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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1THE THREE PRINCIPLES word of God infallibly, as the holy men that penned the Scriptures, and others also. And he that can understand these things in himself, may well know who speaketh by the spirit of God, and who speaketh his own fancies and delusions ; as our Saviour said, He that doth the will of my Father which is in heaven, shall know of my ivords whether they be of God. But if that will of his Father in heaven had not been in them from the beginning of their life, in their conception in their mother's womb, how could they, to whom he said this, have done that will, whereby they might know whence his words proceeded ? And according to this rule may any discern the words and writings of all. Therefore such things as these are necessary to be known.

2There are some who have desired his writings might be epitomized, for ease of those that have not leisure to read so large treatises. Truly the spare time they spend in any other outward thing, may be spent with more benefit a thousandfold in this ; and where he hath written at large it would not be understood if it were contracted more in brief; and all his books, as large as they are, are but a small spark of the Great Mystery ; and where he hath written more in brief it is so obscure to some that they think it impossible to be understood. He wrote both so briefly and obscurely, as I conceive, that none but such as would be diligent in the practice of that which he hath written plainly and at large should be able to understand it. TO THE READER XV It is intended that the book of the Threefold Life (which with the Three Principles and Forty Questions are a complete contence1 of all the Mysteries) should be published in English with the soonest conveniency ; and in the meantime, for a taste of the spirit of prophecy which the author had, there is a little treatise of some prophecies concerning these latter times collected out of his writings by a lover of the Teutonic philosophy, and entitled Mercurius Teutonicus.

3In turning the German into English I retain in some places the propriety of the German language, because the author should be rendered as near as might be in his own expression, that those excellent notions which he layeth down might not be slipped over as men do common current English, but that the strangeness of the words may make them a little stay, and consider what the meaning may be, having some difference from the vulgar English phrase. Also, where it is somewhat hard at first sight to know what some of the words mean, I have set the synonyms in the margin, and sometimes the English rendering between two semiquadrates [ ].2 In the Preface to the lovers of wisdom set before the Forty Questions in English, there are some of 1 Obs. = Table of contents. z Note. — The side-notes and all words within square brackets in the text are additions by the translator. Marks of parenthesis are usually equivalent to commas, the enclosed words being translations from the German. — C. J. B. THE THREE PRINCIPLES

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

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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