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. "\~\T^ know Christ hath taught us, that aP60?16V V judgment shall be kept, not only for the punishment of the despisers of God, and for a reward to the good, but also for the sake of the creature, and of 2 nature, that they may once be 2 the outward delivered from vanity; and we know that the substance of this world, and the property thereof, must pass away ; the sun and the stars, and also the four elements, must pass away as to their source [or property], and all must be restored again ; and then the life will spring forth through death, and the figure of everything shall stand eternally before God, for which end it was created ; also we know that our souls are immortal, generated out of the eternal band ; and when this world passeth away, then also all its essences pass away, which are generated out of it, and the 3 tincture » Or the remaineth still in the spirit. e^nces°or ' 2. Therefore, 0 man ! consider thyself here in snbstance745 746 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 27 this world, in which them standest in the birth, them art sown as a seed or grain, and a tree groweth 1 field or sou. out of thee ; therefore now see in what * ground thou standest, that thou mayest be found to be timber for the great building of God in his love, and not for a threshold [or footstool] to be trodden under-foot, or that is fit for nothing but for the fire, whereof nothing will remain but dust and ashes.

23. It is said to thee, that the wood [or fuel] of thy soul shall burn in the last fire, and that thy soul shall remain to be ashes in the fire, and thy body shall appear like black soot. Why wilt thou then stand in a wilderness, yea in a rock where there is no water ? How then will thy tree grow again ? 0 ! what great misery it is that we are •grounder ignorant in what 2soil we grow, and what kind of field. 8 sap, juice, s essences we draw to us, seeing our fruit shall or substance. appear an(j ^ tasted, and that which is pleasant shall stand upon God's table ; and the other shall be cast to the devil's swine. Therefore let it move you, to look that you grow in the ground or soil of Christ, and bring forth fruit that may be set upon God's table, which fruit never perisheth, but continually springeth, and the more it is eaten of, the pleasanter it is. How wilt thou rejoice in the Lord ! 4. The Last Judgment is appointed for that end ; and as we know that all things [in this world] have had a beginning, so they shall also CL 27] OF THE LAST JUDGMENT 747 have an end ; for before the time of this world there was nothing but the band of eternity, which maketh itself, and in the band the spirit, and the spirit in God, who is the highest good, which was always from eternity, and never had any beginning ; but this world hath had a beginning from the eternal band in the time.

35. For this world maketh a time, therefore it must perish ; and as it hath been nothing, so it will be nothing again ; for the spirit moveth in the l ether; and therein the zlimbus (which is 1 Or upholder. corruptible) is generated, from whence all things 2 the seed> proceed ; and yet there was no fashioner but the spirit (or the vulcan) in the essences, and so also there were no essences ; they were generated in the will of the spirit, and in that will is the 3 fashioner, which hath fashioned all things out ofsfranier, nothing, but merely out of the will. or former. 6. Seeing then it is fashioned out of the eternal will, therefore it is eternal, not in substance, but in the will ; and after the breaking of the substance this world standeth wholly and altogether (like a figure) in the will for [a 4 glass of] God's works of < figure, or wonder. And so we know now, that where there *" is a will, it must comprehend itself so that it be a will, and that comprehension maketh an attraction, and that which is attracted is in the will, and it is thicker than the will, and is the darkness of the will, and a source in the darkness ; for the will desireth to be free, and yet cannot be free, except 748 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 27 it go again in itself out of the darkness, and if it do, then the darkness continueth in the first will, and the reconceived will remaineth in itself 1 liberty or in the l light.

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