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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1it standeth behind the veil [of Moses], and asketh continually, Where is the place ?), therefore we will set it down for the sake of the lily-rose, where then the Holy Ghost will open many doors in the 2 to be opened, wonders, which men now hold for 2 impossible; 8 Or at home, and in the world none is 3 therein, but they are 4 Or at Babel. 4 in Babel. 62. Therefore now if we will speak of our native country, out of which we are wandered with Adam ; and will tell of the resting-place of the 6 Or to think souls ; we need not to 6 cast our minds afar off ; for distant place, far off and near is all one and the same thing with Ch. 19] ENTERING OF THE SOULS TO GOD 499 God ; the place of the holy Trinity is l all over. 1 Or everyHeaven and hell are [everywhere] all over in this world, and the man (Christ) dwelleth all over, for he hath laid off the corruptibility, and hath swallowed up death, as also that which is [fragile or] temporal, and he liveth in God ; his body is the substance of the element, which out of the Word of the mercifulness, is from eternity generated out of the gates of the deep ; it is the 2 habitation, where 2 Or refreshment. the sharpness of God breaketh open the darkness, where the eternal virtue [or power] appeareth in wonders ; and it is the tincture of the Deity, which is before God, out of which the heavenly virtues are generated ; its name is Wonderful ; the earthly tongue cannot express it.

263. And Adams body was also created out of it ; and the whole world was made through the element out of its issuing forth. Now therefore this gate is [everywhere] all over ; that which is most inward is also the most outward, but the middlemost is the kingdom of God ; the outward world hangeth to the outermost, and yet is not the outermost ; but the ground of hell is the outermost ; and none of them all comprehendeth the other, and yet they are in one another, and the one is not seen in the other, but the 8 source which * Or property is broken forth. 64. We find indeed the virtue of the kingdom of heaven in all things ; and also we find the virtue [or effect] of the kingdom of hell in all things ; and 500 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 19 yet the thing is not hurt [or disturbed] by either 1 Or the one of them, but what is not generated out l of one [of eternal. them alone J. 65. The soul of man is generated out of the gates of the breaking-through out of the outward into the inward, and is gone forth out of the 2 the spirit inward (in 2the out-birth of the inward) into the of this world. , , , r , -, . outward ; and that [SOU1J must enter again into the inward ; if it remain in the outward, it is in hell, in the deep great wideness [vacuum or space], without end, where the source [or the rising tormenting quality] generateth itself according to the inward, and in itself goeth forth into the outward.

366. The source in the breaking-forth out of the outward into the inward, is the sharpness and the almightiuess of the kingdom of the heavens over the outward ; the outward is the eternal band, and the inward is the eternal virtue and light, and cannot perish. And thus God is all in all, and yet there is nothing that comprehendeth or detaineth him, and he is included in nothing. 67. Therefore the soul (when it departeth from the body) needeth not to go far ; for at that place where the body dieth, there is heaven and hell ; and the man Christ dwelleth everywhere. God and the devil are there, yet each of them in his own kingdom. The paradise is also there; and the soul needeth only to enter through the deep door in the centre. Is the soul holy ? Then it standeth Ch. 19] ENTERING OF THE SOULS TO GOD 501 in the gate of heaven, and the earthly body hath but kept it out of heaven ; and now when the body corneth to be broken, then the soul is already in the heaven ; it needeth no going out or in, Christ hath it in his arms, for where the four elements break, there the root of them remaineth, which is the holy element, and therein the body of Christ standetb, and also the paradise, which standeth in the springing source of joy ; and that element is the soft still habitation.

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