Transcribed from the 1895 Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier edition, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
author of ‘Characters and Characteristics of William Law’etc.
Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier
30 St. Mary Street, Edinburgh, and
24 Old Bailey, London
1895
This lecture was delivered at the opening of my Classes for the studyof the pre-Reformation, Reformation, and post-Reformation Mystics duringSession 1894-5. A Lecture on William Lawwas delivered at the opening of a former Session as an Introductionto the whole subject of Mysticism.
A. W.
St. George’s Free Church,
5th November 1894. p. 7
Jacob Behmen, the greatest of the mystics, and the father of Germanphilosophy, was all his life nothing better than a working shoemaker. He was born at Old Seidenberg, a village near Goerlitz in Silesia, inthe year 1575, and he died at Goerlitz in the year 1624. JacobBehmen has no biography. Jacob Behmen’s books are his bestbiography. While working with his hands, Jacob Behmen’swhole life was spent in the deepest and the most original thought; inpiercing visions of God and of nature; inprayer, in praise, and in love to God p. 8andman. Of Jacob Behmen it may be said with the utmost truth andsoberness that he lived and moved and had his being in God. Jacob Behmen has no biography because his whole life was hid with Christin God.
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While we have nothing that can properly be called a biography ofJacob Behmen, we have ample amends made to us in those priceless morselsof autobiography that lie scattered so plentifully up and down all hisbooks. And nothing could be more charming than just those incidentaland unstudied utterances of Behmen about himself. Into the verydepths of a passage of the profoundest speculation Behmen will all ofa sudden throw a few verses of the most childlike and heart-winningconfidences about his own mental history and his own spiritual experience.p. 9 And thus it is that,without at all intending it, Behmen has left behind him a complete historyof his great mind and his holy heart in those outbursts of diffidence,deprecation, explanation, and self-defence, of which his philosophicaland theological, as well as his apologetic and experimental, books areall so full. It were an immense service done to our best literatureif some of Behmen’s students would go through all Behmen’sbooks, so as to make a complete collection and composition of the bestof those autobiographic passages. Such a book, if it were welldone, would at once take rank with The Confessions of St.Augustine, The Divine Comedy of Dante,and the Grace Abounding of John Bunyan. It would then be seen by all, what few, till then, will believe, thatJacob Behmen’s mind and heart p. 10andspiritual experience all combine to give him a foremost place amongthe most classical masters in that great field.
In the nineteenth chapter of the Aurora there occurs a veryimportant passage of this autobiographic nature. In that famouspassage Behmen tells his readers that when his eyes first began to beopened, the sight of this world completely overwhelmed him. Asaph’sexperiences, so powerfully set before us in the seventy-third Psalm,will best convey, to those