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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1prophecy, which is God's ? Look upon Christ's the manifestaApostles, did any other teach them than God, who hidden things was in them, and they in him? 11. 0 dear children of God in Christ, fly away from Antichrist, who hath set up himself over all the coasts of the earth, and who setteth a painted image before you, as the serpent did before our mother Eve, and 2painteth your own image of20rrepre- . «. « *» ' i sentethtoyou. bod [as if it were] far on from God : But consider what is written, The Word is near thee, yea in thy heart and lips. And God himself is the Word which is in thy heart and lips. 12. But Antichrist hath never sought anything else but his own pleasure in the third Principle, and to fulfil it in the house of flesh ; and therefore he hath detained people with laws of his own inventing, which are neither grounded in nature, nor in the paradise of God, neither are they to be found in the centre of the birth of life. 13. Dear children, consider, how mightily and powerfully, with wonders, miracles, and works, the spirit of God went forth in word and deed in 36 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 4

2the times of the Apostles, and after, til] Antichrist and the spirit of self-pride, with his invented laws and astral wisdom, brake forth, and set himself up by that worldly and fleshly arm [or by the authority of the worldly magistrate], merely for his own pleasure and honour's sake, where the most precious words of Christ (who gave no laws to man, but the law of nature and the law of love, which is his own heart) must be a cloak for him, viz. for Antichrist, who is a prince in the third Principle ; what he ordains must be as the voice to Moses out of the bush : And so the man of pride makes as if 1 divine or himself had l divine power upon earth, and knoweth apostolical _ i TT i /^i authority, or not, in his blindness, the Holy Ghost will not be 2 Or blinded ' 2 tied [or bound up to their canons and human 5dt£E!Md inventions]. 14. But if any would attain salvation, he must »iuthe be born again, through the water in the 3 centre ground where ., , . /••>•/'' •

3the grain of of the birth of life, which spnngeth up in the £ wwn an'd centre in the light of God ; for which end God the Father hath by his Son commanded Baptism, that so we might have a law, and a remarkable sign of remembrance, signifying how a child void of understanding receiveth an outward sign, and the inward man the power and the new birth in the centre of the birth of life; and that there ariseth the confirmation, which the light of God brought into A dam, when the light of God the Father, in the centre of the fifth form of the birth of the life of Adam, brake forth or sprang up. Thus it is both Ch. 4] OF THE TRUE ETERNAL NATURE 37 in the baptism of an infant or child, and also in the repenting convert, that in Christ returneth again to the Father. 15. The Last Supper of Christ with his disciples is just such another covenant as the [Psedobaptism or] baptism of infants. That which is done to the infant in baptism, that is done also to the poor sinner which awakeneth from the sleep of Antichrist, and cometh to the Father in and through Christ ; as shall be handled in its place.

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