Jacob Behmen: An Appreciation

by Alexander Whyte

generated for thee in thy heart.’ And, again: ‘God is in thy dark heart. Knock, and He shall come out within thee into the light. 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. And then thou art His brother, His flesh, and His spirit. Thou also art a child of His Father. God is in thee. 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. His speculations are all saturated

with a constant reference to salvation. His whole metaphysic is pervaded by practical applications.’ And conspicuously so, we may here point out, is his metaphysic of God and of the heart of man. 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. In like manner, also, thou art in hell and among the devils when thou art in any envy, malice,

anger, or ill-will. Thou needest not to ask where is heaven or where is hell. Both are within thee, even in thy heart. Now, then, when thou prayest, pray in that heaven that is within thee, and there the Holy Ghost shall meet with thee and will help thee, and thy soul shall be the whole of heaven 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. And thus it is that Behmen appeals to all his readers, that if they will only go down deep enough into their own hearts—then, there, down there, deeper than

indwelling sin, deeper than original sin, deep down and seated in the very substance and centre of their souls—they will come upon secret and unexpected seeds of the Divine Life. Seeds, blades, buddings, and new beginnings of the very life of God the Son, in their deepest souls. Secret and small, Behmen exclaims, as those seeds of Eden are, despise them not; destroy them not, for a blessing for thee is in them. Water those secret seeds, sun them, dig about them, and they will grow up in you also. The Divine Life is in you, quench it not, for it is of God. Nay, it is God Himself in you. It depends upon yourself whether or no that which is at this moment the smallest of all seeds is yet to become in you the greatest and the most fruitful of all trees.

‘Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is,’ is a characteristic saying

of a fellow-countryman of Behmen’s. And Behmen’s super-confessional and almost super-scriptural treatment of that frequent scriptural anthropomorphism,—‘unavoidable and yet intolerable,’—the wrath of God, must be left by me in Behmen’s own bold pages. 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; this house of joy to be a house of mourning, lamentation,

and woe; this house of all refreshment to be full of hunger and thirst; this abode of love to be a prison of enmity and ill-will; this seat of meekness to be the haunt of pride and rage and malice. 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; his fine and fruitful treatment of what he always calls ‘the process of Christ’; and, intimately connected with that, his still super-confessional treatment of imputation,—of all

that, and much more like that, I cannot now attempt to speak. Nor yet of his superb teaching on love. ‘Throw out thy heart upon all men,’ he now commands and now beseeches us. ‘Throw open and throw out thy heart. 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. He was libelled and maligned,

harassed and hunted to death by a world that was not worthy of such a gift of God. A sudden and severe sickness came upon Behmen till he sank in death with his Aurora and his Holy Week and his Divine Vision all lying still unfinished at his bedside. ‘Open the door and let in more of that music,’ the dying man said to his weeping son. Behmen was already hearing the harpers harping with their harps. He was already taking his part in the song they sing in heaven to Him who loved them, and washed them from their sins in His own blood. ‘And now,’ said the prodigal son, the blessed Behmen, ‘I go to-day to be with my Redeemer and my King in Paradise,’ and so died.