What the other world was, or Elysium?
Didst never travel in thy sleep?
Beaumont and Fletcher: The Mad Lover.
Willoughby’s Essay—Fourth Evening.
§ 4. Jacob Behmen and his Aurora.
Let us now crave acquaintance with that most notable theosophist, Jacob Behmen.
It is evening, and in the little town of Görlitz the business of the day is over. The shopkeepers are chatting together before their doors, or drinking their beer at tables set out in the open air; and comfortable citizens are taking wife and children for a walk beyond the town. There is a shoe-maker’s shop standing close to the bridge, and under its projecting gable, among the signs and samples of the craft, may be read the name of Jacob Boehme. Within this house, in a small and scantily-furnished room, three men are seated at a table whereon lie a few books and papers and a great heap of newly-gathered plants and wild-flowers. The three friends have just returned from a long ramble in the fields which lie without the Neissethor. That little man, apparently about forty years of age, of withered, almost mean, aspect, with low forehead, prominent temples, hooked nose, short and scanty beard, and quick blue eyes, who talks with a thin, gentle voice, is Jacob.[[228]] On one side of him sits Dr. Kober, a medical man of high repute in Görlitz. He it is who gathered in their walk these flowers, and now he takes up one of them from time to time, and asks Behmen to conjecture, from its form and colour, its peculiar properties. Often has he to exchange looks of wonder with his learned friend on the other side the table, at the marvellous insight of their uneducated host. This third member of the trio is Dr. Balthasar Walter, the Director of the Laboratory at Dresden, a distinguished chemist, who has travelled six years in the East, has mastered all the scientific wisdom of the West, and who now believes that his long search after the true philosophy has ended happily at last, beneath the roof of the Görlitz shoemaker. He, too, will sometimes pronounce a Greek or an Oriental word, and is surprised to find how nearly Behmen divines its significance, from the mere sound and the movement of the lips in the formation of its syllables.[[229]] When Walter utters the word Idea, Behmen springs up in a transport, and declares that the sound presented to him the image of a heavenly virgin of surpassing beauty. The conversation wanders on—about some theosophic question, it may be, or the anxious times, or the spread of Behmen’s writings through Silesia and Saxony, with the persecutions or the praises following; while good Frau Behmen, after putting a youngster or two to bed, is busy downstairs in the kitchen, preparing a frugal supper.
Jacob Behmen was born at the village of Alt-Seidenberg, near Görlitz, in the year 1575. As a child, he was grave and thoughtful beyond his years. The wonders of fairy tradition were said to have become objects of immediate vision to the boy, as were the mysteries of religion, in after years, to the man. Among the weather-stained boulders of a haunted hill, the young herd-boy discovered the golden hoard of the mountain folk—fled in terror, and could never again find out the spot.[[230]]
While not yet twenty, Behmen saw life as a travelling apprentice. The tender conscience and the pensive temperament of the village youth shrank from the dissolute and riotous companionship of his fellow-craftsmen. Like George Fox, whom at this period he strongly resembled, he found the Church scarcely more competent than the world to furnish the balm which should soothe a spirit at once excited and despondent. Among the clergy, the shameful servility of some, the immoral life of others, the bigotry of almost all, repelled him on every hand. The pulpit was the whipping-post of imaginary Papists and Calvinists. The churches were the fortified places in the seat of war. They were spiritually what ours were literally in King Stephen’s days, when the mangonel and the cross-bow bolts stood ready on the battlemented tower, when military stores were piled in the crypt, and a moat ran through the churchyard. The Augsburg Confession and the Formula Concordiæ were appealed to as though of inspired authority. The names of Luther and Melanchthon were made the end of controversy and of freedom. The very principle of Protestantism was forsaken when ecclesiastics began to prove their positions, not by Scripture, but by Articles of Faith. So Behmen wandered about, musing, with his Bible in his hand, and grieved sore because of the strife among Christian brethren, because evil everywhere was spreading and fruitful, and goodness so rare and so distressed; because he saw, both near and far away, such seeming waste and loss of human souls. A profound melancholy took possession of him—partly that the truth which would give rest was for himself so hard to find, but most for the sight of his eyes which he saw, when he looked abroad upon God’s rational creatures. On his return from his travels he settled in Görlitz, married early, and worked hard at his trade. Everywhere these anxious questing thoughts about life’s mystery are with him, disquieting. He reads many mystical and astrological books, not improbably, even thus early, Schwenkfeld and Paracelsus.[[231]] But the cloudy working of his mind is not soon to give place to sunshine and clear sky. He is to be found still with the pelican and the bittern in the desolate places where the salt-pits glisten, and the nettles breed, and the wild beasts lie down, and the cedar work is uncovered,—among the untimely ruins of that City of Hope which had almost won back Christendom in the resistless prime of Luther.
At last, upon an ever-memorable day, as he sat meditating in his room, he fell, he knew not how, into a kind of trance. The striving, climbing sorrows of his soul had brought him to this luminous table-land. A halcyon interval succeeded to the tempest. He did not seek, he gazed; he was surrounded by an atmosphere of glory. He enjoyed for seven days an unruffled soul-sabbath. He looked into the open secret of creation and providence. Such seemed his ecstasy. In Amadis of Greece an enchanter shuts up the heroes and princesses of the tale in the Tower of the Universe, where all that happened in the world was made to pass before them, as in a magic glass, while they sat gazing, bound by the age-long spell. So Behmen believed that the principles of the Universal Process were presented to his vision as he sat in his study at Görlitz. We may say that it was the work of all his after days to call to mind, to develop for himself, and to express for others, the seminal suggestions of that and one following glorious dream.