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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.
112. Afterwards there pressed forward the line of the Covenant, with the spiritual Leah, viz. the first created image out of the limus of the earth, wherein the five prints of the nails, the wounds of Christ, stood; they should be shown to the only God, that therein he should receive the handmaids' children, who all bowed themselves before God. 13. Then afterwards came Joseph with his mother, viz. the image of the heavenly world's substance, and bowed before the only God, which had been angry with him. 14. Men should not understand this in divided figures, types or images, but as the properties of the humanity are manifested before God through the suffering of Christ in one only image, viz. in Christ's humanity in the kingdom of the restoration or redemption, viz. in the kingdom of heaven. The reader should understand our sense properly: for we write here in the vision of all the three Principles, how it went, and still to this day goes, with the new birth. Our exposition will not bear any dividing of the figure or creature: we understand it in one creature.
215. Our earnest and hearty consideration is this: That we may see and understand how we poor children of Eve were brought through Christ's suffering and death, and set before God's countenance, and how first the soul, with the body of sin, must pass through death, and in the resurrection come again with the body before God, where the body from the limus of the earth is esteemed strange in the presence of God. Therefore it is prefigured in the type in the condition of a handmaid, and then presently, in that body, the prints of the nails and the suffering of Christ is set before God. Out of which death of Christ the fair image created in Adam appears again; as the whole figure together of Jacob thus fairly typifies, and as the spirit has signified thereby.
316. And Esau said further to Jacob, What do you mean by all this herd which I met? He answered, That I might find grace in the sight of my Lord. Esau said, I have enough, my brother; keep what you have. Jacob answered, O no, if I have found grace in your sight, then receive my present at my hand: for I have seen your face, as if I had seen the face of God; and let it please you from me. Take, I pray you, the blessing from me which I have brought you; for God has bestowed it upon me, and I have enough. Thus he constrained him that he took it (Gen. xxxiii. 8-11). This now is the fair figure wherewith the spirit alludes, how Christ appears before God, with his Christendom, viz. with his purchased goods. Then says the Father to the Son, Whither will you go with these your children, who meet me daily, in that they come to me? And Christ says, O Lord, that I might find grace from you with them. And the Father says, They are your purchased goods, keep what you have, I have without them enough, even all things.
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.
112. Afterwards there pressed forward the line of the Covenant, with the spiritual Leah, viz. the first created image out of the limus of the earth, wherein the five prints of the nails, the wounds of Christ, stood; they should be shown to the only God, that therein he should receive the handmaids' children, who all bowed themselves before God. 13. Then afterwards came Joseph with his mother, viz. the image of the heavenly world's substance, and bowed before the only God, which had been angry with him. 14. Men should not understand this in divided figures, types or images, but as the properties of the humanity are manifested before God through the suffering of Christ in one only image, viz. in Christ's humanity in the kingdom of the restoration or redemption, viz. in the kingdom of heaven. The reader should understand our sense properly: for we write here in the vision of all the three Principles, how it went, and still to this day goes, with the new birth. Our exposition will not bear any dividing of the figure or creature: we understand it in one creature.
215. Our earnest and hearty consideration is this: That we may see and understand how we poor children of Eve were brought through Christ's suffering and death, and set before God's countenance, and how first the soul, with the body of sin, must pass through death, and in the resurrection come again with the body before God, where the body from the limus of the earth is esteemed strange in the presence of God. Therefore it is prefigured in the type in the condition of a handmaid, and then presently, in that body, the prints of the nails and the suffering of Christ is set before God. Out of which death of Christ the fair image created in Adam appears again; as the whole figure together of Jacob thus fairly typifies, and as the spirit has signified thereby.
316. And Esau said further to Jacob, What do you mean by all this herd which I met? He answered, That I might find grace in the sight of my Lord. Esau said, I have enough, my brother; keep what you have. Jacob answered, O no, if I have found grace in your sight, then receive my present at my hand: for I have seen your face, as if I had seen the face of God; and let it please you from me. Take, I pray you, the blessing from me which I have brought you; for God has bestowed it upon me, and I have enough. Thus he constrained him that he took it (Gen. xxxiii. 8-11). This now is the fair figure wherewith the spirit alludes, how Christ appears before God, with his Christendom, viz. with his purchased goods. Then says the Father to the Son, Whither will you go with these your children, who meet me daily, in that they come to me? And Christ says, O Lord, that I might find grace from you with them. And the Father says, They are your purchased goods, keep what you have, I have without them enough, even all things.
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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