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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.
140. A Christian is a new creature in the ground of his heart, his mind is bent only to well-doing: not to steal, else were Christ, [by consequence, accounted] a thief in man. Let but the mantle of Christ fall off and restore what you have stolen, and gained and extorted with unrighteousness and injury; and cast away the old quarrels, strivings and litigations 1 from your soul, and go naked and empty under the cross to which Christ hangs, and look upon his fresh bleeding wounds, and take his blood into your hungry soul; and then you will be healed, and redeemed and released from all want: else no comfort of satisfaction and merit will help you. All true comfort is but this, That a Christian comforts himself that he shall in this repentance in Christ Jesus obtain a gracious God: and that shall even be his comfort, that he may not despair. 1 Lawsuits. 41. The satisfaction wherewith the unrighteous comforts himself and says, My works avail nothing, Christ has done all, I can do nothing; and continues under such comfort in sins, that is the devil's fish hook, whereby he catches his fish with Christ's mantle.
242. Christ had his purple mantle on him when he was in his suffering; but when he hung on the cross he had it no more, much less in his resurrection: So also should a man take this mantle about him only when he goes into Christ's suffering and death in repentance. In repentance it is alone available, and no way else, that a soul should wrap itself up in it, when it is ashamed in its sins, before the face of God. 43. All that is taught and believed otherwise is deceit, a fable, and Babel. All teachers that teach otherwise are but servants and slaves of the belly, the devil's fishermen, and a deceit of the world: of these let men beware. For he that will be a teacher must also be a true Christian, that so he may also thus live in Christ: else he is a thief and a murderer, that climbs up some other way into the sheepfold (John X. I), of whom Christ speaks. 44. And Moses says further, Then they took their present, and the double money with them, and Benjamin; and arose and went into Egypt, and presented themselves before Joseph. And when Joseph saw them with Benjamin, he said to his steward, Bring these men to my house, and slay and make ready; for they shall eat with me at noon. And the man did as Joseph said unto him; and brought the men into Joseph's house (Gen. xliii. 15-17).
345. This now signifies thus: That he that hides himself under the mantle must come forth, and bring his unrighteous wrong gotten goods again, and come before the face of the heavenly Joseph, and come naked and empty of his I-hood or own ability, and bring the right Benjamin that is in him along with him. Then Joseph draws near him, and sees him, and commands his steward, viz. the spirit of power, to bring these men into his house, viz. into his humanity. And then the Lamb of God shall be made ready, and these men, or the life's essences of the right soul, shall eat at Joseph's table with him at noon (then it is noon when the high light of grace shines as at noon or midday in the soul); and here Joseph's brethren are reconciled, when they eat with Joseph, that is, with Christ, of his food. 46. This now is the supper (Apocalypse iii. 20). Here a man casts away the mantle, and becomes a brother of Joseph, and needs no more flattery or comforting of himself, but becomes a Christian in Christ, who is dead with Christ to his sins, and is become living in him, and is risen again in him, and lives with him, eats with him at his table, and is no more a servant of sin, who must fear again, but who is a son in the house to whom the inheritance he longs (Gal. iv. 7), according to the Scriptures.
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.
140. A Christian is a new creature in the ground of his heart, his mind is bent only to well-doing: not to steal, else were Christ, [by consequence, accounted] a thief in man. Let but the mantle of Christ fall off and restore what you have stolen, and gained and extorted with unrighteousness and injury; and cast away the old quarrels, strivings and litigations 1 from your soul, and go naked and empty under the cross to which Christ hangs, and look upon his fresh bleeding wounds, and take his blood into your hungry soul; and then you will be healed, and redeemed and released from all want: else no comfort of satisfaction and merit will help you. All true comfort is but this, That a Christian comforts himself that he shall in this repentance in Christ Jesus obtain a gracious God: and that shall even be his comfort, that he may not despair. 1 Lawsuits. 41. The satisfaction wherewith the unrighteous comforts himself and says, My works avail nothing, Christ has done all, I can do nothing; and continues under such comfort in sins, that is the devil's fish hook, whereby he catches his fish with Christ's mantle.
242. Christ had his purple mantle on him when he was in his suffering; but when he hung on the cross he had it no more, much less in his resurrection: So also should a man take this mantle about him only when he goes into Christ's suffering and death in repentance. In repentance it is alone available, and no way else, that a soul should wrap itself up in it, when it is ashamed in its sins, before the face of God. 43. All that is taught and believed otherwise is deceit, a fable, and Babel. All teachers that teach otherwise are but servants and slaves of the belly, the devil's fishermen, and a deceit of the world: of these let men beware. For he that will be a teacher must also be a true Christian, that so he may also thus live in Christ: else he is a thief and a murderer, that climbs up some other way into the sheepfold (John X. I), of whom Christ speaks. 44. And Moses says further, Then they took their present, and the double money with them, and Benjamin; and arose and went into Egypt, and presented themselves before Joseph. And when Joseph saw them with Benjamin, he said to his steward, Bring these men to my house, and slay and make ready; for they shall eat with me at noon. And the man did as Joseph said unto him; and brought the men into Joseph's house (Gen. xliii. 15-17).
345. This now signifies thus: That he that hides himself under the mantle must come forth, and bring his unrighteous wrong gotten goods again, and come before the face of the heavenly Joseph, and come naked and empty of his I-hood or own ability, and bring the right Benjamin that is in him along with him. Then Joseph draws near him, and sees him, and commands his steward, viz. the spirit of power, to bring these men into his house, viz. into his humanity. And then the Lamb of God shall be made ready, and these men, or the life's essences of the right soul, shall eat at Joseph's table with him at noon (then it is noon when the high light of grace shines as at noon or midday in the soul); and here Joseph's brethren are reconciled, when they eat with Joseph, that is, with Christ, of his food. 46. This now is the supper (Apocalypse iii. 20). Here a man casts away the mantle, and becomes a brother of Joseph, and needs no more flattery or comforting of himself, but becomes a Christian in Christ, who is dead with Christ to his sins, and is become living in him, and is risen again in him, and lives with him, eats with him at his table, and is no more a servant of sin, who must fear again, but who is a son in the house to whom the inheritance he longs (Gal. iv. 7), according to the Scriptures.
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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