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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1into great consideration, and weigh it well, it is a most serious matter, and we see the whole terrible earnest [severity], that when the soul of Christ brake off from the earthly body, when it passed into the anger of the Father, viz. into hell, then the earth trembled, and the stony rocks cleft in sunder, also the sun lost its light ; and this we see clearly, and understand it from the mouth of Christ. 39. When he now had undergone all the reproach and sufferings, he said on the cross, It is finished ; while he yet lived in the earthly body, he said it was finished ; understand, all that should have remained upon us eternally, and should have sprung up in us, with all the ignominy in which we stood before hell and the kingdom of heaven, he had all that laid upon him ; concerning which, Isaiah saith, Surely, he bare our infirmities, and took upon him our transgressions ; yet we held him as one smitten of God, tormented, and afflicted, but he took upon him our diseases, and all our miseries were laid upon him, and through his wounds we are healed ; we all went astray like sheep, every one hath looked upon his own way ; and yet we could not help ourselves, but we went as miserable half-slain sheep, and we must let the devil (in the anger of God) do with us what he will ; for we bear on us a monstrous garment, and stand in great ignominy before heaven and hell. 1 Or scorned. 40. Even as God * reproached Adam in the

2Ch. 25] CHRIST'S DEATH AND RESURRECTION 695 Garden of Eden, when he had put the outward garment upon him, saying, Behold, Adam is become as one ofus^ All this reproach [and scorn] must the man Christ take upon him ; also all torment and misery into which Adam was fallen this Champion in the battle must bear upon him before his heavenly Father, and there was the Lamb of God, and he hung upon the cross as a patient lamb in our stead ; for we should have been afflicted eternally in our cross-birth, and therefore there hung in great patience (as an obedient lamb for the slaughter) the Prince of the Eternal Life, and set himself before his Father, as if he himself were the * transgressor. ' Or guilty. The Gate of the Great z Secret. 2 or hidden Mystery. 41. Here, my beloved Reader, if thou art born of God, open the eyes of thy spirit wide, that the King of Glory may enter into thee, and open thy understanding ; consider every syllable ; for they are of great moment, they are not s mute, neither Or dumb, are they from a blind centre brought forth into the light. Behold, here hung on the cross God and man ; there was the Holy Trinity ; there were all the three Principles; and the Champion stood in the battle. 42. Now which was the Champion in the battle? Behold, when Christ had finished, he said, Father, I commend my spirit into thy hands, and he inclined his head, and departed. Behold, 696 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 25 1 qu left.

3his Father is the kingdom, power, and glory, and in him is all ; and all is his ; the love is his Heart ; and the anger is his eternal strength ; the love is his light ; and the anger is the eternal darkness, and maketh another Principle, wherein the devils are. 43. Now it was the love that became man, and had put on our human soul ; and the soul was enlightened from the love, and stood with its root in the anger, as in the strong might of the Father ; and now the new man in the love commended the uitted or soul to the Father into his might, and l yielded up the earthly life, [which proceeded] from the constellations and elements, viz. the kingdom of this world ; and so the soul now stood no more in the kingdom of this world, in the 2 source of life, but it stood in death ; for the kingdom of this world, the blower up [of life], the air, was gone.

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