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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1^Or engrafted. l inoculated thy soul into my virtue [or power], that thy body might spring and grow again out of my body, out of the holy element before God ; and I have bound myself to thee by my spirit. Have I not made a covenant with thee, that thou shouldst be mine ? Have I not given thee my body for food, and my blood for drink ? Have I 2 Or leader, not given thee my spirit for a 2 conductor, and allotted thee my kingdom for thy own ? Wherefore dost thou despise me, and goest away from me ? Thou runnest after the wolves and the dogs, and howlest with them, and thou seekest only after anger, and how thou mayest bite [and Ch. 21] THE CAINISH AND ABELLISH KINGDOMS 585 devour] ; thou swallowest nothing but l fierceness l wrath, [into thee]. What shall I say ? I have in my sins and suffering and death (by my regeneration) generated W1 no such beast, and therefore I will not have it, except it be again born anew in me, to an angelical image, and then it shall be with me. 'B THE TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER Of the New Regeneration in Christ [from] out of the old Adamical Man. The Blossom of the Holy Bud. The noble Gate of the right [and] true Christianity. EGA USE we have written hitherto of the originality of the essence of all essences, how all [things] take beginning, and have shewn the eternal enduring [substance], and also the transitory ; therefore we will now shew further, 1 man. what is most profitable for J him to do, and to

2leave undone ; wherein we will shew what God by his eternal Word hath ever spoken (by his holy spirit) by Moses, and by the Prophets ; as also what the mouth of Christ and his Apostles have spoken, what God will have us men to do, and leave undone. 2. Seeing we poor Adamical men are, with our father Adam and mother Eve, gone forth out of the incorruptible and unchangeable inheritance, out from our true native country, into a strange inn, where we are not at home, but are merely guests, and where we must in so great misery continually 586 Ch. 22] THE NEW REGENERATION IN CHRIST 587 expect, when our strange host will thrust us out, and bereave us of all our ability, and take away from us all we have, so that we are truly swimming in a deep sea of misery, and swelter in a strange bath of thorns and thistles ; and we know for certain, and see it also daily before our eyes, that we are no other than pilgrims in this inn, which must continually expect when the breaker [or destroyer] will come, and take our heart, senses, and mind, also our flesh and blood, and goods ; therefore it is indeed most necessary for us, to learn to know and find the way to our true native country, that we may avoid the great misery and calamity, and enter into an eternal inn, which is our own, whence none may drive us out.

33. But because there are two of these inns, which are eternal without end and expulsion ; the one standing in eternal joy (in great brightness and perfection) in mere love and meekness ; but the other in great perplexity, anguish, misery, distress, hunger, and thirst, where never any refreshment from the love of God cometh ; therefore it is very necessary that we learn, with great earnestness, to know the true way of entrance into the eternal joy, that we may not with the devil's dogs howl eternally in the anguishing inn. 4. And now if we look round about us everywhere, upon heaven and earth, the stars and elements, yet we can see and know no way [or where we may go to our rest ; we see no 588 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 22 other than the way of the entrance in of our life, and then of the end of our life, where our body goeth into the earth, and all our labour (also our arts and glory) is inherited by another, who also vexeth himself therewith for a while, and then followeth after us ; and that continueth so from the beginning of the world to its end. 1 understand, 5. We can in our misery never l know where or compre- . . 1111 hend. our spirit doth abide when the body breaketn, and

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