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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159. And further, we must look, where then the own will sticketh, [whereby] man can in [his] own power yield up himself how he will, [either] to the kingdom of heaven, or to the kingdom of hell. To this looking-glass we will invite them that hunger and thirst after the noble knowledge, and shew them the ground, whereby they may in their minds be freed from the errors and contentious controversies in the antichristian kingdom. Whosoever now shall rightly apprehend this gate, 1 being of ail he shall understand the 1 essence of all essences; substance of and if he rightly consider it, [he shall so] learn all substances. n , _. i « .i_ -i> i to understand what Moses, and all the rropnets, and also what the holy Apostles have written, and in [or from] what kind of spirit every one hath spoken ; also what hath ever been, and what shall or can be afterwards. The most precious Gate in the Root of the Lily. 60. Now if we consider the three Principles, and how they are in their original, and how they generate themselves thus, then we [shall] find the essence of Ch. 14] BIRTH AND PROPAGATION OF MAN 285

2all essences, how the one goeth out of the other thus, and how the one is higher graduated than the other, how the one is eternal, and the other corruptible, and how the one is fairer and better than the other : Also thus we [shall] find wherefore the one willeth [to go] * forward, and the other 2 backward : 1 in Also, [thus we shall] find the love and desire, and2in'self the hate [and enmity] of every thing.

361. But' now we cannot say of the originalness of the essence of all essences otherwise, than that in the original there is but one only essence, out of which now goeth forth the essence of all essences ; and that one essence is the eternal mind of God, that standeth [hidden] in the darkness, and that same essence hath longed from eternity, and had it in the will to generate the light : And that longing is the source [or eternal working property], and that will is the springing up. Now the springing up maketh the stirring and the mobility, and the mobility maketh the attracting in the will, and the will maketh again the longingness, so that the will always longeth after light : And this is an eternal band, that is without beginning and without end ; for where there is a willing, there is also desiring, and where there is a desiring, there is also, in the will's desiring, an attracting of that which the will desireth. Now the desiring is sour, hard, and cold, for it draweth to it, and holdeth it ; for where there is nothing, there the desiring can hold nothing ; and therefore if the will desireth to 286 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 14 hold anything, the desiring must be hard, that the will may comprehend it ; and being there was nothing from eternity, therefore the will also could comprehend and hold nothing.

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