John Sparrow

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John Sparrow (12 May 1615 – December 1670) was an English gentleman of the Inner Temple who became the principal translator of Jacob Boehme into English — the first hand to carry the whole body of the Görlitz shoemaker’s writings into any modern European vernacular complete. He came of an Essex family, was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1633, called in due course to the Bar. The lawyer’s training shows in the work that made his name: a patient, exacting, word-by-word fidelity carried over from the construing of statutes to the construing of a visionary’s private German. For the better part of his life almost nothing else about him is fixed. He is known through the books that bear his rendering.

Engraved portrait of John Sparrow by David Loggan, 1659, beneath it the “Wonder-Eye of Eternity” from Boehme’s Forty Questions that Sparrow had translated — Rijksmuseum, via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

The dating crux

The base record of Sparrow’s life has long been unstable at both ends. The older Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) gave his death as “1665?”, a conjecture that propagated through legacy bibliographies and is still met in catalog notices. The current Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), in Ariel Hessayon’s article, fixes the dates precisely — born 12 May 1615, died in December 1670 — the death established from the diary extracts of the antiquary William Holman. The 1670 date is now the scholarly consensus and the working figure; the “1665?” of the Victorian dictionary is superseded, though it survives in older citations. The earlier notices also tended to confuse the translator with his father and namesake; the modern account, while thin on his inner life, at least disentangles the two men.

The translating campaign

The house in Görlitz associated with Jacob Boehme, the shoemaker whose corpus Sparrow carried into English — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA).

Boehme had printed only a single book in his own lifetime — Der Weg zu Christo, issued at Görlitz on New Year’s Day 1624, months before he died. Everything else he wrote between 1612 and 1624 circulated first as scribal manuscript through the Silesian pietist underground and then, after 1631, through the Amsterdam network of the Dutch merchant Abraham van Beyerland, who financed the first German printings. It was from this Amsterdam channel — Beyerland’s manuscripts and printings sent across the sea — that the English campaign drew its texts.

Working between roughly 1645 and 1662, Sparrow rendered the bulk of the corpus, in concert with his “dear kinsman” and collaborator John Ellistone (d. 22 August 1652, at Gestingthorpe in Essex — a date Sparrow himself records in a preface). Ellistone’s death left Sparrow to carry the work nearly alone through the second half of the campaign; where Ellistone had begun a translation and not finished it, Sparrow completed it. The printing was paid for and seen through the press chiefly by the bookseller Humphrey Blunden, at the Castle in Cornhill, and later by Giles Calvert at the west end of St Paul’s Churchyard — both of them publishers of the heterodox and the radical-spiritual in Interregnum London — with the work of the press largely done by the printer Matthew Simmons. The antiquary Durand Hotham, an early English reader and biographer of Boehme, stands at the edge of the same circle.

The landmark volumes set the pattern of the whole. XL Questions concerning the Soule, together with The Clavis — Boehme’s own short lexicon of his coined terms — appeared in 1647; the Clavis in particular mattered, for it gave the English reader the author’s own glossary to a vocabulary no dictionary could supply. The Second Booke: Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence followed in 1648, the Threefold Life of Man in 1650, and at last the great unfinished first work, the Aurora, in 1656, under the title Sparrow gave it: The Day-Spring. The series ran on through Several Treatises (1661) and The Remainder of Books Written by Jacob Behme (1662); a revised Forty Questions of the Soul was reissued in 1665. Many of the standard English titles by which Boehme’s treatises are still known descend directly from the choices made in these volumes — The Day-Spring for the Aurora the most evocative among them.

The “Philosophic Globe” or Wonder-Eye of Eternity, the one diagram tied to Boehme’s Forty Questions of the Soul — the work Sparrow issued in English as the XL Questions concerning the Soule (1647) — via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

Carrying the idiom across intact

The labor was unusual in scale and in method alike. Boehme wrote in a strained, self-coined German, a tongue stretched and torqued to hold what plain language would not — the inner life of God before the world, the birth of the cosmos out of an ungrounded ground, the war of light and darkness within the divine nature itself. He minted compounds, bent ordinary words to technical senses, pressed alchemical and astrological terms into theology. A translator faced a standing choice: smooth the strangeness into readable English and lose the thing that made it Boehme, or carry the coined idiom across intact and let the English strain as the German strained. Sparrow chose the second. He preserved the neologism, kept the compound, declined to paraphrase the difficulty away — and the result is an English that can be as forbidding as its original, but that holds the doctrine where a smoother version would have leaked it. The Clavis he set beside the text precisely because the reader would need the author’s own key to a language built for one mind’s vision. (The substance of that vision — the Ungrund, the seven source-spirits, the figure of Sophia — belongs to Boehme’s own account and to the Boehmean theosophical lineage; Sparrow’s contribution is the English vessel it travels in.)

The soil: censorship-loosened England

The translations arrived at an exact moment. The abolition of the Court of Star Chamber by the Long Parliament in July 1641 dissolved the prerogative machinery that had policed the English press, and the licensing regime collapsed in practice; the Stationers’ monopoly broke, and the output of printed titles multiplied several-fold within two years. Parliament’s own Licensing Order of June 1643 tried to rebuild control — it was against that order that Milton wrote Areopagitica the next year — but it never held the field as the older system had. Into that opening poured astrological, prophetic, sectarian, and mystical literature of every stripe; the years of the Civil War and the Interregnum (1649–1660) were the most fertile English ground heterodox spiritual writing would find for a century. Boehme in Sparrow’s English met a ready and a hungry readership, and helped form the loose current of English followers afterward called Behmenists. Some early gatherings of them shaded, in the next decades, toward the Quaker movement and toward other currents of the inner light; the Cambridge Platonist Henry More thought the German sufficiently dangerous to write a formal censure of him, the Philosophiae Teutonicae Censura, in 1670 — a measure of how far the translated Boehme had traveled into English minds.

The reception: a long descent

Through Sparrow’s channel Boehme reached a line of readers that ran on for two centuries. The first inheritors were the visionaries of the Philadelphian Society — John Pordage, the ejected Berkshire rector who gathered the earliest English Behmenist circle, and after him Jane Lead, whose own visionary writing took its frame and much of its vocabulary from the English Boehme that Sparrow had made. The Sophia-thread, the doctrine of divine Wisdom drawn from Boehme’s later treatises, passes visibly from the translated text into Lead’s A Fountain of Gardens. A generation on, the line reached its most powerful English reader: the divine William Law, who came to Boehme in the 1730s through the German collected edition and devoted the last phase of his life to the theosophy.

The four-volume Works of Jacob Behmen of 1764–1781, long called the “Law edition,” was assembled from Law’s papers after his death and carries his name on its title pages and Dionysius Andreas Freher’s diagrams in its plates — but its English text is not a new translation. It is, in the main, Sparrow and Ellistone’s, lightly modernized in phrasing. The same underlying English was edited once more, with emendations, for the John M. Watkins reprints early in the twentieth century. Across nearly three hundred years, the English-speaking world read its Boehme, with few exceptions, in the words a Caroline lawyer chose in the 1640s and 1650s.

One of Dionysius Andreas Freher’s emblematic diagrams from the Works of Jacob Behmen (the “Law edition,” 1764–1781), whose English text remained Sparrow and Ellistone’s — via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

Comparatively little of Sparrow’s own belief survives to set beside the work — no treatise of his own, no record of a circle he led, scarcely a personal document beyond the prefaces to the volumes themselves. He is among the company of transmitters whose name is fixed to another’s words: like the London printer Henry Pepwell, whose single 1521 quarto became, in retrospect, the thread by which certain English mystical texts survived, Sparrow is remembered for what he carried rather than for what he said. The distinction is that what Pepwell preserved was already English; what Sparrow did was make Boehme English in the first place, and keep him difficult while doing it. The English Boehme — the Boehme who shaped Protestant theosophy in the English tongue, who reached Law and the Philadelphians and, through them, the Romantic and esoteric currents that drew on him after — is in large measure Sparrow’s Boehme, the work of a translator who set himself to keep a hard vision legible without making it easy.

→ Related: Lutheran Paracelsian Reform · Jacob Boehme · Christian Theosophy Boehmean · Jane Lead · Philadelphian Society · Henry Pepwell · Mysticism · Christian Mysticism · Esotericism · Paracelsianism