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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.
172. Hearken, you adorned and crowned Babylon, full of evil and wickedness in the sight of God and his angels; we have heard a watchman say: Away! the city, together with the tower of the whore and the beast, is fallen, and judged of the Most High. You shall not see the city of God for ever, unless that your children do put off and cast away the defiled garment, full of shame; and fall down wholly naked and bare, without any image, at the feet of the Most High; and turn unto him. Such as these may indeed see it; but as for others, who hope for golden mountains, and seek for temporal honour, money, and pleasure of the flesh; not any of them. Amen. 73. Reason will here, (in the above-mentioned text, where it is mentioned that a true Christian must die to all images [opinions] and self-knowledge, and be wholly annihilated in himself), begin to speculate, cavil, and say, that we do forbid man the natural knowledge and external rational wisdom, whereby men do govern the life and all things of this world, and if this were so all understanding would be abolished.
274. Unto him we declare, that nothing is hereby taken away or abolished in man; neither understanding, skill nor art, for all these arise out of the divine wisdom. We do not nullify the expressed Word of the formed wisdom, but only the beast, which will rule in divine contemplation, viz. the beast-like will of self and selfish ownhood and propriety, which is departed from God, which honours itself as a false selfly god, and cannot believe or trust in God (this is even the Antichrist, which has set himself up in God's place, 2 Thess. ii. 4). And we withal do teach, that man must wholly die to the Antichristian image, that he may be born again in Christ, with a new life and will; which new will has might and ability in the formed word of nature to see and behold with divine eyes, all the wonders of God both in nature and creature, in the formed wisdom. 75. For if the Antichrist dies in the soul, then Christ arises from death; for he rests in the five vowels in his grave, viz. in the mental tongue, which died in Adam, and lies captive in Antichrist. When this same arises from death in the mental tongue, and is made alive, then he opens all the treasures of the heavenly wisdom in the sensual tongue; so that man does far more clearly understand the spirits of the letters, viz. the formed word of nature, in all the three Principles, than he did before in the Antichristian whore's child.
376. For the new birth is indeed effected and brought to pass in the mental tongue, viz. in the disappeared image of the heavenly humanity; but it tinges and casts away the false Antichristian image of the natural humanity, viz. of the spirits of the dumb senseless letters, and does make them all senseless and dead in their selfhood, and gives them their own life; so that they do behold themselves in the new humanity, and make all their assumptions and formations in the new humanity. 77. These new assumptions and formings are effected and wrought forth in the divine will, in resignation; and they are the heavenly images and formings, which are formed and shaped in the Holy Ghost to the honour of God. 78. For if the holy name of God be not in its power, in the forming of the words, viz. in the spirits of the letters, which are the formed word, and helps to form the word in the sensual tongue, then the false Antichrist speaks only from his own self-assumption of the literal form.
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.
172. Hearken, you adorned and crowned Babylon, full of evil and wickedness in the sight of God and his angels; we have heard a watchman say: Away! the city, together with the tower of the whore and the beast, is fallen, and judged of the Most High. You shall not see the city of God for ever, unless that your children do put off and cast away the defiled garment, full of shame; and fall down wholly naked and bare, without any image, at the feet of the Most High; and turn unto him. Such as these may indeed see it; but as for others, who hope for golden mountains, and seek for temporal honour, money, and pleasure of the flesh; not any of them. Amen. 73. Reason will here, (in the above-mentioned text, where it is mentioned that a true Christian must die to all images [opinions] and self-knowledge, and be wholly annihilated in himself), begin to speculate, cavil, and say, that we do forbid man the natural knowledge and external rational wisdom, whereby men do govern the life and all things of this world, and if this were so all understanding would be abolished.
274. Unto him we declare, that nothing is hereby taken away or abolished in man; neither understanding, skill nor art, for all these arise out of the divine wisdom. We do not nullify the expressed Word of the formed wisdom, but only the beast, which will rule in divine contemplation, viz. the beast-like will of self and selfish ownhood and propriety, which is departed from God, which honours itself as a false selfly god, and cannot believe or trust in God (this is even the Antichrist, which has set himself up in God's place, 2 Thess. ii. 4). And we withal do teach, that man must wholly die to the Antichristian image, that he may be born again in Christ, with a new life and will; which new will has might and ability in the formed word of nature to see and behold with divine eyes, all the wonders of God both in nature and creature, in the formed wisdom. 75. For if the Antichrist dies in the soul, then Christ arises from death; for he rests in the five vowels in his grave, viz. in the mental tongue, which died in Adam, and lies captive in Antichrist. When this same arises from death in the mental tongue, and is made alive, then he opens all the treasures of the heavenly wisdom in the sensual tongue; so that man does far more clearly understand the spirits of the letters, viz. the formed word of nature, in all the three Principles, than he did before in the Antichristian whore's child.
376. For the new birth is indeed effected and brought to pass in the mental tongue, viz. in the disappeared image of the heavenly humanity; but it tinges and casts away the false Antichristian image of the natural humanity, viz. of the spirits of the dumb senseless letters, and does make them all senseless and dead in their selfhood, and gives them their own life; so that they do behold themselves in the new humanity, and make all their assumptions and formations in the new humanity. 77. These new assumptions and formings are effected and wrought forth in the divine will, in resignation; and they are the heavenly images and formings, which are formed and shaped in the Holy Ghost to the honour of God. 78. For if the holy name of God be not in its power, in the forming of the words, viz. in the spirits of the letters, which are the formed word, and helps to form the word in the sensual tongue, then the false Antichrist speaks only from his own self-assumption of the literal form.
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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