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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144. And now there was nothing more on the soul, but only that which itself is (in its own eternal root) in the Father. And here we should have remained in the anger, in the dark hell, but the bright Father in his glory took the soul to him, into the Trinity. Now the soul was clothed with the love in the Word, which made the angry Father (in the innermost source of the soul) pleasant, and reconcilable, and so in this moment (in the essences of the soul) the lost paradise sprang up again ; whereupon the earth trembled [viz. the out-birth out of the element], and the sun, the king of the life of the third Principle, lost its light ; 2 Or active property. Ch. 25] CHRIST'S DEATH AND RESURRECTION 697 for there rose up another Sun in death ; understand, in the anger of the Father the love was shining like a bright Morning-Star. 45. l And thus the body of Christ (on the soul) l Not«, out of was the pure element before God, out of which the S' sun of this world is generated, and the same body included the whole world, and then the nature of this world trembled, and the stony rocks cleft in sunder ; for the fierce wrathful death had (in the Fiat) congealed and concreted the stony rocks together; and now the holy life went into the fierce wrathful death, whereupon the stones did cleave asunder, to shew that the life stood up again in death, and did spring forth through death.

246. And then also the holy bodies went out of the graves ; consider this well ; those that had put their trust in the Messiah, had (in the Promise) gotten the pure element for a new body ; and now when the promised Saviour went through death into life, and put on that pure element for a body, then their souls in the Saviour (in whom they stood) in hope gat the upper hand, and put on their new body (in the body of Christ) and lived in him, in his [power and] virtue ; there were the holy Patriarchs and Prophets, who in this world had put on the Treader upon the Serpent, in the Word of God, wherein they had prophesied of him, and wrought miracles, they were now quickened in the virtue of Christ; for the virtue of Christ sprang up through death, and reconciled the Father, who 698 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 25 held the soul captive in the anger, and they now entered with Christ into life. 47. Here, ye beloved sheep, observe : When Christ died, he did not cast away his body (which he had here) and yield it up to the four elements to be swallowed up, so that he must have wholly 1 He hath a strong body ; no, but l the source [or property] of this world, which is in the stars and elements ; 'corruption and the 2 incorruptible swallowed up the corruptput on meorruption. ible, so that it is a body which liveth (in the

3virtue of God) in God, and not in the spirit of this [four elementary] world ; and Paul saith concerning the Last Judgment, That the incorruptible (viz. the new man) shall over-clothe the corruptible, and shall swallow up the corruptible, so that death shall be made a scorn, according to that saying, [0 Death /] where is thy sting ? 0 Hell ! where is thy victory ? 48. You must know, that Christ, while he lived upon the earth, and all we that are new-born in him, have and carry the heavenly flesh and blood in the earthly [man], and we carry it also in the new man, in the body of Christ. And when we die thus in the old earthly body, then we live (in the new body) in the body of Jesus Christ, and spring up in him out of death ; and our springing up is our paradise, where our essences spring up in God, and the earthly is swallowed up in death, and we put on our Lord Jesus Christ, not only in the faith and spirit, but in the virtue [and power] of Ch. 25] CHRIST'S DEATH AND RESURRECTION 699 the body, in our heavenly flesh and blood ; and so we live to God the Father in Christ his Son, and the Holy Ghost-confirmeth all our doings ; for all what we shall do, it is God doth it in us. 49. And thus there will be a Tabernacle of God with men, and the body of Christ will be our temple, wherein we shall know and see the great wonders of God, and speak of them with rejoicing. And that is the temple, the new Jerusalem, of which the Prophet Ezekiel writeth.

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