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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138. You are to know, that as Mary did bear the heavenly image, viz. a new man born out of the mercy of God in the old earthly [man], viz. in the kingdom of this world, which kingdom she had in her as her own, which yet did not comprehend the new man ; so also the Word of God entered into the body of the virgin Mary, intothe heavenly matrix, into the eternal virgin of God, and that [Word] in that [eternal virgin of God] became a heavenly man, out of the paradisical holy pure element, in the person of the new regenerated man of the Virgin Mary, and (with his eternal Deity) was together generated in the beginning own soul of Mary, and with his entrance of his Deity hath brought the soul of Mary again into the holy Father; so that the souls of men (which were gone out from the Deity) were newborn again in the soul of Christ, and begotten to the Heart of God. 39. For Christ brought no strange soul out of heaven with him, into the highly blessed heavenly pure virgin ; but as all souls are generated, so Christ also received his soul in his body, though 604 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 22 in his undefiled body of holiness, which was become Marys own. For we must say, that the \ Barmhertz- pure element in the l mercy of God, became fulness. Marys own, wherein her new body (2in her ^Or belonging origjnal g()ulj consisteth. The most precious Gate. 8 new or 40. For no 8 other soul is generated in any man, strange. .. 11-1 i • -i * • -\ i

2t Or by but a new body, but the soul is renewed * with the pure Deity ; and Christ with his entrance into death (where he severed .his holy man from the 6 the soul. kingdom of this world) severed 6 it also from the 6 Or working fierceness of the eternal anger, and from the 6 source property. . . ot the originality. 41. And as the pure element (which is in the presence of God, and wherein God dwelleth) is truly everywhere in the whole space of this world, and hath attracted to it the kingdom of this world, 7 the pure viz. 7 its own out-birth, as a body, and yet this very one element's own oat- body doth not comprehend the element, no more than the body [comprehendeth] the soul ; so Christ also hath truly, in the body of the Virgin Mary, attracted to him [or put on] our human essences, and is become our brother; yet these human essences cannot comprehend his eternal Deity, only the new man, born in God, comprehendeth the Deity, after the same manner as the body doth the soul, and no otherwise. 42. Therefore the body of Christ is inferior to the Deity ; and in these our human essences he Ch. 22] THE NEW REGENERATION IN CHRIST 605

3suffered death, and his Deity of the holy man in the pure element entered together also into death, and bereaved jieath of its power, and did separate the natural soul (which Christ commended to his Father, when he died on the Cross) from the kingdom of this world, also from death, from the devil, and from hell, in the strong divine might [or power], and opened a gate for us all, who come to him, and incline ourselves (with mind and thoughts) to him ; then the Father draweth our soul (which is in him) into the pure love of Christ ; where then it putteth its imagination again through Christ l forward into the Holy Trinity, and is fed ' Or in true . . r . ^TT , - resignation. again from the Verbum Dorrnm [the Word of the Lord]; where then it is an angel again, quite separated from the kingdom of the devil, and of this world, in the death of Christ. 43. And for this cause God became man, that he might in himself new generate the soul of man again, and might redeem it from the chains of the fierceness o of anger, and not at all for the bestial body's sake, which must melt again into the four elements, and come to nothing; of which nothing will remain, but the shadow in the figure of all 2 its works and a his, or man's works. 3 matters, which he hath wrought at any time. 3 qr substance,

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