Alexander Whyte

“ When Behmen begins to teach us to pray, and when the lesson comes to us out of his own closet, then we are able to see in a nearer light something of the originality, the greatness, the strength, and the true and genuine piety of the philosopher and the theologian. When Behmen’s philosophy and theology become penitence, prayer, and praise, then by their fruits we know how good his philosophy and his theology must be, away down in their deepest and most hidden nature. ”

“ The following are some of the university questions that Balthazar Walter took down and sent to Jacob Behmen for his answer: ‘What is the soul of man in its innermost essence, and how is it created, soul by soul, in the image of God? Is the soul propagated from father to son like the body? or is it every time new created and breathed in from God? How comes original sin into each several soul? How does the soul of the saint feed and grow upon the word of God? Whence comes the deadly contrariety between the flesh and the spirit? Whither goes the soul when it at death departs from the body? ”

“ God is the Essence of all Essences to Behmen. God is the deepest Ground, the living and the life-giving Root of all existence. At the same time, the Divine Nature is so Divine; It is so high and so deep; It is so unlike all that is not Itself ”

“ No human being knew all this time what Jacob Behmen was passing through, and he never intended that any human being should know. But, with all his humility, and all his love of obscurity, he could not remain hidden. Just how it came about we are not fully told; but, long before his book was finished, a nobleman in the neighbourhood, who was deeply interested in the philosophy and the theology of that day, somehow got hold of Behmen’s papers and had them copied out and spread abroad, to Behmen’s great surprise and great distress. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is only an everlasting present where he is now leading us. For, as God the Father generates the Son eternally and continually; and as the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son eternally and continually, so God the Word eternally and continually says, ‘Let this Beginning of all things be, and let it continue to be.’ And, as He speaks, His Word awakens the ever-dawning morning of the ever new-created day. And He beholds Eternal Nature continually rising up before Him, and He pronounces it very good. ”

“ For Nature has given to everything its own language according to its innermost essence. And this is the language of Nature, in which everything continually speaks, manifests, and declares itself for what it is,—so much so, that all that is spoken or written even about God, however true, if the writer or speaker has not the Divine Nature within himself, then all he says is dumb to me ”

“ The Divine Nature, Eternal Nature, Temporal Nature, p. 71Human Nature, when evolved out of one another, and when related to one another, as Behmen sees them evolved and related, are categories of the clearest, surest, most necessary, and most intensely instructive kind. And if the height and the depth, the massiveness, the stupendousness, and the grandeur, as well as the sweetness, and the beauty, and the warmth, and the fruitfulness of a doctrine of God is any argument or evidence of its truth, then Behmen’s magnificent doctrine of the Godhead is surely proved to demonstration and delight. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is all the reality, inwardness, and spirituality of The Imitation in The Supersensual Life, together with a sweep of imagination, and a grasp of understanding, as well as with both a sweetness and a bitterness of heart that even A Kempis never comes near. The Supersensual Life of Jacob Behmen, in the English of William Law, is a superb piece of spiritual work, and a treasure-house of masculine English. ”

“ The Holy Ghost holds the key of thy dark heart. Ask, and He shall be given to thee within thee. Do not let any sophister teach thee that thy God is far aloft from thee as the stars are. Only offer at this moment to God thine heart, and Christ, the Son of God, will be born and formed within thee. ”

“ It is a fundamental doctrine of Behmen’s that the fall would have been immediate and eternal death to Adam and Eve had not the Divine Word, the Seed of the woman, entered their hearts, and kept a footing in their hearts, and in the hearts of all their children, against the fulness of time when He would take our flesh and work out our redemption. ”

“ So that all the inhabitants of heaven are for ever knowing, seeing, hearing, feeling, and variously enjoying all that is great, amiable, infinite, and gracious in the Divine Nature.’ And again, in his Way to Divine Knowledge: ‘Out of this transcendent Eternal Nature, which is as universal and immense as the Godhead itself, do all the highest beings, cherubims and seraphims, all the hosts of angels, and all intelligent spirits, receive their birth, existence, substance, and form. ”

“ And a deep vein of autobiographic life and interest runs through the four tracts and binds them into a quick unity. ‘A soldier,’ says Behmen, ‘who has been in the wars can best tell another soldier how to fight.’ And neither Augustine nor Luther nor Bunyan carries deeper wounds, or broader scars, nor tells a nobler story in any of their autobiographic and soldierly books than Behmen does in his Way to Christ. ”

“ The Aurora was written in a language, if writing and a language it can be called, that had never been seen written or heard spoken before, or has since, on the face of the earth. And as our students learn Greek in order to read Homer and Plato and Paul and John, and Latin in order to read Virgil and Tacitus, and Italian to read Dante, and German to read Goethe, so William Law tells us that he learned Behmen’s Behmenite High Dutch, and that too after he was an old man, in order that he might completely master the Aurora and its kindred books. ”

“ Every day men are signing themselves from within. Every act they perform, every word they speak, every wish they entertain,—it all comes out and is fixed for ever in their character, and even in their appearance. ”

“ Till I remembered that far deeper and far truer saying, that ‘simply to say man at all is to say melancholy.’ No: with all respect, the real fact is surely as near as possible the exact opposite. A light, elastic, Erasmus-like nature, is the exception among men of real genius. At any rate, Jacob Behmen was the exact opposite of Erasmus, and of all such light and elastic men. ”

“ For laughter sin has brought horror; for munificence, beggary; and for heaven, hell. Oh, thou miserable man, turn convert. For the Father stretches out both His hands to thee. Do but turn to Him and He will receive and embrace thee in His love.’ It was the sin and misery of this world that first made Jacob Behmen a philosopher, and it was the sinfulness of his own heart that at last made him a saint. Behmen’s full doctrine and practice of prayer also ”

“ 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. ”

“ Power, might, majesty, heaven, paradise, elements, stars, the whole earth—all is thine. Thou art in Christ over hell, and all that it contains.’ ‘Behmen’s speculation,’ Martensen is always reminding us, ‘streams forth from the deepest practical inspiration. ”

“ Though there is a great deal of needless and wearisome repetition in Jacob Behmen’s writings, at the same time there is scarcely a single subject in the whole range of theology on which he does not throw a new, an p. 67intense, and a brilliant light. In his absolutely original and magnificent doctrine of God, while all the time loyally true to it, Behmen has confessedly transcended the theology of both the Latin and the Reformed Churches; and, absolutely unlettered man though he is, has taken his stand at the very head of the great Greek theologians. ”

“ Eternal Nature is an invisible essence, and it is the essential ground out of which all the visible and invisible worlds are made. For the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. In that radiant original universe also all the thoughts of God which were to usward from everlasting, all the Divine ideas, patterns, and plans of things, are laid open, displayed, copied out and sealed up for future worlds to see carried out. ‘Through this Kingdom of Heaven, or Eternal Nature,’ says William Law, in his Appeal p. ”

“ But as those years went on it came to be with him, to use his own words, as with so much grain that has been buried in the earth, and which, in spite of storms and tempests, will, out of its own life, spring up, and that even when reason says it is now winter, and that all hope and all power is gone. ”

“ This is both German and Christian philosophy, I said to myself as I revelled in the Theoscopia. Let the serious student listen to the titles of some of the chapters of the Theoscopia, and then let him say what he would not have given to have p. 61got such a book from such a pen in its completed shape: ‘What God is, and how we men shall know the Divine Substance by the Divine Revelation. Why it sometimes seems as if there were no God, and as if all things went in the world by chance. Why God, who is Love itself, permits an evil will contrary to His own. ”

“ Strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. Behmen’s philosophical, theological, and experimental doctrine of sin also, with one example, must be wholly passed by. ‘If all trees were clerks,’ he exclaims in one place, ‘and all their branches pens, and all the hills books, and all the water ink, yet all would not sufficiently declare the evil that sin hath done. For sin has made this house of heavenly light to be a den of darkness ”

“ Let all preachers and pastors who would master the rationale of temptation, and who would ground their directions and their comforts to their people in the nature of things, as well as in the word of God, make Jacob Behmen and William Law and Prebendary Clark their constant study. ‘I write for no other purpose,’ says Behmen, ‘than that men may learn how to know themselves. ”

“ It is so beyond and above all language, and p. 72all thought, and all imagination of man or angel, that universe after universe have had to come into existence, and have had to be filled, each successive universe after its own kind, with all the fulness of God, before that universe of which we form a part, and to which our utmost imagination is confined, could have come into existence, and into recognition of itself. Behmen’s Eternal Nature must never be taken for the Eternal God. The Divine Nature, the Eternal Godhead, exists in the Father, in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost ”

“ Eternal Nature is not the Divine Nature, but it is as near to the Divine Nature in its qualities and in its powers as any created p. 73thing can ever by any possibility be. Now, if we are still to follow Behmen, we must not let ourselves indolently think of the production of Eternal Nature as a divine act done and completed in any past either of time or of eternity. ”

“ After what I have taken upon me to say about Behmen, the learned Bishop’s authoritative passage must be quoted:—‘If we compare Behmen’s doctrine of the Trinity,’ says the learned and evangelical Bishop, ‘with that which is contained in the otherwise so admirable Athanasian Creed, the latter but displays to us a most abstruse metaphysic; a God for mere thought, and in whom there is nothing sympathetic for the heart of man. ”

“ On every page of his, wherever you happen to open him, Behmen is found teaching that God and Christ, heaven and hell, life and death, are in every several human heart. Heaven and all that it contains is every day either being quenched and killed in every human heart, or it is being anew generated, rekindled, and accepted there; and in like manner hell. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Specially of man and his soul, what the soul is, and how it is an eternal creature. Also what heaven is, wherein God and the holy angels and holy men dwell, and hell wherein the devils dwell: and how all things were originally created and had their being. In sum, what the Essence of all Essences is. And thus I commit my reader to the sweet love of God.’ The Three Principles, according to Christopher Walton, was the first book of Behmen’s p. 33that William Law ever held in his hand. ”

“ From careful study of Behmen’s theology,’ continues Bishop Martensen, ‘one gains a prevailing impression that Behmen’s God is, in His inmost Being, most kindred to man, even as man in his inmost being is still kindred to God. ”

“ Eternal Nature is thus the great storehouse and workshop in which all the created essences, elements, principles, and potentialities of all possible worlds are laid up. Here is the great treasury and laboratory into which the Filial Word enters, when p. 75by Him God creates, sustains, and perfects the worlds, universe after universe. Here, says Behmen, is the great and universal treasury of that heavenly clay of which all things, even to angels and men, are made ”