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.