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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1xl THE THREE PRINCIPLES overlook similar occurrences in the lives of St Paul, of Plotinus, and of many an Indian philosopher. The inward strife and yearning of soul that filled the years of his youth are well illustrated by a highly instructive part of his book Aurora, viz., Chapter 19, from which we will quote the following words: " When I plainly found out that good and evil are in all " things, as well in the elements as in creatures ; and " that in this world the God-fearing fare no better than " the Godless, I fell into depression and sadness, and not " even the Scriptures, which were well known to me, " could give me any comfort. The devil must surely " have rejoiced at this, and often impressed my mind " with heathenish thoughts, whereof I will make no " mention here." (Namely, the pantheistic thought that since the world is God's, all things therein must also be good.). ... " But as, in my awakened zeal and eager- " ness, I stormed violently against God and all the Gates " of Hell, .... my spirit at last broke through into the " innermost Birth of the Divinity and was caught up in " Love, as a Bridegroom embraces his dear Bride. The " triumph in my soul cannot be told or described ; I can " liken it only to the birth of life through death, and com- " pare it to a resurrection from the dead" [pars. 8-12].

2This " breaking through into the innermost birth of the Divinity " took place, according to another statement, twelve years before he began to write the Aurora (1600), and the same year it happened that, as his glance met the bright reflection of the sun's rays upon a pewter vessel, he suddenly was " . . . . introduced into the innermost essence or centre of occult nature." The sun — so he may have mused — is the only source of light here, and yet this light could not be manifest, were it not for the dark pewter which throws it back and makes it visible. Indeed in this one thought lies the very kernel of his whole later system, and in his 2nd Epistle [Ellistone, 1649] the philosopher himself sets forth the development of this idea. INTRODUCTION xli

3"In this my most earnest seeking and desire, . . . . <( a gate was opened unto me, so that in a quarter of an " hour, I saw and learnt more than if I had studied " many years in some university ; . . . . for I perceived " and recognized the Being of all beings, the Byss and " the Abyss ; also the birth of the Holy Trinity, the " descent and origin of this world and of all creatures, " through the Divine Wisdom. I discovered also within " myself the three worlds, namely : (1) the divine, " angelical or paradisical ; then (2) the dark world, as " the original of nature to the fire ; and of (3) this " external visible world, as a procreation or external " birth, or as a substance manifested forth out of both " inner and spiritual worlds. I saw and understood the " whole nature of good and of evil, their origin and " mutual relation, and what constitutes the womb of the " genetrix ; so that I not only wondered greatly, but " also rejoiced. " And it was powerfully borne upon my mind to write " down these things as a Memorial, however difficult they " might be of apprehension to my outer self, and of ex- " pression through my pen. I felt compelled to begin at " once like a child going to school, to work upon this very " great Mystery. Interiorly I saw it all well enough, as " in a great depth ; for I looked through as into a chaos " wherein all things lie [latent, undifferentiated] ; but " the unravelling thereof proved impossible.

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