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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1Ch. 23] THE PRECIOUS TESTAMENTS OF CHRIST 635 how then can he be in this world? And when thou reachest furthest, thou thinkest that he is present only with his Holy Spirit, here in his Testaments, and that the Testaments are only 1 signs of his merits. What sayest thou then of 1 symbols of his satififacthy new man ? When indeed the soul is fed with tion. the Holy Ghost, what [food] hath thy new man then? 2 For each life feedeth upon its mother. 2Thenewman . feedeth upon 7. Now if the soul eateth of the clear Deity, the pure «iemeat, and the what ffoodl hath the body then ? * or thou outward man eateth of the knowest that the soul and the body are not one four elements. and the same thing ; it is indeed a Tveryl 3 body, 3 Corpus, and 3 . . they differ as but the soul is a spirit, and must have spiritual body and food, and the body must have bodily food. Or wilt thou give the new man earthly food ? If thou meanest so, thou art yet far from the kingdom of God. The heavenly body of Christ did eat no earthly food, but the outward body only did eat that. Is not Christ's body now in the 4 holy Ternary, * the pure 1111 holy substanand eateth paradisical food ? Wherefore then shall tiaiity, viz. the angelical not our new man do so ? Did he not eat heavenly world, the 11 /• n°ly earth.

2food forty days in the wilderness, and always afterwards ? And did he not tell his disciples at Jacob's well, / have meat to eat that ye know not of-, and \ further, It is my meat to do the will of my Father which is in heaven \ Is the will of God his food, why then is it not ours, if we live in him ? Hath not the Deity of Christ put on the kingdom of heaven for a body? Is not the pure element (wherein the Deity dwelleth) his body? 636 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 23 8. But reason saith, The body of Christ is but in one place, how can he then be everywhere ? He is indeed a creature, and a creature cannot be in all places at once. Hearken, beloved reason : When the Word became man in the body of Mary, was he not at that time also aloft above the stars ? When he was at Nazareth, was he not then also at Jerusalem, and everywhere in all the thrones [of heaven] ? Or dost thou suppose, when God became man, that he was shut up and confined within the humanity, and was not everywhere ? Dost thou suppose, that the Deity (in Christ's becoming man) divided itself ? 0 no ; he never went from his place, that cannot be.

39. And now he is become man, therefore his humanity is everywhere, wheresoever his Deity was ; for thou canst not say, that there is any place in heaven or in this world, where God is not ; now wheresoever the Father is, there also is his Heart in him, and there also is the Holy Ghost. Now his Heart is become man, and in the humanity of Christ ; and therefore if you will think, that the body of Christ is far off in heaven, yet you must also say, that the Heart of God is in him ; and now (when you say that God the Father is here present) will you say, that the Heart in him is not here present with him ? Or wilt thou divide the Heart of God, and wilt only make it, that there is but a spark of it in the body of Christ, and that the rest of it is everywhere all over? What do you do1? Ch. 23] THE PRECIOUS TESTAMENTS OF CHRIST 637 Desist, and I will truly and exactly shew you the true ground. 10. Behold, God the Father is everywhere, and his l Heart and light is everywhere in the Father, 1 Or Son. for it is always from eternity begotten everywhere of the Father, and his birth hath neither beginning nor end, he is even at this very day continually generated of the Father ; and then also when he was in the body of Mary, yet he stood in the Father's birth, and was continually begotten of the Father, and the Holy Ghost proceeded continually from eternity, from the Father through his 2 Heart; 2 Son or for the whole 3 generation of the Deity is no otheror

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