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.

primarypage 53

171. For he is always shut up in the first Principle (as in the eternal death), and yet he raiseth himself up continually, thinking to reach the Heart of God, and to domineer over it ; for his bitter sting in the birth climbeth up thus eternally in the 2 source of 2 Or root, the fire, and affordeth him a proud will to have all 62 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 4 [at his pleasure], but he attaineth nothing ; his food of is the * source of water, viz. the brimstone-spirit, which is the most aching mother, from which the indissoluble band is fed and nourished ; his refresh- « vit the cold ing is the eternal 2fire, and eternal freezing in the harsh mother, and eternal hunger in the bitterness, an eternal thirst in the source of the fire ; his climbing up is his fall, the more he climbeth up in his will, the greater is his fall ; like one that standing upon a high clift, would cast himself down into a bottomless pit, he looketh still further, and he falleth in further and further, and yet can find no ground.

272. Thus he is an eternal enemy to the Heart of God, and all the holy angels ; and he cannot frame any other will in himself. His angels and devils are of very many several sorts, all according to the eternal birth. For at the time of his creation he stood (in the kingdom of heaven) in the point, locus, or place (where the Holy Ghost in the birth of the Heart of God, in paradise, did open infinite and innumerable centres), in the eternal birth ; in » Or created, this seat or place, he was 8 bodified, and hath his 4 in the open- beginning 4 in the opening of the centres in the ing of the . ground, as a eternal nature. building from ,_, /• / • . the earth. 73. Ihereiore (as is mentioned before in the third chapter) when the birth of life sprang up, every essence had again a centre in itself, according to its own property or quality, and figureth a life according to its essences, viz. harshness, bitterness, Ch. 4] OP THE TRUE ETERNAL NATURE 63 fire, and sound ; and all further according to the ability of the eternal birth, which is l confirmed in 1 Or eatabthe kingdom of heaven. O

374. Seeing then that they stood in heaven in the time of their creation, therefore their quality was also manifold ; and all should have been and continued angels, if the great fountain Lucifer (from whence they proceeded) had not destroyed them. And so now also every one in his fall continueth in his own essences, only the second Principle is extinguished in them ; and so it is also with the soul of man, when the light of God goeth out in it ; but so long as that shineth therein, it is in paradise, and eateth of the Word of the Lord, of which shall be clearly spoken in its due place. B THE FIFTH CHAPTER Of ike third Principle, or creation of the material World, with the Stars and Elements ; wherein the first and second Principles are more clearly understood. IECAUSE I may happen not to be understood clearly enough by the desirous Reader, and shall be as one that is altogether dumb to the unenlightened (for the eternal and indissoluble band, wherein the essence of all essences standeth, is not easily nor in haste to be understood), therefore it is necessary that the desirous Reader do the more earnestly consider himself what 1 inward he is, and from whence his reason and l senses do thoughts. proceed, wherein he findeth the similitude of God, especially if he consider and meditate what his soul is, which is an eternal incorruptible spirit. 2 Or be in true 2. But if the Reader be 2 born of God, there is

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.

primarypage 53

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