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Updated: May 26, 2025
Nor is this coincidence at all to be wondered at. We had studied in the same school; been disciplined by the same preparatory philosophy, namely, the writings of Kant; we had both equal obligations to the polar logic and dynamic philosophy of Giordano Bruno; and Schelling has lately, and, as of recent acquisition, avowed that same affectionate reverence for the labours of Behmen, and other mystics, which I had formed at a much earlier period.
As his customers came and gave their orders in his shop; as his neighbours collected, and gossiped, and debated, and quarrelled around his shop window; as his minister fumed and raged against him in the pulpit; as the Council of Goerlitz sat and swayed, passed sentence upon him, retracted their sentence, and again gave way under the pressure of their minister, and pronounced another sentence, all this time Behmen was having poor human nature, to all its joints and marrow, and to all the thoughts and instincts of its heart, laid naked and open before him, both in other men and in himself.
But if you are a true student and a good man; if you are an open-minded and a humble- minded man; if you are prepared to sit at any man's feet who will engage to lead you a single step out of your ignorance and your evil; if you open Behmen with a predisposition to believe in him, and with the expectation and the determination to get good out of him, then, in the measure of all that; in the measure of your capacity of mind and your hospitality of heart; in the measure of your humility, seriousness, patience, teachableness, hunger for truth, hunger for righteousness, in that measure you will find Jacob Behmen to be what MAURICE tells us he found him to be, 'a generative thinker. Out of much you cannot understand, wherever the blame for that may lie, out of much slag and much dross, I am mistaken if you will not lay up some of your finest gold; and out of much straw and chaff some of the finest of the wheat.
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 Moravian brethren, though dating in the first instance from the time of Huss, owed their resuscitation to that wave of mystic pietism which passed through Germany in the seventeenth century, showing its early power in the writings of Behmen, and reaching its full tide in the new vigour of spiritual life inspired into the Lutheran Church by the activity of Arndt and Spener.
The coincidence of Schelling's system with certain general ideas of Behmen, he declares to have been mere coincidence; while my obligations have been more direct. He needs give to Behmen only feelings of sympathy; while I owe him a debt of gratitude.
His estimate of Behmen and his writings, we may observe in passing, is both sound and charitable, and speaks as much for Mr. Vaughan's heart as for his head.
The Divine Nature will be quenched and extinguished in thee, till nothing but self and hell is left to thee. In the name, and in the strength of GOD, love all men. Love thy neighbour as thyself, and do to thy neighbour as thou doest to thyself. And do it now. For now is the accepted time; and now is the day of salvation! Jacob Behmen died in his fiftieth year.
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.
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.
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