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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1not manifest, until awakened." The division between heaven and hell is not in terms of space. " Heaven is in " hell and hell in heaven, and neither manifest to the " other " (Mysterium Magnum, viii. 28). In the place of the rejected Lucifer — here Boehme expounds the Mosaic creation story — God created man in His own likeness, more perfect than the Angels, destined to rule over all things. " Heaven, earth, stars and elements, all, as well " as the divine Trinity, are represented in man, and " nothing can be named that is not in man." — " The soul " of Adam was from the eternal will, out of the centra " natures, where light and darkness divide. Understand ! " he is no separated spark, as a part from the whole ; " for he is no part, but the whole altogether ; just as " every point is a whole " (Threefold Life, vi. 47, 49).

2Man was placed between the kingdoms of light and darkness, free to choose. " The will of the soul is free, " either to sink in itself and heed nothing, but to grow " as a branch on a tree and eat of God's love, or to lift " itself in the fire, in its own will and be an own tree " " (Forty Quest, ii. 2). " But the will of life broke itself " away from the Divine Essence, and went into percep- " tion [experience], out of unity into variety [complexity], " and resisted the unity as the eternal rest and only " good " (Divine Contemplation, ii. 7). " The soul's " essence became enamoured with the creation of the " formed word in its freedom of choice, and lifted itself " in longing for freedom " (Election, vi. 73). " When the " longing for the spirit of this world became uppermost " in Adam, he sank into sleep." — " The sleep denotes " death and an overcoming." — " But with the sleep, time " became manifest in man ; he fell asleep to the angelical " world, and awakened to the external world." The Virgin, the Divine Wisdom, who hitherto had dwelt in him, now fled from him, and in her stead, the earthly wife was given him, with whom the fall into sin was consummated and extended to the whole of mankind; " for the souls of men are altogether as if they were one INTRODUCTION Ixiii

3" soul " (Threefold Life, xvi. 13). But redemption also remained, hidden as a germ in humanity (Boehme conveys this through allegories of the deepest meaning, by following up the idea throughout the Old Testament), until it was born, as the Saviour from Mary, into whom had also passed [entered] the eternal Virgin, the Divine Wisdom. But " the historical belief in Christ is a mere spark (of " the fire) that must first be set alight." — " None is a " Christian, unless Christ lives and works in him." — " When Christ arises, then Adam dies with his serpent- " substance ; when the sun rises, the night is swallowed " up in the day and there is no more night." — " Whoso- " ever has Christ in himself is a Christian, is crucified " and dead with Christ, and lives in His resurrection." — " Zion is not born first outwardly, but interiorly ; we " must seek and find ourselves within ourselves." — " No " one need run anywhere .... but in himself is the gate " to the Divinity. . . . Whither shall the soul lift itself, " since it is itself the source of Eternity ? " A newer theologian (Harless, J. Boehme and the Alchemists) affirms, on account of these statements, that Boehme has wiped out Christ for us, and left only Christ in us. We would remark in answer that, if those who possess Him yet miss anything, then must their conception of Christ in us be very inadequate.

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