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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1Ch. 21] THE CAINISH AND ABELLISH KINGDOMS 569 him in righteousness, and in the fear of God ; him, the Treader upon the Serpent taketh into his arms, and maketh him an heavenly image ; such a one is a child of heaven, and not thy l fox. 1 Or thy xr -LIT TTTi r i subtle, cun29. JNow it may be asked, Wherefore art thou nmg seeming called the Antichrist ? Hearken, thou art 2 the 2 Or agaiDSt opposer of Christ, and thou hast built thyself achrist seeming [holy] hypocritical kingdom, with a great show ; therein thou exercisest thy hypocrisy, thou earnest the law of God upon thy lips, and thou teachest it, but with thy deeds thou deniest the power thereof, thy heart is only bent upon the spirit of this world, the kingdom of thy hypocrisy tends only to thy own honour [and repute] under a pretended holiness ; all knees must bend before thee, as if thou wast Christ, and thou hast the heart of a greedy wolf. 30. Thou boastest that thou hast the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and yet thyself art in the abyss ; thy heart hangeth on thy keys, and not on the heart of God, thou hast the keys of the chest of gold, and not of the breaking through, by confidence in God ; thou makest many 3 laws, and 3 canons, yet thyself keepest none, and thy 3 law is to as and orders! much purpose as the tower of Babel [was], which should have reached to heaven, and thy 3laws reach to heaven as much as that did.

231. Thou prayest before God, but in thy wolfish beast ; the spirit of this world (and not God) receiveth thy prayers ; for thy heart is a devourer, 570 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 21 and entereth into the devourer ; thou desirest not earnestly to enter into God, but merely with thy historical hypocritical mouth, and thy heart presseth earnestly into the spirit of this world ; thou desirest only much temporal goods, honour, power, and authority in this world, and so thereby 1 Or kingdom, thou drawest the l region of this world to thee. 32. Thou suppressest the miserable and needy under thy feet, and thou constrainest him with necessity, and makest him vain [or carelessly wicked], so that he runneth after thy beast, and gazeth upon thee, and also becometh a servant of the opposer of Christ ; thy beast whereon thou ridest is thy strength and power, which thou usurpest to thyself, thou fattenest thy beast with the fatness of the earth, and thou crammest it with the sweat of the needy ; it is filled up with the tears of the miserable, whose sighs and groans press in through the gate of the deep to God, and 2 Or stir up. (with their pressing in) they 2 awaken the anger of God in thy beast ; as the blood of Abel did the anger in Cain.

333. Thus thou comest galloping with thy prancing horse, and thou ridest before the gate of heaven, and desirest 3 abstinence, and in thy shape thou art a wolf. What shall St Peter say to it ? Dost thou suppose that he will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven ? 0 no ! he hath none for wolves ; he hath but one for himself, he had never any to spare for others. 3 rest, forgiveness, or comfort. Ch. 21] THE CAINISH AND ABELLISH KINGDOMS 571 34. Wouldst thou get into heaven ? Then thou must put off thy wolf, and get into a lamb's skin ; not with hypocrisy, in a corner f1 chamber], cloister, 1 closet, ceil, or wilderness [and hermitage], but with earnestness in the new birth ; and thy light must shine forth in righteousness and mercifulness, to the overthrow of the kingdom of the devil, and it must destroy his nest, with kind well-doing to the needy.

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