Jacob Behmen by Alexander Whyte (pdf ebook reader .TXT) 📕

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