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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135. Hearken, thou antichristian scorner ; it is not enough for thee to stand and say, I have the true ground of the knowledge [that leadeth] to the kingdom of heaven, I have found the true religion. And doth condemn every one that hath not thy knowledge, or doth not consent to thy opinion ; thou sayest, Such a one is a heretic, and of the devil. And thou art a wolf, and dost nothing else but confound the sheep with thy fierceness, and causest them to offend, and to calumniate those whom neither thou nor they know, as the Ephesians did by Paul. Dost thou suppose that thou hast hunted away the wolf by this means ? Or hast thou not rather generated a heap of young scornful wolves, which howl and yell, and every one would devour, and yet know not where the evil beast is, nor especially that most evil beast of all, which generated them ? 0 blind Babel, the kingdom of Christ doth not consist herein, but the abominable Antichrist of confusion in Babel. 36. But what can be said? The devil will 572 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 21

2have it no otherwise. When his kingdom beginneth to be stormed [battered and assaulted] at one place, then he bloweth up the storm all over [as well in one as in another], in the children of God ; the spirit of punishment [vengeance or reproof] is stirred up ; and in the worldly bestial man, the devil bloweth up mere scorning and disgracing mockers ; for they have the kingdom of Christ in the history, and the devil's kingdom in themselves, as their own possession. 37. What doth thy knowledge avail thee, thou opposer of Christ, that thou knowest how to speak of the kingdom of heaven, of the suffering and death of Christ, and of the new-birth in Christ, when thou art without it, sticking merely in the history ? Shall not thy knowledge be a witness against thee, which shall judge thee ? Or wilt thou say thou art not the Antichrist of Babel ? Surely thou art the hypocrite, and thou fattenest thy evil beast yet more and more, and thou art the devourer in the Revelation of John. Thou dwellest not only at Rome, but thou hast possessed the breadth of the earth. I have seen thee in the spirit, and therefore it is that I write of thee, thou wonder of the world, of heaven, and of hell. 38. Thus this kingdom took beginning with Cain, and it hath its ground from the devil, who is a mocker of God ; for the devil desireth nothing else but strong and mighty exalting in his own Ch. 21] THE CAINISH AND ABELLISH KINGDOMS 573

3power above the thrones of heaven ; but he cannot get in, and therefore he is so maliciously enraged, and his source for quality] standeth in the anguish, not towards the birth, but towards the l source J Or torment of fire. Of the Kingdom of Christ in this World. 39. Seeing now man is entered into the spirit of this world, and hath all gates in [him], viz. the kingdom of heaven, and the kingdom of hell, and also the kingdom of this world, and must thus live in the press [or narrow chink], between heaven and this world, where the devil stirreth up one mocker after another, (who are brought up by the kingdom of fierceness), and continually stirreth them up against the children of God, so that the world is full of tyrants, and bestial, bloody, incestuous persons, also murderers and thieves, and because covetousness grew up, therefore the office of ruling was most profitable, that the wicked 2 driver might be stopped by power [and authority]. » 40. And so it is seen, how the providence of God is come to the help of the kingdom of this world, and hath by the spirit of this world stirred up rulers, who have inflicted punishment ; yet the spirit of God complaineth of them, that they are turned tyrants, who suppress all with their power ; and the Abellish Church in love consisteth not therein, but the strong might of God, for the suppressing of evil-doers. 574 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 21

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