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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1As regards the question : Where does the soul go after death ? Boehme writes in his little book, Of the Supersensual Life : " It has no need to go ; it has heaven and " hell within itself. The kingdom of God is within you." — " Heaven and hell are within one another and are to " one another as a nothing." "Wheresoever thou dost not dwell according to thy " Selfhood and thine own will, there do the angels dwell " with thee and everywhere; and wheresoever thou " dwellest according to thy Selfhood and thine own will, " there do the devils dwell with thee and everywhere." And as he expressed in such words the nothingness of THE THREE PRINCIPLES space, so does he also express the nothingness of this temporal order of life in the verse he used to write in his friends' albums : — " Weme Zeit 1st wie Ewigkeit Und Ewigkeit wie die Zeit, Der ist befreit Von allem Streit." (He is made free from all strife, to whom time is as Eternity and Eternity as time.) THE FIRST CHAPTER Of the first Principle of the Divine l Essence. i Being or Substance.

21. O^ EEING we are now to speak of God, what ^3 he is, and where he is, we must say, that God himself is the essence of all essences ; for all is generated or born, created and proceeded from him, and all things take their first beginning out of God ; as the Scripture witnesseth, saying, Through him, and in him are all things. Also, The heaven and the heaven of heavens are not able to contain him : Also, Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: And in Our Father is mentioned, Thine is the kingdom and the power ; understand all power. 2. But there is yet this difference [to be observed], that evil neither is, nor is called God ; this is understood in the first Principle, where it is the earnest fountain of the wrathfulness, according to which, God calleth himself an angry, wrathful, and zealous God. For the original of life, and of all mobility, consisteth in the wrathfulness ; yet if the [tartness] be kindled with the light of God, it is then no more tartness, but the severe wrathfulness is changed into great joy. 2 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 1 1 Or materials, 3. Now when God was to create the world, and all things therein, he had no other l matter to make 2 essence, or it of, but his own 2 being, out of himself. But now, substance. /-. •• . .., .. i .,•• -i-iii

3God is a spirit that is incomprehensible, which natn neither beginning nor end, and his greatness and depth is all. Yet a spirit doth nothing but ascend, flow, move, and continually generate itself, and in itself hath chiefly a threefold manner of form in its generating or birth, viz. Bitterness, Harshness, and s Or Scorch- 3 Heat, and these three manners of forms are none ingof them the first, second, nor third ; for all these 4begetteth, three are but one, and each of them 4generateth beareth, or bnngeth the second and third. For between 6 harshness and forth. » astringency, bitterness, fire is generated : and the wrath of the or attracting. fife ^ ^ bitterness or sfcing itself} an(i the narshness is the stock or father of both these, and yet is generated of them both ; for a spirit is like a will, sense [or thought], which riseth up, and in its rising • infecteth, beholdeth, 6 perfecteth, and generateth itself. impregnateth, . ormixeth 4. Now this cannot be expressed or described, seed in itself. . . . n

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