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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1self is that only man which is both good and evil, and that he shall have the reward of either of them, and to which of them he inclineth in this life, to that his soul goeth when he dieth ; and that he shall arise at the Last Day in power, in his labour [and works] which he exercised here, and live therein eternally, and also be glorified therein ; XXVI THE THREE PRINCIPLES i sil^t. iruii-f. 8 Or evil disposition. * Corpus, or body, or natural substance. 4 Viz. through and from God's wrath and love. 9 imaging, fashioning, framing.

2and that shall be his eternal food and l subsistence ; therefore it is very necessary for him to learn to know himself, how it is with him, and whence the impulsion to good and evil cometh, and what indeed the good and evil merely are in himself, and whence they are stirred, what properly is the original of all the good, and of all the evil, from whence, and by what [means] evil is come to be in the devils, and in men, and in all creatures ; seeing the devil was a holy angel, and man also created good, and that also such 2 unto wardn ess is found to be in all creatures, biting, tearing, worrying, and hurting one another, and such enmity, strife, and hatred in all creatures ; and that every 3 thing is so at odds with itself, as we see it to be, not only in the living creatures, but also in the stars, elements, earth, stones, metals, in wood, leaves, and grass ; there is a poison and malignity in all things ; and it is found that it must be so, or else there would be no life, nor mobility, nor would there be any colour or virtue, neither thickness nor thinness, nor any perceptibility or sensibility, but all would be as nothing.

314. In this high consideration it is found that all is through and from *God himself, and that it is his own substance, which is himself, and he hath created it out of himself ; and that the evil belongeth to the 6 forming and mobility; and the good to the love ; and the austere, severe, or contrary will belougeth to the joy ; so far as the \ PREFACE XXV11 creature is in the light of God, so far the wrathful aiid contrary will maketh the rising, eternal joy ; but if the light of God be extinguished, it maketh the rising, painful torment, and the hellish fire. 15. That it may be understood how all this is, I will describe the Three Divine Principles, that therein all may be declared, what God is, what nature is, what the creatures are ; what the love and meekness of God is, what God's desiring or will is, what the wrath of God and the devil is, and in * conclusion, what joy and sorrow are ; and how 1 in brief, or all took a beginning, and endureth eternally, with the true difference between the eternal and transitory creatures, especially of man, and of his soul, what it is, and how it is an eternal creature : And what heaven is, wherein God and the holy angels and holy men dwell ; and what hell is, wherein the devils dwell ; and how all things originally were created, and had their being. In sum, what the 2 Essence of all essences is. 2 Being of ail

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