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

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