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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1therein, in the centre of the deep, is the reconceived will to the light ; and the will is the desiring, and the desiring attracteth to it, and that which is attracted maketh the darkness in the will, so that in the first will, the second will generateth itself again, that it might fly out of the darkness ; and the second will is the mind, which discovereth itself in the darkness, and the [discovery or] glance breaketh [or dispelleth] the darkness, so that it standeth in the sound and in the crack ; where then the flash sharpeneth itself, and so standeth eternally in the broken darkness, so that the darkness thus standeth in the sound of the stars. And in the breaking of the darkness, the re-conceived will is free, and dwelleth without the darkness, in itself; and the flash which there is the separation and the sharpness, and the noise [or sound] is the dwelling of the will, or of the continually conceived mind ; and the noise and the sharpness of the flash are in the dwelling of the will free from the darkness. And the flash Ch. 16] THREEFOLD SPIRIT AND WILL 343 elevateth the will, and the will triurnpheth in the sharpness of the flash, and the will discovereth itself in the sharpness of the sound in the flash of the light, l without the darkness in the breaking, in the 1 extra. infiniteness. And in that infiniteness of the flash, there is in every discovery of the whole 2in the20rintoa * /. . particular.

2particular (in every reflection) again a centre of such a birth as is in the whole. And those particulars are the senses, and the whole is the mind out of which the senses proceed ; and therefore the senses are mutable [or transitory], and not in the 3 substance; but the mind is whole, and in3 whole or the substance. 6. My beloved Reader, just thus is our mind also. It is the indissoluble band, which God by the Fiat in the moving spirit breathed into Adam out of the eternal mind, [from whence] the essences are a particular, or a sparkle out of the eternal mind, which hath the centre of the breaking, and in the breaking hath the sharpness in itself; and that will driveth [forth] the flash [or glimpse] in the breaking, and the sharpness of the consuming of the darkness is in the glimpse [or flash] of the willing, and the will is our mind. The glimpse is the eyes in the fire-flash, which discovereth itself in our essences Mn us, and without us, for it is4 The glance free, and hath both the gates open, that [gate] in can look upon the darkness, and that gate in the light. For good^oth" although it continueth in the darkness, yet it without* us. breaketh the darkness, and maketh all light in 344 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 16 itself; and where it is, there it seeth. As our 1 Or see into, thoughts, they can 1 speculate a thing that is many

3miles off, when the body is far from thence, and it may be never was in that place ; the discovery or glimpse [or piercing sight of the eye of the mind] goeth through wood and stone, through bones and 2 obstruct or marrow, and there is nothing that can 2 withhold it, hinder it. for it pierceth and breaketh the darkness every where without rending the body of any thing, and the will is its horse whereon it rideth. Here many things must be concealed, because of the devilish enchantment, (or else we would reveal much more here), for the nigromanticus [necromancer] is generated here. 7. But now the first will in the mind is out of the sour anxiety, and its glimpse [or discovery] in the original, is the bitter, strong [or sour] fireflash in the sharpness, which maketh the stirring and noise, and also the seeing in the glance of the sharpness of the fire-flash, that so the re-conceived glimpses [disco verings or glances] in the thoughts have a light in them from whence they see, when they run [along] like a flash. 8. Yet this 3 first will in the mind ought not to stay behind in the abyss of the sour fierceness, (in which the fierce malice is), but ought to go forward in the centre of the breaking forth out of the darkness into the light, for in the light there is mere meekness, lowliness, humility, goodwill, and friendly desires, that it might with its 3 Or earnest will. Ch. 1G] THREEFOLD SPIRIT AND WILL 345

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