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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1608 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 22 anger, so hath the Deity of Christ opened the gate of the eternal life, so that all men can press in to God, in this opened gate. For the third Principle is broken here, and judgment passed upon the prince of darkness, which so long held us prisoners in death. 49. But since man is so slow of apprehension, it may be, we shall not sufficiently be understood, and therefore we will once more set it down briefly and accurately, how these great Mysteries are ; for we know what adversary we have, viz. the prince of this world ; he will not sleep, but try what he can to suppress this noble grain of mustard-seed. 50. Behold, thou noble mind, thou who desirest the kingdom of God, to thee we speak, and not to the Antichrist in Babel, who desireth nothing else but the kingdom of this world ; take notice of it, the time of sleep is past, the bridegroom cometh, for the bride saith, Come, be in earnest, gaze not at the hand that used this pen, it is another pen that hath written this, which neither thou nor I do know ; for the mind (if it be faithful) apprehendeth the Deity ; and do not so slight thyself ; if thou art born in God, then thou art greater and more than all this world. 51. Observe it; the angel said to Mary, Thou shalt conceive and bear a Son, and shalt call his name Jesus ; he shall be great, and be called a Son of the Most High, and God the Lord shall give him the throne of his Father David, and he

2Ch. 22] THE NEW REGENERATION IN CHRIST 609 shall be a king over the house of Jacob eternally, and of his kingdom tJiere shall be no end. 52. You must- understand, Mary was to conceive in the body, viz. in her own body, not in a strange assumed [body], as the unenlightened (who apprehend not the kingdom of God) might interpret our writings to mean. Besides, it is not the ground either which the ancients and those heretofore have set down (which yet went very high) as if Mary from eternity had been hidden in Ternario Sancto [the holy Ternary or Trinity], and that she entered at that time only into Anna, as into a case [or house], and was not of the seed of Joachim, and blood of Anna. They say, she was an eternal virgin out of the Trinity, of whom Christ was born ; because he came not out of the flesh and blood of any man, and as himself witnesseth, that he was not of this world, but was come from heaven. He saith, That he came forth from God, and must return again to God ; and to Nicodemus he said, None goeth into heaven, but the Son of Man which is come from heaven, and who is in heaven. 53. And there he spake clearly of the Son of Man, of his humanity, and not of his Deity merely ; for he saith plainly, The Son of Man. But God from eternity was not the Son of Man, and therefore no Son of Man can proceed from the Trinity ; therefore we must look upon it aright. If Mary had proceeded out of the Trinity, where

3should our poor captivated souls have been? If 39 610 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 22 Christ had brought a strange soul from heaven, how should we have been delivered ? Had it been possible to redeem man [without it], what needed God to come into our form, and be crucified ? If it could have been so, then God should instantly have separated or freed Adam from death, when he fell. Or dost thou suppose that God is so maliciously zealous, as to be so angry without a cause ? 54. Indeed, when his wrath was sprung up in man, then he would manifest his wonders, but that was not the purpose of God when he created Adam ; but it was tried which of them should get the victory, the meekness, or the fierceness in the eternal root ; but the soul in Adam was yet free, and there was nothing else that could perish, but 1 self-will, or the l own will. 55. And so now the soul was the will, which was breathed into Adam, by the spirit of God out of the eternal will of the Father, and yet out of that place where the Father (viz. God) out of the darkness, in his own reconceived will, entereth into himself, and in himself generateth the meekness in his own reconceived will. 56. And so the soul of man is out of the same balance in the angle of the recomprehended will, towards the light, and also in the first will in itself, in its own centre, where behind it the darkness is comprehended, and before it is the end of the eternal band, and in itself there would be nothing

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