The book opens by telling you how to read it, and by warning that reading it the ordinary way will fail: the seeker must not "read them outwardly only, with sharp speculation and meditation", or he "shall remain in the outward imaginary ground only, and obtain no more than a counterfeit color of them". A counterfeit colour — not an error, but a likeness with nothing behind it. Boehme is describing the failure mode of a reader who understands every sentence and has received nothing, and he places the warning before the glossary rather than after it.
Open to all
Jacob Boehme — the works in English, and one in Frencheditor’s preface to the volume
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.
page 1
[ Editorial matter of the 2009 electronic edition withheld. ]
1. It is written, The natural man [1] receives not the things of the spirit, nor the Mystery of the kingdom of God, they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them: therefore I admonish and exhort the Christian lover of Mysteries, if he will study these high writings, and read, search, and understand them, that he does not read them outwardly only, with sharp speculation and meditation; for in so doing, he shall remain in the outward imaginary ground only, and obtain no more than a [2] counterfeit color of them.
[1] understands or perceives not. [2] or feigned shadow of them.
2. For a man's own reason, without the light of them. God, cannot come into the ground [of them], it is impossible; let his wit be ever so high and subtle, it apprehends but as it were the shadow of it in a glass.
3. For Christ says, without me you can do nothing; and he is the Light of the World, and the Life of men.
4. Now if any one would search the divine ground, that is, the divine [1] revelation, he must first consider with himself for what end he desires to know such things; whether he desires to practice that which he might obtain, and bestow it to the glory of God and the welfare of his neighbor; and whether he desires to die to earthliness, and to his own will, and to live in that which he seeks and desires, and to be one spirit with it.
[1] or manifestation
5. If he have not a purpose, that if God should reveal himself and his Mysteries to him, he would be one spirit and have one will with him, and wholly resign and yield himself up to him, thatGod's spirit might do what he pleases with him and by him, and that God might be his knowledge, will, and [1] deed, he is not yet fit for such knowledge and understanding.
[1] or working
6. For there are many that seek Mysteries and hidden knowledge, merely that they might be respected and highly esteemed by the world, and for their own gain and profit; but they attain not this ground, where the spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God: as it is written.
7. It must be a totally resigned and yielded will, in which God himself searches and works, and which continually pierces into God, in yielding and resigned humility, seeking nothing but his eternal native country, and to do his neighbor service with it; and then it may be attained. And he must begin with effectual repentance and amendment, and with prayer, that his understanding might be opened from within; for then the inward will bring itself into the outward.
8. But when he reads such writings, and yet cannot understand them, he must not presently throw them away, and think it is impossible to understand them; no, but he must turn his mind to God, beseeching him for grace and understanding, and read again; and then he shall see more and more in them, till at length he be drawn by the power of God into the very depth itself, and so come into the supernatural and supersensual ground, viz. into the eternal unity of God; where he shall hear unspeakable but effectual words of God, which shall bring him back and outward again, by the divine effluence, to the very grossest and meanest matter of the earth, and then back and inwards to God again;then the spirit of God searches all things with him, and by him;and so he is rightly taught and driven by God).
page 1
[ Editorial matter of the 2009 electronic edition withheld. ]
1. It is written, The natural man [1] receives not the things of the spirit, nor the Mystery of the kingdom of God, they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them: therefore I admonish and exhort the Christian lover of Mysteries, if he will study these high writings, and read, search, and understand them, that he does not read them outwardly only, with sharp speculation and meditation; for in so doing, he shall remain in the outward imaginary ground only, and obtain no more than a [2] counterfeit color of them.
[1] understands or perceives not. [2] or feigned shadow of them.
2. For a man's own reason, without the light of them. God, cannot come into the ground [of them], it is impossible; let his wit be ever so high and subtle, it apprehends but as it were the shadow of it in a glass.
3. For Christ says, without me you can do nothing; and he is the Light of the World, and the Life of men.
4. Now if any one would search the divine ground, that is, the divine [1] revelation, he must first consider with himself for what end he desires to know such things; whether he desires to practice that which he might obtain, and bestow it to the glory of God and the welfare of his neighbor; and whether he desires to die to earthliness, and to his own will, and to live in that which he seeks and desires, and to be one spirit with it.
[1] or manifestation
5. If he have not a purpose, that if God should reveal himself and his Mysteries to him, he would be one spirit and have one will with him, and wholly resign and yield himself up to him, thatGod's spirit might do what he pleases with him and by him, and that God might be his knowledge, will, and [1] deed, he is not yet fit for such knowledge and understanding.
[1] or working
6. For there are many that seek Mysteries and hidden knowledge, merely that they might be respected and highly esteemed by the world, and for their own gain and profit; but they attain not this ground, where the spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God: as it is written.
7. It must be a totally resigned and yielded will, in which God himself searches and works, and which continually pierces into God, in yielding and resigned humility, seeking nothing but his eternal native country, and to do his neighbor service with it; and then it may be attained. And he must begin with effectual repentance and amendment, and with prayer, that his understanding might be opened from within; for then the inward will bring itself into the outward.
8. But when he reads such writings, and yet cannot understand them, he must not presently throw them away, and think it is impossible to understand them; no, but he must turn his mind to God, beseeching him for grace and understanding, and read again; and then he shall see more and more in them, till at length he be drawn by the power of God into the very depth itself, and so come into the supernatural and supersensual ground, viz. into the eternal unity of God; where he shall hear unspeakable but effectual words of God, which shall bring him back and outward again, by the divine effluence, to the very grossest and meanest matter of the earth, and then back and inwards to God again;then the spirit of God searches all things with him, and by him;and so he is rightly taught and driven by God).
Note the apparatus, because it is easy to misread. "The natural man [1] receives not" is followed, within the same segment, by "[1] understands or perceives not". Those bracketed numerals are the seventeenth-century English translator's MARGINAL glosses, flattened into the line by the capture; they are not footnote references, and there is no footnote apparatus for them to point at. The gloss always follows in the same block of text. Read them as the translator leaning in to say "what he means here is —".
This issue opens "[ Editorial matter of the 2009 electronic edition withheld. ]". That notice is the rights determination working in plain sight, and it is worth knowing what it covers: the modern editor's introduction and notes are in copyright and are not served; the 1647 English translation of Boehme beneath them is public domain and is served entire. Nothing of Boehme is missing from this issue. Where a work's text itself cannot be published, the reader is told so on the page rather than shown a gap.