fiery property is different from the gross iron, and has another source, so likewise the new spiritual humanity in the ens of Christ in the divine love-fire is far another essence than the earthly body; albeit the soul is understood in the fire, and in the light's lustre the body of Sophia; for the power or virtue of the light is the tincture or the beginning to the new spiritual body; which power, the soul's believing desire takes, and forms or brings it into an essence: that is, it makes it essential: it becomes an essence or spiritual body from the desire, which spiritual essence is the Temple of God, of which the Scripture speaks. 9. But our Babylon will understand nothing hereof, but will be wholly blind therein; for she will not know how Christ is born in the faith in us, and how faith comes to essence; but she will downright make the half-Serpent man to be an assumed and adopted child of grace, and set it in God's Temple. But it avails not. Shall the devil sit at the right hand of God in the fountain of the living and seeing? He has been once cast away from thence, he shall not any more possess the same: a beast is not Sophia: The Scripture says, You must be converted, and be born anew as children, else you shall not see God (Matt, xviii. 3).
310. The soul cannot see God, save only in its new-born image; only through and in virgin Sophia, in Jacob's Star, viz. in the name of Jesus, it sees in Jehova, in the wellspring of the life of God. It is not itself this very fountain: it gives only the fire to the manifestation of this fountain. But the fountain is understood in the light, viz. in the meekness of the light. 11. Now the soul's magic fire-source could not so be enkindled that a shining lustre of a light might arise in the soul's fire, ifthe divine love-desire, viz. the love ens, had not given itself into the soul's fire. The ens of Christ out of the divine love gives itself into the soul's fire-source, which the soul's fire eats into its fiery essence, and thereupon the life of the wrathfulness dies, and the fair precious light is thence generated; for here Christ arises out of the consuming fire of the Father's property, according to his anger, from death, out of the fire of another life. Here the magical soul's fire becomes the precious Sophia's bridegroom, and here are man and wife; viz. both tinctures, of the fire and of the light, become one person, viz. an angel 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.
11 Or, dwells through the soul. 2 Note what the Fiat is. 6. Understand, a spiritual essence. And this same spiritual essence is the inward new man, viz. a new house or habitation of the soul, in which it dwells according to the inward heavenly world; the name of which essence is Sophia, viz. the Bride of Christ, Christ's humanity; in which the glorious Jacob's Star of the dear and precious name, Jesus, is a shining light, whereby the soul sees and knows God. 7. The soul is not changed into the Deity, viz. into [Lahai-roi] the fountain of the living and seeing, for it is the eternal and temporal nature's. But the Deity is not nature's, but the will to nature, and manifests itself through the soul's nature. As the fire manifests itself through the iron, where then the iron seems as if it were mere fire, and yet it keeps its own nature, and the fire also its own, and the one does only dwell in the other, and one is the manifestation of the other. The iron has no power over the fire, only the fire gives itself to the iron, and the iron gives its ens to the fire, and so both are changed into one, and yet remain two essences: So likewise it is to be understood with the soul and the Deity.
28. And as the fiery property is different from the gross iron, and has another source, so likewise the new spiritual humanity in the ens of Christ in the divine love-fire is far another essence than the earthly body; albeit the soul is understood in the fire, and in the light's lustre the body of Sophia; for the power or virtue of the light is the tincture or the beginning to the new spiritual body; which power, the soul's believing desire takes, and forms or brings it into an essence: that is, it makes it essential: it becomes an essence or spiritual body from the desire, which spiritual essence is the Temple of God, of which the Scripture speaks. 9. But our Babylon will understand nothing hereof, but will be wholly blind therein; for she will not know how Christ is born in the faith in us, and how faith comes to essence; but she will downright make the half-Serpent man to be an assumed and adopted child of grace, and set it in God's Temple. But it avails not. Shall the devil sit at the right hand of God in the fountain of the living and seeing? He has been once cast away from thence, he shall not any more possess the same: a beast is not Sophia: The Scripture says, You must be converted, and be born anew as children, else you shall not see God (Matt, xviii. 3).
310. The soul cannot see God, save only in its new-born image; only through and in virgin Sophia, in Jacob's Star, viz. in the name of Jesus, it sees in Jehova, in the wellspring of the life of God. It is not itself this very fountain: it gives only the fire to the manifestation of this fountain. But the fountain is understood in the light, viz. in the meekness of the light. 11. Now the soul's magic fire-source could not so be enkindled that a shining lustre of a light might arise in the soul's fire, ifthe divine love-desire, viz. the love ens, had not given itself into the soul's fire. The ens of Christ out of the divine love gives itself into the soul's fire-source, which the soul's fire eats into its fiery essence, and thereupon the life of the wrathfulness dies, and the fair precious light is thence generated; for here Christ arises out of the consuming fire of the Father's property, according to his anger, from death, out of the fire of another life. Here the magical soul's fire becomes the precious Sophia's bridegroom, and here are man and wife; viz. both tinctures, of the fire and of the light, become one person, viz. an angel 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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