Jacob Behmen | Page 2

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 but, Behold the son of thine handmaiden! I have often besought Him to take these too high and too deep matters away from off me, and to commit them to men of more learning and of a better style of speech. But He always put my prayer away from Him and continued to kindle His fire in my bones. And with all my striving to quench GOD'S spirit of revelation, I found that I had only by that gathered the more stones for the house that He had ordained me to build for Him and for His children in this world.'
Jacob Behmen's first book, his Aurora, was not a book at all, but a bundle of loose leaves. Nothing was further from Behmen's mind, when he took up his pen of an evening, than to make a book. He took up his pen after his day's work was over in order to preserve for his own memory and use in after days the revelations that had been made to him, and the experiences and exercises through which GOD had passed him. And, besides, Jacob Behmen could not have written a book even if he had tried it. He was a total stranger to the world of books; and then, over and above that, he had been taken up into a world of things into which no book ever written as yet had dared to enter. Again, and again, and again, till it came to fill his whole life, Behmen would be sitting over his work, or walking abroad under the stars, or worshipping in his pew in the parish church, when, like the captive prophet by the river of Chebar, he would be caught up by the hair of the head and carried away into the visions of GOD to behold the glory of GOD. And then, when he came to himself, there would arise within him a 'fiery instigation' to set down for a 'memorial' what he had again seen and heard. 'The gate of the Divine Mystery was sometimes so opened to me that in one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at a university.