Another unfinished fragment that Behmen’s readers seek for and treasure up like very sand of gold is his Holy Week. This little work, its author tells us, was undertaken upon the entreaty and desire of some loving and good friends of his for the daily exercise of true religion in their hearts and in the little church of their families. The following is Behmen’s method of prayer for Monday, which is the only day’s prayer he got finished before his death: ‘A short prayer when we awake early and before we rise. A prayer and thanksgiving after we are risen. A prayer while we wash and dress. A prayer when we begin to work at our calling. A prayer at noon. A prayer toward evening. A prayer when we undress. A prayer of thanks for the bitter passion and dying of Jesus Christ.’ What does the man mean? many of
his contemporaries who came upon his Holy Week would say, What does the madman mean? Would he have us pray all day? Would he have us pray and do nothing else? Yes; it would almost seem so. For in his Supersensual Life the Master says to the disciple who has asked, ‘How shall I be able to live aright amid all the anxiety and tribulation of this world?’: ‘If thou dost once every hour throw thyself by faith beyond all creatures into the abysmal mercy of God, into the sufferings of Christ, and into the fellowship of His intercession, then thou shalt receive power from above to rule over the world, and death, and the devil, and hell itself.’ And again, ‘O thou of little courage, if thy will could but break itself off every half-hour from all creatures, and plunge itself into that where no creature is or can be, presently it would be
penetrated with the splendour of the Divine glory, and would taste a sweetness no tongue can express. Then thou wouldst love thy cross more than all the glory and all the goods of this world.’ The author had begun a series of reflections and meditations on the Ten Commandments for devotional use on Tuesday, but got no further than the Fifth. Behmen is so deep and so original in his purely philosophical, theological, and speculative books, that in many places we can only stand back and wonder at the man. But in his Holy Week Behmen kneels down beside us. Not but that his characteristic depth is present in his prayers also; but we all know something of the nature, the manner, and the blessedness of prayer, and thus it is that we are so much more at home with Behmen, the prodigal son, than we are
with Behmen, the theosophical theologian. When Behmen begins to teach us to pray, and when the lesson comes to us out of his own closet, then we are able to see in a nearer light something of the originality, the greatness, the strength, and the true and genuine piety of the philosopher and the theologian. When Behmen’s philosophy and theology become penitence, prayer, and praise, then by their fruits we know how good his philosophy and his theology must be, away down in their deepest and most hidden nature. I agree with Walton that those prayers are full of unction and instruction, and that some of them are of the ‘highest magnetical power’; and that, as rendered into modern phraseology, they are most beautiful devotional compositions, and very models of all that a divinely illuminated mind would address
to God and Christ. For myself, immediately after the Psalms of David I put Jacob Behmen’s Holy Week and the prayers scattered up and down through his True Repentance, and beside Behmen I put Bishop Andrewes’ Private Devotions. I have discovered no helps to my own devotional life for a moment to set beside Behmen and Andrewes.
A Treatise on Baptism and the Lord’s Supper; A Key to the Principal Points and Expressions in the Author’s Writings; and then a most valuable volume of letters—Epistolae Theosophicae—complete the extraordinarily rich bibliography of the illuminated and blessed Jacob Behmen.
Though there is a great deal of needless and wearisome repetition in Jacob Behmen’s writings, at the same time there is scarcely a single subject in the whole range of theology on which he does not throw a new, an
intense, and a brilliant light. In his absolutely original and magnificent doctrine of God, while all the time loyally true to it, Behmen has confessedly transcended the theology of both the Latin and the Reformed Churches; and, absolutely unlettered man though he is, has taken his stand at the very head of the great Greek theologians. The Reformers concentrated their criticism upon the anthropology and soteriology of the Church of Rome, and especially upon the discipline and worship connected therewith. They saw no need for recasting any of the more fundamental positions of pure theology. And while Jacob Behmen, broadly speaking, accepts as his own confession of faith all that Luther and Calvin and their colleagues taught on sin and salvation, on the corruption and guilt of sinners, and on the redeeming work of
our Lord, he rises far above the greatest and best of his teachers in his doctrine of the Godhead. Not only does he rise far higher in that doctrine than either Rome or Geneva, he rises far higher and sounds far deeper than either Antioch, or Alexandria, or Nicomedia, or Nice. On this profound point Bishop Martensen has an excellent appreciation of Behmen. After what I have taken upon me to say about Behmen, the learned Bishop’s authoritative passage must be quoted:—‘If we compare Behmen’s doctrine of the Trinity,’ says the learned and evangelical Bishop, ‘with that which is contained in the otherwise so admirable Athanasian Creed, the latter but displays to us a most abstruse metaphysic; a God for mere thought, and in whom there is nothing sympathetic for the heart of man. Behmen, on the
contrary, reveals to us the Living God, the God of Goodness, the Eternal Love, of which there is absolutely no hint whatever in the hard Athanasian symbol. By this attitude of his to the affections of the human heart, Behmen’s doctrine of the Trinity is in close coherence with the Reformation, and with its evangelical churches. . . . Behmen is anxious to state a conception of God that will fill the hiatus between the theological and anthropological sides of the dogmatical development which was bequeathed by the Reformation; he seeks to unite the theological and the anthropological. . . . From careful study of Behmen’s theology,’ continues Bishop Martensen, ‘one gains a prevailing impression that Behmen’s God is, in His inmost Being, most kindred to man, even as man in his inmost being is still kindred to God. And, besides, we recognise in Behmen