we are glad and proud and the better to read.
About his next book Behmen thus writes: ‘Upon the desire of some high persons with whom I did converse in the Christmas holidays, I have written a pretty large treatise upon Election, in which I have done my best to determine that subject upon the deepest grounds. And I hope that the same may put an end to many contentions and controversies, especially of some points betwixt the Lutherans and Calvinists, for I have taken the texts of Holy Scripture which speak of God’s will to harden sinners, and then, again, of His unwillingness to harden, and have so tuned and harmonised them that the right understanding and meaning of the same may be seen.’ ‘This author,’ says John Sparrow, ‘disputes not at all. He desires only to confer
and offer his understanding of the Scriptures on both sides, answering reason’s objections, and manifesting the truth for the conjoining, uniting, and reconciling of all parties in love.’ And that he has not been wholly unsuccessful we may believe when we hear one of Behmen’s ablest commentators writing of his Election as ‘a superlatively helpful book,’ and again, as a ‘profoundly instructive treatise.’ The workman-like way in which Behmen sets about his treatment of the Election of Grace, commonly called Predestination, will be seen from the titles of some of his chapters. Chap. i. What the One Only God is. Chap. ii. Concerning God’s Eternal Speaking Word. Chap. v. Of the Origin of Man; Chap. vi. Of the Fall of Man. Chap. viii. Of the sayings of Scripture, and how they oppose one another. Chap. ix. Clearing the Right Understanding
of such Scriptures. Chap. xiii. A Conclusion upon all those Questions. And then, true to his constant manner, as if wholly dissatisfied with the result of all his labour in things and in places too deep both for writer and reader, he gave all the next day after he had finished his Election to an Appendix on Repentance, in order to making his own and his reader’s calling and election sure. And it may safely be said that, than that day’s work, than those four quarto pages, not Augustine, not Luther, not Bunyan, not Baxter, not Shepard has ever written anything of more evangelical depth, and strength, and passion, and pathos. It is truly a splendid day’s work! But it might not have been possible even for Behmen to perform that day’s work had he not for months beforehand been dealing day and night with the deepest and the most heart-searching
things both of God and man. What a man was Jacob Behmen, and chosen to what a service! At work all that day in his solitary stall, and then all the night after over his rush-light writing for a memorial to himself and to us his incomparable Compendium of Repentance.
In a letter addressed to one of the nobility in Silesia, and dated February 19, 1623, Behmen says: ‘When you have leisure to study I shall send you something still more deep, for I have written this whole autumn and winter without ceasing.’ And if he had written nothing else but his great book entitled Mysterium Magnum that autumn and winter, he must have written night and day and done nothing else. Even in size the Mysterium is an immense piece of work. In the English edition it occupies the whole of the third quarto volume of 507 pages; and then for its
matter it is a still more amazing production. To say that the Mysterium Magnum is a mystical and allegorical commentary upon the Book of Genesis is to say nothing. Philo himself is a tyro and a timid interpreter beside Jacob Behmen. ‘Which things are an allegory,’ says the Apostle, after a passing reference to Sarah and Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael; but if you would see actually every syllable of Genesis allegorised, spiritualised, interpreted of Christ, and of the New Testament, from the first verse of its first chapter to the last verse of its last chapter, like the nobleman of Silesia, when you have leisure, read Behmen’s deep Mysterium Magnum. I would recommend the enterprising and unconquerable student to make leisure so as to master Behmen’s Preface to the Mysterium Magnum at the very least. And if he does that,
and is not drawn on from that to be a student of Behmen for the rest of his days, then, whatever else his proper field in life may be, it is not mystical or philosophical theology. It is a long step both in time and in thought from Behmen to Schopenhauer; but, speaking of one of Schelling’s books, Schopenhauer says that it is all taken from Jacob Behmen’s Mysterium Magnum; every thought and almost every word of Schelling’s work leads Schopenhauer to think of Behmen. ‘When I read Behmen’s book,’ says Schopenhauer, ‘I cannot withhold either admiration or emotion.’ At his far too early death Behmen left four treatises behind him in an unfinished condition. The Theoscopia, or Divine Vision, is but a fragment; but, even so, the study of that fragment leads us to believe that, had Behmen lived to the ordinary limit of human
life, and had his mind continued to grow as it was now fast growing in clearness, in concentration, and in simplicity, Behmen would have left to us not a few books as classical in their form as all his books are classical in their substance; in their originality, in their truth, in their depth, and in their strength. As it is, the unfinished, the scarcely-begun, Theoscopia only serves to show the student of what a treasure he has been bereft by Behmen’s too early death. As I read and re-read the Theoscopia I felt the full truth and force of Hegel’s generous words, that German philosophy began with Behmen. This is both German and Christian philosophy, I said to myself as I revelled in the Theoscopia. Let the serious student listen to the titles of some of the chapters of the Theoscopia, and then let him say what he would not have given to have
got such a book from such a pen in its completed shape: ‘What God is, and how we men shall know the Divine Substance by the Divine Revelation. Why it sometimes seems as if there were no God, and as if all things went in the world by chance. Why God, who is Love itself, permits an evil will contrary to His own. The reason and the profit, why evil should be found along with good. Of the mind of man, and how it is the image of God, and how it can still be filled with God. Why this Temporal Universe is created; to what it is profitable; and how God is so near unto all things’: and so on. ‘But no amount of quotation,’ says Mrs. Penney, that very able student of Behmen, lately deceased, ‘can give an adequate glimpse of the light which streams from the Theoscopia when long and patiently studied.’