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Updated: June 29, 2025
This extreme contrast of opinions may be easily accounted for. To most modern readers Jacob Behmen's works must be an intolerable trial of patience. They will find page after page of what they may very pardonably call, as Wesley did, 'sublime nonsense' or unintelligible jargon.
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.
Behmen's full doctrine and practice of prayer also; his fine and fruitful treatment of what he always calls 'the process of CHRIST'; and, intimately connected with that, his still super- confessional treatment of imputation, of all that, and much more like that, I cannot now attempt to speak. Nor yet of his superb teaching on love.
What and where is Paradise? Through a hundred and fourteen large quarto pages Behmen's astonishing answers to the forty questions run; after which he adds this: 'Thus, my beloved friend, we have set down, according to our gifts, a round answer to your questions, and we exhort you as a brother not to despise us. For we are not born of art, but of simplicity.
'His language is barbarous, unscriptural, and unintelligible. 'It is most sublime nonsense, inimitable bombast, fustian not to be paralleled. Bishop Warburton also refers to him in the most unqualified terms of contempt. William Blake, most mystical of poets and painters, delighted, as might well be expected, in Behmen's writings.
In his preparations for a new edition of Behmen in English, William Law had re-translated and paraphrased The Supersensual Life, and the editor of the 1781 edition of Behmen's works has incorporated Law's beautiful rendering of that tract in room of JOHN SPARROW'S excellent but rather too antique rendering.
What he read he thoroughly assimilated; and Behmen's strange theosophy, after passing through the mind of his English exponent, reappeared in a far more logical and comprehensible form. It cannot be said that Law was altogether a gainer by his later studies.
The Divine Life is in you, quench it not, for it is of GOD. Nay, it is GOD Himself in you. It depends upon yourself whether or no that which is at this moment the smallest of all seeds is yet to become in you the greatest and the most fruitful of all trees. 'Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is, is a characteristic saying of a fellow-countryman of Behmen's.
While working with his hands, Jacob Behmen's whole life was spent in the deepest and the most original thought; in piercing visions of GOD and of nature; in prayer, in praise, and in love to GOD and man.
Just how it came about we are not fully told; but, long before his book was finished, a nobleman in the neighbourhood, who was deeply interested in the philosophy and the theology of that day, somehow got hold of Behmen's papers and had them copied out and spread abroad, to Behmen's great surprise and great distress.
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