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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.
12. Out of which blossom the holy image of God is again grown in flesh and blood, viz. in a holy body. We see its boughs and branches so fair and excellent, that the soul does most exceedingly rejoice [at this contemplation], and truly desires to bud and grow forth along with these boughs and branches, to the great praise of God in our angelical tree of the hierarchies of Christ, in 1 the holy Paradise. 3. God made a Covenant with Adam after his fall, when he died to the heavenly ens in him, that God would quicken him again, and regenerate him anew. And this Covenant was the root in the disappeared ens which grew in this line of Adam from Seth and his children and posterity, even unto Noah, in one stem of the tree; 2 and with Noah God renewed the Covenant. 1 Text, of. 2 In the stock or body of the tree. 4. For the undivided sensual tongue, wherein the spirits of the letters did rule in one harmony, continued until the flood, so that all men spoke in one tongue, in which tongue the divine spirit of the five vowels, viz. the divine understanding, moved. 5. But seeing they had introduced the image and beast of vanity into the sensual tongue, and fell wantonly in love with the Babylonical whore of selfhood, therefore God complained against them, that they would not suffer his spirit any more to rule them, and said, that it repented him that he had made man.
26. For as the sorrow to destruction did manifest and open itself even so also the sorrow of repentance to the new regeneration out of the Covenant. Thus the sorrow of the formed Word in the only sensual tongue destroyed every life and being which lived in the air, that is, in the manifested spirit of God, viz. in the third Principle; and the word of the sensual tongue did, after the flood, put itself forth in a compaction of the spirits of the letters. 7. For God said to Noah, the men are flesh, and moreover vain and wicked, even from their youth. Thus the holy Spirit would not any more manifest himself in the evil contrived sensual tongue, but left them to follow their own fancy; seeing they refused to follow him: he suffered the power and force of nature to manifest its wonders out of evil and good, viz. in images of the dark and outward world, where their images were trimmed up and set forth in the [glory and] light of the outward nature, wherein evil and good are mixed together, to the contemplation of the wonders of God, according to love and anger; from which ground the heathen's understanding, with their idols, did arise and spring forth.
38. For the understanding of the spirits of the letters did bring itself into the formings of many speeches, and in those formings of self the images were brought forth in the understanding, wherein the outward nature did behold itself; and also the devil did, from God's wrath, introduce his imagination and desire into men, thereby to lead them from the true understanding into images; so that they did not know the true God. 9. For all the oracles of the heathenish gods do take their original out of the outward and inward nature of the dark world, as a figure or understanding of the soul of the outward and inward dark world, like a peculiar selfly god, understand, a nature-god; for as the sensual tongue was become such a nature-god, and understanding, which did play the hypocrite with itself; and formed the images in itself; so God suffered it to be that nature did likewise represent itself to them as a god in the oracles, and spoke through the images. 10. For the heathen worshipped the stars and four elements; seeing they knew that the stars and four elements governed the outward life of all things. Their understanding of the compacted sensual tongue, viz. the comprehended word of the understanding, did also enter into the formed compacted and amassed word of nature in
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.
12. Out of which blossom the holy image of God is again grown in flesh and blood, viz. in a holy body. We see its boughs and branches so fair and excellent, that the soul does most exceedingly rejoice [at this contemplation], and truly desires to bud and grow forth along with these boughs and branches, to the great praise of God in our angelical tree of the hierarchies of Christ, in 1 the holy Paradise. 3. God made a Covenant with Adam after his fall, when he died to the heavenly ens in him, that God would quicken him again, and regenerate him anew. And this Covenant was the root in the disappeared ens which grew in this line of Adam from Seth and his children and posterity, even unto Noah, in one stem of the tree; 2 and with Noah God renewed the Covenant. 1 Text, of. 2 In the stock or body of the tree. 4. For the undivided sensual tongue, wherein the spirits of the letters did rule in one harmony, continued until the flood, so that all men spoke in one tongue, in which tongue the divine spirit of the five vowels, viz. the divine understanding, moved. 5. But seeing they had introduced the image and beast of vanity into the sensual tongue, and fell wantonly in love with the Babylonical whore of selfhood, therefore God complained against them, that they would not suffer his spirit any more to rule them, and said, that it repented him that he had made man.
26. For as the sorrow to destruction did manifest and open itself even so also the sorrow of repentance to the new regeneration out of the Covenant. Thus the sorrow of the formed Word in the only sensual tongue destroyed every life and being which lived in the air, that is, in the manifested spirit of God, viz. in the third Principle; and the word of the sensual tongue did, after the flood, put itself forth in a compaction of the spirits of the letters. 7. For God said to Noah, the men are flesh, and moreover vain and wicked, even from their youth. Thus the holy Spirit would not any more manifest himself in the evil contrived sensual tongue, but left them to follow their own fancy; seeing they refused to follow him: he suffered the power and force of nature to manifest its wonders out of evil and good, viz. in images of the dark and outward world, where their images were trimmed up and set forth in the [glory and] light of the outward nature, wherein evil and good are mixed together, to the contemplation of the wonders of God, according to love and anger; from which ground the heathen's understanding, with their idols, did arise and spring forth.
38. For the understanding of the spirits of the letters did bring itself into the formings of many speeches, and in those formings of self the images were brought forth in the understanding, wherein the outward nature did behold itself; and also the devil did, from God's wrath, introduce his imagination and desire into men, thereby to lead them from the true understanding into images; so that they did not know the true God. 9. For all the oracles of the heathenish gods do take their original out of the outward and inward nature of the dark world, as a figure or understanding of the soul of the outward and inward dark world, like a peculiar selfly god, understand, a nature-god; for as the sensual tongue was become such a nature-god, and understanding, which did play the hypocrite with itself; and formed the images in itself; so God suffered it to be that nature did likewise represent itself to them as a god in the oracles, and spoke through the images. 10. For the heathen worshipped the stars and four elements; seeing they knew that the stars and four elements governed the outward life of all things. Their understanding of the compacted sensual tongue, viz. the comprehended word of the understanding, did also enter into the formed compacted and amassed word of nature in
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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