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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1" Many will say, what were a God whose body, sub- " stance and virtue consisted of Fire, Air, Water and " Earth ? But see, thou unbelieving man, I will shew " thee the true essence of the Godhead. Inasmuch as " this whole substance is not God, thou art not God's " Image ; wheresoever there be a strange God, thou hast " no part in Him. For thou art created out of God, and " livest in Him, and He ever gives thee, out of Himself, " power, blessing, food and drink ; thy knowledge also is " all from Him, and, when thou diest, thou wilt be buried Hv THE THREE PRINCIPLES " in Him. . . . See ; that is the true and only God, out of " whom thou art created, and in whom thou livest. " When thou lookest upon the deep, and upon the stars, " and the earth, thou seest thy God, and in Him thou art " and livest, and this same God governs thee also, and " from the same God hast thou [received] thy senses, and " thou art a creature in Him and from Him ; otherwise " wert thou nothing. Now thou wilt say that what I " write is heathenish. But hear and see and mark the " difference, how it all is ; for what I write is not " heathenish, but philosophical. I am no heathen ; but " I have the deep and true knowledge of the one great " God who is the All " (pars. 3, 4, 9, 10).

2" Therefore we cannot say that God's being is some- " thing afar, that possesses or occupies any particular spot " or place ; for the Abyss of nature and creature is God " Himself " (Divine Contemplation, iii. 21). But, decidedly as Boehme declares himself in these words on the side of Pantheism, he is yet very far from accepting it as all-sufficient. "Since it is the truth, I " must affirm that God is all. But what shall I do with " such a statement ? for it is no religion. Such a " religion did the devil accept, and wanted to be manifest " in all things and mighty in all " (Apol. II, contra Tylcken, 140). By declaring Pantheism insufficient, and describing it as the devil's religion, our philosopher means doubtless that Pantheism must take account of all that is in the world, and look not only upon good, but also upon evil, as God's Self -manifestation ; and that therefore the pantheistic god is not only God, but, as first originator of evil, also the devil. While ordinary Pantheism makes light of the fact of evil, and explains it away as merely negative, as the unavoidable shadow to the light, and so on, Jacob Boehme, on the contrary, deeply filled with the consciousness of this same fact of evil, considers it in all its magnitude, and earnestly strives to find an answer to the question, Whencj^is evil ? A question over which all pantheistic and theistic INTRODUCTION

3theories alike come to grief. For Pantheism, considering the universe as God Himself, cannot admit evil as such; and Theism is unable adequately to explain it even by falling back upon the doctrine of free-will, since it allows that free-will is divinely created, and therefore ultimately, though indirectly, God must be regarded as the originator of evil. There is another solution of these difficulties ; but it lies very deep and becomes only possible by looking upon the human soul not — according to Pantheism — as a mode of the divine substance; nor, according to Theism, as the work of the Creator; but rather as absolutely self-existent. In other words, it is to be considered that good and evil, God and the devil, heaven and hell are opposed possibilities within the soul, in relation to which the soul possesses perfect liberty of choice, and full independence from any external influence and from any predetermined inherent condition; for even this is the deep meaning of the word free-will.

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