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

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,