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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161. I say, 7 this hath not been sought, but we7 high knowsought the Heart of God, that we might hide us 256 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 13 1 storm. therein from the l tempest of the devil. But when we came there, then the loving virgin out of paradise met us, and offered us her love, she would be kind [and friendly] to us, and be betrothed to us for a companion, and shew us the way to paradise, where we shall be safe from the stormy tempest, and she carried a branch in her hand, and said, We will plant this, and a lily shall grow, and I will come to thee again ; from whence we gat this longing to write of the amiable virgin, which did shew us the way into paradise, where we must go through the kingdom of this world, and also through the kingdom of hell, and no hurt done us ; and according to that [direction of her's] we write. THE FOURTEENTH CHAPTER Of the Birth and Propagation of Man. The very Secret Gate. 1. TF we consider now the springing up of the *•*- life, and in what place of the body it is where the life is generated, then we shall rightly find the whole ground of man, and there is nothing so secret in man l but that it may be found. For 1 ,,*.,, not be found. we must needs say, that the heart is the place wherein the noble life is generated, and the life again generateth the heart.

22. As it is mentioned above, so the life in the anguish, with the kindling of the light, taketh its beginning from the glance of the sunshine, from the spirit of the stars and elements in the great anguish, where death and life wrestle one with the other. For when man departed from paradise into another birth (viz. into the spirit of this world, into the quality of the sun, stars, and elements) then the paradisical [vision or] seeing ceased [or was extinguished], where man seeth from the divine virtue, without [need of] the sun and stars ; where 257 17 258 THE THREE PRINCIPLES Ch. 14 1 Or there the the l springing up of the life is in the Holy life in the r a & . Holy Ghost Ghost and the light of God is the glance of the buddeth forth . . . e in the place spirit, from whence he seeth ; which went out ; elements. for the spirit of the soul went into the Principle « man. of this world.

33. You must not so understand it, as if it were extinguished in itself : No ; but the soul of Adam went out from the Principle of God, into the Principle of this world ; and therein now the spirit of every soul is thus generated again by human propagation, as is mentioned before, and it cannot be otherwise. And therefore if we would be fit for the kingdom of heaven, we must be regenerated anew in the spirit of God, or else none can inherit the kingdom of God, as Christ taught us faithfully ; of which I will write hereafter, that it may be a fountain for the thirsty, and a light to the noble way, in the blossom of the lily. 4. And we must here know, that our life, which we get in our mother's body [or womb,] standeth merely and only in the power of the sun, stars, and elements ; so that they not only figure [or fashion] a child in the mother's body, and give it life, but also bring it into this world, and nourish it the whole time of its life, and bring it up, also cause fortune and misfortune to it, and, at last, death and corruption ; and if our essences (out of which our life is generated) were not higher, in their first degree out of Adam, [than the beasts], then we should be wholly like the beasts. Ch. 14] BIRTH AND PROPAGATION OP MAN 259 5. But our l essences are generated much higher l active, essen- ,,.. f i t-f • 7 i tial virtues,

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