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Updated: June 29, 2025
Such a book, if it were well done, would at once take rank with The Confessions of ST. AUGUSTINE, The Divine Comedy of DANTE, and the Grace Abounding of JOHN BUNYAN. It would then be seen by all, what few, till then, will believe, that Jacob Behmen's mind and heart and spiritual experience all combine to give him a foremost place among the most classical masters in that great field.
Jacob Behmen, the greatest of the mystics, and the father of German philosophy, was all his life nothing better than a working shoemaker. He was born at Old Seidenberg, a village near Goerlitz in Silesia, in the year 1575, and he died at Goerlitz in the year 1624. Jacob Behmen has no biography. Jacob Behmen's books are his best biography.
After what I have taken upon me to say about Behmen, the learned Bishop's authoritative passage must be quoted: 'If we compare Behmen's doctrine of the Trinity, says the learned and evangelical Bishop, 'with that which is contained in the otherwise so admirable Athanasian Creed, the latter but displays to us a most abstruse metaphysic; a GOD for mere thought, and in whom there is nothing sympathetic for the heart of man.
Seek the noble knowledge of thyself. Seek it and you will find a heavenly treasure which will not be eaten by moths, and which no thief shall ever take away. I shall not attempt to enter on the thorny thicket of Jacob Behmen's polemical and apologetical works. I shall not even load your mind with their unhappy titles.
Dante himself does not beat such a soaring wing as Behmen's; and all the trumpets that sound in Paradise Lost do not swell my heart and chase its blood like Jacob Behmen's broken syllables about the Fall. I would not wonder to have it pointed out to me in the world to come that all that Gichtel, and St.
At the same time let all intending students of Jacob Behmen take warning that they will have to learn an absolutely new and an unheard-of language if they would speak with Behmen and have Behmen speak with them. For Behmen's books are written neither in German nor in English of any age or idiom, but in the most original and uncouth Behmenese.
It does not stagger me to hear his disciples calling him, as HEGEL does, 'a man of a mighty mind, or, as LAW does, 'the illuminated Behmen, and 'the blessed Behmen. 'In speculative power, says dry DR. KURTZ, 'and in poetic wealth, exhibited with epic and dramatic effect, Behmen's system surpasses everything of the kind ever written. Some of his disciples have the hardihood to affirm indeed that even ISAAC NEWTON ploughed with Behmen's heifer, but had not the boldness to acknowledge the debt.
The Divine Nature, human nature, time, space, matter, life, love, sin, death, holiness, heaven, hell, Behmen's reader must have lived and moved all his days among such things as these: he must be at home, as far as the mind of man can be at home, among such things as these, and then he will begin to understand Behmen, and will still strive better and better to understand him; and, where he does not as yet understand him, he will set that down to his own inattention, incapacity, want of due preparation, and want of the proper ripeness for such a study.
Our COLLINS and COWPER were often thrown into that extraordinary state of mind, when the ideal presence converts us into visionaries; and their illusions were as strong as SEEDENBORG'S, who saw a terrestrial heaven in the glittering streets of his New Jerusalem; or JACOB BEHMEN'S, who listened to a celestial voice till he beheld the apparition of an angel; or CARDAN'S, when he so carefully observed a number of little armed men at his feet; or BENVENUTO CELLINI'S, whose vivid imagination and glorious egotism so frequently contemplated "a resplendent light hovering over his shadow."
Nothing was further from Behmen's mind, when he took up his pen of an evening, than to make a book. He took up his pen after his day's work was over in order to preserve for his own memory and use in after days the revelations that had been made to him, and the experiences and exercises through which GOD had passed him.
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