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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1of another, to [increase] the love and delight. But they make not of Christ (their great Prince) a deaf hearer, as if he did neither hear, feel, nor see anything himself; who stretcheth out his arms, and himself without ceasing calleth with his holy spirit, and inviteth all the children of men to 486 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 19 the wedding ; he will readily accept all, if they would but come. 32. How then should a soul come before Christ, and pray for a living invocator, whereas Christ himself doth stand and invite men, and is himself the Atonement of the anger in the Father ? For the Father hath given men to the Son, as himself witnesseth : They were thine, and thou hast given them to me, and I will that they be with me, and see my glory which thou hast given me. 33. 0 thou confounded Babel, go out from Antichrist, and come (with a penitent heart and mind) before thy merciful brother, and Saviour of all men ; he will more readily hear thee, than thou come to him. Step only out of this wicked Babel into a new birth, and be not so much in love with the kingdom of this world; thou art but a mere guest and stranger in it. What availeth thee

21 Or corrupt- thy * transitory honour [from men], which scarce lasteth one moment ? Thou shalt indeed get much greater [surpassing] joy and honour in the new regeneration, where the holy souls in the heaven, and the angels, will rejoice with thee. Consider what joy and gladness thou wilt stir up thereby in the Heart of Jesus Christ, where then instantly the precious talent (the Holy Ghost) will be given thee, and thou wilt get the keys of the kingdom of heaven, that thou thyself mayest open it. Or dost thou think it is not true ? Do but seek and try with an earnest mind, and thou wilt find Cll. 19] ENTERING OF THE SOULS TO GOD 487 wonders indeed ; thou thyself shalt know [understand], and (without any doubt at all) assuredly see in thy mind, out of what school this is written. 34. Now the mind thinketh, that if all the works of a soul (which it wrought here) shall follow it in the figure, then how shall it be, if a soul here hath for a long time l committed great J Or wrought great crimes, abominations, then that they will be great shame sins, and • . /. blasphemies. to it, it they must stand in the figure before its eyes ? This is a great stumbling-block of the devil's, which plagueth the poor soul, and usually forceth it thereby into despair, so that itself continually presenteth its sins before it, and despaireth of the grace of God.

335. Now behold, thou beloved soul, who art dearly redeemed by thy Saviour Jesus Christ, (with his entrance into the humanity, and with his entrance in the abyss of hell), and plucked off from the kingdom of the devil, in the might of the Father, and sealed with his blood and death, and covered with his ensign of triumph, all thy works, [both] the evil and the good which thou hast done, follow thee in the shadow, but not in the substance, nor in the source, [or in the working property]. Yet they will not be any 2 prejudice 2 detraction, in the heaven to the holy souls, which have turned disgrace. into the regeneration in Christ, but they shall have their highest joy concerning them, in that they have stuck in such hard misery and sins, and have been plucked out of them by their Saviour Christ ; 488 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 19 and from thence will arise mere joy and rejoicing, 1 hunter, or that they are redeemed from the l driver of their the devil. . / . . sins, and from great misery, and that the driver is captivated, which tormented them day and night 28infulness. in such 2 sins.

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