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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1part unregenerated, whom the 2 driver holdeth 2 hunter, or captive ; thou must not hide nor bury thy Pearl, per8ecutor' 582 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 21 but shew the same to them, that they also may come into my arms ; thy mouth must not be 1 Or tell the shut, thou shalt walk in my law and J declare truth. the truth. 62. And although the driver compasseth thee about, and will fetch thee away, yet there is a limit set for thy beast, how far it shall go, the hunter cannot break [or destroy] it sooner than the limited time ; and then if he do break it, it is done only for [the manifesting of] God's deeds of wonder, and for thy best good ; all thy stripes in the thorny bath shall stand in my kingdom for a fair ensign of thy victory ; and moreover, thou shalt have great joy in it, before the angels of God, in that thou hast despised the hunter, and art gone out of a wild birth into an angelical one. 0 how thou wilt rejoice, when thou shalt think upon thy 2 vexed and wild beast, which 2 plagued thee day and night, in that thou art 3 loosed from it.

263. Then thou hast great honour for thy great shame. And therefore why art thou so sad ? Lift up thyself out of thy wild beast, as a fair flower springeth out of the earth. Or dost thou suppose, thou wild beast, that my spirit is mad, that it so little esteemeth thee ? Thou sayest I am indeed thy beast, yet thou art born out of me ; if I had not grown forth, thou hadst not been either. Hearken thou my beast, I am greater than thou ; when thou wast to be, there I was thy master-framer ; my essences are out of the root of 8 Or released. Ch. 21] THE CA1NISH AND ABELLISH KINGDOMS 583 the eternity, but thou art from this world, and thou breakest [or corruptest], but I live in my source [or quality] eternally ; therefore am I much nobler than thou ; thou livest in the tierce [wrathful] source, but I will put my strong fierce property into the light, into the eternal joy ; my works stand in power, and thine remain in the figure ; when I shall once be released from thee, then I shall take thee no more to be my beast again, but [I will take] my new body which I brought forth in thee, in thy deepest root of the holy element. I will no more have thy rough issues of the four elements, death swalloweth thee up. But I spring and grow out of thee, with my new body, as a flower out of its root ; I will 1 forget thee. For the glory of God (which 2 cursed ftc thee together with the earth) hath grafted my 2 Or fled from

3root again in his Son, and my body groweth in11"** the holy element before God. Therefore thou art but my wild beast, which dost plague me, and make me sick here, upon which the devil rideth, as upon his accursed horse ; and although the world scorn thee, I regard not that, it doth that for my sake ; and yet it cannot see me, neither can it know me. And wherefore then is it so mad? It cannot murder me, for I am not in it. 64. But thou, mad world, what shall the spirit say [of thee]? Art thou not my brother? The essences of my spirit stir thee ; go forth out of thy 584 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 21 beast, and then I go with my companions into the garden of roses, into the lily of God. Why keepest thou back, and sufferest thyself to be held by the devil ? Is he not thy enemy ? He doth but hunt after thy Pearl ; and if he getteth it, then thy spirit becometh a worm and beast in its figure. Why sufferest thou thy angelical image to be taken away, for temporal pleasure sake ? Thy pleasure is only in the corruptible beast. But what doth that avail the soul ? If thou dost not go out from it, thou wilt get eternal woe and sorrow by it. 65. Or what shall thy noble warrior Christ say to it ? Have not I [saith Christ] broken thy wild beast ? Am not I entered into death ? I have cut off from thy soul the four elements, and the wickedness [or malice] of the devil, and have

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