Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence

Gate passedSeeker and aboveModern transcription — not a facsimileJacob Boehme (1575–1624)PUBLIC DOMAIN as published. Boehme d. 1624; the Sparrow translation is 1656. Per-part determination MADE 2026-08-29: the eight front-matter segments carrying the 2009 electronic edition own introductory apparatus were withheld (three excised in full, five redacted in part where a public-domain title block or Boehme text shared the page). The remaining 5,022 segments are public domain and are open at seeker tier.905 of 1000 segments carry a modern register · 343 pp

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.

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1God his Father 679 c XXXIV THE THREE PRINCIPLES OHAP. PAOK 26. Of the Feast of Pentecost. Of the sending of the Holy Ghost to his Apostles, and the believers . 727 27. Of the Last Judgment. Of the resurrection of the dead, and of the eternal life .... 745 An Appendix, or fundamental and true description of the threefold life of man . . . . . .761 An Alphabetical Table of the principal contents . . 773 INTRODUCTION1 " My knowledge is not, as yours, the outcome of fancy or opinion ; but I have living knowledge through vision and experience. " — JACOB BOEHME (contra Tylcken, ii. 53).

2IT has been affirmed by Goethe, in a well-known passage of his writings, that the main theme of the world's and of mankind's history is the struggle between faith and infidelity. But what is faith, and what is infidelity ? Has not the infidelity of one age, after meeting with revilings and provoking persecutions, yet often become later the faith of another age ? Therefore, we would reinterpret or rectify Goethe's statement by suggesting that the main and essential theme of history consists in the struggle of the living with the dead. Again and again we observe the same world's drama unfolding itself. When a great truth arises that opposes time-consecrated traditions, how few, beside the very noblest minds of the day, are able to seize upon it, and to become its martyrs, until it wins at last, after long strife, and becomes the common possession of mankind ! Then again we see how, in the grasp of the multitude, that which was living becomes dead; how that which was deeply thought and felt, turns into empty forms and meaningless words; how that which was originally treasured for its own sake is degraded

31 Jacob Boehme: Hit Life and Fhilotophy. An Address delivered at Kiel, 8th May 1897, by Dr Paul Deussen, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Kiel. Enlarged and published in aid of a fund for the raising of a Memorial-monument to Jacob Boehme. Kiel, 1897. Translated by Mrs D. 8. Hehner, and here printed by the author's special permission. [The references are to the English editions of J. B.'s works.] XXXvi THE THREE PRINCIPLES into a mere tool for personal purposes; thus the once persecuted becomes persecutor; the old and moribund opposes the new and living, until, defeated and ousted, it lingers behind as a powerless shadow and survives but as a ghost in the world's history. Numerous are the illustrations that might be given in support of these facts ; and the same observations apply also, if, taking our standpoint in the Indian mind-world, we confine our outlook and considerations to Western development.

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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Commentary

whole issue ·

Cross-estate[P-V]translated_asboehme:2:1:003

This English 'Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence' and boehme:11 are the same work in two languages — and the French is not just any translation. It is Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin's own: 'Des trois principes de l'essence divine', issued by the Périsse brothers of the rue Mercière. Saint-Martin learned German in his fifties expressly to read Boehme, and spent his last years translating him. The estate therefore holds, side by side, the text that formed the Unknown Philosopher and the form in which he gave it to France — the single most direct documentary link between the two founders of this corpus.

→ boehme:11