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Updated: June 26, 2025
And as I stopped my reading for a little, a procession of men of real and indisputable genius passed before me, who had all lodged with Behmen in the melancholy inn. Till I remembered that far deeper and far truer saying, that 'simply to say man at all is to say melancholy. No: with all respect, the real fact is surely as near as possible the exact opposite.
In a letter addressed to one of the nobility in Silesia, and dated February 19, 1623, Behmen says: 'When you have leisure to study I shall send you something still more deep, for I have written this whole autumn and winter without ceasing. And if he had written nothing else but his great book entitled Mysterium Magnum that autumn and winter, he must have written night and day and done nothing else.
He was libelled and maligned, harassed and hunted to death by a world that was not worthy of such a gift of GOD. A sudden and severe sickness came upon Behmen till he sank in death with his Aurora and his Holy Week and his Divine Vision all lying still unfinished at his bedside. 'Open the door and let in more of that music, the dying man said to his weeping son.
We shall perhaps set you down by the side of Jacob Behmen or of Emanuel Swedenbourg, and in an earlier age you might have been a prophet, and have ranked perhaps with Mahomet.
He had only the most outward apprehension of the dogmatics of his day, and he was totally incapable of understanding Jacob Behmen. But it is not for the limitations of his understanding that Pastor Richter stands before us so laden with blame. The school is a small one still that, after two centuries of study and prayer and a holy life, can pretend to understand the whole of the Aurora.
He never threw over all his ballast of common sense so as to rise above an atmosphere in which a rational being could breathe. I found in his library William Law's edition of Jacob Behmen.
Behmen's treatise has been well described by Walton as containing the philosophy of temptation; and by Martensen as displaying a most profound knowledge of the human heart. Behmen sets about his task as a ductor dubitantium in a masterly manner. He takes in hand the comfort and direction of sin-distressed souls in a characteristically deep, inward, and thorough-going way.
Mechanically I turned to the shelves by the fireplace, and examined the volumes ranged in that department. I found they contained the works of those writers whom we may class together under the title of mystics, Iamblichus and Plotinus; Swedenborg and Behmen; Sandivogius, Van Helmont, Paracelsus, Cardan. Works, too, were there, by writers less renowned, on astrology, geomancy, chiromancy, etc.
Behmen Mirza learnt, however, through his friends, that the minister entertained an inveterate hatred towards him, and that he ran the risk of being deprived of his sight, or even made away with altogether. They advised him to lose no time, but quit the country immediately.
About his next book Behmen thus writes: 'Upon the desire of some high persons with whom I did converse in the Christmas holidays, I have written a pretty large treatise upon Election, in which I have done my best to determine that subject upon the deepest grounds.
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