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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1outwardly any more; but the mind (in the centre of the breaking-through of the life into the element, into the presence of the chaste and modest virgin, the wisdom of God) that understood it well : For * he lodged a precious and worthy guest ; for i man. the Word (which God the Father spake concerning the Treader upon the Serpent) went out of the Heart, and out of the mouth of God, and that was the spark of love [proceeding] out of the Heart of God, which was from eternity in the Heart of God, wherein God the Father had known and elected mankind (before the foundations of the world were laid) that they should live therein ; and that the same [spark or promise] should stand in the rising-up of the life ; and Adam also in his creation stood therein. 103. And this is that which Saint Paul said, That man is elected in Christ, before the foundation of the world ; and not those dregs of despair that are now taught about the Election of Grace ; they are not the right understanding. I will shew thee Paul's [meaning about] his Election of Grace in its due place, when I shall write of the 2 bestial, 2 This the wolfish, and doggish minds of men, that will not eth of in his 8 give way that the Treader upon the Serpent may J enter into them, so that the heavenly Father (in his Son Jesus Christ, through his incarnation, .

2sufferings and death) might draw them to him ; 3 Or desire, they will not endure that drawing, for they have the essences of the serpent which draw into hell : 416 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 17 But this is not from God, as if he did willingly leave them ; no, but from the doggish nature, engrafted from the stars and from the devil ; which God knoweth well, and will not cast the Pearl before swine. Whereas [nevertheless] it were possible, if they did but turn, and did step into the new birth, they would obtain the jewel, though indeed it seldom happeneth, therefore God knoweth [who are] his. 104. As is mentioned above, so hath that same Word out of the Heart of God (which God spake to Adam and Eve) imaged [or formed] itself in Adam and Eve, in the light of the life in its own centre, and espoused itself with the dear and worthy 1 the wisdom J virgin of the chastity, to continue eternally with Adam and Eve, and to defend them from the fiery essences and darts of the devil ; as also, if they would incline to that same Word, that then they should thereby receive the rays of the holy Trinity, and also the wisdom of the virgin. 105. And this Word should enlighten the soul, and at the departure of the body be the light of the soul, and bring the soul through the gate of the darkness into paradise, (before the bright countenance of God), into the second Principle, into the element, where there is no pain.

3106. For [there] the Word clothed the soul, and shut up the kingdom of hell, and there it shall wait till the day of the restitution, and then it shall get a body again out of the element, out of Ch. 17] OF THE FALL OF ADAM AND EVE 417 the body that was here [in this life], when the 1 fierceness shall be washed and melted away in > wrath, corruption, sin, the fire at the last day ; and not a strange body, dross, or the r -i -i grimness. but the same it did bear, m the [one] element hidden in the four elements, that same shall go forth and flourish as Adam [had done] in [his] creation. The Gate of the Redemption. 107. And the same Word is propagated by the two first 2 persons [or people], from one to another, 2 Mensctum. [and that] in the birth of the life, and [in the] kindling of the soul, yet, in the centre ; and the kingdom of heaven is near in every one's mind, and they can attain it, if they will themselves; for God hath bestowed it to every one, out of grace. 108. Yet thou .must know that the Word sticketh not in thy [mortal] flesh and blood; as thy flesh cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven, so therefore it cannot stick in the flesh ; but [it sticketh] in the Principle, in the centre of the soul, and it is the bridegroom of the soul. If the soul be 3 faithful, then he resteth in its bosom ; 8 Or conf i r tinue in true but if it turn unfaithful, then it [the soul lorsaketn resignation. or] goeth away out of the Word.

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