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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1And therefore also our re-birth and salvation through the Christ within us are but a return to our own primordial divine being. Boehme writes : " Nothing can " rest in itself ; it must return to that whence it came. " The mind has turned away from unity in a desire for " perception [experience], to try the qualities in separa- " tion [as apart from one another], and therefore the " separation [division, contrary will, evil] arose in it, " which now governs the mind. Neither can it be set " free, until it forsakes itself in the desire for the " qualities, and lifts itself again into perfect stillness, " silencing its own will, so that the will may penetrate " [merge again] beyond all sense and form, into the " eternal will of the Abyss whence it originated ; willing " nothing of itself, but only what God wills through it " (Mysterium Magnum, Abstract 7). j

2We have tried in the above to extract from Boehme's teaching that kernel which lies embedded therein, of first principles and essential truths drawn from nature, and therefore irrefutable. We will now briefly consider the shell of myth and symbolism which encloses the same. / Boehme himself is well aware of the inadequacy of his exposition, inasmuch as he unceasingly impresses upon his readers that, on account of human weakness, he describes as a time-process that which is eternal, and sets side by side things which are inter-dependent and joined with one another in a perfect unity. Having pointed this out, he describes how originally God only is the Abyss out of which all " Byss " issues ; the primordial condition of all being, and therefore Himself Iviii THE THREE PRINCIPLES

3without substance, nature or qualities ; the eternal silence, the All and the No-thing ; neither darkness nor light ; manifest to none, not even to Himself. In the portraying of this eternal One, Boehme links the Christian tradition of the Trinity with the Neoplatonic division of the One in subject and object, by placing Son and Spirit between the Father (subject) and the "wisdom" wherein He mirrors His being (world of ideas). " The first only will, without a beginning, begets " in itself a comprehensible will which is Son to the " Abyssal Will, when the Nothing makes itself within " itself into a Something .... wherein the Abyss " conceives [forms] itself into a Byss, and the issue of " the Abyssal Will through the conceived Son is called " Spirit ; and that which is issued is the delight wherein " the Father ever finds and beholds Son and Spirit ; and " it is called God's Wisdom, or Contemplation " (Election, i. 10-17). " Therein lie all things as a divine Imagina- " tion, wherein all ideas of angels and souls are seen " eternally in divine likeness, not as creatures, but as a " reflection ; as when a man beholds himself in a mirror " (Clavis, par. 43). This constructive blending of Christian and Neoplatonic traditions, on account of which Boehme was reproached with teaching a " Quaternary " ( ' quartitatem ' instead of ' quantitatem ' is anyhow used in Richter's abusive verses), is entirely in contradiction to his fundamental idea, because it assumes opposites to be already in God; while the very lack of contraries and the necessity for the same is made the motive for further developments, as the following shews : —

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