Jacob Behmen | Page 4

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 we read Behmen's earlier work especially, we continually exclaim, O for a chapter of John Bunyan's clear, and sweet, and classical English! The