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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1after your prating and blasphemy, whereby you make our women and children scoffers, so that they learn nothing bat scornful and reproachful speeches, and so persecute and vex one another therewith in 1 Babel. Can the kingdom of Christ be found in l in the . M contentious such things ? Or rather do you not build the wrangling. scornful and reproachful church of Babel ? Where is your apostolical heart, [consisting] in love ? Is your scorn and derision of others, Christ's meekness, who said, Love one another, be ye followers of me, and so it shall be known that ye are my disciples ? To you it is said; the 2 anger burneth in Babel ; 2 Or wrath -11 i of God. when the flame thereof nseth up, then will the elements shake and tremble, and Babel shall be burnt in the fire. 80. The temptation of Christ rightly sheweth \ us his Person ; therefore open thy eyes, and let not Babel trouble thee, it is the price of thy body and soul ; for that [temptation] in the hard combat of Adam in the Garden of Eden, which Adam could not hold out in, here the worthy Champion went through with it, and hath obtained victory, in his humanity in heaven, and over this world.

281. As we have demonstrated the true Christ, who is God and man in one undivided Person, so we must now shew what kind of man he is, according to the kingdom of this world ; for the great wonders cannot sufficiently be described, they are still greater; there is need of an angelical tongue as well as of an earthly, and because we 622 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 22 have but an earthly, therefore we will write from an angelical mind, and speak the great wonders of God with the earthly tongue. 82. Let us look upon his baptism, and then upon his temptation instantly after his baptism, and so we shall find our new regeneration, as also in what kingdom we lie imprisoned ; and we very highly rejoice (in this knowledge) that God is become man : And if now we would apprehend it, we must first set down the baptism of Christ, and then the temptation in its right order. Of the Baptism of Christ upon Earth, in Jordan.

383. It is known to us, that (in Adam's fall) we are fallen into the anger of God, when the spirit, or soul of Adam, turned from the Heart of God into the spirit of this world, where instantly the holy heavenly image was extinguished, and the anger in the darkness held the poor soul captive, and where the devil instantly gat his entrance and habitation in the anger of the human soul ; and if the Treader upon the Serpent had not entered instantly into the mark of separation, in the centre of the light of life, then the wrath would have devoured us, and we should have continued eternally to be companions of the devils ; but when the Treader upon the Serpent thus1 entered into the middle (though not so presently into the humanity, but into the centre of the light of life) then the poor imprisoned souls which turned themOh. 22] THE NEW REGENERATION IN CHRIST 623 selves to God again, were (in the centre) bound or knit to the Deity again, till the Champion [or Saviour] came -into the humanity, where (in his conception and humanity) he received the whole man again, and this we see clearly in his baptism ; for there was that one Person which was both God and man, he had the heavenly and also the •earthly body.

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