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

by Robert Alfred Vaughan

It is curious to observe how Behmen’s theory takes hold of Chemistry with one hand, and Theology with the other. Paracelsus pronounced all matter composed of salt, mercury, and sulphur. Behmen adds, ‘It is even so, considering salt as the representative of the astringent or attractive principle—mercury, of the fluent or separative,—and sulphur, of nature’s pain in the resultant process of production.’ Again, the Father is the dark or fiery principle; the Son, the principle of light or grace; and the Holy Ghost, the creative, formative, preserving principle—the outbirth or realization of the two former. There are no materials so incongruous that a dexterous use of imaginative or superficial analogies cannot combine them. In this way, a medley of terms from the nomenclature of every science may be catalogued and bracketed in symmetrical groups of twos and threes. Behmen was too much in earnest, however, to carry such artificial method very far. He was more concerned about thought than orderly form. He could not postulate a fact to fill a gap in a synopsis. Though he mingles in much confusion the sciences of mind and matter, he does not confound their subjects, and regard them as different states of one substance. He would not affirm, with Schelling, that matter was mind dormant; and mind, matter realized and self-conscious.

We have seen that Behmen assigns the first three principles to the dark kingdom of the Father. When he describes that as a realm of wrath and darkness, he speaks chiefly from the human point of view. God is love. The Father regarded as the wrath-principle, cannot strictly be called God. But the very principle which makes love what it is, becomes, in respect to sin, so much wrath.

Yet, independently of man, and of such wrath as he may know, God would still have manifested himself in contraries. The divine One, the unmanifested Subject, seeking an object—desiring, as it were, to find himself, becomes what, for lack of better terms, Behmen has to call a craving darkness, or burning sense of want. Not that Deity suffers pain; but a certain passion must form the base of action. Realizing that object, the darkness becomes light. That light—the Son—had not been, but for the darkness—the Father. Then from the two, which are one, arise, in the Holy Spirit, the archetypal Forms of the universe. Thus, from the depth of the divine nature itself spring these opposites, Power and Grace, Wrath and Love, Darkness and Light; and thence, by a combination of forces, the manifestation of God in the quickened, changeful universe. But for such antithesis God had remained unrevealed. Without so much of antagonism as is essential to action, the Divine Being had not realized the glory of his nature.

At the same time, Behmen carefully excludes the notion of modern pantheism, that the Divine Idea develops itself by a process, and grows as the world grows.[^[244]] ‘I have to relate in succession,’ he would say, ‘what takes place simultaneously in God,—to describe separately what is one in Him. He needs no method, no medium. The Eternal Nature is not his instrument for creating the visible universe. Thought and realization, with God, take place together, and are in Him identical.’ So, in describing a landscape, we have to relate severally the sounds and appearances of birds and clouds, hills and waters. But to him who is on the spot, the birds sing, the waters shine, the clouds fly, the trees bow on the hill, and the corn waves along the valley, at one and the same time. His senses are the focus of the whole: he sits in the centre. But description must travel the circumference.

We now arrive once more at Behmen’s ‘Yea and Nay’—that theory of antithesis before noticed: his explanation of the origin of Evil. These Contraries are his trade-winds, whereby he voyages to and fro, and traverses with such facility the whole system of things. He teaches that the Divine Unity, in its manifestation or self-realization, parts into two principles, variously called Light and Darkness, Joy and Sorrow, Fire and Light, Wrath and Love, Good and Evil. Without what is termed the Darkness and the Fire, there would be no Love and Light. Evil is necessary to manifest Good. Not that anything is created by God for evil. In everything is both good and evil: the predominance decides its use and destiny. What is so much pain and evil in hell, is, in heaven, so much joy and goodness. The bitter fountain and the sweet flow originally from one divine Source. The angels and the devils are both in God, of whom, and in whom, all live and move. But from their divine basis, or root, the former draw joy and glory, the latter shame and woe. The point of collision is the gate of anguish and of bliss.

Thus Behmen, from far away, echoes Heraclitus, and declares Strife the father of all things. What were Virtue, he would ask, without temptation? In life’s warfare lies its greatness. Our full wealth of being is only realized by a struggle for very life. Not till the height of the conflict between Siegfried and the dragon—not till the mountain is all flames and earthquake with that fearful fight, do the dwarfs bring out their hoard, and untold riches glitter round the victor.

Behmen was by no means the first to devise a hypothesis so plausible. We meet with it in quarters widely remote—in the pantheism of Jelaleddin Rumi and of John Scotus Erigena. But nowhere does it occupy so central a place, undergo such full development, receive such copious illustration, as in the theosophy of the Görlitz shoemaker.

Like most of those attempts to explain the inexplicable which have proved more than usually attractive, this theory has its truth and its falsehood. It is true that the harmonious development of life is neither more nor less than a successive reconciliation of contraries. The persistent quality, representing our individuality and what is due to the particular self, must not exist alone. The diffusive quality, or fluent, having regard only to others, must not exist alone. The extreme of either defeats itself. Each is necessary to, or, as Behmen would say, lies in the other. The two factors are reconciled, and consummated in a higher unity when the command is obeyed—‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ Towards this standard all moral development must tend. Pairs of principles, like the Personal and the Relative, the Ideal and the Actual, &c.—at once twin and rival—where each is the complement of the other, are very numerous. They are designed for union, as heat and cold combine to produce a temperate or habitable clime. Had Behmen confined his theory of contraries within such limits, we might have questioned his expressions;—we must, I think, have admitted his principle.

But when he takes good and evil as the members of such an antithesis, he is deceived by an apparent likeness. It would be a strange thing should any one declare courage and meekness, lowliness and aspiration, the work of God and the work of man, incapable of harmony. It is still more strange to hear any man pronounce any harmony possible between good and evil, sin and holiness. The former set of terms belong to one family, the latter are reciprocally destructive, totally incompatible. Here lies Behmen’s fallacy.

To regard goodness as a quality which would remain inert and apathetic were it not endowed with individuality and consistence by evil, and goaded to activity by temptation, is altogether to mistake its nature. An adequate conception of Virtue must require that it be benignly active within its allotted range.