Jacob Behmen

Jacob Behmen

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Jacob Behmen, by Alexander Whyte
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Title: Jacob Behmen an appreciation
Author: Alexander Whyte

Release Date: July 16, 2005 [eBook #16306]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JACOB
BEHMEN***

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