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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184. But now Baptism was not instituted in respect of the earthly corruptible [man], which belongeth to the earth, nor for the heavenly [man's] sake, which was pure and spotless without that, but for the poor soul's sake. Seeing the heavenly man in Christ took our natural soul (in the body of the Virgin Mary) to his heavenly man, and that also the earthly man hung to the soul, therefore the holy Trinity [by the hand of man] took the water of the eternal life in the pure element, and dipped the soul therein, as I may so speak. 85. See, thou beloved soul, thou wast gone out from God ; but his love caught hold of thee again, and 1 fastened thee (with the Promise) to his thread ; l tied or knit. and then came the fulfilling of the Promise, and put another new body on to thee ; but thou canst not have another soul, for thy soul was out of the eternity. Therefore now as the Holy Ghost overshadowed and filled [or impregnated] Mary, so the water out of the heavenly matrix (which hath its beginning out of the Trinity) in the baptism of 624 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 22 Christ (and in all baptized Christians) overshadowed and l filled the soul of Christ in the baptism in Jordan, and also the souls of all Christians, and so renewed the earthly water (of the out-birth) in the 2 in true soul, and washed it clean, that it is 2in itself a pure angel, which of itself may eat of the heavenly fruit ; and that is the cause of the baptism. 0 Man consider thyself.

28 6. Now when the poor soul was thus bathed in the water of eternal life (out of the pure element) which sinTerncrio is 3 in the holy Ternary, that it not only enjoyed the same outwardly, but was also filled [or impregnated] therewith, as the Holy Ghost impregnated Mary in the holy Ternary ; then it stood [inclined] 4 in true * forward, viz. right forward towards God, and into God, as a new half-generated and washed creature, 6 in self. and 5 behind it was the anger of the darkness in the kingdom of this world still fast bound to it, so that it could not be wholly freed from it, except it entered into death, and quite brake off the kingdom of this world. Of the Temptation of Christ. 87. Therefore must Christ now (after the baptism) be tempted ; and he was set against the kingdom of the fierce wrath, to see whether this [second] Adam, thus new prepared, could stand in the new and old man, with the half new-born and washed soul, and set his imagination upon God, Ch. 22] THE NEW REGENERATION IN CHRIST 625 and eat of the Word of the Lord. And there it was tried whether the soul would press in to God, or into the spirit of this world again. 88. And here you may clearly know, that the spirit of God brought this Christ into the wilderness to be tempted, in that the devil was permitted, in the kingdom of God's anger, to set upon him, and to tempt this second Adam, as he had tempted the first Adam in the Garden of Eden.

389. And there now was no earthly meat or drink ; and the soul in Christ understood now very well what inn [or house] it was in, that it was in God, and that it could of stones make bread, seeing there was none there ; but it must eat no earthly bread, but heavenly [bread] out of the holy Ternary, in its heavenly body ; and the earthly body must be hungry, that the soul might be rightly tempted. For the earthly body was an hungred, as the text in the Gospel saith very rightly. 90. Now the heavenly [body] must overcome the earthly, that the earthly may be as it were dead and impotent, and that the heavenly may 1 keep the dominion. And now as Adam stood in i or be prethe 2 angle (between love and wrath) when he was 2° tempted, there stood both kingdoms against him, balanceand pulled at him ; and as God the Father (direct forward, in his reconciled will) is the kingdom of heaven, and the clear Deity ; and backward (in the eternal root of nature) there is his wrath and 40 626 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 22 1 the kingdom auger, and yet * both of them are in the eternal of heaven and , ., , kingdom of Father ; and as in the eternal nature 01 the wrath, the light or the kingdom of heaven is not known, and also in the eternal light, the kingdom of fierceness and wrath is not known, because each kingdom is in itself, so is the soul of man also ; it hath both 2imagineth, kingdoms in it; in which it 2 tradeth, in that it ia inclined, or . i i • i c

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