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Updated: June 26, 2025
The believers of the different creeds of Christianity will take offence at the statement that "Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities in its bosom."
WILLIAM LAW, a man of the best understanding, and of the humblest heart, tells us that his first reading of Behmen put him into a 'perfect sweat' of astonishment and awe. No wonder, then, that a man of Gregory Richter's narrow mind and hard heart was thrown into such a sweat of prejudice and anger and ill-will.
In his preparations for a new edition of Behmen in English, William Law had re-translated and paraphrased The Supersensual Life, and the editor of the 1781 edition of Behmen's works has incorporated Law's beautiful rendering of that tract in room of JOHN SPARROW'S excellent but rather too antique rendering.
Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are likewise his debtors, and must say after him. For it is fair to credit the broadest generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his thesis. Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato, at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.
But it might not have been possible even for Behmen to perform that day's work had he not for months beforehand been dealing day and night with the deepest and the most heart-searching things both of GOD and man. What a man was Jacob Behmen, and chosen to what a service!
In reading Behmen I am always at home, and kept close to the kingdom of GOD that is within me. 'I am not young, said CLAUDE DE ST. MARTIN, 'being now near my fiftieth year, nevertheless I have begun to learn German, in order that I may read this incomparable author in his own tongue.
But let no one be frightened away from his pages by the terrible names of Plotinus and Proclus and Porphyry, of Behmen or Spinoza, or of those modern German philosophers with whom it is not pretended that he had any intimate acquaintance. Mr. George Ripley, a man of erudition, a keen critic, a lover and admirer of Emerson, speaks very plainly of his limitations as a scholar.
Behmen is healthily and beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrowness and incommunicableness. Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and, with all his accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels. It is the best sign of a great nature, that it opens a foreground, and, like the breath of morning landscapes, invites us onward.
Seeds, blades, buddings, and new beginnings of the very life of GOD the Son, in their deepest souls. Secret and small, Behmen exclaims, as those seeds of Eden are, despise them not; destroy them not, for a blessing for thee is in them. Water those secret seeds, sun them, dig about them, and they will grow up in you also.
The Town Council of Goerlitz, hounded on by their Minister, sentenced Behmen to be banished, and interdicted him from ever writing any more. But in sheer shame at what they had done they immediately recalled Behmen from banishment; only, they insisted that he should confine himself to his shop, and leave all writing of books alone.
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