Willoughby’s Essay—Fourth Evening.

§ 4. Jacob Behmen and his Aurora.

Let us now crave acquaintance with that most notable theosophist, Jacob Behmen.

It is evening, and in the little town of Görlitz the business of the day is over. The shopkeepers are chatting together before their doors, or drinking their beer at tables set out in the open air; and comfortable citizens are taking wife and children for a walk beyond the town. There is a shoe-maker’s shop standing close to the bridge, and under its projecting gable, among the signs and samples of the craft, may be read the name of Jacob Boehme. Within this house, in a small and scantily-furnished room, three men are seated at a table whereon lie a few books and papers and a great heap of newly-gathered plants and wild-flowers. The three friends have just returned from a long ramble in the fields which lie without the Neissethor. That little man, apparently about forty years of age, of withered, almost mean, aspect, with low forehead, prominent temples, hooked nose, short and scanty beard, and quick blue eyes, who talks with a thin, gentle voice, is Jacob.^[228] On one side of him sits Dr. Kober, a medical man of high repute in Görlitz. He it is who gathered in their walk these flowers, and now he takes up one of them from time to time, and asks Behmen to conjecture, from its form and colour, its peculiar properties. Often has he to exchange looks of wonder with his learned friend on the other side the table, at the marvellous insight of their uneducated host. This third member of the trio is Dr. Balthasar Walter, the Director of the Laboratory at Dresden, a distinguished chemist, who has travelled six years in the East, has mastered all the scientific wisdom of the West, and who now believes that his long search after the true philosophy has ended happily at last, beneath the roof of the Görlitz shoemaker. He, too, will sometimes pronounce a Greek or an Oriental word, and is surprised to find how nearly Behmen divines its significance, from the mere sound and the movement of the lips in the formation of its syllables.^[229] When Walter utters the word Idea, Behmen springs up in a transport, and declares that the sound presented to him the image of a heavenly virgin of surpassing beauty. The conversation wanders on—about some theosophic question, it may be, or the anxious times, or the spread of Behmen’s writings through Silesia and Saxony, with the persecutions or the praises following; while good Frau Behmen, after putting a youngster or two to bed, is busy downstairs in the kitchen, preparing a frugal supper.

Jacob Behmen was born at the village of Alt-Seidenberg, near Görlitz, in the year 1575. As a child, he was grave and thoughtful beyond his years. The wonders of fairy tradition were said to have become objects of immediate vision to the boy, as were the mysteries of religion, in after years, to the man. Among the weather-stained boulders of a haunted hill, the young herd-boy discovered the golden hoard of the mountain folk—fled in terror, and could never again find out the spot.^[230]

While not yet twenty, Behmen saw life as a travelling apprentice. The tender conscience and the pensive temperament of the village youth shrank from the dissolute and riotous companionship of his fellow-craftsmen. Like George Fox, whom at this period he strongly resembled, he found the Church scarcely more competent than the world to furnish the balm which should soothe a spirit at once excited and despondent. Among the clergy, the shameful servility of some, the immoral life of others, the bigotry of almost all, repelled him on every hand. The pulpit was the whipping-post of imaginary Papists and Calvinists. The churches were the fortified places in the seat of war. They were spiritually what ours were literally in King Stephen’s days, when the mangonel and the cross-bow bolts stood ready on the battlemented tower, when military stores were piled in the crypt, and a moat ran through the churchyard. The Augsburg Confession and the Formula Concordiæ were appealed to as though of inspired authority. The names of Luther and Melanchthon were made the end of controversy and of freedom. The very principle of Protestantism was forsaken when ecclesiastics began to prove their positions, not by Scripture, but by Articles of Faith. So Behmen wandered about, musing, with his Bible in his hand, and grieved sore because of the strife among Christian brethren, because evil everywhere was spreading and fruitful, and goodness so rare and so distressed; because he saw, both near and far away, such seeming waste and loss of human souls. A profound melancholy took possession of him—partly that the truth which would give rest was for himself so hard to find, but most for the sight of his eyes which he saw, when he looked abroad upon God’s rational creatures. On his return from his travels he settled in Görlitz, married early, and worked hard at his trade. Everywhere these anxious questing thoughts about life’s mystery are with him, disquieting. He reads many mystical and astrological books, not improbably, even thus early, Schwenkfeld and Paracelsus.^[231] But the cloudy working of his mind is not soon to give place to sunshine and clear sky. He is to be found still with the pelican and the bittern in the desolate places where the salt-pits glisten, and the nettles breed, and the wild beasts lie down, and the cedar work is uncovered,—among the untimely ruins of that City of Hope which had almost won back Christendom in the resistless prime of Luther.

At last, upon an ever-memorable day, as he sat meditating in his room, he fell, he knew not how, into a kind of trance. The striving, climbing sorrows of his soul had brought him to this luminous table-land. A halcyon interval succeeded to the tempest. He did not seek, he gazed; he was surrounded by an atmosphere of glory. He enjoyed for seven days an unruffled soul-sabbath. He looked into the open secret of creation and providence. Such seemed his ecstasy. In Amadis of Greece an enchanter shuts up the heroes and princesses of the tale in the Tower of the Universe, where all that happened in the world was made to pass before them, as in a magic glass, while they sat gazing, bound by the age-long spell. So Behmen believed that the principles of the Universal Process were presented to his vision as he sat in his study at Görlitz. We may say that it was the work of all his after days to call to mind, to develop for himself, and to express for others, the seminal suggestions of that and one following glorious dream.

Behmen was twenty-five years of age when the subject of this first illumination. He stated that he was thrown into his trance while gazing on the dazzling light reflected from a tin vessel, as the rays of the sun struck into his room. Distrusting at first the nature of the vision, he walked out into the fields to dissipate the phantasmagoria; but the strange hues and symbols were still present, and seemed to point him to the heart and secret of the universe. For several years his gift lay hidden. Behmen was known as a quiet, meditative, hard-working man, fond of books; otherwise scarcely distinguishable from other cobblers. Ten years after the first manifestation he believed himself the recipient of a second, not, like the former, mediated by anything external; and revealing, with greater fulness and order, what before lay in comparative confusion. To fix this communication in a form which might be of abiding service to him, he began to write his Aurora.

But he shall tell his own story, as he did tell it, one-and-twenty years later, to his friend Caspar Lindern.

‘I saw and knew,’ he says, ‘the Being of all Beings, the Byss (Grund) and the Abyss: item, the birth of the Holy Trinity; the origin and primal state of this world and of all creatures through the Divine Wisdom. I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds,—i.e. (1) the divine angelic or paradisiacal world; then, (2) the dark world, as the original of nature, as to the fire; and (3) this external visible world, as a creation and out-birth, or as a substance spoken forth out of the two inner spiritual worlds. Moreover, I saw and had cognizance of the whole Being in good and in evil—how each had its origin in the other, and how the Mother did bring forth;—and this all moved me not merely to the height of wonder, but made me to rejoice exceedingly. (Incredible as it may appear, this passage has a meaning, which may become apparent to some readers after a perusal of what is said farther on, in explanation of Behmen’s system.)

‘Soon it came strongly into my mind that I should set the same down in writing, for a memorial, albeit I could hardly compass the understanding thereof in my external man, so as to write it on paper. I felt that with such great mysteries I must set to work as a child that goes to school. In my inward man I saw it well, as in a great deep, for I saw right through as into a chaos in which everything lay wrapped, but the unfolding thereof I found impossible.

‘Yet from time to time it opened itself within me, as in a growing plant. For the space of twelve years I carried it about within me—was, as it were, pregnant therewith, feeling a mighty inward impulse, before I could bring it forth in any external form; till afterwards it fell upon me, like a bursting shower that hitteth wheresoever it lighteth, as it will. So it was with me, and whatsoever I could bring into outwardness that I wrote down.

‘Thereafter the sun shone on me a good while, yet not steadily and without interval, and when that light had withdrawn itself I could scarce understand my own work. And this was to show man that his knowledge is not his own, but God’s, and that God in man’s soul knoweth what and how he will.

‘This writing of mine I purposed to keep by me all my life, and not to give it into the hands of any man. But it came to pass in the providence of the Most High, that I entrusted a person with part of it, by whose means it was made known without my knowledge. Whereupon my first book, the Aurora, was taken from me, and because many wondrous things were therein revealed, not to be comprehended in a moment by the mind of man, I had to suffer no little at the hands of the worldly-wise—(von den Vernunft-weisen).

‘For three years I saw no more of this said book, and thought it verily clean dead and gone, till some learned men sent me copies therefrom, exhorting me not to bury my talent. To this counsel my outward reason was in no wise willing to agree, having suffered so much already. My reason was very weak and timorous at that time, the more so as the light of grace had then been withdrawn from me some while, and did but smoulder within, like a hidden fire. So I was filled with trouble. Without was contempt, within, a fiery driving; and what to do I knew not, till the breath of the Most High came to my help again, and awoke within me a new life. Then it was that I attained to a better style of writing, likewise to a deeper and more thorough knowledge. I could reduce all better to outward form—as, indeed, my book concerning The Threefold Life through the Three Principles doth fully show, and as the godly reader whose heart is opened will see.

‘So, therefore, have I written, not from book-learning, or the doctrine and science of men, but from my own book which was opened within me,—the book of the glorious image of God, which it was vouchsafed to me to read: ’tis therein I have studied—as a child in its mother’s house, that sees what its father doth, and mimics the same in its child’s-play. I need no other book than this.

‘My book has but three leaves—the three principles of Eternity. Therein I find all that Moses and the prophets, Christ and his apostles, have taught. Therein I find the foundation of the world and all mystery,—yet, not I, but the Spirit of the Lord doth it, in such measure as He pleaseth.

‘For hundreds of times have I prayed him that if my knowledge were not for his glory and the edifying of my brethren, he will take it from me, only keeping me in his love. But I have found that with all my earnest entreaty the fire within me did but burn the more, and it is in this glow, and in this knowledge, that I have produced my works....

‘Let no man conceive of me more highly than he here seeth, for the work is none of mine; I have it only in that measure vouchsafed me of the Lord; I am but his instrument wherewith he doeth what he will. This, I say, my dear friend, once for all, that none may seek in me one other than I am, as though I were a man of high skill and intellect, whereas I live in weakness and childhood, and the simplicity of Christ. In that child’s work which he hath given me is my pastime and my play; ’tis there I have my delight, as in a pleasure-garden where stand many glorious flowers; therewith will I make myself glad awhile, till such time as I regain the flowers of Paradise in the new man.’^[232]

This letter alludes to the way in which the Aurora was made public without the knowledge of its author. The friend to whom he showed it was Karl von Endern, who, struck by its contents, caused a copy to be taken, from which others were rapidly multiplied. The book fell into the hands of Gregory Richter, the chief pastor in Görlitz. Well may Behmen say that the Aurora contained some things not readily apprehended by human reason. A charitable man would have forgiven its extravagances, catching some glimpses of a sincere and religious purpose; a wise man would have said nothing about it; a man the wisest of the wise would have been the last to pretend to understand it. But Richter—neither charitable nor wise exceedingly, nor even moderately stocked with good sense—fell into a blundering passion, and railed at Behmen from the pulpit, as he sat in his place at church, crimson, but patient, the centre of all eyes.

Behmen had already rendered himself obnoxious to Richter by a temperate but firm remonstrance against an act of ecclesiastical oppression. Now, his pretensions seem openly to militate against that mechanical religious monopoly with which Richter imagined himself endowed,—a privilege as jealously watched and as profitably exercised by such men as that of the muezzins of the mosque of Bajazet, who are alone entitled to supply the faithful with the praying compasses that indicate the orthodox attitude. The insolent, heretical, blasphemous cobbler shall find no mercy. Richter loudly calls for the penalties of law, to punish a fanatic who has taught (as he declares) that the Son of God is Quicksilver! 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.

His book, as it became known, procured him many influential friends among men of learning and men of rank throughout Lusatia. He was exhorted not to hide his talent, and the ensuing five years became a period of incessant literary activity.^[233] The scholarship of friends like Kober and Walther assisted him to supply some of the defects of his education; the liberality of others provided for his moderate wants, and enabled him to forsake his business for his books.^[234] Once more did his old enemy, the primarius Richter, appear against him, with a pamphlet of virulent pasquinades in Latin verse. Behmen issued an elaborate reply, entering minutely into every charge, sending the clerical curses ‘home to roost,’ and praying for the enlightenment of his persecutor with exasperating good temper.^[235] The magistrates, fluttered and anxious, requested him to leave Görlitz. Knightly friends opened their castle gates to him; he preferred retirement at Dresden. There, a public disputation he held with some eminent divines and men of science, was said to have excited general admiration. He returned to Görlitz in his last illness, to die in the midst of his family. He expired early on Sunday morning, on the twenty-first of November, 1624, in his fiftieth year. He asked his son Tobias if he heard the beautiful music, and bade those about him set the doors open that the sounds might enter. After receiving the sacrament, he breathed his last, at the hour of which a presentiment of dissolution had warned him. His last words were, ‘Now I am going to Paradise!‘^[236]

Behmen’s learned friends were accustomed thus to test the insight they so revered, and would occasionally attempt to mislead his sagacity by wrong terms and entrapping questions; but always, we are assured, without success. See Ein Schreiben von einem vornehmen Patritio und Rathsverwandten zu Görlitz wegen seel. Jac. Behmen’s Person und Schriften, appended to Franckenberg’s Life of Behmen.

The rationale of this peculiar significance of letters and syllables he gives in the following passage:—

When man fell into sin, he was removed from the inmost birth and set in the other two, which presently encompassed him, and mingled their influences with him and in him (inqualireten mit ihme und in ihme), as in their own peculiar possession; and man received the spirit and the whole generation of the sidereal, and also of the external birth. Therefore he now speaks all words according to the indwelling generative principle of nature. For the spirit of man, which stands in the sidereal birth, and combines with all nature, and is as all nature itself, shapes the word according to the indwelling principle of birth. When he sees anything he gives it a name answering to its peculiar property or virtue; and if he does this he must fashion the word in the form, and generate it with his voice in the way in which the thing he names generates; and herein lies the kernel of the whole understanding of the Godhead.—Aurora, cap. xix. §§ 74-76. On this principle he examines, syllable by syllable, the opening words of Genesis—not those of the Hebrew, but the German version (!), as follows:—‘Am Anfang schuff Gott,’ &c. These words we must very carefully consider. The word AM takes its rise in the heart, and goes as far as the lips. There it is arrested, and goes sounding back to whence it came. Now, this shows that the sound went forth from the heart of God, and encompassed the entire locus of the world; but when it was found to be evil, then the sound returned to its place again. The word AN pushes forth from the heart to the mouth, and has a long stress. But when it is pronounced, it closes in its sedes in the midst with the roof of the mouth, and is half without and half within. This signifies that the heart of God felt repugnance at the corruption of the world, and cast the corrupt nature from him, but again seized and stayed it in the midst by his heart. Just as the tongue arrests the word, and retains it half without and half within, so the heart of God would not utterly reject the enflamed Salitter, but would defeat the schemes and malice of the Devil, and finally restore the other.—Aurora, cap. xviii. §§ 48-52. A similar precious piece of nonsense is to be found, cap. xviii. §§ 72, &c. of which Barmherzig is the thema. He declares, in another place, that when the spiritual Aurora shall shine from the rising of the sun to the going-down of the same, RA. RA. R.P. shall be driven into banishment, and with him AM. R. P. These are secret words, he says, only to be understood in the language of nature.—Aurora, xxvi. 120.

Behmen was indebted to his conversations with men like Kober and Walther for much of his terminology, and probably to the suggestions awakened by such intercourse for much of the detailed application of his system. See Lebens-lauff, § 20; and compare the Clavis, or Schlüssel etlicher vornehmen Puncten, &c.

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

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.