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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1This solution of endless difficulties was, it is true, not perceived quite fully or clearly by Jacob Boehme ; but, in his best moments, he comes nearer to it than any other philosopher before him, and expresses it occasionally as distinctly as was possible to him under the influence of Biblical theistic tradition. Let us compare such quotations as the following : " For each man is free, " and as a god to himself ; he may transform himself in " this life, in the wrath or in the light " (Aurora, xviii. 43). "Since man has free-will, God is not Almighty " over him, to do with him what He wills. The free- " will has neither beginning nor cause; it is neither " limited, nor formed by anything. It is its own Self's " origin, out of the Word's divine virtue, out of God's " love and anger. It forms for itself in its own will a " centre to its own seat ; it begets itself in the first " Principle to the fire and to the light. Its true origin " is from the no-thing, when the no-thing .... intro- " duces itself into a liking for contemplation [perception, 'Ivf THE THREE PRINCIPLES

2" vision], and the liking introduces itself into a will, and " the will into a desire, and the desire into a substance " (Mysterium Magnum, xxvi. 53). " So he lives in two " Principles, both of which draw him and desire to have " him, (1) in the source of the fierceness, whose origin is " the darlcness of the abyss, and (2) in the divine virtue, " whose source is the light and the divine joy in the " broken [burst] gates of heaven. . . . Thus is man " attracted to both and held by both ; but in him stands " the centre, which holds the balance between the two " wills " (Three Principles, xxi. 19, 20). " Thus we " should take heed and beget that which is good out of " ourselves. If we make an angel of ourselves, we are " that ; if we make a devil of ourselves, we are that "also" (Incarnation, II., ix. 12-14). "Therefore let " each (one) heed what he does. Each man is his own " God and also his own devil ; as he inclines to, or gives " himself unto, either of these Principles, the same impels " and leads him, and becomes his master " (Incarnation, I., v. 133).

3Summing up these thoughts, and freeing them as much as possible from all obscurity, we obtain as the fundamental essence of Boehme's philosophy the following propositions :-f-The Principle of all things, the Godhead, must be regarded as a Being in whom the contraries good and evil are already contained, yet not as good or evil; but as an equilibrium of mutually opposed, yet complementary and harmoniously working, forces. They are already good and evil, but only in possibility, not in reality ;( not yet " kindled " as Boehme has it; not made actual, as we should express it. This possible good and evil which is latent in God becomes actual only when the soul in its own primordial freedom chooses the one or the other. The soul is not a being different from God, but, on the contrary, is fundamentally the divine substance itself, inasmuch as it brings into a reality the possible opposition between good and evil. In Boehme's own words : " The inner essence of the soul INTRODUCTION Ivii " is the divine nature .... and is neither evil nor good, " but .... in the kindled life of the soul the same will " divides itself ; .... it is itself its own cause to good " and evil ; for it is the centre of God, where God's love " and anger are latent and undeveloped in one essence " (Election, viii. 275-278). " Therefore the soul is God's own substance " (Three Principles, iv. 20).

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