Chapter 1

Transcribed from the 1895 Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier edition by David Price, email [email protected]

Jacob Behmen an Appreciation by Alexander Whyte

author of 'Characters and Characteristics of William Law' etc.

Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier 30 St. Mary Street, Edinburgh, and 24 Old Bailey, London 1895

This lecture was delivered at the opening of my Classes for the study of the pre-Reformation, Reformation, and post-Reformation Mystics during Session 1894-5. A Lecture on WILLIAM LAW was delivered at the opening of a former Session as an Introduction to the whole subject of Mysticism.

A. W.

ST. GEORGE'S FREE CHURCH, 5_th November_ 1894.

Jacob Behmen

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.

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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.'