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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16. But mark and consider this well, dear Reader, and let not your simplicity deceive you, the author is not greater than others, he knoweth no more, i mini. Ch. 4] OF THE TRUE ETERNAL NATURE 33 neither hath he any greater authority than other children of God. Do but look upon yourself, why have you earthly thoughts of yourself? Why will you be mocked by the devil, and be fooled by the world, [so as to be led to think] that you are but a kind of figure like God, and not generated or begotten of God ? i 7. Your monstrous form or shape indeed is not God, nor of his essence, or substance, but the hidden man, x which is the soul, 2 is the proper i which the essence of God, forasmuch as the love in the light !° , , o 2 Or out of of God is sprung up in your own centre, out • essence or which the Holy Ghost proceedeth, wherein the substance, as J a child is the second Principle of God consisteth : How then should father's own substance.

2you not have power and authority to speak of God, who is your Father, of whose essence you are ? Behold, is not the world God's ? And the Light of God being in you, it must needs be also yours, as it is written, The Father hath given all things to the Son, and the Son hath given all to you. The Father is the eternal power, or virtue, and the Son is the Heart and light continuing eternally in the Father, and you continue in the Father and the Son. 'And now, being the Holy Ghost proceedeth from the Father and the Son, and that the eternal power or virtue of the Father is in you, and that the eternal light of the Son shineth in you, why will you be fooled ? ) Know you not what Paul said : That our conversation is in heaven, from whence we expect our Saviour 34 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 4 Jesus Christ, who will bring us out of this monstrous image, or birth (in the corruption of the 1 Or paradisi- third Principle of this world), in the x paradisical nance86 birth to eat the Word of the Lord? 8. Why will you be fooled by Antichrist, by his laws [precepts] and pratings? Where will you seek God? in the deep above £he stars? You will not be able to find him there. Seek him in 2 Or in the your heart, 2 in the centre of the birth of your life, foundation of and there you shall find him, as our father Adam the beginning , , ,-, ,., and sustaining and mother JtLve did.

39. For it is written, You must be born anew through the water and the spirit, or else you shall not see the kingdom of God. This birth must be done within you : The Heart, or the Son of God must arise in the birth of your life ; and then the Saviour Christ is your faithful Shepherd, and you are in him, and he in you, and all that he and his Father have is yours, and none shall pluck you out of his hands ; and as the Son (viz. the Heart of the Father) is one [with the Father], so also the new man is one in the Father and the Son, one virtue or power, one light, one life, one 1 Or enduring eternal paradise, one eternal heavenly 3 birth, one substance. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and thou his child. 10. Doth not the son see plainly what the father doth in his house ? And now if the son learn to do the same thereby, what displeasure will the father have towards his son for it ? Nay, will not the father be well pleased that his son is Ch. 4] OF THE TRUE ETERNAL NATURE 35 so apt [and forward to learn] ? Then why should the heavenly Father be so displeased with his children in this world, which depend upon him, and enquire after him, which would fain learn to know him, fain labour in his works, and do his will ? Doth not the Regenerator bid us come to him, and whosoever cometh to him, he will not reject? Why should any Resist the spirit of J0r withstand

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