Jacob Behmen, the greatest of the mystics, and the father of German
philosophy, was all his life nothing better than a working shoemaker.
He was born at Old Seidenberg, a village near Goerlitz in Silesia, in
the year 1575, and he died at Goerlitz in the year 1624. Jacob
Behmen has no biography. Jacob Behmen’s books are his best
biography. While working with his hands, Jacob Behmen’s
whole life was spent in the deepest and the most original thought; in
piercing visions of God and of nature; in
prayer, in praise, and in love to God and
man. Of Jacob Behmen it may be said with the utmost truth and
soberness that he lived and moved and had his being in God.
Jacob Behmen has no biography because his whole life was hid with Christ
in God.
* * * * *
While we have nothing that can properly be called a biography of
Jacob Behmen, we have ample amends made to us in those priceless morsels
of autobiography that lie scattered so plentifully up and down all his
books. And nothing could be more charming than just those incidental
and unstudied utterances of Behmen about himself. Into the very
depths of a passage of the profoundest speculation Behmen will all of
a sudden throw a few verses of the most childlike and heart-winning
confidences about his own mental history and his own spiritual experience.
And thus it is that,
without at all intending it, Behmen has left behind him a complete history
of his great mind and his holy heart in those outbursts of diffidence,
deprecation, explanation, and self-defence, of which his philosophical
and theological, as well as his apologetic and experimental, books are
all so full. It were an immense service done to our best literature
if some of Behmen’s students would go through all Behmen’s
books, so as to make a complete collection and composition of the best
of those autobiographic passages. Such a book, if it were well
done, would at once take rank with The Confessions of St.
Augustine, The Divine Comedy of Dante,
and the Grace Abounding of John Bunyan.
It would then be seen by all, what few, till then, will believe, that
Jacob Behmen’s mind and heart and
spiritual experience all combine to give him a foremost place among
the most classical masters in that great field.
In the nineteenth chapter of the Aurora there occurs a very
important passage of this autobiographic nature. In that famous
passage Behmen tells his readers that when his eyes first began to be
opened, the sight of this world completely overwhelmed him. Asaph’s
experiences, so powerfully set before us in the seventy-third Psalm,
will best convey, to those who do not know Behmen, what Behmen also
passed through before he drew near to God.
Like that so thoughtful Psalmist, Behmen’s steps had well-nigh
slipped when he saw the prosperity of the wicked, and when he saw how
waters of a full cup were so often wrung out to the people of God.
The mystery of life,
the sin and misery of life, cast Behmen into a deep and inconsolable
melancholy. No Scripture could comfort him. His thoughts
of God were such that he will not allow himself,
even after they are long past, to put them down on paper. In this
terrible trouble he lifted up his heart to God,
little knowing, as yet, what God was, or
what his own heart was. Only, he wrapped up his whole heart, and
mind, and will, and desire in the love and the mercy of God:
determined not to give over till God had
heard him and had helped him. ‘And then, when I had wholly
hazarded my life upon what I was doing, my whole spirit seemed to me
suddenly to break through the gates of hell, and to be taken up into
the arms and the heart of God. I can
compare it to nothing else but the resurrection at the last day.
For then, with all reverence I say it, with the eyes of my spirit I
saw God. I saw both what God
is, and I saw how God is what He is.
And with that there came a mighty and an incontrollable impulse to set
it down, so as to preserve what I had seen. Some men will mock
me, and will tell me to stick to my proper trade, and not trouble my
mind with philosophy and theology. Let these high matters alone.
Leave them to those who have both the time and the talent for them,
they will say. So I have often said to myself, but the truth of
God did burn in my bones till I took pen
and ink and began to set down what I had seen. All this time do
not mistake me for a saint or an angel. My heart also is full
of all evil. In malice, and in hatred, and in lack of brotherly
love, after all I have seen and experienced, I
am like all other men. I am surely the fullest of all men of all
manner of infirmity and malignity.’ Behmen protests in every
book of his that what he has written he has received immediately from
God. ‘Let it never be imagined
that I am any greater or any better than other men. When the Spirit
of God is taken away from me I cannot even
read so as to understand what I have myself written. I have every
day to wrestle with the devil and with my own heart, no man in all the
world more. Oh no! thou must not for one moment think of me as
if I had by my own power or holiness climbed up into heaven or descended
into the abyss. Oh no! hear me. I am as thou art.
I have no more light than thou hast. Let no man think of me what
I am not. But what I am all men may be who will truly believe,
and will truly wrestle
for truth and goodness under Jesus Christ.
I marvel every day that God should reveal
both the Divine Nature and Temporal and Eternal Nature for the first
time to such a simple and unlearned man as I am. But what am I
to resist what God will do? What am
I to say but, Behold the son of thine handmaiden! I have often
besought Him to take these too high and too deep matters away from off
me, and to commit them to men of more learning and of a better style
of speech. But He always put my prayer away from Him and continued
to kindle His fire in my bones. And with all my striving to quench
God’s spirit of revelation, I found
that I had only by that gathered the more stones for the house that
He had ordained me to build for Him and for His children in this world.’
Jacob Behmen’s first book, his Aurora, was not a book
at all, but a bundle of loose leaves. Nothing was further from
Behmen’s mind, when he took up his pen of an evening, than to
make a book. He took up his pen after his day’s work was
over in order to preserve for his own memory and use in after days the
revelations that had been made to him, and the experiences and exercises
through which God had passed him. And,
besides, Jacob Behmen could not have written a book even if he had tried
it. He was a total stranger to the world of books; and then, over
and above that, he had been taken up into a world of things into which
no book ever written as yet had dared to enter. Again, and again,
and again, till it came to fill his whole life, Behmen would be sitting
over his work, or walking abroad under the stars, or worshipping in
his pew in the parish
church, when, like the captive prophet by the river of Chebar, he would
be caught up by the hair of the head and carried away into the visions
of God to behold the glory of God.
And then, when he came to himself, there would arise within him a ‘fiery
instigation’ to set down for a ‘memorial’ what he
had again seen and heard. ‘The gate of the Divine Mystery
was sometimes so opened to me that in one quarter of an hour I saw and
knew more than if I had been many years together at a university.
At which I did exceedingly admire, and, though it passed my understanding
how it happened, I thereupon turned my heart to God
to praise Him for it. For I saw and knew the Being of all Beings;
the Byss and the Abyss; as, also, the Generation of the Son and the
Procession of the Spirit. I saw the descent and original of this
world also, and of
all its creatures. I saw in their order and outcome the Divine
world, the angelical world, paradise, and then this fallen and dark
world of our own. I saw the beginning of the good and the evil,
and the true origin and existence of each of them. All of which
did not only cause me great wonder but also a great joy and a great
fear. And then it came with commanding power into my mind that
I must set down the same in pen and ink for a memorial to myself; albeit,
I could hardly contain or express what I had seen. For twelve
years this went on in me. Sometimes the truth would hit me like
a sudden smiting storm of rain; and then there would be the clear sunshine
after the rain. All which was to teach me that God
will manifest Himself in the soul of man after what manner and what
measure it pleases Him and as it seems good in His sight.’
No human being knew all this time what Jacob Behmen was passing through,
and he never intended that any human being should know. But, with
all his humility, and all his love of obscurity, he could not remain
hidden. Just how it came about we are not fully told; but, long
before his book was finished, a nobleman in the neighbourhood, who was
deeply interested in the philosophy and the theology of that day, somehow
got hold of Behmen’s papers and had them copied out and spread
abroad, to Behmen’s great surprise and great distress. Copy
after copy was stealthily made of Behmen’s manuscript, till, most
unfortunately for both of them, a copy came into the hands of Behmen’s
parish minister. But for that accident, so to call it, we would
never have heard the name of Gregory Richter,
First Minister of Goerlitz, nor could we have believed that
any minister of Jesus Christ could have gone
so absolutely mad with ignorance and envy and anger and ill-will.
The libel is still preserved that Behmen’s minister drew out against
the author of Aurora, and the only thing it proves to us is this,
that its author must have been a dull-headed, coarse-hearted, foul-mouthed
man. Richter’s persecution of poor Behmen caused Behmen
lifelong trouble; but, at the same time, it served to advertise his
genius to his generation, and to manifest to all men the meekness, the
humility, the docility, and the love of peace of the persecuted man.
‘Pastor-Primarius Richter,’ says a bishop of his own communion,
‘was a man full of hierarchical arrogance and pride. He
had only the most outward apprehension of the dogmatics of his day,
and he was totally incapable of understanding Jacob Behmen.’
But it is not for the limitations of
his understanding that Pastor Richter stands before us so laden with
blame. The school is a small one still that, after two centuries
of study and prayer and a holy life, can pretend to understand the whole
of the Aurora. William Law,
a man of the best understanding, and of the humblest heart, tells us
that his first reading of Behmen put him into a ‘perfect sweat’
of astonishment and awe. No wonder, then, that a man of Gregory
Richter’s narrow mind and hard heart was thrown into such a sweat
of prejudice and anger and ill-will.
I do not propose to take you down into the deep places where Jacob
Behmen dwells and works. And that for a very good reason.
For I have found no firm footing in those deep places for my own feet.
I wade in and in to the utmost of my ability, and still there rise up
above me, and stretch out around me, and sink down
beneath me, vast reaches of revelation and speculation, attainment and
experience, before which I can only wonder and worship. See Jacob
Behmen working with his hands in his solitary stall, when he is suddenly
caught up into heaven till he beholds in enraptured vision The Most
High Himself. And then, after that, see him swept down to hell,
down to sin, and down into the bottomless pit of the human heart.
Jacob Behmen, almost more than any other man whatsoever, is carried
up till he moves like a holy angel or a glorified saint among things
unseen and eternal. Jacob Behmen is of the race of the seers,
and he stands out a very prince among them. He is full of eyes,
and all his eyes are full of light. It does not stagger me to
hear his disciples calling him, as Hegel
does, ‘a man of a mighty mind,’ or, as LAW does, ‘the
illuminated Behmen,’
and ‘the blessed Behmen.’ ‘In speculative power,’
says dry Dr. Kurtz, ‘and in poetic
wealth, exhibited with epic and dramatic effect, Behmen’s system
surpasses everything of the kind ever written.’ Some of
his disciples have the hardihood to affirm indeed that even Isaac
Newton ploughed with Behmen’s heifer, but had not the boldness
to acknowledge the debt. I entirely accept it when his disciples
assert it of their master that he had a privilege and a passport permitted
him such as no mortal man has had the like since John’s
eyes closed upon his completed Apocalypse. After repeated and
prolonged reading of Behmen’s amazing books, nothing that has
been said by his most ecstatic disciples about their adored master either
astonishes or offends me. Dante himself does not beat such a soaring
wing as Behmen’s; and
all the trumpets that sound in Paradise Lost do not swell my
heart and chase its blood like Jacob Behmen’s broken syllables
about the Fall. I would not wonder to have it pointed out to me
in the world to come that all that Gichtel, and St. Martin, and Hegel,
and Law, and Walton, and Martensen, and Hartmann have said about Jacob
Behmen and his visions of God and Nature
and Man were all but literally true. No doubt,—nay, the
thing is certain,—that if you open Jacob Behmen anywhere as Gregory
Richter opened the Aurora; if a new idea is a pain and a provocation
to you; if you have any prejudice in your heart for any reason against
Behmen; if you dislike the sound of his name because some one you dislike
has discovered him and praised him, or because you do not yourself already
know him and love him, then, no doubt, you will find plenty in Behmen
at which to stumble,
and which will amply justify you in anything you wish to say against
him. But if you are a true student and a good man; if you are
an open-minded and a humble-minded man; if you are prepared to sit at
any man’s feet who will engage to lead you a single step out of
your ignorance and your evil; if you open Behmen with a predisposition
to believe in him, and with the expectation and the determination to
get good out of him,—then, in the measure of all that; in the
measure of your capacity of mind and your hospitality of heart; in the
measure of your humility, seriousness, patience, teachableness, hunger
for truth, hunger for righteousness,—in that measure you will
find Jacob Behmen to be what Maurice tells
us he found him to be, ‘a generative thinker.’ Out
of much you cannot understand,—wherever the blame for
that may lie,—out of much slag and much dross, I am mistaken if
you will not lay up some of your finest gold; and out of much straw
and chaff some of the finest of the wheat. The Divine Nature,
human nature, time, space, matter, life, love, sin, death, holiness,
heaven, hell,—Behmen’s reader must have lived and moved
all his days among such things as these: he must be at home, as far
as the mind of man can be at home, among such things as these, and then
he will begin to understand Behmen, and will still strive better and
better to understand him; and, where he does not as yet understand him,
he will set that down to his own inattention, incapacity, want of due
preparation, and want of the proper ripeness for such a study.
At the same time let all intending students of Jacob Behmen take
warning that they will have to learn an absolutely
new and an unheard-of language if they would speak with Behmen and have
Behmen speak with them. For Behmen’s books are written neither
in German nor in English of any age or idiom, but in the most original
and uncouth Behmenese. Like John Bunyan, but never with John Bunyan’s
literary grace, Behmen will borrow, now a Latin word or phrase from
his reading of learned authors, or, more often, from the conversations
of his learned friends; and then he will take some astrological or alchemical
expression of Agrippa, or Paracelsus,
or some such outlaw, and will, as with his awl and rosin-end, sew together
a sentence, and hammer together a page of the most incongruous and unheard-of
phraseology, till, as we read Behmen’s earlier work especially,
we continually exclaim, O for a chapter of John Bunyan’s clear,
and sweet, and classical English! The Aurora was written
in a language, if writing and a language it can be called, that had
never been seen written or heard spoken before, or has since, on the
face of the earth. And as our students learn Greek in order to
read Homer and Plato and Paul and John, and Latin in order to read Virgil
and Tacitus, and Italian to read Dante, and German to read Goethe, so
William Law tells us that he learned Behmen’s Behmenite High Dutch,
and that too after he was an old man, in order that he might completely
master the Aurora and its kindred books. And as our schoolboys
laugh and jeer at the outlandish sounds of Greek and Latin and German,
till they have learned to read and love the great authors who have written
in those languages, so Wesley, and Southey,
and even Hallam himself, jest
and flout and call names at Jacob Behmen, because they have not taken
the trouble to learn his language, to master his mind, and to drink
in his spirit. At the same time, and after all that has been said
about Behmen’s barbarous style, Bishop Martensen tells us how
the readers of Schelling were surprised and
enraptured by a wealth of new expressions and new turns of speech in
their mother tongue. But all these belonged to Behmen, or were
fashioned on the model of his symbolical language. As it is, with
all his astrology, and all his alchemy, and all his barbarities of form
and expression, I for one will always take sides with the author of
The Serious Call, and The Spirit of Prayer, and The
Spirit of Love, and The Way to Divine Knowledge, in the disputed
matter of Jacob Behmen’s sanity and sanctity; and I will
continue to believe that if I had only had the scholarship, and the
intellect, and the patience, and the enterprise, to have mastered, through
all their intricacies, the Behmenite grammar and the Behmenite vocabulary,
I also would have found in Behmen all that Freher and Pordage and Law
and Walton found. Even in the short way into this great man that
I have gone, I have come upon such rare and rich mines of divine and
eternal truth that I can easily believe that they who have dug deeper
have come upon uncounted riches. ‘Next to the Scriptures,’
writes William Law, ‘my only book is the illuminated Behmen.
For the whole kingdom of grace and nature was opened in him. In
reading Behmen I am always at home, and kept close to the kingdom of
God that is within me.’ ‘I
am not young,’ said Claude De
St. Martin, ‘being now near my fiftieth year, nevertheless
I have begun to learn German, in order that I may read this incomparable
author in his own tongue. I have written some not unacceptable
books myself, but I am not worthy to unloose the shoestrings of this
wonderful man. I advise you to throw yourself into the depths
of Jacob Behmen. There is such a profundity and exaltation of
truth in them, and such a simple and delicious nutriment.’
The Town Council of Goerlitz, hounded on by their Minister, sentenced
Behmen to be banished, and interdicted him from ever writing any more.
But in sheer shame at what they had done they immediately recalled Behmen
from banishment; only, they insisted that he should confine himself
to his shop, and leave all writing of books alone. Behmen had
no ambition to write
any more, and, as a matter of fact, he kept silence even to himself
for seven whole years. But as those years went on it came to be
with him, to use his own words, as with so much grain that has been
buried in the earth, and which, in spite of storms and tempests, will,
out of its own life, spring up, and that even when reason says it is
now winter, and that all hope and all power is gone. And thus
it was that, under the same instigation which had produced the Aurora,
Behmen at a rush wrote his very fine if very difficult book, The
Three Principles of the Divine Essence. He calls The Three
Principles his A B C, and the easiest of all his books. And
William Law recommends all beginners in Behmen to read alone for some
sufficient time the tenth and twelfth chapters of The Three Principles.
I shall let Behmen describe the
contents of his easiest book in his own words. ‘In this
second book,’ he says, ‘there is declared what God
is, what Nature is, what the creatures are, what the love and meekness
of God are, what God’s
will is, what the wrath of God is, and what
joy and sorrow are. As also, how all things took their beginning:
with the true difference between eternal and transitory creatures.
Specially of man and his soul, what the soul is, and how it is an eternal
creature. Also what heaven is, wherein God
and the holy angels and holy men dwell, and hell wherein the devils
dwell: and how all things were originally created and had their being.
In sum, what the Essence of all Essences is. And thus I commit
my reader to the sweet love of God.’
The Three Principles, according to Christopher
Walton, was the first book of Behmen’s that
William Law ever held in his hand. That, then, was the title-page,
and those were the contents, that threw that princely and saintly mind
into such a sweat. It was a great day for William Law, and through
him it was, and will yet be acknowledged to have been, a great day for
English theology when he chanced, at an old bookstall, upon The Three
Principles, Englished by a Barrister of the Inner Temple.
The picture of that bookstall that day is engraven in lines of light
and love on the heart of every grateful reader of Jacob Behmen and of
William Law’s later and richer and riper writings.
In three months after he had finished The Three Principles,
Behmen had composed a companion treatise, entitled The Threefold
Life of Man. Modest about himself as Behmen always was, he
could not be wholly blind about his
own incomparable books. And he but spoke the simple truth about
his third book when he said of it—as, indeed, he was constantly
saying about all his books—that it will serve every reader just
according to his constellation, his inclination, his disposition, his
complexion, his profession, and his whole condition. ‘You
will be soon weary of all contentious books,’ he wrote to Casper
Lindern, ‘if you entertain and get The Threefold Life
of Man into your mind and heart.’ ‘The subject
of regeneration,’ says Christopher Walton, ‘is the pith
and drift of all Behmen’s writings, and the student may here be
directed to begin his course of study by mastering the first eight chapters
of The Threefold Life, which appear to have been in great favour
with Mr. Law.’
Behmen’s next book was a very extraordinary piece of work,
and it had a very extraordinary
origin. A certain Balthazar Walter,
who seems to have been a second Paracelsus in his love of knowledge
and in his lifelong pursuit of knowledge, had, like Paracelsus, travelled
east, and west, and north, and south in search of that ancient and occult
wisdom of which so many men in that day dreamed. But Walter, like
his predecessor Paracelsus, had come home from his travels a humbler
man, a wiser man, and a man more ready to learn and lay to heart the
truth that some of his own countrymen could all the time have taught
him. On his return from the east, Walter found the name of Jacob
Behmen in everybody’s mouth; and, on introducing himself to that
little shop in Goerlitz out of which the Aurora and The Threefold
Life had come, Walter was wise enough to see and bold enough to
confess that he had found a teacher and
a friend there such as neither Egypt nor India had provided him with.
After many immensely interested visits to Jacob Behmen’s workshop,
Walter was more than satisfied that Behmen was all, and more than all,
that his most devoted admirers had said he was. And, accordingly,
Walter laid a plan so as to draw upon Behmen’s profound and original
mind for a solution of some of the philosophical and theological problems
that were agitating and dividing the learned men of that day.
With that view Walter made a round of the leading universities of Germany,
conversed with the professors and students, collected a long list of
the questions that were being debated in that day in those seats of
learning, and sent the list to Behmen, asking him to give his mind to
them and try to answer them. ‘Beloved sir,’ wrote
Behmen, after three months’ meditation
and prayer, ‘and my good friend: it is impossible for the mind
and reason of man to answer all the questions you have put to me.
All those things are known to God alone.
But, that no man may boast, He sometimes makes use of very mean men
to make known His truth, that it may be seen and acknowledged to come
from His own hand alone.’ It is told that when Charles the
First read the English translation of Behmen’s answers to the
Forty Questions, he wrote to the publisher that if Jacob Behmen
was no scholar, then the Holy Ghost was still with men; and, if he was
a learned man, then his book was one of the best inventions that had
ever been written. The Forty Questions ran through many
editions both on the Continent and in England, and it was this book
that gained for Jacob Behmen the denomination of
the Teutonic Philosopher, a name by which he is distinguished among
authors to this day. The following are some of the university
questions that Balthazar Walter took down and sent to Jacob Behmen for
his answer: ‘What is the soul of man in its innermost essence,
and how is it created, soul by soul, in the image of God?
Is the soul propagated from father to son like the body? or is it every
time new created and breathed in from God?
How comes original sin into each several soul? How does the soul
of the saint feed and grow upon the word of God?
Whence comes the deadly contrariety between the flesh and the spirit?
Whither goes the soul when it at death departs from the body?
In what does its rest, its awakening, and its glorification consist?
What kind of body shall the glorified body be? The soul and spirit
of Christ, what are they? and are they the
same as ours? What and where is Paradise?’ Through
a hundred and fourteen large quarto pages Behmen’s astonishing
answers to the forty questions run; after which he adds this:
‘Thus, my beloved friend, we have set down, according to our gifts,
a round answer to your questions, and we exhort you as a brother not
to despise us. For we are not born of art, but of simplicity.
We acknowledge all who love such knowledge as our brethren in Christ,
with whom we hope to rejoice eternally in the heavenly school.
For our best knowledge here is but in part, but when we shall attain
to perfection, then we shall see what God
is, and what He can do. Amen.’
A Treatise of the Incarnation of the Son of God comes next,
and then we have three smaller works written to clear up and
to establish several difficult and disputed matters in it and in some
of his former works. To write on the Incarnation of the Son of
God would need, says Behmen, an angel’s
pen; but his defence is that his is better than any angel’s pen,
because it is the pen of a sinner’s love. The year 1621
saw one of Behmen’s most original and most powerful books finished,—the
Signatura Rerum. In this remarkable book Behmen teaches
us that all things have two worlds in which they live,—an inward
world and an outward. All created things have an inner and an
invisible essence, and an outer and a visible form. And the outward
form is always more or less the key to the inward character. This
whole world that we see around us, and of which we ourselves are the
soul,—it is all a symbol, a ‘signature,’ of an invisible
world. This
deep principle runs through the whole of creation. The Creator
went upon this principle in all His work; and the thoughtful mind can
see that principle coming out in all His work,—in plants, and
trees, and beasts.
As German Boehme never cared for plants
Until it happed, a-walking in the fields,
He noticed all at once that plants could speak,
Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him.
That day the daisy had an eye indeed—
Colloquized with the cowslips on such themes!
We find them extant yet in Jacob’s prose.
But, best of all, this principle comes out clearest in the speech,
behaviour, features, and face of a man. Every day men are signing
themselves from within. Every act they perform, every word they
speak, every wish they entertain,—it all comes out and is fixed
for ever in their character, and even in their appearance. ‘Therefore,’
says Behmen in the beginning of his book, ‘the greatest understanding
lies in the signature. For by the external form of all creatures;
by their voice and action, as well as by their instigation, inclination,
and desire, their hidden spirit is made known. For Nature has
given to everything its own language according to its innermost essence.
And this is the language of Nature, in which everything continually
speaks, manifests, and declares itself for what it is,—so much
so, that all that is spoken or written even about God,
however true, if the writer or speaker has not the Divine Nature within
himself, then all he says is dumb to me; he has not got the hammer in
his hand that can strike my bell.’
The Way to Christ was Behmen’s next book, and in the
four precious treatises that compose that book our author takes an altogether
new departure. In his
Aurora, in The Three Principles, in the Forty Questions,
and in the Signatura Rerum, Jacob Behmen has been writing for
philosophers and theologians. Or, if in all these works he has
been writing for a memorial to himself in the first place,—even
then, it has been for himself on the philosophical and theological side
of his own mind. But in The Way to Christ he writes for
himself under that character which, once taken up by Jacob Behmen, is
never for one day laid down. Behmen’s favourite Scripture,
after our Lord’s promise of the Holy Spirit to them that ask for
Him, was the parable of the Prodigal Son. In all his books Behmen
is that son, covered with wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, but
at last beginning to come to himself and to return to his Father.
The Way to Christ is a production of the very greatest depth
and strength, but it
is the depth and the strength of the heart and the conscience rather
than the depth and the strength of the understanding and the imagination.
This nobly evangelical book is made up of four tracts, entitled respectively,
Of True Repentance, Of True Resignation, Of Regeneration,
and Of the Supersensual Life. And a deep vein of autobiographic
life and interest runs through the four tracts and binds them into a
quick unity. ‘A soldier,’ says Behmen, ‘who
has been in the wars can best tell another soldier how to fight.’
And neither Augustine nor Luther nor Bunyan carries deeper wounds, or
broader scars, nor tells a nobler story in any of their autobiographic
and soldierly books than Behmen does in his Way to Christ.
At the commencement of The True Repentance he promises us that
he will write of a process or
way on which he himself has gone. ‘The author herewith giveth
thee the best jewel that he hath.’ And a true jewel it is,
as the present speaker will testify. If The True Repentance
has a fault at all it is the fault of Rutherford’s Letters.
For the taste of some of his readers Behmen, like Rutherford, draws
rather too much on the language and the figures of the married life
in setting forth the love of Christ to the
espoused soul, and the love of the espoused soul to Christ.
But with that, and all its other drawbacks, The True Repentance
is such a treatise that, once discovered by the proper reader, it will
be the happy discoverer’s constant companion all his earthly and
penitential days. As the English reader is carried on through
the fourth tract, The Supersensual Life, he experiences a new
and an increasing sense of ease and pleasure, combined with
a mystic height and depth and inwardness all but new to him even in
Behmen’s books. The new height and depth and inwardness
are all Jacob Behmen’s own; but the freedom and the ease and the
movement and the melody are all William Law’s. In his preparations
for a new edition of Behmen in English, William Law had re-translated
and paraphrased The Supersensual Life, and the editor of the
1781 edition of Behmen’s works has incorporated Law’s beautiful
rendering of that tract in room of John Sparrow’s
excellent but rather too antique rendering. We are in John Sparrow’s
everlasting debt for the immense labour he laid out on Behmen, as well
as for his own deep piety and personal worth. But it was service
enough and honour enough for Sparrow to have Englished Jacob Behmen
at all for his fellow-countrymen,
even if he was not able to English him as William Law would have done.
But take Behmen and Law together, as they meet together in The Supersensual
Life, and not A Kempis himself comes near them even in his own proper
field, or in his immense service in that field. There is all the
reality, inwardness, and spirituality of The Imitation in The
Supersensual Life, together with a sweep of imagination, and a grasp
of understanding, as well as with both a sweetness and a bitterness
of heart that even A Kempis never comes near. The Supersensual
Life of Jacob Behmen, in the English of William Law, is a superb
piece of spiritual work, and a treasure-house of masculine English.
(If Christopher Walton is right, we must read ‘Lee’ for
‘Law’ in this passage. If Walton is right, then there
was a master of English
in those days we had not before been told of.)
A Treatise of the Four Complexions, or A Consolatory Instruction
for a Sad and Assaulted Heart, was Behmen’s next book.
The four complexions are the four temperaments—the choleric, the
sanguine, the phlegmatic, and the melancholy. Behmen’s treatise
has been well described by Walton as containing the philosophy of temptation;
and by Martensen as displaying a most profound knowledge of the human
heart. Behmen sets about his task as a ductor dubitantium
in a masterly manner. He takes in hand the comfort and direction
of sin-distressed souls in a characteristically deep, inward, and thorough-going
way. The book is full of Behmen’s observation of men.
It is the outcome of a close and long-continued study of character and
conduct. Every page
of The Four Complexions gleams with a keen but tender and wistful
insight into our poor human nature. As his customers came and
gave their orders in his shop; as his neighbours collected, and gossiped,
and debated, and quarrelled around his shop window; as his minister
fumed and raged against him in the pulpit; as the Council of Goerlitz
sat and swayed, passed sentence upon him, retracted their sentence,
and again gave way under the pressure of their minister, and pronounced
another sentence,—all this time Behmen was having poor human nature,
to all its joints and marrow, and to all the thoughts and instincts
of its heart, laid naked and open before him, both in other men and
in himself. And then, as always with Behmen, all this observation
of men, all this discovery and self-discovery, ran
up into philosophy, into theology, into personal and evangelical religion.
In all that Behmen better and better saw the original plan, constitution,
and operation of human nature; its aboriginal catastrophe; its weakness
and openness to all evil; and its need of constant care, protection,
instruction, watchfulness, and Divine help. Behmen writes on all
the four temperaments with the profoundest insight, and with the fullest
sympathy; but over the last of the four he exclaims: ‘O hear me!
for I know well myself what melancholy is! I also have lodged all my
days in the melancholy inn!’ As I read that light and elastic
book published the other day, The Life and Letters of Erasmus,
I came on this sentence, ‘Erasmus, like all men of real genius,
had a light and elastic nature.’ When I read that, I
could not believe my eyes. I had been used to think of light and
elastic natures as being the antipodes of natures of real genius.
And as I stopped my reading for a little, a procession of men of real
and indisputable genius passed before me, who had all lodged with Behmen
in the melancholy inn. Till I remembered that far deeper and far
truer saying, that ‘simply to say man at all is to say melancholy.’
No: with all respect, the real fact is surely as near as possible the
exact opposite. A light, elastic, Erasmus-like nature, is the
exception among men of real genius. At any rate, Jacob Behmen
was the exact opposite of Erasmus, and of all such light and elastic
men. Melancholy was Jacob Behmen’s special temperament and
peculiar complexion. He had long studied, and watched, and wrestled
with, and prayed over that complexion
at home. And thus it is, no doubt, that he is so full, and so
clear, and so sure-footed, and so impressive, and so full of fellow-feeling
in his treatment of this special complexion. Behmen’s greatest
disciple has assimilated his master’s teaching in this matter
of complexion also, and has given it out again in his own clear, plain,
powerful, classical manner, especially in his treatise on Christian
Regeneration. Let all preachers and pastors who would master
the rationale of temptation, and who would ground their directions
and their comforts to their people in the nature of things, as well
as in the word of God, make Jacob Behmen
and William Law and Prebendary Clark their constant study. ‘I
write for no other purpose,’ says Behmen, ‘than that men
may learn how to know themselves. Seek the noble
knowledge of thyself. Seek it and you will find a heavenly treasure
which will not be eaten by moths, and which no thief shall ever take
away.’
I shall not attempt to enter on the thorny thicket of Jacob Behmen’s
polemical and apologetical works. I shall not even load your mind
with their unhappy titles. His five apologies occupy in bulk somewhere
about a tenth part of his five quarto volumes. And full as his
apologies and defences are of autobiographic material, as well as of
valuable expansions and explanations of his other books, yet at their
best they are all controversial and combative in their cast and complexion;
and, nobly as Behmen has written on the subject of controversy, it was
not given even to him, amid all the misunderstandings, misrepresentations,
injuries, and insults he suffered from, always to write what we
are glad and proud and the better to read.
About his next book Behmen thus writes: ‘Upon the desire of
some high persons with whom I did converse in the Christmas holidays,
I have written a pretty large treatise upon Election, in which I have
done my best to determine that subject upon the deepest grounds.
And I hope that the same may put an end to many contentions and controversies,
especially of some points betwixt the Lutherans and Calvinists, for
I have taken the texts of Holy Scripture which speak of God’s
will to harden sinners, and then, again, of His unwillingness to harden,
and have so tuned and harmonised them that the right understanding and
meaning of the same may be seen.’ ‘This author,’
says John Sparrow, ‘disputes not at all. He desires only
to confer and offer
his understanding of the Scriptures on both sides, answering reason’s
objections, and manifesting the truth for the conjoining, uniting, and
reconciling of all parties in love.’ And that he has not
been wholly unsuccessful we may believe when we hear one of Behmen’s
ablest commentators writing of his Election as ‘a superlatively
helpful book,’ and again, as a ‘profoundly instructive treatise.’
The workman-like way in which Behmen sets about his treatment of the
Election of Grace, commonly called Predestination, will be seen
from the titles of some of his chapters. Chap. i. What the
One Only God is. Chap. ii. Concerning
God’s Eternal Speaking Word.
Chap. v. Of the Origin of Man; Chap. vi. Of the Fall of
Man. Chap. viii. Of the sayings of Scripture, and how they
oppose one another. Chap. ix. Clearing the Right Understanding
of such Scriptures.
Chap. xiii. A Conclusion upon all those Questions. And then,
true to his constant manner, as if wholly dissatisfied with the result
of all his labour in things and in places too deep both for writer and
reader, he gave all the next day after he had finished his Election
to an Appendix on Repentance, in order to making his own and
his reader’s calling and election sure. And it may safely
be said that, than that day’s work, than those four quarto pages,
not Augustine, not Luther, not Bunyan, not Baxter, not Shepard has ever
written anything of more evangelical depth, and strength, and passion,
and pathos. It is truly a splendid day’s work! But
it might not have been possible even for Behmen to perform that day’s
work had he not for months beforehand been dealing day and night with
the deepest and the most heart-searching things
both of God and man. What a man was
Jacob Behmen, and chosen to what a service! At work all that day
in his solitary stall, and then all the night after over his rush-light
writing for a memorial to himself and to us his incomparable Compendium
of Repentance.
In a letter addressed to one of the nobility in Silesia, and dated
February 19, 1623, Behmen says: ‘When you have leisure to study
I shall send you something still more deep, for I have written this
whole autumn and winter without ceasing.’ And if he had
written nothing else but his great book entitled Mysterium Magnum
that autumn and winter, he must have written night and day and done
nothing else. Even in size the Mysterium is an immense
piece of work. In the English edition it occupies the whole of
the third quarto volume of 507 pages; and then for its matter
it is a still more amazing production. To say that the Mysterium
Magnum is a mystical and allegorical commentary upon the Book of
Genesis is to say nothing. Philo himself is a tyro and a timid
interpreter beside Jacob Behmen. ‘Which things are an allegory,’
says the Apostle, after a passing reference to Sarah and Hagar and Isaac
and Ishmael; but if you would see actually every syllable of Genesis
allegorised, spiritualised, interpreted of Christ,
and of the New Testament, from the first verse of its first chapter
to the last verse of its last chapter, like the nobleman of Silesia,
when you have leisure, read Behmen’s deep Mysterium Magnum.
I would recommend the enterprising and unconquerable student to make
leisure so as to master Behmen’s Preface to the Mysterium Magnum
at the very least. And if he does that, and
is not drawn on from that to be a student of Behmen for the rest of
his days, then, whatever else his proper field in life may be, it is
not mystical or philosophical theology. It is a long step both
in time and in thought from Behmen to Schopenhauer;
but, speaking of one of Schelling’s books, Schopenhauer says that
it is all taken from Jacob Behmen’s Mysterium Magnum; every
thought and almost every word of Schelling’s work leads Schopenhauer
to think of Behmen. ‘When I read Behmen’s book,’
says Schopenhauer, ‘I cannot withhold either admiration or emotion.’
At his far too early death Behmen left four treatises behind him in
an unfinished condition. The Theoscopia, or Divine Vision,
is but a fragment; but, even so, the study of that fragment leads us
to believe that, had Behmen lived to the ordinary limit of human life,
and had his mind continued to grow as it was now fast growing in clearness,
in concentration, and in simplicity, Behmen would have left to us not
a few books as classical in their form as all his books are classical
in their substance; in their originality, in their truth, in their depth,
and in their strength. As it is, the unfinished, the scarcely-begun,
Theoscopia only serves to show the student of what a treasure
he has been bereft by Behmen’s too early death. As I read
and re-read the Theoscopia I felt the full truth and force of
Hegel’s generous words, that German philosophy began with Behmen.
This is both German and Christian philosophy, I said to myself as I
revelled in the Theoscopia. Let the serious student listen
to the titles of some of the chapters of the Theoscopia, and
then let him say what he would not have given to have got
such a book from such a pen in its completed shape: ‘What
God is, and how we men shall know the Divine
Substance by the Divine Revelation. Why it sometimes seems as
if there were no God, and as if all things
went in the world by chance. Why God,
who is Love itself, permits an evil will contrary to His own.
The reason and the profit, why evil should be found along with good.
Of the mind of man, and how it is the image of God,
and how it can still be filled with God. Why this Temporal Universe
is created; to what it is profitable; and how God is so near unto all
things’: and so on. ‘But no amount of quotation,’
says Mrs. Penney, that very able student of Behmen, lately deceased,
‘can give an adequate glimpse of the light which streams from
the Theoscopia when long and patiently studied.’
Another unfinished fragment that Behmen’s readers seek for
and treasure up like very sand of gold is his Holy Week.
This little work, its author tells us, was undertaken upon the entreaty
and desire of some loving and good friends of his for the daily exercise
of true religion in their hearts and in the little church of their families.
The following is Behmen’s method of prayer for Monday, which is
the only day’s prayer he got finished before his death:
‘A short prayer when we awake early and before we rise.
A prayer and thanksgiving after we are risen. A prayer while we
wash and dress. A prayer when we begin to work at our calling.
A prayer at noon. A prayer toward evening. A prayer when
we undress. A prayer of thanks for the bitter passion and dying
of Jesus Christ.’ What does the
man mean? many of his
contemporaries who came upon his Holy Week would say, What does
the madman mean? Would he have us pray all day? Would he
have us pray and do nothing else? Yes; it would almost seem so.
For in his Supersensual Life the Master says to the disciple
who has asked, ‘How shall I be able to live aright amid all the
anxiety and tribulation of this world?’: ‘If thou dost once
every hour throw thyself by faith beyond all creatures into the abysmal
mercy of God, into the sufferings of Christ,
and into the fellowship of His intercession, then thou shalt receive
power from above to rule over the world, and death, and the devil, and
hell itself.’ And again, ‘O thou of little courage,
if thy will could but break itself off every half-hour from all creatures,
and plunge itself into that where no creature is or can be, presently
it would be penetrated
with the splendour of the Divine glory, and would taste a sweetness
no tongue can express. Then thou wouldst love thy cross more than
all the glory and all the goods of this world.’ The author
had begun a series of reflections and meditations on the Ten Commandments
for devotional use on Tuesday, but got no further than the Fifth.
Behmen is so deep and so original in his purely philosophical, theological,
and speculative books, that in many places we can only stand back and
wonder at the man. But in his Holy Week Behmen kneels down
beside us. Not but that his characteristic depth is present in
his prayers also; but we all know something of the nature, the manner,
and the blessedness of prayer, and thus it is that we are so much more
at home with Behmen, the prodigal son, than we are with
Behmen, the theosophical theologian. When Behmen begins to teach
us to pray, and when the lesson comes to us out of his own closet, then
we are able to see in a nearer light something of the originality, the
greatness, the strength, and the true and genuine piety of the philosopher
and the theologian. When Behmen’s philosophy and theology
become penitence, prayer, and praise, then by their fruits we know how
good his philosophy and his theology must be, away down in their deepest
and most hidden nature. I agree with Walton that those prayers
are full of unction and instruction, and that some of them are of the
‘highest magnetical power’; and that, as rendered into modern
phraseology, they are most beautiful devotional compositions, and very
models of all that a divinely illuminated mind would address to
God and Christ.
For myself, immediately after the Psalms of David I put Jacob Behmen’s
Holy Week and the prayers scattered up and down through his True
Repentance, and beside Behmen I put Bishop Andrewes’ Private
Devotions. I have discovered no helps to my own devotional
life for a moment to set beside Behmen and Andrewes.
A Treatise on Baptism and the Lord’s Supper; A Key
to the Principal Points and Expressions in the Author’s Writings;
and then a most valuable volume of letters—Epistolae Theosophicae—complete
the extraordinarily rich bibliography of the illuminated and blessed
Jacob Behmen.
Though there is a great deal of needless and wearisome repetition
in Jacob Behmen’s writings, at the same time there is scarcely
a single subject in the whole range of theology on which he does not
throw a new, an intense,
and a brilliant light. In his absolutely original and magnificent
doctrine of God, while all the time loyally
true to it, Behmen has confessedly transcended the theology of both
the Latin and the Reformed Churches; and, absolutely unlettered man
though he is, has taken his stand at the very head of the great Greek
theologians. The Reformers concentrated their criticism upon the
anthropology and soteriology of the Church of Rome, and especially upon
the discipline and worship connected therewith. They saw no need
for recasting any of the more fundamental positions of pure theology.
And while Jacob Behmen, broadly speaking, accepts as his own confession
of faith all that Luther and Calvin and their colleagues taught on sin
and salvation, on the corruption and guilt of sinners, and on the redeeming
work of our Lord,
he rises far above the greatest and best of his teachers in his doctrine
of the Godhead. Not only does he rise
far higher in that doctrine than either Rome or Geneva, he rises far
higher and sounds far deeper than either Antioch, or Alexandria, or
Nicomedia, or Nice. On this profound point Bishop Martensen has
an excellent appreciation of Behmen. After what I have taken upon
me to say about Behmen, the learned Bishop’s authoritative passage
must be quoted:—‘If we compare Behmen’s doctrine of
the Trinity,’ says the learned and evangelical Bishop, ‘with
that which is contained in the otherwise so admirable Athanasian Creed,
the latter but displays to us a most abstruse metaphysic; a God
for mere thought, and in whom there is nothing sympathetic for the heart
of man. Behmen, on the contrary,
reveals to us the Living God, the God
of Goodness, the Eternal Love, of which there is absolutely no hint
whatever in the hard Athanasian symbol. By this attitude of his
to the affections of the human heart, Behmen’s doctrine of the
Trinity is in close coherence with the Reformation, and with its evangelical
churches. . . . Behmen is anxious to state a conception of God
that will fill the hiatus between the theological and anthropological
sides of the dogmatical development which was bequeathed by the Reformation;
he seeks to unite the theological and the anthropological. . . . From
careful study of Behmen’s theology,’ continues Bishop Martensen,
‘one gains a prevailing impression that Behmen’s God
is, in His inmost Being, most kindred to man, even as man in his inmost
being is still kindred to God. And,
besides, we recognise in Behmen throughout
the pulse-beat of a believing man, who is in all his books supremely
anxious about his own salvation and that of his fellow-men.’
Now, it is just this super-confessional element in Behmen, both on his
speculative and on his practical side, taken along with the immediate
and intensely practical bearing of all his speculations, it is just
this that is Behmen’s true and genuine distinction, his shining
and unshared glory. And it is out of that supreme, solitary, and
wholly untrodden field of Behmen’s super-confessional theology
that all that is essential, characteristic, distinctive, and fruitful
in Behmen really and originally springs. The distinctions he takes
within, and around, and immediately beneath the Godhead, are of themselves
full of the noblest light. The Divine Nature, Eternal Nature,
Temporal Nature, Human
Nature, when evolved out of one another, and when related to one another,
as Behmen sees them evolved and related, are categories of the clearest,
surest, most necessary, and most intensely instructive kind. And
if the height and the depth, the massiveness, the stupendousness, and
the grandeur, as well as the sweetness, and the beauty, and the warmth,
and the fruitfulness of a doctrine of God
is any argument or evidence of its truth, then Behmen’s magnificent
doctrine of the Godhead is surely proved
to demonstration and delight. God is
the Essence of all Essences to Behmen. God
is the deepest Ground, the living and the life-giving Root of all existence.
At the same time, the Divine Nature is so Divine; It is so high and
so deep; It is so unlike all that is not Itself; It is so beyond and
above all language, and all
thought, and all imagination of man or angel, that universe after universe
have had to come into existence, and have had to be filled, each successive
universe after its own kind, with all the fulness of God,
before that universe of which we form a part, and to which our utmost
imagination is confined, could have come into existence, and into recognition
of itself. Behmen’s Eternal Nature must never be taken for
the Eternal God. The Divine Nature,
the Eternal Godhead, exists in the Father, in the Son, and in the Holy
Ghost; and then, after the Eternal Generation of the Son, and the Eternal
Procession of the Holy Ghost, there comes up in order of existence Eternal
Nature. Eternal Nature is not the Divine Nature, but it is as
near to the Divine Nature in its qualities and in its powers as any
created thing can ever
by any possibility be. Now, if we are still to follow Behmen,
we must not let ourselves indolently think of the production of Eternal
Nature as a divine act done and completed in any past either of time
or of eternity. There is neither past nor future where we are
now walking with Behmen. There is only an everlasting present
where he is now leading us. For, as God
the Father generates the Son eternally and continually; and as the Holy
Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son eternally and continually,
so God the Word eternally and continually
says, ‘Let this Beginning of all things be, and let it continue
to be.’ And, as He speaks, His Word awakens the ever-dawning
morning of the ever new-created day. And He beholds Eternal Nature
continually rising up before Him, and He pronounces it very good.
The Creator so transcends
the creation, and, especially, that late and remote creation of which
we are a part, that, as the Creator’s first step out of Himself,
and as a step towards our creation, is His creation, generation, or
other production of a nature or universe that shall be capable of receiving
immediately into itself all that of the Creator that He has purposed
to reveal and to communicate to creatures,—a nature or universe
which shall at the same time be itself the beginning of creation, and
the source, spring, and quarry out of which all that shall afterwards
come can be constructed. Eternal Nature is thus the great storehouse
and workshop in which all the created essences, elements, principles,
and potentialities of all possible worlds are laid up. Here is
the great treasury and laboratory into which the Filial Word enters,
when by Him God
creates, sustains, and perfects the worlds, universe after universe.
Here, says Behmen, is the great and universal treasury of that heavenly
clay of which all things, even to angels and men, are made; and here
is the eternal turning-wheel with which they are all framed and fashioned.
Eternal Nature is an invisible essence, and it is the essential ground
out of which all the visible and invisible worlds are made. For
the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
In that radiant original universe also all the thoughts of God
which were to usward from everlasting, all the Divine ideas, patterns,
and plans of things, are laid open, displayed, copied out and sealed
up for future worlds to see carried out. ‘Through this Kingdom
of Heaven, or Eternal Nature,’ says William Law, in his Appeal
to all that Doubt,
‘is the invisible God eternally breaking
forth and manifesting Himself in a boundless height and depth of blissful
wonders, opening and displaying Himself to all His heavenly creatures
in an infinite variety and an endless multiplicity of His powers, beauties,
joys, and glories. So that all the inhabitants of heaven are for
ever knowing, seeing, hearing, feeling, and variously enjoying all that
is great, amiable, infinite, and gracious in the Divine Nature.’
And again, in his Way to Divine Knowledge: ‘Out of this
transcendent Eternal Nature, which is as universal and immense as the
Godhead itself, do all the highest beings, cherubims and seraphims,
all the hosts of angels, and all intelligent spirits, receive their
birth, existence, substance, and form. And they are one and united
in one, God in them, and they in God,
according to the prayer
of Christ for His disciples, that they, and
He, and His Holy Father might be united in one.’ A little
philosophy, especially when the philosopher does not yet know the plague
of his own heart, tends, indeed, to doubt and unbelief in the word of
God and in the work of Christ.
But the philosophy of Behmen and Law will deepen the mind and subdue
the heart of the student till he is made a prodigal son, a humble believer,
and a profound philosopher, both in nature and in grace, like his profound
masters.
Behmen’s teaching on human nature, his doctrine of the heart
of man, and of the image of God in the heart
of man, has a greatness about it that marks it off as being peculiarly
Behmen’s own doctrine. He agrees with the catechisms and
the creeds in their teaching that the heart of man was at first like
the heart of God in knowledge, righteousness,
and true holiness. But Behmen is above and beyond the catechisms
in this also, in the way that he sees the heart of man still opening
in upon the Divine Nature, as also upon Eternal and Temporal Nature,
somewhat as the heart of God opens on all
that He has made. On every page of his, wherever you happen to
open him, Behmen is found teaching that God
and Christ, heaven and hell, life and death,
are in every several human heart. Heaven and all that it contains
is every day either being quenched and killed in every human heart,
or it is being anew generated, rekindled, and accepted there; and in
like manner hell. ‘Yea,’ he is bold to exclaim, ‘God
Himself is so near thee that the geniture of the Holy Trinity is continually
being wrought in thy heart. Yea, all the Three Persons are generated
for thee in thy heart.’ And, again: ‘God
is in thy dark heart. Knock, and He shall come out within thee
into the light. The Holy Ghost holds the key of thy dark heart.
Ask, and He shall be given to thee within thee. Do not let any
sophister teach thee that thy God is far
aloft from thee as the stars are. Only offer at this moment to
God thine heart, and Christ,
the Son of God, will be born and formed within
thee. And then thou art His brother, His flesh, and His spirit.
Thou also art a child of His Father. God
is in thee. Power, might, majesty, heaven, paradise, elements,
stars, the whole earth—all is thine. Thou art in Christ
over hell, and all that it contains.’ ‘Behmen’s
speculation,’ Martensen is always reminding us, ‘streams
forth from the deepest practical inspiration. His speculations
are all saturated with
a constant reference to salvation. His whole metaphysic is pervaded
by practical applications.’ And conspicuously so, we may
here point out, is his metaphysic of God
and of the heart of man. The immanence of God,
as theologians and philosophers call it; the indwelling of God,
as the psalmists and the apostles and the saints call it; the Divine
Word lightening every man that comes into the world, as John has it,—of
the practical and personal bearings of all that Behmen’s every
book is full. Dost thou not see it and feel it? he continually
calls to his readers. Heaven, be sure, is in every holy man, and
hell in every bad man. When thou dost work together with God
then thou art in heaven, and thy soul dwells in God.
In like manner, also, thou art in hell and among the devils when thou
art in any envy, malice, anger,
or ill-will. Thou needest not to ask where is heaven or where
is hell. Both are within thee, even in thy heart. Now, then,
when thou prayest, pray in that heaven that is within thee, and there
the Holy Ghost shall meet with thee and will help thee, and thy soul
shall be the whole of heaven within thee. It is a fundamental
doctrine of Behmen’s that the fall would have been immediate and
eternal death to Adam and Eve had not the Divine Word, the Seed of the
woman, entered their hearts, and kept a footing in their hearts, and
in the hearts of all their children, against the fulness of time when
He would take our flesh and work out our redemption. And thus
it is that Behmen appeals to all his readers, that if they will only
go down deep enough into their own hearts—then, there, down there,
deeper than indwelling
sin, deeper than original sin, deep down and seated in the very substance
and centre of their souls—they will come upon secret and unexpected
seeds of the Divine Life. Seeds, blades, buddings, and new beginnings
of the very life of God the Son, in their
deepest souls. Secret and small, Behmen exclaims, as those seeds
of Eden are, despise them not; destroy them not, for a blessing for
thee is in them. Water those secret seeds, sun them, dig about
them, and they will grow up in you also. The Divine Life is in
you, quench it not, for it is of God.
Nay, it is God Himself in you. It depends
upon yourself whether or no that which is at this moment the smallest
of all seeds is yet to become in you the greatest and the most fruitful
of all trees.
‘Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is,’ is a characteristic
saying of a fellow-countryman
of Behmen’s. And Behmen’s super-confessional and almost
super-scriptural treatment of that frequent scriptural anthropomorphism,—‘unavoidable
and yet intolerable,’—the wrath of God,
must be left by me in Behmen’s own bold pages. Strong meat
belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of
use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.
Behmen’s philosophical, theological, and experimental doctrine
of sin also, with one example, must be wholly passed by. ‘If
all trees were clerks,’ he exclaims in one place, ‘and all
their branches pens, and all the hills books, and all the water ink,
yet all would not sufficiently declare the evil that sin hath done.
For sin has made this house of heavenly light to be a den of darkness;
this house of joy to be a house of mourning, lamentation, and
woe; this house of all refreshment to be full of hunger and thirst;
this abode of love to be a prison of enmity and ill-will; this seat
of meekness to be the haunt of pride and rage and malice. For
laughter sin has brought horror; for munificence, beggary; and for heaven,
hell. Oh, thou miserable man, turn convert. For the Father
stretches out both His hands to thee. Do but turn to Him and He
will receive and embrace thee in His love.’ It was the sin
and misery of this world that first made Jacob Behmen a philosopher,
and it was the sinfulness of his own heart that at last made him a saint.
Behmen’s full doctrine and practice of prayer also; his fine and
fruitful treatment of what he always calls ‘the process of Christ’;
and, intimately connected with that, his still super-confessional treatment
of imputation,—of all that,
and much more like that, I cannot now attempt to speak. Nor yet
of his superb teaching on love. ‘Throw out thy heart upon
all men,’ he now commands and now beseeches us. ‘Throw
open and throw out thy heart. For unless thou dost exercise thy
heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man in the world, thy self-love,
thy pride, thy contempt, thy envy, thy distaste, thy dislike will still
have dominion over thee. The Divine Nature will be quenched and
extinguished in thee, till nothing but self and hell is left to thee.
In the name, and in the strength of God,
love all men. Love thy neighbour as thyself, and do to thy neighbour
as thou doest to thyself. And do it now. For now is the
accepted time; and now is the day of salvation!’
Jacob Behmen died in his fiftieth year. He was libelled and
maligned, harassed
and hunted to death by a world that was not worthy of such a gift of
God. A sudden and severe sickness came
upon Behmen till he sank in death with his Aurora and his Holy
Week and his Divine Vision all lying still unfinished at
his bedside. ‘Open the door and let in more of that music,’
the dying man said to his weeping son. Behmen was already hearing
the harpers harping with their harps. He was already taking his
part in the song they sing in heaven to Him who loved them, and washed
them from their sins in His own blood. ‘And now,’
said the prodigal son, the blessed Behmen, ‘I go to-day to be
with my Redeemer and my King in Paradise,’ and so died.