Jacob Behmen: An Appreciation

by Alexander Whyte

with a mystic height and depth and inwardness all but new to him even in Behmen’s books. The new height and depth and inwardness are all Jacob Behmen’s own; but the freedom and the ease and the movement and the melody are all William Law’s. In his preparations for a new edition of Behmen in English, William Law had re-translated and paraphrased The Supersensual Life, and the editor of the 1781 edition of Behmen’s works has incorporated Law’s beautiful rendering of that tract in room of John Sparrow’s excellent but rather too antique rendering. We are in John Sparrow’s everlasting debt for the immense labour he laid out on Behmen, as well as for his own deep piety and personal worth. But it was service enough and honour enough for Sparrow to have Englished Jacob Behmen at all

for his fellow-countrymen, even if he was not able to English him as William Law would have done. But take Behmen and Law together, as they meet together in The Supersensual Life, and not A Kempis himself comes near them even in his own proper field, or in his immense service in that field. There is all the reality, inwardness, and spirituality of The Imitation in The Supersensual Life, together with a sweep of imagination, and a grasp of understanding, as well as with both a sweetness and a bitterness of heart that even A Kempis never comes near. The Supersensual Life of Jacob Behmen, in the English of William Law, is a superb piece of spiritual work, and a treasure-house of masculine English. (If Christopher Walton is right, we must read ‘Lee’ for ‘Law’ in this passage. If Walton is right, then there was a

master of English in those days we had not before been told of.)

A Treatise of the Four Complexions, or A Consolatory Instruction for a Sad and Assaulted Heart, was Behmen’s next book. The four complexions are the four temperaments—the choleric, the sanguine, the phlegmatic, and the melancholy. Behmen’s treatise has been well described by Walton as containing the philosophy of temptation; and by Martensen as displaying a most profound knowledge of the human heart. Behmen sets about his task as a ductor dubitantium in a masterly manner. He takes in hand the comfort and direction of sin-distressed souls in a characteristically deep, inward, and thorough-going way. The book is full of Behmen’s observation of men. It is the outcome of a close and long-continued study of character and conduct.

Every page of The Four Complexions gleams with a keen but tender and wistful insight into our poor human nature. As his customers came and gave their orders in his shop; as his neighbours collected, and gossiped, and debated, and quarrelled around his shop window; as his minister fumed and raged against him in the pulpit; as the Council of Goerlitz sat and swayed, passed sentence upon him, retracted their sentence, and again gave way under the pressure of their minister, and pronounced another sentence,—all this time Behmen was having poor human nature, to all its joints and marrow, and to all the thoughts and instincts of its heart, laid naked and open before him, both in other men and in himself. And then, as always with Behmen, all this observation of men, all this discovery and self-discovery,

ran up into philosophy, into theology, into personal and evangelical religion. In all that Behmen better and better saw the original plan, constitution, and operation of human nature; its aboriginal catastrophe; its weakness and openness to all evil; and its need of constant care, protection, instruction, watchfulness, and Divine help. Behmen writes on all the four temperaments with the profoundest insight, and with the fullest sympathy; but over the last of the four he exclaims: ‘O hear me! for I know well myself what melancholy is! I also have lodged all my days in the melancholy inn!’ As I read that light and elastic book published the other day, The Life and Letters of Erasmus, I came on this sentence, ‘Erasmus, like all men of real genius, had a light and elastic nature.’ When I read that,

I could not believe my eyes. I had been used to think of light and elastic natures as being the antipodes of natures of real genius. And as I stopped my reading for a little, a procession of men of real and indisputable genius passed before me, who had all lodged with Behmen in the melancholy inn. Till I remembered that far deeper and far truer saying, that ‘simply to say man at all is to say melancholy.’ No: with all respect, the real fact is surely as near as possible the exact opposite. A light, elastic, Erasmus-like nature, is the exception among men of real genius. At any rate, Jacob Behmen was the exact opposite of Erasmus, and of all such light and elastic men. Melancholy was Jacob Behmen’s special temperament and peculiar complexion. He had long studied, and watched, and wrestled with, and prayed over that

complexion at home. And thus it is, no doubt, that he is so full, and so clear, and so sure-footed, and so impressive, and so full of fellow-feeling in his treatment of this special complexion. Behmen’s greatest disciple has assimilated his master’s teaching in this matter of complexion also, and has given it out again in his own clear, plain, powerful, classical manner, especially in his treatise on Christian Regeneration. Let all preachers and pastors who would master the rationale of temptation, and who would ground their directions and their comforts to their people in the nature of things, as well as in the word of God, make Jacob Behmen and William Law and Prebendary Clark their constant study. ‘I write for no other purpose,’ says Behmen, ‘than that men may learn how to know themselves. Seek the

noble knowledge of thyself. Seek it and you will find a heavenly treasure which will not be eaten by moths, and which no thief shall ever take away.’

I shall not attempt to enter on the thorny thicket of Jacob Behmen’s polemical and apologetical works. I shall not even load your mind with their unhappy titles. His five apologies occupy in bulk somewhere about a tenth part of his five quarto volumes. And full as his apologies and defences are of autobiographic material, as well as of valuable expansions and explanations of his other books, yet at their best they are all controversial and combative in their cast and complexion; and, nobly as Behmen has written on the subject of controversy, it was not given even to him, amid all the misunderstandings, misrepresentations, injuries, and insults he suffered from, always to write what