Behemoth

“ Hell implies a Dragon as its representative and ruler. Theology may induce the abject and cowardly to subject their human hearts to the process of induration required for loyalty to such powers, but in the end it makes atheism the only salvation of brave, pure, and loving natures. The Dragons’ breath has clouded the ancient heavens and blighted the old gods; but the starry ideals they pursue in vain. Behemoth has supplied sirloins to many priesthoods for a long time, but he has at last become too tough even for their teeth, and they feed him less carefully every year. ”

“ He does not dive so sheer as the author of Festus into the bosom of far unintelligibility, plummet-deep beyond the range of comprehension, or the shuddering gaze of the immortals. He may not be endowed with the naked eagle-eye of Gideon Stoupie, the bard of Kirriemuir, whose works we last week noticed, and whose grand alcoholic enthusiasm shouts ha, ha, to the mutchkin, as loudly as the call of the trumpet that summons Behemoth from his lair. ”

“ For the king of the Myocene period he described the Megathareum under the title of Behemoth. God opens the understanding of Job’s three mistaken friends, and makes demands for repentance and reparation. Job becomes their intercessor. The captivity of Piety ends here. ”

“ Aben Esra, on the words, “Behold now Behemoth, which I made with thee,” says—
בהמות שם בהמה גדולה אין בישוב גדולה ממנה וטעם עמך לפי שהיתה ביבשה כי באחרית יזכור הלויתן שהוא בים ויש אומרים כי טעם עמך שהבהמות נולדו ביום אחד עם אדם הראשון וזה דרך דרש ׃
“Behemoth is the name of a great beast. In the habitable world there is not a greater than it. The reason why the words ‘with thee’ are added, is, that it is a land animal, and at the end he mentions Leviathan, which is an animal of the sea. But some say the meaning of ‘with thee’ is, that the beasts were created on the same day with the first Adam ”

“ Nor do the descriptions of Behemoth and Leviathan comport with the dragon-form.
The serpent as an animal is a consummate development. Its feet, so far from having been amputated, as the fables say, in punishment of its sin, have been withdrawn beneath the skin as crutches used in a feebler period. It is found as a tertiary fossil. Since, therefore, the dragon form ex hypothesi is a reminiscence of the huge, now fossil, Saurians which preceded the serpent in time, the early mythologies could hardly have so regularly described great serpents instead of dragons. ”

“ D'ye happen to vant any fine oranges, Sir Hairon? Proud to vait upon yer at yer ouse—knows it vell. Not a Lord in the land—not the Dukey Vellintons himself has got a finer. Now.
Professor Bereshith dwelt with much earnestness upon the contemptible character of the greedy and avaricious man, and upon his inevitably low station in the scale of society; but his speech was interrupted by Mrs. Behemoth, who insisted on forcing her way to the chairman, in order to get him to buy a ring which had come into [Pg 49] her hands rather promiscuous, and was just fit for his finger. ”

“ To write on the Incarnation of the Son of God would need, says Behmen, an angel’s pen; but his defence is that his is better than any angel’s pen, because it is the pen of a sinner’s love. The year 1621 saw one of Behmen’s most original and most powerful books finished,—the Signatura Rerum. In this remarkable book Behmen teaches us that all things have two worlds in which they live,—an inward world and an outward. All created things have an inner and an invisible essence, and an outer and a visible form. And the outward form is always more or less the key to the inward character. ”

“ For unless thou dost exercise thy heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man in the world, thy self-love, thy pride, thy contempt, thy envy, thy distaste, thy dislike will still have dominion over thee. The Divine Nature will be quenched and extinguished in thee, till nothing but self and hell is left to thee. In the name, and in the strength of God, love all men. Love thy neighbour as thyself, and do to thy neighbour as thou doest to thyself. And do it now. For now is the accepted time; and now is the day of salvation!’
Jacob Behmen died in his fiftieth year. ”

“ The immanence of God, as theologians and philosophers call it; the indwelling of God, as the psalmists and the apostles and the saints call it; the Divine Word lightening every man that comes into the world, as John has it,—of the practical and personal bearings of all that Behmen’s every book is full. Dost thou not see it and feel it? he continually calls to his readers. Heaven, be sure, is in every holy man, and hell in every bad man. When thou dost work together with God then thou art in heaven, and thy soul dwells in God. ”

“ That, in man's inner nature, which answers to this power or life in the seed, is called by Behmen the Life or Spirit of Jesus Christ. Egoism or Ihood, the old contracting, narrowing cell, is destroyed as this expansive and expanding force grows and breaks forth. Behmen says: "As the Sun in the visible world ruleth over Evil and Good, and, with its light and power, and all whatsoever itself is, is present everywhere, and penetrates into every Being, and wholly giveth itself to every Being, and yet ever remaineth whole, and nothing of its being goeth away therewith. ”

“ Behemot, too, is destined to be served to the pious as an appetizing dainty, but before they enjoy his flesh, they will be permitted to view the mortal combat between leviathan and behemot, as a reward for having denied themselves the pleasures of the circus and its gladiatorial contests. [143]
Leviathan, ziz, and behemot are not the only monsters; there are many others, and marvellous ones, like the reem, a giant animal, of which only one couple, male and female, is in existence. Had there been more, the world could hardly have maintained itself against them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But all this affects the outside form, not the essence of the doctrine. Behmen is concerned with the real nature of things, apart from time and space, with their apparent, but so misleading, facts. He appeals to each Soul's knowledge of itself, and, on the principle that all is in everything, draws from the nature of Man, that little Universe (and we can no otherwise learn things as they are in themselves) , his teaching as to Universal Nature. "In Man (he says) lies all whatsoever the Sun shines upon, or Heaven contains, as also Hell and all the Deeps." ”

“ Sounds have no softness, flowers and germs no sweetness, plants and fruits have no growth, but as the Mystery of Light opens itself in them." [F] And so Behmen himself says: "There is nothing that is created or born in Nature but it also manifests its internal form externally; for the internal continually labours or works itself forth to manifestation. We know in the power and form of this World, how the only Essence has manifested itself with the external birth in the desire of the similitude ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The idea that man, himself disordered, sees nature and the world as out of joint,—that the restoration of light within him will glorify the universe without, is comparatively modern. The original design of man, in Behmen’s system, requires a restitution in which man shall be once more the angelic lord of life,—the summoner and monarch of all its potencies. Carriere has pointed out, with just discrimination, the distinction between Behmen’s position and that of German pantheism in our times. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In order to be understood, we will state that the Triune spirit of the world contains the word, and is therefore the source of energy and life in both the subjective and objective worlds, and in fact is the source of all that exists outside of spirit. It is under the direction of spirit in developing forms and giving them activity and life. We thus perceive how a knowledge of the word gives us an insight into the work of God in creation.
Jacob Behmen was a mystic, and acquainted with the meaning of the word which he obtained through illumination or the unfolding of inner consciousness. ”

“ And they are one and united in one, God in them, and they in God, according to p. 77the prayer of Christ for His disciples, that they, and He, and His Holy Father might be united in one.’ A little philosophy, especially when the philosopher does not yet know the plague of his own heart, tends, indeed, to doubt and unbelief in the word of God and in the work of Christ. But the philosophy of Behmen and Law will deepen the mind and subdue the heart of the student till he is made a prodigal son, a humble believer, and a profound philosopher, both in nature and in grace, like his profound masters. ”

“ It may be well to add, that Freher's writings (in sequence to those of Law above named) are all but essential for the proper understanding of Behmen, especially of his descriptions of the generation of Nature, as to its seven properties, two co-eternal principles, and three constituent parts: which is the deepest and most difficult point of all others to apprehend rightly (that is, with intellectual clearness, as well as sensitively in our own spiritual regeneration) , and indeed the key to every mystery of truth and life. ”

“ Görlitz magistrates, either of the Shallow family, or, it may be, overborne by the blustering Rector, pronounce Behmen ‘a villain full of piety,’ and banish him the town. But by the next day the tide would appear to have turned, and the exile is brought back with honour. The shoemaker’s booth is the scene of a little ovation, while Richter fumes at the parsonage. Behmen, however, must give up the manuscript of the Aurora, and is required for the future to stick to his last. ”

“ On the other hand, a man can feed these also from without with their appropriate food by misdirected desire, thereby starving the heavenly life in the Soul.
Thus the essence of Behmen's teaching as to the Soul incarnate in Man and revealed by his body, is that it is an eternal Being, and that it is a source of joy or anguish according as it is, or is not, purified or tranquillised by communion with the Centre of Light, or the Fountain of Life. He does not contemplate, as some Eastern teachers perhaps do, the annihilation of the Will of the Soul by a kind of higher spiritual suicide ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”