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.
1my bed, and defiled it with unchastity; you have used my concubine, viz. my formed Word, to your whoredom, and have made of the churches of my children a whore-house, and have defiled my marriagebed, which I have in the churches, where I beget my children. 43. This the spirit of God signifies clearly, by the declaration of the patriarch Jacob, where he says thus concerning these churches and their sacrifices: Reuben, you are my first son, you are my first power, and my first might, the chief in the offering, and the chief in the kingdom: unstable therein as water, you shall not be the chief; for you have climbed up upon your father's bed, and there have you defiled my bed by your climbing up (Gen. xlix. 3,4). 44. The spirit speaks clearly in this text: for Reuben signifies the ordinance of the first Church, viz. the power out of which it was
2built, that is, the first power of the Christian Church or congregation, and is God's concubine, by which he dwells. But their ministers are climbed up into God's marriage-bed, and have gotten the concubine to themselves, and taken her into their power, and have gotten her with child, with human fictions, fleshly honour and voluptuousness. And it says clearly, you are the chief in the offering, and in the kingdom: for so it must needs be, when the whoredom is not committed. But seeing Reuben exercises whoredom with the churches, it says thus, you shall not be the chief ;for he was unstable therein as water, and signifies thereby that he would give himself to fleshly lust and self-love, and that in unstability: and in that regard is rejected of God.
345. Thus the spirit signifies under this figure, how this concubine, viz. the Church, would be reproached with its first power, viz. of its own children; so that it will be said by the churches, It is a spiritual whore-house, which a man must distinguish from the temple of JESUS CHRIST. For the spirit says, you shall not be the chief; neither in the offering, nor in the kingdom: and thus she has lost the true divine power 2 by the whoredom of her ministers, and stands at present rightly as a deflowered one that is made a whore, which is despised of Israel for her unchastity, which is practised by her; which is cried out upon by almost everyone, each party crying out against the church of the other, for a whore-house, as is enough manifest; and all libraries are full of such a cry, and men at present are ready to storm and fall in upon the whore-house. 1 Holy men. 2 Jus Divinum.
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.
1my bed, and defiled it with unchastity; you have used my concubine, viz. my formed Word, to your whoredom, and have made of the churches of my children a whore-house, and have defiled my marriagebed, which I have in the churches, where I beget my children. 43. This the spirit of God signifies clearly, by the declaration of the patriarch Jacob, where he says thus concerning these churches and their sacrifices: Reuben, you are my first son, you are my first power, and my first might, the chief in the offering, and the chief in the kingdom: unstable therein as water, you shall not be the chief; for you have climbed up upon your father's bed, and there have you defiled my bed by your climbing up (Gen. xlix. 3,4). 44. The spirit speaks clearly in this text: for Reuben signifies the ordinance of the first Church, viz. the power out of which it was
2built, that is, the first power of the Christian Church or congregation, and is God's concubine, by which he dwells. But their ministers are climbed up into God's marriage-bed, and have gotten the concubine to themselves, and taken her into their power, and have gotten her with child, with human fictions, fleshly honour and voluptuousness. And it says clearly, you are the chief in the offering, and in the kingdom: for so it must needs be, when the whoredom is not committed. But seeing Reuben exercises whoredom with the churches, it says thus, you shall not be the chief ;for he was unstable therein as water, and signifies thereby that he would give himself to fleshly lust and self-love, and that in unstability: and in that regard is rejected of God.
345. Thus the spirit signifies under this figure, how this concubine, viz. the Church, would be reproached with its first power, viz. of its own children; so that it will be said by the churches, It is a spiritual whore-house, which a man must distinguish from the temple of JESUS CHRIST. For the spirit says, you shall not be the chief; neither in the offering, nor in the kingdom: and thus she has lost the true divine power 2 by the whoredom of her ministers, and stands at present rightly as a deflowered one that is made a whore, which is despised of Israel for her unchastity, which is practised by her; which is cried out upon by almost everyone, each party crying out against the church of the other, for a whore-house, as is enough manifest; and all libraries are full of such a cry, and men at present are ready to storm and fall in upon the whore-house. 1 Holy men. 2 Jus Divinum.
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.