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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11 Or bringeth secrecies, and the body is that which l generate th, that which • i / • - is hidden to so also here ; the wisdom (or the eternal virgin) of essence. _. .. , ., _ -i • i i i God openeth all the great wonders in the holy element, for there are the essences, wherein the buds [or fruits] of paradise spring up ; and if we take the eternal band (and that together) wherein the Deity generateth from eternity, then it is called the eternal limbus of God, wherein consisteth the essence of all essences. 22. For in the root of the limbus in the dark anxiety is the anger and the darkness, and the first cause of the essences ; but because we have before handled it at large, therefore here we leave it thus, for we should not be well understood [in brief] ; and so we will reach after our Immanuel. 23. Thus know (my beloved Reader) that our father Adam is gone out of this glory into the out-birth of the substance of this world ; and now if he is to be helped, then the Barmhertzigkeit, or 2 mercifulness of God (as above mentioned) must new regenerate him ; and in this 2 mercifulness of God man was 3 foreseen (before the foundation of the world was laid) to live eternally therein, for (as to his soul) he is out of the eternal will of God the Father, out of which this mercifulness is generated. The Gate of Immanuel.

224. Therefore know (beloved Christian mind) how thou art helped, and consider this gate diligently, it is an earnest one ; for Moses and all the Prophets Or mercy. 3 Or predestinated. Ch. 22] THE NEW REGENERATION IN CHRIST 597 witness concerning these things, viz. concerning our salvation in restoring [us] ; be not drowsy here, it is the fairest • gate of this book ; the more thou readest it, the more thou wilt be in love with it. 25. Seeing now we know, that we lost our heavenly man in our first fall, so also we know that a new l one is generated to us in the merciful- l heavenly ness of God, into which we should and must enter, if we will be the children of God ; and without 1 this we are the children of the anger of God. 26. And as the Prophets have written of it, so the new man (which is born 2to us of God) is the2 Or in. Son of the virgin, not of earthly flesh and blood, also not of the seed of man, but conceived by the Holy Ghost, and born of a pure divine chaste virgin, and (in this world) revealed [or manifested] in our flesh and blood, and is entered with his holy body into death, and hath separated the earthly [body], together with the might of the anger, from the holy element, and hath 3 restored the soul 3 brought it again, and hath opened the gate to the light of again. God again, so that the averted soul can (with the essences of the Father in the holy will) reach the light of God again.

327. Therefore now we know, that we were not created to generate f* that which is] earthly, but 4 Or in an earthly, but heavenly, out of the body of the pure element, heavenly which [body] Adam had before his sleep, and [before] his Eve [was], when he was neither man nor woman [male nor female], but one only image 598 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 22 of God, full of chastity, out of the pure element. He should have generated an image again like himself; but because he went into the spirit of this world, therefore his body became earthly, and so the heavenly birth was gone, and God must make the woman out of him, as is before mentioned. Now if we, the children of Eve, are to be helped, then there must come a new virgin, and bear us a Son, who should be God with us, and in us.

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