Chapter VII

When I myself from mine own self do quit,
And each thing else; then all-spreaden love
To the vast Universe my soul doth fit,
Makes me half equall to all-seeing Jove.
My mighty wings high stretch’d then clapping light,
I brush the stars and make them shine more bright.

Then all the works of God with close embrace
I dearly hug in my enlarged arms,
All the hid pathes of heavenly love I trace,
And boldly listen to his secret charms.
Then clearly view I where true light doth rise,
And where eternal Night low-pressed lies.

HENRY MORE.

WILLOUGHBY’S ESSAY—FIFTH EVENING.

§ 5. _Jacob Behmen—his Materials and Style of Workmanship._

It has been too much the custom to regard Jacob Behmen as a kind of
speculative Melchisedek—a prodigy without doctrinal father or
mother. Let us endeavour to form a correct estimate of the debt he
owes to his mystical predecessors.

The much-pondering shoemaker consulted the writings of Schwenkfeld
and Weigel in his distress. He found these authors crying
unceasingly, ‘Barren are the schools; barren are all forms;
barren—worse than barren, these exclusive creeds, this deadly
polemic letter.’ Weigel bids him withdraw into himself and await, in
total passivity, the incoming of the divine Word, whose light
reveals unto the babe what is hidden from the wise and prudent. By
the same writer he is reminded that he lives in God, and taught that
if God also dwell in him, then is he even here in Paradise—the state
of regenerate souls. Paracelsus extols the power of faith to
penetrate the mysteries of nature, and shows him how a plain man,
with his Bible only, if he be filled with the Spirit and carried out
of himself by divine communication, may seem to men a fool, but is
in truth more wise than all the doctors. Weigel says that man, as
body, soul, and spirit, belongs to three worlds—the terrestrial, the
astral, and the celestial. Both Weigel and Paracelsus teach him the
doctrine of the microcosm. They assure him that as divine
illumination reveals to him the mysteries of his own being, he will
discern proportionately the secrets of external nature. They teach
that all language, art, science, handicraft, exists potentially in
man; that all apparent acquisition from without is in reality a
revival and evolution of that which is within.

These instructors furnish the basis of Behmen’s mysticism. Having
drunk of this somewhat heady vintage, he is less disposed than ever
to abandon his search. He will sound even those abysmal questions so
often essayed, and so often, after all, resigned, as beyond the
range of human faculties. If, according to the promise, importunate
prayer can bring him light, then shall light be his. When he asks
for an answer from above to his speculative enquiry into the nature
of the Trinity, the processes of creation, the fall of angels, the
secret code of those warring forces whose conflict produces the
activity and vicissitudes of life, he does not conceive that he
implores any miraculous intervention. Provision was made, he
thought, for knowledge thus beyond what is written, in the very
constitution of man’s nature. Such wisdom was but the realization,
by the grace of God, of our inborn possibilities. It was making
actual what had otherwise been only potential. It was bringing into
consciousness an implicit acquaintance with God and nature which was
involved in the very idea of man as the offspring of the Creator and
the epitome of creation.

But of what avail is light on any minor province of enquiry, while
the fundamental perplexity is unsolved,—Whence and what is evil, and
why so masterful? How could King Vortigern build his great fortress
upon Salisbury Plain, when every day’s work was overthrown in the
night by an earthquake—the result of that nocturnal combat in the
bowels of the earth between the blood-red and the milk-white
dragons? And how, pray, was Behmen to come to rest about his own
doubts—far less erect a system,—till he had reconciled the
contradiction at the root of all? The eternal opposites must
harmonize in some higher unity. Here Paracelsus is Behmen’s Merlin.
The doctrine of Development by Contraries was passed, in the
torch-race of opinion, from Sebastian Frank to Paracelsus, and from
him to Weigel. According to this theory, God manifests himself in
opposites. The peace of Unity develops into the strife of the
Manifold. All things consist in Yea and Nay. The light must have
shadow, day night, laughter tears, health sickness, hope fear, good
evil, or they would not be what they are. Only by resistance, only
in collision, is the spark of vitality struck out, is power
realized, and progress possible. Of this hypothesis I shall have
more to say hereafter. It is the chief estate of Behmen’s
inheritance. Theosophy bequeathed him, in addition, sundry lesser
lands;—namely, the Paracelsian Triad of Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury;
the doctrine of the vitality of the world, with the ‘Fifth Element,’
or ‘Breath of Life,’ for Mundane Soul; the theory of sympathies,
stellar influence, signatures; and the alchemico-astrotheologico
jargon of the day.

Such, then, were Behmen’s principal materials. His originality is
displayed in a most ingenious arrangement and development of them;
especially in their application to theology and the interpretation
of Scripture.

The description furnished us by Behmen himself of the deciding epoch
of his life, indicates the kind of illumination to which he laid
claim. The light thus enjoyed was not shed upon a mind from which
all the inscriptions of memory had been effaced, to produce that
blank so coveted by the mystics of a former day. The cloud of glory
magnified and refracted the results of those theosophic studies to
which he confesses himself addicted.

The topographer of Fairyland, Ludwig Tieck, tells us that when the
Elf-children scatter gold-dust on the ground, waving beds of roses
or of lilies instantly spring up. They plant the seed of the pine,
and in a moment mimic pine-trees rise under their feet, carrying
upward, with the growth of their swaying arms, the laughing little
ones. So swiftly, so magically—not by labouring experiment and
gradual induction, but in the blissful stillness of one ecstatic and
consummate week,—arose the Forms and Principles of Behmen’s system,
and with them rose the seer. But how, when the season of vision is
over, shall he retain and represent the complex intricacies of the
Universal Organism in the heart of which he found himself? Memory
can only recal the mystery in fragments. Reflection can with
difficulty supplement and harmonize those parts. Language can
describe but superficially and in succession what the inner eye
beheld throughout and at once. The fetters of time and space must
fall once more on the recovered consciousness of daily life. We have
heard Behmen describe the throes he underwent, the difficulties he
overcame, as he persevered in the attempt to give expression to the
suggestions he received.[237] How long it is before he sees

The lovely members of the mighty whole—
Till then confused and shapeless to his soul,—
Distinct and glorious grow upon his sight,
The fair enigmas brighten from the Night.

To us, who do not share Behmen’s delusion, who see in his condition
the extraordinary, but nowise the supernatural, it is clear that
this difficulty was so great, not from the sublime character of
these cosmical revelations, but because of the utter confusion his
thoughts were in. Glimpses, and snatches, and notions of possible
reply to his questions, raying through as from holes in a shutter,
reveal the clouds of dust in that unswept brain of his, where
medical recipes and theological doctrines, the hard names of alchemy
and the super-subtile fancies of theosophy, have danced a whirlwind
saraband. Yet he believed himself not without special divine aid in
his endeavours to develop into speech the seed of thought deposited
within him. He apologises for bad spelling, bad grammar,
abbreviations, omissions, on the ground of the impetuosity with
which the divine impulse hurried forward his feeble pen.[238]
Unfortunately for a hypothesis so flattering, he improves visibly by
practice, like ordinary folk.

It is scarcely necessary to observe that Behmen and the mystics are
partly right and partly wrong in turning from books and schools to
intuition, when they essay to pass the ordinary bounds of knowledge
and to attain a privileged gnosis. It is true that no method of
human wisdom will reveal to men the hidden things of the divine
kingdom. But it is also true that dreamy gazing will not disclose
them either. Scholarship may not scale the heights of the
unrevealed, and neither assuredly may ignorance. There is nothing to
choose between far-seeing Lynceus and a common sailor of the Argo,
when the object for which they look out together is not yet above
the horizon. The latter, at all events, should not regard the
absence of superior endowment as an advantage.

In the more high-wrought forms of theopathetic mysticism we have
seen reason regarded as the deadly enemy of rapture. The surpassing
union which takes place in ecstasy is dissolved on the first
movement of reflection. Self-consciousness is the lamp whereby the
ill-fated Psyche at once discerns and loses the celestial lover,
whose visits cease with secrecy and night. But Behmen devoutly
employs all the powers of a most active mind to combine, to order,
to analyse, to develop, the heavenly data.

Protestant mysticism generally is, like Behmen’s, communicative. The
mysticism of the Reformation and of the Counter-Reformation afford,
in this respect, a striking contrast. That of the Romanists is, for
the most part, a veiled thing, not to be profaned by speech. It is
an ineffable privilege which description would deprive of its awe.
It is commonly a contrivance employed for effect—a flash, and
darkness. It is a distinction, in some cases, for services past; an
individual preparation, in others, for services to come. The special
revelation of the Protestant is a message to some man for his
fellow-men. It at least contemplates something practical. It is
generally reformatory. The vision of the Romish saint is a private
token of favour, or a scar of honour, or a decoration from the court
of heaven, like a cross or star.

The illumination of Behmen differs, again, from that of Swedenborg,
in that he does not profess to have held communication with spirits,
or to have passed into other worlds and states of being. While his
doctrine is, in many respects, less subjective than that of
Swedenborg, his mode of vision, so entirely internal, is more so.

The three-leaved book, says Behmen, is within me; hence all my
teaching. In man are the three gates opening on the three worlds.
Behmen’s heaven is not wholly above the sky. The subterranean
regions cannot contain his hell. The inner and spiritual sphere
underlies everywhere the material and outward.[239] As with those
hollow balls of carved ivory that come to us from the East, one is
to be discerned within the other through the open tracery. The world
is like some kinds of fruit—a plum or apple, for instance,—and has
its rind-men, its pulp-men, and its core, or kernel-men; yet all
with the same faculties,—only the first live merely on the surface
of things; the last perceive how the outer form is determined by the
central life within. Man intersects the spiritual, sidereal, and
terrestrial worlds, as a line from the centre to the outermost of
three concentric circles. Behmen would say that his insight arose
from his being aided by Divine Grace to live along the whole line of
his nature, with a completeness attained by few. He travels to and
fro on his radius. When recipient of celestial truth he is near the
centre; when he strives to give utterance and form to such
intimations, he approaches the circumference. When asked how he came
to know so much about our cosmogony, and about the origin and
œconomy of the angelic world, he would answer, ‘Because I have lived
in that region of myself which opens out upon those regions. I need
not change my place to have entrance into the heavenly sphere. I
took no Mahomet’s flight. The highest and the inmost, in the deepest
sense, are one.’[240] So it is as though man stood at a spot where
three rivers are about to join; as though to drink of the water of
each was to give him knowledge of the kind of country through which
each had passed; how one ran embrowned out of marshy lakes—through
wealthy plains—under the bridges of cities,—washing away the refuse
of manufactures; while the second came ruddy from rocks, red with
their iron rust,—came carrying white blossoms and silver-grey willow
leaves from glens far up the country, deepfolded in hanging woods;
and the water of the third, ice-cold and hyaline, presented to the
soul, as it touched the lips, visions of the glacier-portcullis from
under whose icicles it leaped at first, and of those unsullied
tracts of heavenward snow which fed its childhood at the bidding of
the sun, and watched it from the heights of eternal silence.

* * * * *

The _Aurora_ was the firstfruit of the illumination thus realized.
He composed it, he reminds us, for himself alone, to give him a hold
against any refluent doubt that might threaten to sweep him back
into the waves. It is the worst written of all his treatises. With
respect to it, the answer of Shakspeare’s Roman shoemaker gives to
Marullus may be adopted by our Teuton—‘Truly, sir, in respect of a
fine workman, I am but, as you would say, a cobbler.’ Yet this
botched performance best renders us the genuine Behmen, as he was
when first the afflatus came, before greater leisure for reading and
study, and intercourse with men of station or scholarship had given
him culture. This _Aurora_, then, over which Karl von Endern pored
in his simplicity till he rose therefrom with a bewildered
admiration and a sense of baffled amazement, physically expressed by
a feverish headache,—over whose pages Gregory Richter galloped with
scornful hoof, striking out pishes and pshaws and bahs over its
flinty ruggedness,—this _Aurora_—a dawn opening for Behmen with such
threatening weather within and without—what kind of book does it
appear to us?

It is at first with curiosity, then with impatience, and ere long
with the irritation of inevitable fatigue, that we read those wordy
pages Behmen wrote with such a furious impetus. How wide the
distance between him and his readers now! Behold him early in his
study, with bolted door. The boy must see to the shop to-day; no
sublunary cares of awl and leather, customers and groschen, must
check the rushing flood of thought. The sunshine streams in—emblem,
to his ‘high-raised phantasy,’ of a more glorious light. As he
writes, the thin cheeks are flushed, the grey eye kindles, the whole
frame is damp and trembling with excitement. Sheet after sheet is
covered. The headlong pen, too precipitate for calligraphy, for
punctuation, for spelling, for syntax, dashes on. The lines which
darken down the waiting page are, to the writer, furrows into which
heaven is raining a driven shower of celestial seed. On the chapters
thus fiercely written the eye of the modern student rests, cool and
critical, wearily scanning paragraphs digressive as Juliet’s nurse,
and protesting with contracted eyebrow, that this easy writing is
abominably hard to read. We survey this monument of an extinct
enthusiasm,—this structure, many-chambered, intricate, covering so
broad a space,—as does the traveller the remains of the Pompeian
baths;—there are the cells and channels of the hypocaust, dusty and
open to the day, the fires long since gone out, and all that made
the busy echoing halls and winding passages so full of life—the
laughter, the quarrel, the chatter of the vestibule, imagination
must supply, while Signor Inglese, beneath a large umbrella and a
straw hat, doth gaze and muse, with smarting eyes and liquefying
body.

Behmen does not suffer much more in this respect than all minds of
his class must suffer. Imagination, with its delicate sympathy, will
know how to make allowance for him; but reason will not attempt to
rescue him from condign sentence of unreadableness. It is obvious,
after all, that the good man’s inspiration was not born of the mania
Plato describes as ‘divine transport;’ that it was akin rather to
that morbid activity which is but ‘human distemper.’ It is the
prerogative of genius to transmit through the dead page, with a glow
that can never become quite cold, some rays of that central heat of
heart which burned when the writer held the pen. The power of Behmen
does not reach so far. That rapidity which was to him the witness of
the Spirit, leaves for us only the common signs of unpardonable
haste,—is tediously visible in negligence, disorder, repetitions,
and diffuseness.

As might be expected, Behmen is often best in those parts of his
writings to which he himself would have assigned less value. In many
of his letters, in some of his prefaces, and interspersed throughout
all his works, exhortations are to be found which in their pungency
and searching force recal the burning admonitions of Richard Baxter.
These appeals, summoning to religious simplicity and thoroughness,
exposing the treacheries of the heart, encouraging the
feeble-minded, awakening the sleeper, would be as eloquent and
pathetic as they are earnest and true, did he oftener know where to
stop. Such passages, however, are preludes or interludes neighboured
by heavy monologue, monotonous and protracted beyond all patience.
We descend from those serene uplands, where the air is redolent of
the cedars of Lebanon, and the voices we hear recal the sounds of
Hebrew prophecy or psalm, to the poor flats of his mortal
speculation—muddy, we must say it, in the finest weather, where
chalky streams wind their slow length by stunted pollards, over
levels of interminable verbiage.

The same ideas incessantly recur, sometimes almost in the same
words. Such repetition contributes not a little to the
discouragement and perplexity of the reader, even when most
pertinaciously bent on exploring these recesses,—as in threading his
dim way through the catacombs, the investigator loses count by the
resemblance of so many passages to each other, and seems to be
returning constantly to the same spot. With all his imagination,
Behmen has little power of elucidation, scarcely any original
illustration. The analogies suggested to him are seldom apt to his
purpose, or such as really throw light on his abstractions. To a
mind active in such direction illustrative allusions are like the
breed of ponies celebrated in the _Pirate_, that graze wild on the
Shetland hills, from among which the islander catches, as he needs,
the first that comes to hand, puts on the halter, canters it his
journey, and lets it go, never to know it more. But Behmen, when he
has laid hold of a similitude, locks the stable door upon it—keeps
it for constant service—and at some times rides the poor beast to
death. The obscurity of his writings is increased by his arbitrary
chemico-theological terminology, and the hopeless confusion in which
his philosophies of mind and matter lie entangled. His pages
resemble a room heaped in disorder, with the contents of a library
and laboratory together. In this apartment you open a folio divine,
and knock over a bottle of nitric acid;—you go to look after the
furnace, and you tumble over a pile of books. You cannot divest
yourself of the suspicion that when you have left the place and
locked the door behind you, these strange implements will assume an
unnatural life, and fantastically change places,—that the books will
some of them squeeze themselves into the crucible, and theology will
simmer on the fire, and that the portly alembic will distil a sermon
on predestination.

The _Aurora_ is broken every here and there by headings in capital
letters—promising and conspicuous sign-posts, on which are written,
‘MARK!‘—‘NOW MARK!‘—‘UNDERSTAND THIS ARIGHT!‘—‘THE GATE OF THE GREAT
MYSTERY!‘—‘MARK NOW THE HIDDEN MYSTERY OF GOD!‘—‘THE DEEPEST
DEPTH!‘—and similar delusive advertisements, pointing the wayfarer,
alas! to no satisfactory path of extrication,—places rather of
deeper peril,—spots like those in the lowlands of Northern Germany,
verdurous and seemingly solid, but concealing beneath their
trembling crust depths of unfathomable mire, whence (like fly from
treacle-jar) the unwary traveller is happy to emerge, miserably
blinded and besmeared, with a hundred-weight of mud weighing down
either limb. Often does it seem as though now, surely, a goodly
period were at hand, and Behmen were about to say something summary
and transparent: the forest opens—a little cleared land is
discernible—a solitary homestead or a charcoal-burner’s hut appears
to indicate the verge of this interminable Ardennes forest of
words—but only a little further on, the trees shut out the sky
again; it was but an interstice, not the limit; and the wild
underwood and press of trunks embarrass and obscure our course as
before. It is some poor relief when Behmen pauses and fetches breath
to revile the Devil, and in homely earnest calls him a damned
stinking goat, or asks him how he relishes his prospects; when he
stops to anticipate objections and objurgate the objectors,
dogmatizing anew with the utmost _naïveté_, and telling them to take
care, for they will find him right to a certainty at the last day;
or, finally, when he refreshes himself by a fling at the Papists,
quite Lutheran in its heartiness. For in Behmen’s mysticism there
was nothing craven, effeminate, or sentimental. He would contend to
the death for the open Bible. All spiritual servitude was his
abhorrence. Very different was the sickly mysticism for a short time
in vogue in Germany at a later period of the seventeenth century.
Behmen was no friend to what was narrow or corrupt in the
Lutheranism of his day. But a Lutheran he remained, and a genuine
Protestant. Sickly and servile natures could only sigh over the
grand religious battle of those days, and would have made away their
birthright—liberty, for that mess of pottage—peace. They began by
regarding the strife between tyranny and freedom with unmanly
indifference. They ended by exercising for the last time their
feeble private judgment, and securing themselves with obsequious
haste in the shackles of the infallible Church.

Footnote 237:

While regarding as infallibly certain the main features of the
doctrine communicated to him, Behmen is quite ready to admit the
imperfect character both of his knowledge and his setting forth
thereof. Light was communicated to him, he said, by degrees, at
uncertain intervals, and never un-mingled with obscurity.—_Aurora_,
cap. vii. § 11; cap. x. § 26, and often elsewhere.

Footnote 238:

_Aurora_, x. §§ 44, 45.

Footnote 239:

See _Aurora_, cap. xix. §§ 26-45; cap. xxiii. § 86.

After speaking of the revolt of Lucifer as the cause of the present
imperfection and admixture of natural evil in the world, by corrupting
the influence of the Fountain-Spirits throughout our department of the
universe, and of the blind and endangered condition of man consequent
thereon, he adds,—‘But thou must not suppose that on this account the
heavenly light in the Fountain-Spirits of God is utterly extinct. No;
it is but a darkness which we, with our corrupt eyesight, cannot
apprehend. But when God removes the darkness which thus broods above
the light, and thine eyes are opened, then thou seest even on the spot
where thou sittest, standest, or dost lie in thy room, the lovely face
of God, and all the gates that open upon heaven. Thou needest not
first lift thine eyes upwards to heaven, for it is written, ‘The word
is near thee, even on thy lips and in thine heart;’ Deut. xxx. 14;
Rom. x. 8. So near thee, indeed, is God, that the birth of the Holy
Trinity takes place in thine heart also, and there all three persons
are born,—Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’—_Aurora_, cap. x. §§ 57, 58.

Footnote 240:

‘The spirit of man,’ says Behmen, ‘contains a spark from the power and
light of God.’ The Holy Ghost is ‘creaturely’ within it when renewed,
and it can therefore search into the depths of God and nature, as a
child in its father’s house. In God, past, present, and future;
breadth, depth, and height; far and near, are apprehended as one, and
the holy soul of man sees them in like manner, although (in the
present imperfect state) but partially. For the devil sometimes
succeeds in smothering the seed of inward light.—_Aurora_, _Vorrede_,
§§ 96-105.

According to Behmen, Stephen, when he saw the heavens opened, and
Christ at the right hand of God, was not spiritually translated into
any distant upper region,—‘he had penetrated into the inmost
birth—into the heaven which is everywhere.’—_Aurora_, cap. xix. § 48.
Similarly, he declares that he had not ascended into heaven, and seen
with the eye of the flesh the creative processes he describes, but
that his knowledge comes from the opening within him of the gate to
the inner heavenly world, so that the divine sun arose and shone
within his heart, giving him infallible inward certainty concerning
everything he announces. If an angel from heaven had told him such
things, he must have doubted. It might have been Satan in a garb of
light: it would have been an external testimony: it would have been
beyond his comprehension; but this light and impulse from within
precludes all doubt. The holy Soul is one spirit with God, though
still a creature; sees as the angels see, and far more, since they
discern only heavenly things, but man has experience both of heaven
and hell, standing as he does midway between the two.—_Aurora_, cap.
xi. §§ 68-72 and cap. xii. § 117. Comp. also cap. xxv. §§ 46-48.