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Updated: June 26, 2025
The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guion, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes to mind, is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes in terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver. "It o'erinforms the tenement of clay," and drives the man mad; or, gives a certain violent bias, which taints his judgment.
In his absolutely original and magnificent doctrine of GOD, while all the time loyally true to it, Behmen has confessedly transcended the theology of both the Latin and the Reformed Churches; and, absolutely unlettered man though he is, has taken his stand at the very head of the great Greek theologians.
On his return from the east, Walter found the name of Jacob Behmen in everybody's mouth; and, on introducing himself to that little shop in Goerlitz out of which the Aurora and The Threefold Life had come, Walter was wise enough to see and bold enough to confess that he had found a teacher and a friend there such as neither Egypt nor India had provided him with.
There is neither past nor future where we are now walking with Behmen. There is only an everlasting present where he is now leading us.
'Beloved sir, wrote Behmen, after three months' meditation and prayer, 'and my good friend: it is impossible for the mind and reason of man to answer all the questions you have put to me. All those things are known to GOD alone.
Wesley had no longer cause to be disturbed by its features of relationship with a school of theology which he had learnt greatly to distrust. The fanciful and obscure philosophy of Dionysius, of Behmen, or of Law had been repugnant to him from the first.
Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare I be ashamed of the Teutonic theosophist, Jacob Behmen? Many, indeed, and gross were his delusions; and such as furnish frequent and ample occasion for the triumph of the learned over the poor ignorant shoemaker, who had dared think for himself.
Emerson seems to have admired Swedenborg at a distance, but seen nearer, he liked Jacob Behmen a great deal better. "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic," is easier reading than the last-mentioned Essay. Emerson accounts for the personal regard which he has for Montaigne by the story of his first acquaintance with him.
Wesley was always able to answer, with perfect correctness, that what was thus said might be true of Moravians, or of Tauler, or of Behmen, or of St. Theresa, or of Madame de Bourignon, or of the Quakers, or even of William Law, but that he himself had never done otherwise than insist most strongly on the essential need of making use of all the external helps which religion can offer.
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.
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