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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.
149. Not that Esau did receive the ens of Christ in the Covenant as Jacob [did], but [he received] his father's love-desire, in which the hidden Covenant stood unmoveable. Now there was thus a conjunction with his father's natural love (for every property loves its own likeness, especially if the likeness be proceeded forth from the essence or thing loving), as Esau was conceived in Rebecca of his father through his love-desire. 50. And it even denotes that the divine ens in God's love in Isaac loved the miserable human nature, to redeem it. Therefore God manifested his love in Abraham's faith, and introduced the same into an ens; so that this same love, which God gave to redeem mankind, should love the human nature in its shut-up abandoned condition. As, in very truth, the true real Adamical nature ordained by God was shut up in Esau, and, on the contrary, the kingdom of the wrath had the outward dominion. Now to redeem this, the spirit in the Covenant, through Isaac's nature, loved his son Esau, viz. the filial nature, and not only because that he was a hunter of the creatures. 51. Yet here also by this hunter we are even to understand the same as is set down before concerning Nimrod, who was a mighty hunter before the Lord. For this whole description of the first book of Moses is God's spirit's figure, type or representation, where he plays 1 with the kingdom of nature, and then also with Christ's
2kingdom; and he has so portrayed, delineated and typified the acts of the holy Patriarchs under his figure, that we may clearly see in all the histories the glance or allusion of God's spirit, how he has delineated and set forth to the life the kingdom of Christ, and the kingdom of nature, and also the devil's kingdom in the wrath of the eternal nature. And neither the Jews nor the Christians hitherto have had a right understanding of the same, which among the patriarchs was rightly understood in its true meaning.
352. But afterwards, when their children and posterity gave no heed unto the same, but disregarded the true understanding, and loved their evil nature more than the spirit in the Covenant, then the understanding was put out2 among them; until they at last also lost the Book of the Law,3 with the holy histories, and Esdras wrote for them again the figure and history, in the spirit of God; and that, very short, brief and exactly, according to the spiritual figure; in which they were more blind than seeing; as to this day their eyes are blinded; and that, because they abused the knowledge of the true God, and served the nature of this world, and honoured their evil will, above God. Therefore also God has withdrawn himself from them, with his Mysteries; and has suffered them to run up and down with the figure, as children full of ignorance; until the Gentiles' time, in the manifestation of grace (in which they also have only abused the time of grace, and the open seal, in their evil nature) does also come to its end and limit: And then the figure shall be fully manifest in the essence for a witness to all nations:4 and after that, the Judgement (Matt. xxiv. 14). 1 Or, sets forth, as in a map. 2 Or, quenched. 3 Esdras wrote the Book of the Law and Histories again after they were lost. 4 Substantially declaring the very thing itself; unclothiag it of its figures and parables.
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.
149. Not that Esau did receive the ens of Christ in the Covenant as Jacob [did], but [he received] his father's love-desire, in which the hidden Covenant stood unmoveable. Now there was thus a conjunction with his father's natural love (for every property loves its own likeness, especially if the likeness be proceeded forth from the essence or thing loving), as Esau was conceived in Rebecca of his father through his love-desire. 50. And it even denotes that the divine ens in God's love in Isaac loved the miserable human nature, to redeem it. Therefore God manifested his love in Abraham's faith, and introduced the same into an ens; so that this same love, which God gave to redeem mankind, should love the human nature in its shut-up abandoned condition. As, in very truth, the true real Adamical nature ordained by God was shut up in Esau, and, on the contrary, the kingdom of the wrath had the outward dominion. Now to redeem this, the spirit in the Covenant, through Isaac's nature, loved his son Esau, viz. the filial nature, and not only because that he was a hunter of the creatures. 51. Yet here also by this hunter we are even to understand the same as is set down before concerning Nimrod, who was a mighty hunter before the Lord. For this whole description of the first book of Moses is God's spirit's figure, type or representation, where he plays 1 with the kingdom of nature, and then also with Christ's
2kingdom; and he has so portrayed, delineated and typified the acts of the holy Patriarchs under his figure, that we may clearly see in all the histories the glance or allusion of God's spirit, how he has delineated and set forth to the life the kingdom of Christ, and the kingdom of nature, and also the devil's kingdom in the wrath of the eternal nature. And neither the Jews nor the Christians hitherto have had a right understanding of the same, which among the patriarchs was rightly understood in its true meaning.
352. But afterwards, when their children and posterity gave no heed unto the same, but disregarded the true understanding, and loved their evil nature more than the spirit in the Covenant, then the understanding was put out2 among them; until they at last also lost the Book of the Law,3 with the holy histories, and Esdras wrote for them again the figure and history, in the spirit of God; and that, very short, brief and exactly, according to the spiritual figure; in which they were more blind than seeing; as to this day their eyes are blinded; and that, because they abused the knowledge of the true God, and served the nature of this world, and honoured their evil will, above God. Therefore also God has withdrawn himself from them, with his Mysteries; and has suffered them to run up and down with the figure, as children full of ignorance; until the Gentiles' time, in the manifestation of grace (in which they also have only abused the time of grace, and the open seal, in their evil nature) does also come to its end and limit: And then the figure shall be fully manifest in the essence for a witness to all nations:4 and after that, the Judgement (Matt. xxiv. 14). 1 Or, sets forth, as in a map. 2 Or, quenched. 3 Esdras wrote the Book of the Law and Histories again after they were lost. 4 Substantially declaring the very thing itself; unclothiag it of its figures and parables.
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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