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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1There was a time when the Mosaic law was the highest word of the day. Sacrifices were offered, and they were offered from the living impulse of the heart ; for, in the sacrifice, man offered himself and his own will to the Divine ; until later, in the custody of a priesthood that made out of sacrificial rites a lucrative business, the idea perished, and the dead form survived, against which the new and living arose in the preaching of the prophets : " I desired mercy and not sacrifice." But the word of the prophets also perished, and soon law and prophets were but a dead letter. Then came among the dead a mighty living One, the same who commanded the would-be disciple to follow and let the dead bury their dead; the same who, when asked what punishment should be meted unto the adulterous woman, stooped down and wrote on the ground — wrote nothing else, we believe, but the word of the law which condemned the woman to die. There it stood, the holy word of the law, written in the dust, a dead letter ! But He had come to bring new life unto men ; He hung upon the Cross for it; yet the mustard-seed of His teaching, full of lifepower, grew into a tree, in the shade of which the nations were to dwell. Not with fire and sword, but with the sap of its inner life, Christianity conquered the world. And then, scarce had its victory been won, when again life gave way to death. The living word of Jesus hardened into fixed and authoritative dogma. Even as Jesus had deplored the fact that " the Scribes and the

2INTRODUCTION XXXV11 Pharisees sit in Moses' seat," so also history repeated itself under another form, and in the seat of Jesus sat the Popes of the Middle Ages. Neoplatonism and mediaeval Mysticism vainly sought with a fresh impetus to break through the crust of orthodoxy; but the storm of the Reformation burst at last, swept away the crystallized traditions and breathed a new life into moribund Christianity. But a short time later, this also fell under the common law of all religious development. The reformers had gone back to the Bible as the source of mediaeval traditions ; the way was clear before them ; the indications pointed to a further going back, without halt or hesitation, beyond and behind the letter of the Bible, right into the very fountain-head whence all revelations, including the Bible, have ever flowed forth, right into the divine powers that slumber in the abysmal depths of every human mind. These living powers were, as before in Jesus and in Paul, awake in Luther, and had given him inspiration : but the well he had begun to sink was soon choked through endless religious strife ; and a hundred years after Luther, there arose, almost as domineering and intolerant as Popery itself, the letter-bound Lutheran orthodoxy.

3In such times lived Jacob Boehme, who, as a religious and philosophical genius, has not often had his equal in the world's history, and might have been the very man fitted to finish Luther's half-done work of Churchreformation, and bring about a reconciliation between sciejjce^n^Lfaith, such as we are still lacking in our days. But unfavourable circumstances hindered his endeavours, both outwardly and inwardly; and while his life was consumed in a continual struggle with the fanatical, letter-ridden orthodoxy, he succeeded but imperfectly, limited as he was by the literal sense of the Bible, in bringing into expression the truly free and truly devout spirit that inwardly animated him. Both the life and the teaching of the man are well worthy of deep consideration ; and both offer over again XXXvhi THE THREE PRINCIPLES the same peculiar drama of life wrestling with death, yet unable to overcome altogether.

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