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Updated: June 26, 2025
Of Jacob Behmen it may be said with the utmost truth and soberness that he lived and moved and had his being in GOD. Jacob Behmen has no biography because his whole life was hid with CHRIST in GOD.
Even in the short way into this great man that I have gone, I have come upon such rare and rich mines of divine and eternal truth that I can easily believe that they who have dug deeper have come upon uncounted riches. 'Next to the Scriptures, writes William Law, 'my only book is the illuminated Behmen. For the whole kingdom of grace and nature was opened in him.
Let all preachers and pastors who would master the rationale of temptation, and who would ground their directions and their comforts to their people in the nature of things, as well as in the word of GOD, make Jacob Behmen and William Law and Prebendary Clark their constant study. 'I write for no other purpose, says Behmen, 'than that men may learn how to know themselves.
Here, says Behmen, is the great and universal treasury of that heavenly clay of which all things, even to angels and men, are made; and here is the eternal turning-wheel with which they are all framed and fashioned. Eternal Nature is an invisible essence, and it is the essential ground out of which all the visible and invisible worlds are made.
Behmen is so deep and so original in his purely philosophical, theological, and speculative books, that in many places we can only stand back and wonder at the man. But in his Holy Week Behmen kneels down beside us.
The Supersensual Life of Jacob Behmen, in the English of William Law, is a superb piece of spiritual work, and a treasure-house of masculine English. A Treatise of the Four Complexions, or A Consolatory Instruction for a Sad and Assaulted Heart, was Behmen's next book. The four complexions are the four temperaments the choleric, the sanguine, the phlegmatic, and the melancholy.
And as our schoolboys laugh and jeer at the outlandish sounds of Greek and Latin and German, till they have learned to read and love the great authors who have written in those languages, so WESLEY, and SOUTHEY, and even HALLAM himself, jest and flout and call names at Jacob Behmen, because they have not taken the trouble to learn his language, to master his mind, and to drink in his spirit.
Again, and again, and again, till it came to fill his whole life, Behmen would be sitting over his work, or walking abroad under the stars, or worshipping in his pew in the parish church, when, like the captive prophet by the river of Chebar, he would be caught up by the hair of the head and carried away into the visions of GOD to behold the glory of GOD. And then, when he came to himself, there would arise within him a 'fiery instigation' to set down for a 'memorial' what he had again seen and heard.
And, besides, Jacob Behmen could not have written a book even if he had tried it. He was a total stranger to the world of books; and then, over and above that, he had been taken up into a world of things into which no book ever written as yet had dared to enter.
In malice, and in hatred, and in lack of brotherly love, after all I have seen and experienced, I am like all other men. I am surely the fullest of all men of all manner of infirmity and malignity. Behmen protests in every book of his that what he has written he has received immediately from GOD. 'Let it never be imagined that I am any greater or any better than other men.
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