Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion

by Robert Alfred Vaughan

And boldly listen to his secret charms.

Then clearly view I where true light doth rise,

And where eternal Night low-pressed lies.

Henry More.

Willoughby’s Essay—Fifth Evening.

§ 5. Jacob Behmen—his Materials and Style of Workmanship.

It has been too much the custom to regard Jacob Behmen as a kind of speculative Melchisedek—a prodigy without doctrinal father or mother. Let us endeavour to form a correct estimate of the debt he owes to his mystical predecessors.

The much-pondering shoemaker consulted the writings of Schwenkfeld and Weigel in his distress. He found these authors crying unceasingly, ‘Barren are the schools; barren are all forms; barren—worse than barren, these exclusive creeds, this deadly polemic letter.’ Weigel bids him withdraw into himself and await, in total passivity, the incoming of the divine Word, whose light reveals unto the babe what is hidden from the wise and prudent. By the same writer he is reminded that he lives in God, and taught that if God also dwell in him, then is he even here in Paradise—the state of regenerate souls. Paracelsus extols the power of faith to penetrate the mysteries of nature, and shows him how a plain man, with his Bible only, if he be filled with the Spirit and carried out of himself by divine communication, may seem to men a fool, but is in truth more wise than all the doctors. Weigel says that man, as body, soul, and spirit, belongs to three worlds—the terrestrial, the astral, and the celestial. Both Weigel and Paracelsus teach him the doctrine of the microcosm. They assure him that as divine illumination reveals to him the mysteries of his own being, he will discern proportionately the secrets of external nature. They teach that all language, art, science, handicraft, exists potentially in man; that all apparent acquisition from without is in reality a revival and evolution of that which is within.

These instructors furnish the basis of Behmen’s mysticism. Having drunk of this somewhat heady vintage, he is less disposed than ever to abandon his search. He will sound even those abysmal questions so often essayed, and so often, after all, resigned, as beyond the range of human faculties. If, according to the promise, importunate prayer can bring him light, then shall light be his. When he asks for an answer from above to his speculative enquiry into the nature of the Trinity, the processes of creation, the fall of angels, the secret code of those warring forces whose conflict produces the activity and vicissitudes of life, he does not conceive that he implores any miraculous intervention. Provision was made, he thought, for knowledge thus beyond what is written, in the very constitution of man’s nature. Such wisdom was but the realization, by the grace of God, of our inborn possibilities. It was making actual what had otherwise been only potential. It was bringing into consciousness an implicit acquaintance with God and nature which was involved in the very idea of man as the offspring of the Creator and the epitome of creation.

But of what avail is light on any minor province of enquiry, while the fundamental perplexity is unsolved,—Whence and what is evil, and why so masterful? How could King Vortigern build his great fortress upon Salisbury Plain, when every day’s work was overthrown in the night by an earthquake—the result of that nocturnal combat in the bowels of the earth between the blood-red and the milk-white dragons? And how, pray, was Behmen to come to rest about his own doubts—far less erect a system,—till he had reconciled the contradiction at the root of all? The eternal opposites must harmonize in some higher unity. Here Paracelsus is Behmen’s Merlin. The doctrine of Development by Contraries was passed, in the torch-race of opinion, from Sebastian Frank to Paracelsus, and from him to Weigel. According to this theory, God manifests himself in opposites. The peace of Unity develops into the strife of the Manifold. All things consist in Yea and Nay. The light must have shadow, day night, laughter tears, health sickness, hope fear, good evil, or they would not be what they are. Only by resistance, only in collision, is the spark of vitality struck out, is power realized, and progress possible. Of this hypothesis I shall have more to say hereafter. It is the chief estate of Behmen’s inheritance. Theosophy bequeathed him, in addition, sundry lesser lands;—namely, the Paracelsian Triad of Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury; the doctrine of the vitality of the world, with the ‘Fifth Element,’ or ‘Breath of Life,’ for Mundane Soul; the theory of sympathies, stellar influence, signatures; and the alchemico-astrotheologico jargon of the day.