Jacob Behmen | Page 4

moves like a holy angel
or a glorified saint among things unseen and eternal. Jacob Behmen is
of the race of the seers, and he stands out a very prince among them. He
is full of eyes, and all his eyes are full of light. It does not stagger me to
hear his disciples calling him, as HEGEL does, 'a man of a mighty
mind,' or, as LAW does, 'the illuminated Behmen,' and 'the blessed
Behmen.' 'In speculative power,' says dry DR. KURTZ, 'and in poetic
wealth, exhibited with epic and dramatic effect, Behmen's system
surpasses everything of the kind ever written.' Some of his disciples
have the hardihood to affirm indeed that even ISAAC NEWTON
ploughed with Behmen's heifer, but had not the boldness to
acknowledge the debt. I entirely accept it when his disciples assert it of
their master that he had a privilege and a passport permitted him such
as no mortal man has had the like since JOHN'S eyes closed upon his
completed Apocalypse. After repeated and prolonged reading of
Behmen's amazing books, nothing that has been said by his most
ecstatic disciples about their adored master either astonishes or offends
me. Dante himself does not beat such a soaring wing as Behmen's; and
all the trumpets that sound in Paradise Lost do not swell my heart and
chase its blood like Jacob Behmen's broken syllables about the Fall. I
would not wonder to have it pointed out to me in the world to come
that all that Gichtel, and St. Martin, and Hegel, and Law, and Walton,
and Martensen, and Hartmann have said about Jacob Behmen and his
visions of GOD and Nature and Man were all but literally true. No
doubt,--nay, the thing is certain,--that if you open Jacob Behmen
anywhere as Gregory Richter opened the _Aurora_; if a new idea is a
pain and a provocation to you; if you have any prejudice in your heart
for any reason against Behmen; if you dislike the sound of his name
because some one you dislike has discovered him and praised him, or
because you do not yourself already know him and love him, then, no
doubt, you will find plenty in Behmen at which to stumble, and which

will amply justify you in anything you wish to say against him. But if
you are a true student and a good man; if you are an open-minded and a
humble- minded man; if you are prepared to sit at any man's feet who
will engage to lead you a single step out of your ignorance and your
evil; if you open Behmen with a predisposition to believe in him, and
with the expectation and the determination to get good out of
him,--then, in the measure of all that; in the measure of your capacity of
mind and your hospitality of heart; in the measure of your humility,
seriousness, patience, teachableness, hunger for truth, hunger for
righteousness,--in that measure you will find Jacob Behmen to be what
MAURICE tells us he found him to be, 'a generative thinker.' Out of
much you cannot understand,--wherever the blame for that may
lie,--out of much slag and much dross, I am mistaken if you will not lay
up some of your finest gold; and out of much straw and chaff some of
the finest of the wheat. The Divine Nature, human nature, time, space,
matter, life, love, sin, death, holiness, heaven, hell,--Behmen's reader
must have lived and moved all his days among such things as these: he
must be at home, as far as the mind of man can be at home, among such
things as these, and then he will begin to understand Behmen, and will
still strive better and better to understand him; and, where he does not
as yet understand him, he will set that down to his own inattention,
incapacity, want of due preparation, and want of the proper ripeness for
such a study.
At the same time let all intending students of Jacob Behmen take
warning that they will have to learn an absolutely new and an
unheard-of language if they would speak with Behmen and have
Behmen speak with them. For Behmen's books are written neither in
German nor in English of any age or idiom, but in the most original and
uncouth Behmenese. Like John Bunyan, but never with John Bunyan's
literary grace, Behmen will borrow, now a Latin word or phrase from
his reading of learned authors, or, more often, from the conversations
of his learned friends; and then he will take some astrological or
alchemical expression of AGRIPPA, or PARACELSUS, or some such
outlaw, and will, as with his awl and rosin-end, sew together a sentence,
and hammer together a page of the most incongruous and unheard- of
phraseology, till, as