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Transcribed from the 1895 Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier editionby David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

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 studyof the pre-Reformation, Reformation, and post-Reformation Mystics duringSession 1894-5.  A Lecture on William Lawwas delivered at the opening of a former Session as an Introductionto the whole subject of Mysticism.

A. W.

St. George’s Free Church,
5th November 1894. p. 7

Jacob Behmen

Jacob Behmen, the greatest of the mystics, and the father of Germanphilosophy, was all his life nothing better than a working shoemaker. He was born at Old Seidenberg, a village near Goerlitz in Silesia, inthe year 1575, and he died at Goerlitz in the year 1624.  JacobBehmen has no biography.  Jacob Behmen’s books are his bestbiography.  While working with his hands, Jacob Behmen’swhole life was spent in the deepest and the most original thought; inpiercing visions of God and of nature; inprayer, in praise, and in love to God p. 8andman.  Of Jacob Behmen it may be said with the utmost truth andsoberness that he lived and moved and had his being in God. Jacob Behmen has no biography because his whole life was hid with Christin God.

* * * * *

While we have nothing that can properly be called a biography ofJacob Behmen, we have ample amends made to us in those priceless morselsof autobiography that lie scattered so plentifully up and down all hisbooks.  And nothing could be more charming than just those incidentaland unstudied utterances of Behmen about himself.  Into the verydepths of a passage of the profoundest speculation Behmen will all ofa sudden throw a few verses of the most childlike and heart-winningconfidences about his own mental history and his own spiritual experience.p. 9 And thus it is that,without at all intending it, Behmen has left behind him a complete historyof his great mind and his holy heart in those outbursts of diffidence,deprecation, explanation, and self-defence, of which his philosophicaland theological, as well as his apologetic and experimental, books areall so full.  It were an immense service done to our best literatureif some of Behmen’s students would go through all Behmen’sbooks, so as to make a complete collection and composition of the bestof those autobiographic passages.  Such a book, if it were welldone, 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, thatJacob Behmen’s mind and heart p. 10andspiritual experience all combine to give him a foremost place amongthe most classical masters in that great field.

In the nineteenth chapter of the Aurora there occurs a veryimportant passage of this autobiographic nature.  In that famouspassage Behmen tells his readers that when his eyes first began to beopened, the sight of this world completely overwhelmed him.  Asaph’sexperiences, so powerfully set before us in the seventy-third Psalm,will best convey, to those who do not know Behmen, what Behmen alsopassed through before he drew near to God. Like that so thoughtful Psalmist, Behmen’s steps had well-nighslipped when he saw the prosperity of the wicked, and when he saw howwaters of a full cup were so often wrung out to the people of God. The p. 11mystery of life,the sin and misery of life, cast Behmen into a deep and inconsolablemelancholy.  No Scripture could comfort him.  His thoughtsof God were such that he will not allow himself,even after they are long past, to put them down on paper.  In thisterrible trouble he lifted up his heart to God,little knowing, as yet, what God was, orwhat his own heart was.  Only, he wrapped up his whole heart, andmind, and will, and desire in the love and the mercy of God:determined not to give over till God hadheard him and had helped him.  ‘And then, when I had whollyhazarded my life upon what I was doing, my whole spirit seemed to mesuddenly to break through the gates of hell, and to be taken up intothe arms and the heart of God.  I cancompare it to nothing else but the resurrection at the last day. p. 12For then, with all reverence I say it, with the eyes of my spirit Isaw God.  I saw both what Godis, and I saw how God is what He is. And with that there came a mighty and an incontrollable impulse to setit down, so as to preserve what I had seen.  Some men will mockme, and will tell me to stick to my proper trade, and not trouble mymind 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 ofGod did burn in my bones till I took penand ink and began to set down what I had seen.  All this time donot mistake me for a saint or an angel.  My heart also is full