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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1We shall now endeavour to present and bring out distinctly, and into clear light, the eternal truths that THE THREE PRINCIPLES are to be found in his system, quite apart from the quaint and variegated forms of half -understood or misunderstood traditions wherewith he clothed his thoughts. The fundamental conception of Jacob Boehme's philosophy might be characterized as Pantheo-dualistic ; that is to say, he attempts to harmonize the undeniable claim of Pantheism that God is not to be known out of and apart from Nature, but in it and through it ; with the equally undeniable fact of dualism, i.e. the evident opposition in this divine world of good and evil. Let us try to elucidate these ideas.

2Pantheism is — here the very word points out the explanation— the counterpart of Theism, and, as can readily be shewn, the unavoidable result of the same. By the term Theism we understand the belief — well known to us from our youth — in a personal anthropomorphic God, who, at a definite period of time, has created the world out of nothing, by a special act of His will. Such a conception was possible and bearable in the dark Middle Ages, which followed after scholastic subtleties, but were blind to the facts of nature. Here below, so they reasoned, is the earth upon which man has his being, and up above in the blue heavens, behind the clouds, lives the Good Lord. Then came Copernicus, who proved that what we call heaven is nothing else but the infinite space which surrounds us on every side, wherein nothing is to be found beyond fixed stars like our sun, and planets like our earth, with all that they contain. In doing away with the old idea of Heaven, Copernicus had, without knowing or wishing it, taken away God. In the new astronomical system, there was no room left for Him. In the same way, a creation of the world out of nothing was no longer admissible after natural research had begun, and when it became more and more clearly recognized that, since matter does not vanish into nothingness, neither can it originate from nothingness, but must have been from all eternity. If, in such circumstances, the idea of God was to be INTRODUCTION liii

3held fast, there was nothing to do but shift from the Theistic theory to the Pantheistic ; remove God into nature itself, since there was no room for Him without, and consider the universe as His Self-manifestation. Following up the various stages of development of the new philosophy, we observe how, in the conceptions of thinkers, God melts away more and more into the universe; how the Theism of Descartes is gradually modified by Geuliner and Malebranche, until, in the completely Pantheistic system of Spinoza, it reaches its last unavoidable consequence. This identification of nature and God, or God and nature (which comes to the very same thing), is expressed in the well known words of Goethe : — " Was waV ein Gott, der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse ! Ihm ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Natur in Sich, Sich in Natur zu hegen, So dass, was in Ihm lebt und vebt und ist, Nie Seine Kraft, nie Seinen Geist vermisst" What were a God, who did, but from without, Upon its course, the Universe impel ! Him it behoves within His world to move, Nature in Him, He in Nature to dwell : So that in Him, what lives and moves and is, May never miss His Spirit nor His Power. Our Jacob Boehme was filled with this great knowledge of Pantheism long before Goethe, indeed long before Descartes and Spinoza. In Aurora, ch. xxiii., he writes: —

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