Jacob Behmen, by Alexander Whyte

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,
5th 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.

* * * * *

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