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Updated: June 29, 2025
As it is, the unfinished, the scarcely-begun, Theoscopia only serves to show the student of what a treasure he has been bereft by Behmen's too early death. As I read and re-read the Theoscopia I felt the full truth and force of Hegel's generous words, that German philosophy began with Behmen. This is both German and Christian philosophy, I said to myself as I revelled in the Theoscopia.
The book is full of Behmen's observation of men. It is the outcome of a close and long-continued study of character and conduct. Every page of The Four Complexions gleams with a keen but tender and wistful insight into our poor human nature.
To Behmen's mind the whole universe of man and nature is transfigured by the pervading presence of a spiritual life. Everywhere there is a contest against evil, sin, and death; everywhere there is a longing after better things, a yearning for the recovery of the heavenly type. Everywhere there is a groaning and travailing in pain until now, awaiting the adoption to wit, the redemption of the body.
Behmen's teaching on human nature, his doctrine of the heart of man, and of the image of GOD in the heart of man, has a greatness about it that marks it off as being peculiarly Behmen's own doctrine. He agrees with the catechisms and the creeds in their teaching that the heart of man was at first like the heart of GOD in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness.
Behmen's favourite Scripture, after our Lord's promise of the Holy Spirit to them that ask for Him, was the parable of the Prodigal Son. In all his books Behmen is that son, covered with wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, but at last beginning to come to himself and to return to his Father.
The Way to Christ was Behmen's next book, and in the four precious treatises that compose that book our author takes an altogether new departure. In his Aurora, in The Three Principles, in the Forty Questions, and in the Signatura Rerum, Jacob Behmen has been writing for philosophers and theologians.
At the same time, and after all that has been said about Behmen's barbarous style, Bishop Martensen tells us how the readers of SCHELLING were surprised and enraptured by a wealth of new expressions and new turns of speech in their mother tongue. But all these belonged to Behmen, or were fashioned on the model of his symbolical language.
Ib. Their doctrine is to be seen in Jacob Behmen's books by him that hath nothing else to do, than to bestow a great deal of time to understand him that was not willing to be easily understood, and to know that his bombasted words do signify nothing more than before was easily known by common familiar terms. This is not in all its parts true.
It is a long step both in time and in thought from Behmen to SCHOPENHAUER; but, speaking of one of Schelling's books, Schopenhauer says that it is all taken from Jacob Behmen's Mysterium Magnum; every thought and almost every word of Schelling's work leads Schopenhauer to think of Behmen.
To many of his contemporaries the result appeared quite the contrary; and he was constantly reproached with having become a mere mystic or a hopeless enthusiast. No doubt, he borrowed from his favourite authors some of their faults as well as many of their virtues. Jacob Behmen's most glaring faults in style and phraseology are sometimes transferred with little mitigation to his pages.
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