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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122. You have a similitude [of this] in yourself. Your soul which is in you giveth reason to you, whereby you think [consider, and perceive] ; that representeth God the Father : The light which shineth in your soul, whereby you know the virtue [or power in you], and lead [and direct and order] Ch. 7] THE FOUR ELEMENTS 99 yourself with ; that representeth God the Son, or the Heart, the eternal power and virtue : And the mind, in which the virtue of the light is, and that which proceedeth from the light wherewith you govern your body ; that representeth the Holy Ghost. 23. The l darkness that is in you, which longeth l Or blindness ITT • i -r* • • i i °f underafter the light, that is the first rrmciple ; the standing, virtue or power of the light which is in you, whereby you can see in your mind without [bodily] eyes, that is the second Principle ; and the longing [power or] virtue, that proceedeth from the mind, and attracteth and filleth [or impregnateth] itself, from whence the material body groweth, that is the third Principle. And you [may] understand very exactly, how there is an inclosure [stop, or knot] between each Principle ; and how God is the beginning and the first virtue [or power] in all things ; and you understand, that in this gross [sluggish, or dull] body, you are not in 2 paradise. For that 2 Or in the [outward body] is but a misty [excrementitious, wherein God 11 . . i , i • i • , i and the angels

2dusky, opaque procreation, orj out-birth in the dwell. third Principle, wherein the soul lieth captive, as in a dark dungeon : Of which you shall find a very large description, when we come to write about the fall of Adam.\ 24. Now mark, when God would manifest himself by the material world, and the matrix stood in the anguishing birth, wherein the Creator moved the first Principle to the creating of angels, then 100 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Cll. 7 the matrix stood undivided in the inward l essence ; for there was then no comprehensibility, but spirit only and the virtue of the spirit. The spirit was God, and the virtue was heaven, and the spirit wrought in the virtue, so that thereby the virtue became attracting and longing, for the spirit beheld itself in the virtue ; and therein the spirit created the virtue from whence the angels came to be. And thus the virtue became the dwelling of the angels, and the paradise wherein the spirit wrought ; and the spirit longed after the light, and the light shone in the virtue ; so there is a paradisical joy, and pleasant sport therein ; and thus God is manifested.

325. Now thus the eternal light, and the virtue of the light, or the heavenly paradise, moveth in the eternal darkness ; and the darkness cannot comprehend the light ; for they are two several Principles ; and the darkness longeth after the light, because that the spirit beholdeth itself therein, and because the divine virtue is manifested in it. But though it hath not comprehended the divine virtue and light, yet it hath continually with great lust lifted up itself towards it, till it hath kindled the root of the fire in itself, from the beams of the light of God ; and there arose the third Principle : And it hath its original out of the first Principle, out of the dark matrix, by the 2 speculating of the virtue [or power] of God. But when the kindled virtue in this springing up [of the third Principle] Ch. 7] THE FOUR ELEMENTS 101 in the darkness became fiery, then God put the Fiat therein, and by the moving spirit, which goeth forth in the virtue of the light, created the fiery source in a bodily manner, and severed it from the matrix, and the spirit called the fiery created properties stars, for their quality. 26. Thus it is plain to our sight how the starry heaven (or as I may better render it to the enlightened Reader), the quintessence (or the fifth form in the birth), is severed from the watery matrix ; or else there would have been no ceasing from the generating of stones and earth, if the

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