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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162. Thus we find now that the three from eternity are an unbeginning and indissoluble band ; attracting, viz. * longing, willing, and desiring ; and the one always generateth the other, and if one were not, then the other also would not be, of which none know what it is ; for it is in itself nothing but a spirit, which is in itself in the darkness ; and yet there is no darkness, but a nothing, neither darkness nor light. Now then the * longing is an hunger [seeking], or an infecting of the desiring, and the will is a retention in the desiring ; and now if the [desiring] must retain the will, then it must be comprehensible, and there must not be one [only] thing alone in the will, but two ; now then seeing they are the two, therefore the attracting must be the third, which draweth that [which is] comprehensible into the will. Now this being thus from eternity, therefore it is found of itself, that from eternity there is a springing and moving ; for that [which is] comprehended must spring and be somewhat, that the will may comprehend somewhat; and seeing that it is somewhat, therefore it must be sour and attractive, that it [may] come to be somewhat. And then seeing it is sour and attractive, therefore the attracting maketh the comprehensibility, that so the will [may] have Cll. 14] BIRTH AND PROPAGATION OF MAN 287 somewhat to comprehend and to hold ; and then it being thus comprehensible, therefore it is thicker

2[grosser or darker] than the will, and it shadoweth the will, and covereth xthat [which is attracted] » which is and the will is in l that, and the longing maketh them both ; and seeing now that the will is in that [which is] comprehensible, therefore that [which is] comprehensible is the darkness of the will ; for it hath with its comprehensibility enclosed the will; now the will not being 2out of that 2 gotten out [which is] comprehensible, it longeth continually after the light, that it might be delivered from the darkness, which yet itself maketh with the longing and attracting. 63. From whence now cometh the anxiety, because the will is shut up in the darkness ; and the attracting of the will maketh the mobility; and that [which is] movable maketh the will's rising up out of the darkness. Now therefore the rising up is the first 3 essence ; for it generateth 3 itself in the attracting, and is itself the attracting. And yet now the will cannot endure the attracting either, for it maketh that dark with the attracted essence [being or substance], which the will comprehendeth, and resisteth it, and the resisting is the stirring, and the stirring maketh a parting or breaking in that [which is] attracted, for it severeth [it] ; and this also the sourness in the attracting cannot endure, and the anguish in the will is [thereby] the greater, and the attracting to hold 288 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 14

3the stirring [is] also the greater. So when the stirring is thus very hard knit together, and held by the sour attracting, then it eateth [gnaweth, presseth, or nippeth] itself, and becometh prickly, and stingeth in the sour anguish. And when the sourness attracteth the more vehemently [or strongly] to it, then the ppickle becometh so very great in anxiety, that the will springeth up horribly, and setteth its purpose to fly away out of the darkness. 64. And here the eternal mind hath its original, 1 property, or in that the will will [go] out of that l source, into 2 flowing or another 2 source of meekness, and from thence the working. eternal l source in the anguish hath also its original, and it is the eternal worm which generateth and eateth itself, and in its own fierceness in itself liveth in the darkness which itself maketh ; and there also the eternal infection [or mixture] hath its original, back from which there is no further to be searched into, for there is nothing 3 Than the deeper, or 3 sooner ; the same always maketh itself eternal pro- ., . 111 i perty of hell, from eternity, and hath no maker or creator. And 4 grim stem- it is not God, but God's original * fierceness [or ness. • , r \ • • i -i wrath], an anxiety, [or aching anguish], generating in itself, and gnawing [eating or devouring] in it, and yet consuming nothing, neither multiplying nor lessening.

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