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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1Concerning the examination that took place before the assembled clergy, 30th July 1613, as mentioned in Scultetus's diary, Boehme himself states the following, in a document of the 3rd April 1624, written as an answer to the Council : — " When I appeared before him " [Gregorius Richter] to defend myself and indicate my " stand-point, the Rev. Primarius exacted from me a " promise to give up writing, and to this I assented, " since I did not yet see clearly the divine way, nor did " I understand what God would later do with me. On " the other hand, the Rev. Primarius, together with the " other preachers, agreed to say nothing more about the " matter from the pulpit. He, however, did not keep his " word, but, on the contrary, never ceased slandering me " and spreading shameful accusations against me, mis- " leading the whole town thereby, and disgracing me in " the eyes of all ; so that I, with my wife and children, " was made a spectacle, and must have been as a clown " and a fool among them. Moreover, by his order, I " gave up for many years (1613-1618) all writing or " speaking about my knowledge of Divine things, hoping " vainly that the evil reports would at last come to an " end, instead of which they only grew worse and more " malignant." As a natural result of these prolonged persecutions, INTRODUCTION xlvii

2the attention of a large number of learned men was drawn to the workman-philosopher. Many who were, like Schwenkfeld and Weigel, highly dissatisfied with the current orthodoxy and inclined to secede, naturalists and physicians, customs officials and noblemen, both in Gorlitz and in the neighbouring towns, became his friends and patrons, and represented to him that he should not bury the talent he had received; that he ought to obey God rather than men, and so on. At the same time, the increasing pressure of his own interior impulse compelled him to give a form at last to that which was fermenting within him ; and, after a silence of five years, he again took up his pen, and during the next six years of his life wrote a number of his more considerable works : The Three Principles, The Threefold Life of Man, the Signatura Rerum, the Mysterium Magnum, and many others. As long as only MS. copies of his books were circulated among his friends, objectors heard little of them, and no opposition was raised. But towards the end of the year 1623, three little devotional works, Of True Repentance, Of True Resignation, and Of the Supersensual Life, were printed together under the title Way to Christ and published by Sigismund von Schweinitz; and then the storm broke afresh. To the slanders he uttered from the pulpit, the Primarius now added poetical effusions in the shape of Latin verses of an abusive character, some of which (7th, 26th and 27th March 1624) were later printed and circulated. The beginning of one of these productions runs thus : —

3" Quot continentur linear, blasphemies Tot continentur in libro sutorio, Qui nil nisi picem redolet sutoriam, Atrum et colorem, quern vocant sutorium, Pfuy ! Pfuy ! teter sit foetor a nobis procul ! " (The shoemaker's book contains as many blasphemies as lines. They have a dreadful odour of shoemakers' pitch and blacking, etc.) The clergy of Liegnitz, spurred into opposition by xlviii THE THREE PRINCIPLES Richter, also lodged a complaint about the heretic before the Town Council of Gorlitz, and on the 26th of March 1624 Boehme was summoned again to the town-hall. The memorable record of this sitting is still preserved ; it runs as follows : — " Jacob Boehme, the shoemaker and rabid enthusiast, • " declares that he has written his book To Eternal Life, " but did not cause the same to be printed. A nobleman, " Sigismund von Schweinitz, did that. The Council gave " him warning to leave the town ; otherwise the Prince " Elector would be apprised of the facts. He thereupon " promised that he would shortly take himself off." The chief pastor's triumph was now complete, as is shewn in his verses of the 27th March : — " Gorlicium tandem te sutor pellit ab urbe, Et jubet ire illuc, quo tua scripta valent." (At last, 0 shoemaker, the town of Gorlitz drives thee forth ; get thee now where they will know thy worth, etc.)

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