Adam was created to be the restoring angel of this world. His nature was twofold. Within, he had an angelic soul and body, derived from the powers of heaven. Without, he had a life and body derived from the powers of earth. The former was given him that he might be separate from, and superior to the world. He was endowed with the latter, that he might be connected with, and operative in the world. His external nature sheltered his inner from all acquaintance with the properties of our corrupted earth. His love and his obedience surrounded him with a perpetual paradise of his own. He could not feel the fierceness of fire, the rigour of cold; he was inaccessible to want or pain. He was designed to be the father of a like angelic-human race, who should occupy and reclaim the earth for God,—keeping down the ever-emerging Curse, and educing and multiplying the Blessing which God had implanted.
But the will of Adam gradually declined from the inward paradisiacal life towards the life of this world. He commenced his downward course by desiring to know the good and evil of the world about him. Then Eve was fashioned out of him, and the distinction of sex introduced. This was a remedial interposition to check his descent. It was deemed better that he should love the feminine part of his own nature rather than the external world.[[248]] Each step of decline was mercifully met by some new aid on the part of God, but all in vain. He ate of the earthly tree, and the angelic life within him became extinct.
Behmen contends stoutly that no arbitrary trial or penalty was imposed on Adam. No divine wrath visited his sin on his descendants. His liability to suffering and death was the natural consequence (according to the divine order) of his breaking away from God, and falling from the angel to the animal life. It is characteristic of Behmen’s theology to resolve acts of judgment, or of sovereign intervention, as much as possible, into the operation of law. Thus, he will not believe that God inflicts suffering on lost souls or devils. Their own dark and furious passions are their chain and flame. He shares this tendency in common with most of the Protestant mystics. And I am by no means prepared to say that our mystics are altogether wrong on this matter.
No sooner had man fallen, than the mercy of God implanted in him the seed of redemption. He lodged in the depths of our nature a hidden gift of the Spirit, the inner light, the internal ‘serpent-bruiser,’ the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. All our beginnings of desire towards God and heaven are the working of this indwelling seed of life. Thus, salvation is wholly of grace. At the same time, it rests with us whether we will realize or smother the nascent blessing. Man is the arbiter of his own destiny, and voluntarily develops, from the depths of his nature, his heaven or his hell.
Lessons of self-abandonment, similar to those of the Theologia Germanica, are reiterated by Jacob Behmen. We are never to forget the ‘Nothingness’ of man, the ‘All’ of God. He pronounces means and ordinances good only as they lead us directly to God,—as they prepare us to receive the divine operation. With Behmen, as with the mystics of the fourteenth century, redemption is our deliverance from the restless isolation of Self, or Ownhood, and our return to union with God. It is a new birth, a divine life, derived from Christ, the true vine.[[249]]
But to this idea the theosophists add another. They have a physical as well as a spiritual regeneration, and believe in the revival, within the regenerate, of a certain internal or angelic body. The Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation gave much encouragement to such fancies. According to Weigel, Christ had a twofold body—one truly human; another, called the heavenly, a procession from the divine nature. Furthermore, theosophy extends the influence of redemption to external nature. In the latter-day, ‘the time of the Lilies,’ all men will be the true servants of Christ, our race will have recovered its lost lordship over nature, and the Philosopher’s Stone will be discovered. That is, man will be able to extract from every substance its hidden perfectness and power.
The strongly subjective bent of Behmen’s mind has its good as well as its evil. He never long loses sight of his great aim—the awakening and sustenance of the inward life. That life was imperilled by formalism, by fatalism, by dogmatical disputes, by the greedy superstition of the gold-seeker. So Behmen warns men incessantly, that no assent to orthodox propositions can save them.[[250]] He argues against the Hyper-Calvinist, and against what he regarded as the Antinomian consequence of the doctrine of ‘imputed righteousness.’[[251]] He was a man of peace,—little disposed to add one more to so many controversies; seldom entering the lists unless challenged.[[252]] He justly condemned as profitless the Millenarian speculations in which some about him were entangled.[[253]] He had no sympathy with those who endeavoured to make ancient Jewish prophecy the fortune-teller of the present day. He declared that the true Philosopher’s Stone, to be coveted by all, was ‘the new life in Christ Jesus.’[[254]] Only by victory over Self could any win victory over nature. To the selfish and the godless no secrets would be revealed. Such men were continually within reach of wonders they might not grasp. So the sinful Sir Launcelot slept by the ruined chapel, and had neither grace nor power to awake, though before him stood the holy vessel of the Sangreall on its table of silver. The treatise on the Three Principles abounds in counsels and exhortation designed to promote practical holiness. The Büchlein vom heiligen Gebet is a collection of prayers for the private use of ‘awakened and desirous souls,’ somewhat after the manner of those in Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion.
When Behmen finds that Scripture contradicts his scheme, on some minor point, he will frequently, instead of resorting to a forced allegorical interpretation, break away without disguise from the authority of its text. Thus, he says more than once, concerning passages in the Mosaic account of the creation, ‘It is evident that the dear man Moses did not write this, for it is contrary to,’ &c., &c.[[255]]
Such, then, is the track of Behmen’s journeying across the speculative wilderness, following the fiery pillar of an imaginary illumination—a pillar, be it observed, much like that column of glory which, as we stand upon the sea-shore, descends to us from the setting sun,—a luminous line which moves as we move, and which, whatever point we occupy, glows from the ripples at our feet up to the fiery horizon beneath which day is sinking. Behmen’s work was done chiefly among the educated. Had his mission been to the lower orders, we should probably have heard of him as the founder of a sect. His object was, however, at once to awaken the life and expound the philosophy of religion, within the Lutheran Church. He called attention to aspects of Christian truth which the systematic theology of that day had too much overlooked. The extensive circulation of his books, and the general welcome given to the main positions of his doctrine, show that his teaching supplied a real want in those times. There can be little doubt that one considerable class of minds, repelled by the assumption or the harshness of the current orthodoxy, was attracted once more to religion under the more genial form in which Behmen presented it. Others were shaken from the sleep of formalism by his vehement expostulations. When the Creed had so largely superseded the Word,—when Protestants were more embittered against each other than brave against the common foe, the broader, deeper doctrine of Behmen would offer to many a blessed refuge. For gold and precious stones shine among his wood and stubble. The darker aspect which some theologians had given to the Divine Sovereignty seemed to pass away, as the trembler studied Behmen’s reassuring page. Apart from scientific technicalities, and the nomenclature of his system, Behmen’s style and spirit were mainly moulded upon Luther’s German Bible. Any one who will take the trouble to look, not into the Aurora, but into the Book of the Three Principles, will find, along with much clouded verbosity and a certain crabbed suggestiveness, a racy idiomatic cast of expression, a hearty manliness of tone, indicating very plainly that Behmen had studied man, and the book which manifests man.
Though his voice is, for us, so faint and distant, we feel how near he must have come to the hearts of his time. Through volumes of speculative vapour, glance and glow the warm emotions of the man, in his apostrophes, appeals, and practical digressions. His philosophy is never that of the artificial abstraction-monger, or the pedantic book-worm. He writes of men and for them as though he loved them. Modern idealism expresses itself with a grace to which the half-educated craftsman was a total stranger. But its rhetorical adornment is a painted flame compared with Behmen’s fire. Unlike the earlier mystics, his theosophy embraces the whole of man. Unlike so much recent speculation, it is wrought out more by the aspiration of the soul than the ambition of the intellect. Amidst the fantastic disorder of his notions, and the strange inequalities of his insight—now so clear and piercing, now so puerile or perverse,—a single purpose stands unquestionable,—he desired to justify the ways of God to men. His life was a waking dream; but never did mystical somnambulist more sincerely intend service to man and praise to God.