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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1446 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 18 open the gate of the deep, and shineth [or appeareth] in the eternal light. 50. Now then as the Word of God is in the Father, and goeth forth out of the Father into the [pure] element, and that the same Word was given to man again in the fall (from out of the [holy] element, through the voice of the Father, with the promise of the Treader upon the Serpent) out of grace, in the centre of the light of life ; so the natural soul of Christ, with its first kindling in its centre of the light of life (where the Word, with the consent of the Virgin Mary, had set itself, by the Word in the Father of eternity) received the Principle of the Father in the light. Ma this man- 51. Thus Christ (l according to this form) was the natural eternal Son of God the Father; and the soul of Christ (in the Word) was a self-subsisting natural Person in the holy Trinity. 52. And there is in the depth of the Deity no such wonderful Person more, as this Christ is, which the Prophet Isaiah calleth (in the spirit highly known by him) Wonderful, Power [or Virtue, Champion, or] Saviour, Eternal Father, and Prince of Peace ; whose dominion is great, and upon his 2 over the shoulders ; 2 understand [upon] the creatures of the creatures of the inward element.

253. And the second birth of the soul of Christ stood in the natural propagation, like [the souls of] all men ; for he also as well [as other men] was in six months wholly figured [framed or formed], with Ch. 18] PROMISED SEED OF THE WOMAN 447 a natural body and soul, with all the gates of the mind and senses; the soul in the first Principle, and the body in the third Principle; and then Christ (the true breaker-through) continued standing in the second Principle, in the kingdom of God, and after nine months was born a man, out of the body [or womb] of the Virgin Mary, and we saw his glory as the glory of the only begotten Son of God the Father. 54. And here the light shone in the darkness of the natural outward body, as Saint John witnesseth ; he came into [or to] his own, and his own received him not, for they knew him not ; but those which received him, [to them] he gave the mitfht to be the children of God ; they were O *^ through him begotten to the kingdom of heaven. For his is the kingdom, the [power or] might, and glory in eternity. Amen. 55. Thus consider here, thou beloved mind, thou shalt here find the * root, whereb)^ men (before the i the foundav -, . , -, . . . r. tion ; hit the

32 birth of Christ) entered into salvation ; if you mark, or get understand this writing aright (as the same is known by the author in the grace of God) then you understand all whatsoever Moses and the Prophets have written ; as also all whatsoever the mouth of Christ hath taught and spoken ; thou hast no need of any 3mask or spectacles about it. That knowledge needeth not to be 4 confirmed by the antichristian throne [or stool], who saith, The divine ordinances must be established by 448 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 18 his see or throne, and whatsoever men must teach 1 that wl"ch and believe, fas if] l he could not err. we call I, or self, in our 56. The light of nature sheweth us now (in the reason. love of God) quite another throne, which God the Father with his Son Jesus Christ hath established ; 2 the throne the same is the eternal 2 throne in for of] grace, of resignation in the mercy where our soul may be new regenerated, and not of God. J , in the anticnristian throne ; that is nothing else but the throne of Babel the confusion, where he may continue to be the ape of Christ upon earth, 3 Or degree with his brave 3 hood ; where of late we saw a of Master, or Doctor. young lad [disciple, or scholar], who plucked the 4 his might, Pearl from his 4 hatband, and his hatband broke ; power, and authority. and then he became as another earthly man, and none saluted [reverenced or regarded] him.

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