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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.
114. We have here also a firm ground and assurance that Christ has truly taken upon him our Adamical soul and humanity in the body of Mary, and has destroyed death, hell, and the anger of God in our humanity which he assumed, and has set up this ladder of Jacob. For God said to Jacob, Through you and your seed shall all the generations of the earth be blessed (v. 14). Through you, Jacob, through your own seed, which is God and man, viz. the heavenly divine ens and substance, and the human ens and substance, in the power of the eternal Word. 15. In which Word the holy name Jesus, viz. the highest love of the Deity, has unfolded and manifested itself in our humanity which he has assumed; which sole love of God, in the name Jesus, has overcome the wrath of the eternal nature in our souls [which is] from the Father's property in the anger; and has changed it into the love of the divine joy; and has broken the still death, which has severed us from the life of God; and has manifested the divine life of the highest holy tincture in the eternal speaking Word of the divine power, in death, and has made death to be life; and so our soul, in this divine power, is together penetrated and pressed through death and the anger of God. 16. And it is in no wise to be so taken, as some say, that the substance wherein the Word is become man, proceeded not from Adam;
2but, as some erroneously say, the Virgin Mary proceeded not from mankind, she has outwardly only taken upon her a human body from Anna, and is not of the seed of Jacob, but is an eternal virgin chosen by God for this purpose before the world was. 17. This text teaches us otherwise, where God says, Through you, and your seed. Not through a strange divine seed only, but through you and your seed, with the entrance of the divine substance. Christ should break death in Adam's soul and body, and destroy hell in Adam's soul and body, which was manifested or revealed in Paradise. 18. For here lay our sickness and misery, which Christ took upon him as a yoke. Christ sacrificed his Father's wrath, which was kindled in our humanity, and awakened his highest love in our human and his holy blood. His holy tincture entered into our human death, and tinctured our (in Adam) faded heavenly substantiality (which faded in Adam when he brought earthliness and the false will thereinto), and raised up our faded heavenly substance with his heavenly living substance, so that life sprang up through death: And this was signified by the dry rod of Aaron. 19. Therefore that is not the true meaning, as some say: Christ has assumed a soul from the Word in the eternal Virgin Mary, so that Christ, as one come from God, and his soul in the humanity of Christ, has one and the same beginning.
320. They were indeed united in the incarnation or the becoming man, so that they are inseparable, but the true ens of the soul, which the Word assumed in the name Jesus, was of us men from the female tincture, viz. from the true Adamical soul, yet from the property of the light, which was severed from Adam [and put into the woman], that this property of the light might transmute or change the fiery masculine property again into the love and divine humility, and that the masculine and feminine property might be quite changed into one image again; as Adam was before his Eve, when he was neither man nor woman, but a masculine virgin. 21. Therefore Christ took his soul from a woman, viz. from a virgin, and yet was a man, so that he rightly stood in the Adamical image, and brought the averted severed properties of life, in which our will had broken itself off from God, again into the temperature and union, viz. into that ONE. 22. For Adam turned his will from the only will of God, and Jesus Christ took our soul again into the only will of God, and turned the will of our soul, in our humanity which he assumed, into the only will of God again. 23. But that the reader may be thoroughly and fundamentally informed what our soul, and what the Word that became man, is,
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.
114. We have here also a firm ground and assurance that Christ has truly taken upon him our Adamical soul and humanity in the body of Mary, and has destroyed death, hell, and the anger of God in our humanity which he assumed, and has set up this ladder of Jacob. For God said to Jacob, Through you and your seed shall all the generations of the earth be blessed (v. 14). Through you, Jacob, through your own seed, which is God and man, viz. the heavenly divine ens and substance, and the human ens and substance, in the power of the eternal Word. 15. In which Word the holy name Jesus, viz. the highest love of the Deity, has unfolded and manifested itself in our humanity which he has assumed; which sole love of God, in the name Jesus, has overcome the wrath of the eternal nature in our souls [which is] from the Father's property in the anger; and has changed it into the love of the divine joy; and has broken the still death, which has severed us from the life of God; and has manifested the divine life of the highest holy tincture in the eternal speaking Word of the divine power, in death, and has made death to be life; and so our soul, in this divine power, is together penetrated and pressed through death and the anger of God. 16. And it is in no wise to be so taken, as some say, that the substance wherein the Word is become man, proceeded not from Adam;
2but, as some erroneously say, the Virgin Mary proceeded not from mankind, she has outwardly only taken upon her a human body from Anna, and is not of the seed of Jacob, but is an eternal virgin chosen by God for this purpose before the world was. 17. This text teaches us otherwise, where God says, Through you, and your seed. Not through a strange divine seed only, but through you and your seed, with the entrance of the divine substance. Christ should break death in Adam's soul and body, and destroy hell in Adam's soul and body, which was manifested or revealed in Paradise. 18. For here lay our sickness and misery, which Christ took upon him as a yoke. Christ sacrificed his Father's wrath, which was kindled in our humanity, and awakened his highest love in our human and his holy blood. His holy tincture entered into our human death, and tinctured our (in Adam) faded heavenly substantiality (which faded in Adam when he brought earthliness and the false will thereinto), and raised up our faded heavenly substance with his heavenly living substance, so that life sprang up through death: And this was signified by the dry rod of Aaron. 19. Therefore that is not the true meaning, as some say: Christ has assumed a soul from the Word in the eternal Virgin Mary, so that Christ, as one come from God, and his soul in the humanity of Christ, has one and the same beginning.
320. They were indeed united in the incarnation or the becoming man, so that they are inseparable, but the true ens of the soul, which the Word assumed in the name Jesus, was of us men from the female tincture, viz. from the true Adamical soul, yet from the property of the light, which was severed from Adam [and put into the woman], that this property of the light might transmute or change the fiery masculine property again into the love and divine humility, and that the masculine and feminine property might be quite changed into one image again; as Adam was before his Eve, when he was neither man nor woman, but a masculine virgin. 21. Therefore Christ took his soul from a woman, viz. from a virgin, and yet was a man, so that he rightly stood in the Adamical image, and brought the averted severed properties of life, in which our will had broken itself off from God, again into the temperature and union, viz. into that ONE. 22. For Adam turned his will from the only will of God, and Jesus Christ took our soul again into the only will of God, and turned the will of our soul, in our humanity which he assumed, into the only will of God again. 23. But that the reader may be thoroughly and fundamentally informed what our soul, and what the Word that became man, is,
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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