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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1doctor, nor of any strange language about it, it standeth written in our body and soul ; and when we see it, it terrifieth us so much, that we tremble at it, as Eve and Adam did in their fall. 39. And if we do not come to know [or have a glimpse of] the Treader upon the Serpent in the mark of the partition [or limit of separation] in the gate of the deep, between the world and the kingdom of hell, then we see [indeed] nothing else 3 persuade us but mere misery and death, which might 3well to awake. , /» i awaken us from sleep. 40. Do but behold thyself, thou blind mind, and 4 Or image, consider thyself, where is thy angelical 4form in thee ? Why art thou so angry, stern [fierce, froward] Ch. 17] OF THE FALL OF ADAM AND EVE 385 and malicious ? Wherefore dost thou elevate thyself still in thy wickedness, in pride, in might [or authority] and pomp, and boastest thyself for a brave and potent beast ? What is it that thou dost ? Wherefore hast thou let the spirit of this world into thee, which seduceth thee (as it listeth) into high-mindedness, into [proud] stoutness, into 1 potency and pomp, into covetousness and lying, 1 authority, into falsehood and treachery, as also into sickness ness. and corruption [or frailty] ? 41. What is it now that thou 2hast after thy 2 keepest or i -, T n r* • -i takest with

2corrupting, when thou diest f Consider thyself, thee. what is it that thou art [then]? Thou art a spirit : But what kind of source [or property] is it that thou hast in thee ? [Surely thou hast in thee] anger, wickedness, pride, self-seeking, wilfulness, (in raising up thyself after temporal pleasure, but finding none) ; [thou hast] a false mind in the spirit, full of lies and deceit, and murderous, [arising in thee] out of the essences. As thou wast upon earth towards men, just so it is [then] with such a spirit as is gone forth from thee out of the corruptible body of the elements. And where shall that [then] remain when this world perisheth ? Dost thou suppose that it shall [then] be an angel? Hath it an angelical quality [source or property] ? Is its source [or quality] in love, humility, and meekness ? Is it in the divine obedience, in the light of joy 1 42. 0 thou blind mind, with thy might and 25 386 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 17 stateliness, full of wickedness and devilish fierce wrath, [wilt thou know where thou art after thy body perisheth] ? Thou art even with all the devils, in the abyss of hell, if thou dost not turn, and by earnest unfeigned sorrow and repentance for thy abominations, enter into the angelical footsteps, that the Saviour and Treader upon the Serpent of fierce wrath, wickedness, lying, and deceit, may meet thee, and embrace thee in his arms, and [that thou] mayest be new-born in him,

31 the wisdom and be yielded up into the bosom of the l chaste and'mercy of , 1 i 1,1 , • God. virgin, and become an angel ; or else thou art in the eternal death, in the eternal darkness, and canst not in all eternity reach the kingdom of God any more. 43. Or dost thou suppose, that I write of the 2 Or know- fall of man without 2 light and understanding? Or that I do not look and see into the Holy Scripture, what that saith of it, [when I say] that man before his fall was angelical in his mind and body ? Then hear and see what Christ saith 8 Matth. xxii. of it, 8 In the resurrection of the dead they will O A neither marry nor be given in marriage, but they are as the angels of God. And such an image God created in the beginning, [according] to his similitude. 44. For an angry, malicious, proud self-seeking for honour, and dignity, a mendacious [or lying], thieving, robbing, murderous, lascivious, lecherous mind, is not the similitude of God. But an Ch. 17] OF THE FALL OF ADAM AND EVE 387

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