Chapter 2

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.'