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Page 1
* * * * *
While we have nothing that can properly be called a biography of Jacob
Behmen, we have ample amends made to us in those priceless morsels of
autobiography that lie scattered so plentifully up and down all his
books. And nothing could be more charming than just those incidental and
unstudied utterances of Behmen about himself. Into the very depths of a
passage of the profoundest speculation Behmen will all of a sudden throw
a few verses of the most childlike and heart-winning confidences about
his own mental history and his own spiritual experience. And thus it is
that, without at all intending it, Behmen has left behind him a complete
history of his great mind and his holy heart in those outbursts of
diffidence, deprecation, explanation, and self-defence, of which his
philosophical and theological, as well as his apologetic and
experimental, books are all so full. It were an immense service done to
our best literature if some of Behmen's students would go through all
Behmen's books, so as to make a complete collection and composition of
the best of those autobiographic passages. Such a book, if it were well
done, would at once take rank with _The Confessions_ of ST. AUGUSTINE,
_The Divine Comedy_ of DANTE, and the _Grace Abounding_ of JOHN BUNYAN.
It would then be seen by all, what few, till then, will believe, that
Jacob Behmen's mind and heart and spiritual experience all combine to
give him a foremost place among the most classical masters in that great
field.
In the nineteenth chapter of the _Aurora_ there occurs a very important
passage of this autobiographic nature. In that famous passage Behmen
tells his readers that when his eyes first began to be opened, the sight
of this world completely overwhelmed him. ASAPH'S experiences, so
powerfully set before us in the seventy-third Psalm, will best convey, to
those who do not know Behmen, what Behmen also passed through before he
drew near to GOD. Like that so thoughtful Psalmist, Behmen's steps had
well-nigh slipped when he saw the prosperity of the wicked, and when he
saw how waters of a full cup were so often wrung out to the people of
GOD. The mystery of life, the sin and misery of life, cast Behmen into a
deep and inconsolable melancholy. No Scripture could comfort him. His
thoughts of GOD were such that he will not allow himself, even after they
are long past, to put them down on paper. In this terrible trouble he
lifted up his heart to GOD, little knowing, as yet, what GOD was, or what
his own heart was. Only, he wrapped up his whole heart, and mind, and
will, and desire in the love and the mercy of GOD: determined not to give
over till GOD had heard him and had helped him. 'And then, when I had
wholly hazarded my life upon what I was doing, my whole spirit seemed to
me 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.'
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