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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1God made thee a degree higher ? Art them not a child of Eve ? Prithee tell me the truth, Art thou not the Antichrist, which under a cloak [of being counted the minister and servant of God] ridest upon the devil's horse ? Methinks I see thee. Hearken ! When thou wentest out of paradise into this world, wherefore didst thou not continue in one [only] love? Wherefore didst thou not rejoice in thy neighbour ? Wherefore didst thou not love the members of thy body ? Why dost thou not adorn thy brother with thy ornament? Didst thou not see him plainly ? Was not the earth thy own ? Thou mightest have made what thou wouldst of it. Who did hinder thee in it? Why didst thou not eat with thy brother ? Thou mightest have had fully enough ; there would never have been any want. If thy humility towards thy brother had continued, then his also had continued towards thee. And then what a fine habitation and dwelling had there been upon earth. What need had there been for thee to have coined silver and gold, if unity had continued? Thou mightest have made thy ornaments of it well enough ; if thou hadst adorned thy brother and sister, then they would have adorned thee again with their ready serviceable love. Dost thou think it had been a sin, if thou hadst gone in pure silk and gold, for the benefit of thy brother, and to the honour of the great God ? 18. 0 thou blind Babel \ I must tell thee, how 510 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 20

2thou becamest thus mad ; thou hast suffered thyself to be possessed by the region of the stars, and to be led by the abominable devil, and art become a perjured [or forsworn] whore to God, and nevertheless, thou hast built thyself a kingdom upon earth ; 1 the stars as l they lead their region, thou leadest thine ; as they order their . government generate by the elements, and consume it again, so dost thou with thy children also ; thou generatest them and killest them again ; thou makest war, and art a murderer for thy pride and covetousness sake, so that thou hast no room at all upon the earth. 19. Dost thou suppose that God taketh pleasure in it ? Yes, the spirit of the great world is pleased with it ; and through that spirit the fierce anger of God [is also pleased], because they qualify [or mingle] one with another, and out of one and the same root. 20. Dost thou suppose that all the Prophets have spoken from the pleasant kind love of God, from the Heart of God, when they said to the kings of Israel, Enter into battle, thou shalt overcome, God shall give you victory ? Indeed they spake from God, but from his fierce wrath against sins, through the spirit of the great world, which would devour again what it hath made, because the love was extinguished. 21. Or dost thou suppose that God sent Moses to slay the kings of the heathen in the Promised Land, and that he is so well pleased with murderCh. 20] ADAM AND EVE'S GOING OUT OF PARADISE 511

3ings ? No, friend, look under the veil of Moses, and thou shall find it quite otherwise. 22. Why did God keep Israel forty years in the wilderness, and fed them with * heavenly bread ? J manna. That they should be a people full of love, such as love one another, and should depend on God in one love ; and therefore he gave their laws brightness [or clarity], to see if they could live in the love of the Father, and then he would have sent them among the heathen, to turn them with their wonders ; as was done at the time of the Apostles. And in that he fed them from the ^heaven, and that none of them (which gathered much or little) had any want; thereby they ought to have known, that the kingdom [the power and all] is God's, and that they were in him ; they ought to have left their covetousness, and to converse among one another with brotherly love, none ought to look after covetousness, because he horribly punished 2it. > covetous23. Also when the heathen should hear, that nes8' God would send this people, which he had brought out of Egypt with great wonders [or miracles], among them to destroy them, that they should turn to God, and depart from covetousness, and enter into brotherly love, therefore he gave 3 them 3 the heathen. a long time of respite ; as also to Israel (whom he fed from heaven) for an example, that one people should be an example to the other, that there is a God that is almighty. But they being earthly,

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