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Updated: June 26, 2025
How different is Jacob Behmen! he is tremulous with emotion, and listens awe-struck, with the gentlest humanity, to the Teacher whose lessons he conveys; and when he asserts that, "in some sort, love is greater than God," his heart beats so high that the thumping against his leathern coat is audible across the centuries. 'Tis a great difference.
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."
Although, apparently, a practical disciple of Behmen, I am no believer in his visionary creed. Quiet is not happiness; nor can the absence of all strong and painful emotion compensate for the weary heaviness of inert existence, passionless, dreamless, changeless.
The last governor of Tebris, Behmen Mirza, the schach's brother, was a remarkably intelligent and just man. He brought the province of Aderbeidschan into a flourishing condition in a few years, and everywhere established order and security.
A meek and shy quietest, his intellectual powers were never stimulated into feverous energy by crowds of proselytes, or by the ambition of proselyting. Jacob Behmen was an enthusiast, in the strictest sense, as not merely distinguished, but as contra-distinguished, from a fanatic.
The wives of the banished prince, Behmen, who were left behind, learnt, through Dr. Cassolani, that I thought of going to Tiflis. They requested me to visit them, that I might be able to tell the prince that I had seen them and left them well. The doctor conducted me into their presence.
Take the great doctrinal and experimental Puritans, such as John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Richard Baxter, John Howe, and Jonathan Edwards, and add on to them the greatest and best mystics, such as Jacob Behmen, Thomas A Kempis, Francis Fenelon, Jeremy Taylor, Samuel Rutherford, Robert Leighton, and William Law, and you will have the profoundest, the most complete, the most perfect, and, I will add, the most fascinating and enthralling of spiritual teaching in all the world.
A few of his hymns and short meditations rise to a higher poetical level. They are referred to with much praise by Mr. G. Macdonald, who adds the just remark that 'The mystical thinker will ever be found the reviver of religious poetry. Like Law, John Byrom was a great admirer of Behmen.
At the same time, and after all that has been said about Behmen's barbarous style, Bishop Martensen tells us how the readers of SCHELLING were surprised and enraptured by a wealth of new expressions and new turns of speech in their mother tongue. But all these belonged to Behmen, or were fashioned on the model of his symbolical language.
But take Behmen and Law together, as they meet together in The Supersensual Life, and not A Kempis himself comes near them even in his own proper field, or in his immense service in that field.
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