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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11. ~TT is apparent, how they have hitherto in -J- Babel danced [or contended] about the Cup of Jesus Christ, and about his holy Testaments, for which they have caused many wars and blood-sheddings ; but what kind of knowledge concerning those [Testaments] they in Babel have, appeareth by their works of love among one another, which their Councils have brought to pass, where men have stopped the mouth of the 1 rule or Holy Ghost, and have made a worldly * dominion out of the priesthood of Christ. 2 Or the 2. 0 you high-priests and 2 scribes, what answer the Scripture, will you make to Christ, when you shall be found thus [at his coming]? Or do you suppose you stand in the dark '? No, you stand in the presence of the clear countenance of Jesus Christ, who is 632 Cll. 23] THE PRECIODS TESTAMENTS OF CHRIST 633

2judge of the quick and dead ; do but open your eyes, and rightly feed the flock of Jesus Christ, he cometh and demandeth them of you. You are not all shepherds or pastors, but intruded covetous wolves ; you rely on your school-art [or universitylearning and scholarship]. 0, that availeth nothing in the presence of God ; the Holy Ghost speaketh not from that, he will not be bound up. If you will be pastors, then you must hold out in the temptation, and put on the garment of the Lamb in your heart ; you must not take the wool of the sheep only from them, but you must give them the food of the Holy Ghost in true love, and be practisers of it yourselves. But xhow will you i Note this, give it, if you be in the wilderness still, and have chosen the kingdom of this world to yourselves in the last temptation ? What shall be said of you ? Is not the anger broke out and burning? Carry fuel to it, for Babel is on fire, the 2 water is dried 2 humility I'll T up. Or what have 1 to do with tnee, that 1 must write thus ? 3. We have shewn in few words the incarnation and birth of Jesus Christ the Son of God, and yet we are so very earthly, and cannot apprehend it, but are continually asking, Where is Christ with his body? Where shall we seek for him? And therefore our soul longeth to write of his omnipresence, and that, notwithstanding all the raging and fury of the devil, and of Antichrist. 4. We having clearly described, how God, out of

3634 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 23 his love and mercifulness of grace hath turned his beloved Heart to us again, and how he hath opened the gate to the kingdom of heaven for our souls, therefore now we are further to consider of the body of Christ. For reason saith continually, The body of Christ is gone up into heaven, he is far 1 government, from us, we must erect a kingdom, that we may or form of serve him in his absence, as Jeroboam did with the calves ; and so that kingdom is rightly called Babel. 5. Dost thou boast thyself to be a Christian, why dost thou not then believe his word, when he said, He would be with us to the end of the world ; and said, moreover, He ivould give us his body for meat, and his blood for drink ; also his body is meat indeed, and his blood is drink indeed] What do you understand by this, an absent [Christ]? 0 thou poor sick Adam, wherefore art thou gone again out of paradise ? Hath not Christ brought thee in again, wherefore then didst thou not stay there ? Dost thou not see, that the Apostles of Christ and their successors (who dwelt in the paradise of Christ with their souls) did great wonders 1 Wherefore art thou again entered into the spirit of this world ? Dost thou suppose that thou shalt find the paradise with thy reason in thy art ? Dost thou not think it hath another Principle, and that thou shalt not find it, except thou be born anew ? 6. Thou sayest, Christ is ascended into heaven,

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