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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144. But in the new man (which we attract on to our souls in the bosom of the virgin) we shall spring and flourish again ; and therein is no necessity nor death, for the kingdom of this world passeth away. Therefore he that hath not this 606 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 22 image in the new birth, shall, in the restoration of the spirit of the eternal nature, have the image of what his heart and confidence hath been set upon here [put upon him] ; for every kingdom imageth (or figureth] its creatures, according to the essences which were grown here in their will.

245. And that you may rightly and properly understand us ; we [mean or] understand here no strange Christ, who is not our brother ; as himself said, at his resurrection, Go to my brethren, and your brethren, and tell them, I go to my God and to your God. As indeed the body (which we here carry about us) is not the image of God, which God created ; for the kingdom of this world put its image upon us, when Adam consented to yield to it ; and we (if we be regenerated) are not at home in this world with our new man ; as Christ said to his disciples, / have called you out of this world, that you shall be where I am ; and St Paul saith, Our conversation (as to the new man) is in heaven. Thus we understand also, that our Immanuel, [who is] the most holy of all, with his true image of God (wherein also our true image of God doth consist) is not of this world ; but as the old mortal man (from the kingdom of this world) hangeth to us, so our mortal man also hung to the image of God in Christ, which he drew from his mother Mary, as the pure element [draweth] the kingdom of this world [to it]. 46. But now we must not think, that the holy Ch. 22] THE NEW REGENERATION IN CHRIST 607

3man in Christ died, for that dieth not ; but the mortal [man] from the kingdom of this world [is that which die.th] ; that [was it which] cried (on the cross) My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? And we see very clearly the great might [and power] of the holy man in Christ, when the mortal (which was taken from this world) went into death, how the holy almighty [man] wrestled with death, insomuch that the elements did shake with it, and the sun (which is the light of the nature of this world) lost its splendour, as if it were then to perish ; and then the living Champion in Christ fought with the anger, and stood in the hell of the anger of God, and loosed the soul (which he commended into his Father's hands) quite off from the anger of God, also from the source [or torment] of hell ; and this was that which David said, Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, nor permit thy holy [one'] to 1 perish. 1 rot, consume, 47. The Deity was in the human soul, and°r here it brake the sword of the Cherubim ; so that as Adam had brought his soul into the prison of anger, and so afterwards all souls from Adam are generated such, and are all of them, as in one root, imprisoned in the anger of death, till Christ ; so the noble Champion Christ here destroyed death in the human soul, and brought the soul through death into his eternal new humanity, and put it into an eternal 2 covenant. 'contract, 48. And as Adam had opened the gate of the marriage'. °r

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