A scholar like Carlstadt, a professor of established repute,

surrenders at last to the vulgar error of the very coarsest

mysticism. He advises his students to go home; human learning is

vain; Hebrew and Greek an idle toil; inspiration is far above

scholarship. Were there not prophets among them, wiser than all the

doctors, who had never studied anything or anywhere for half an

hour? He himself went about among the poor people, asking them the

meaning of Scripture passages, and believing that the hap-hazard

notions they put forth were a special revelation from Him who hideth

from the wise and prudent what is revealed unto babes. Imagine the

Professor bawling a text into the ear of some deaf old crone who

cowers beside the stove, and awaiting the irrelevant mumblings of

ignorant decrepitude as the oracle of God! Fancy him accosting the

shoemaker at his stall, and getting his notion of the text in

question, noting it down as infallible, and going his way rejoicing;

while Crispin, who knows him, thinks over and over again what a far

cleverer answer he might have given, and wishes unsaid what

Carlstadt believes inspired!

Is there no one in Wittenberg to unmask these follies, and to quiet

the smouldering excitement dangerously spreading among townspeople

and students? Melanchthon is young. The loud browbeating volubility

of the prophets overpowers his gentle nature. He is undecided—he

fancies he sees some force in what they say about baptism. He is

timid—he will do nothing.

Friends write to Luther. Back comes an answer from a man who sees to

the heart of the matter in a moment—a standing confutation of the

mystic’s ambition, in three sentences. Thus replies Luther—‘Do you

wish to know the place, the time, the manner in which God holds

converse with men? Hear then—‘As a lion so hath he crushed all my

bones;’ and again, ‘I am cast out from before thy face;’ and again,

‘My soul is filled with plagues, and my life draweth nigh unto the

gates of hell.’ The Divine Majesty does not speak to men

immediately, as they call it, so that they have vision of God, for

He saith, ‘No flesh shall see me and live.’ Human nature could not

survive the least syllable of the Divine utterance. So God addresses

man through men, because we could not endure His speaking to us

without medium.’

And the mystics could not say (as mystics so commonly plead) that

Luther was a man unable, from defective experience, to understand

them. If any man had sounded the depths of the soul’s ‘dim and

perilous way,’ it was he. Nay, it is for him to question _their_

experience. ‘Inquire,’ he says to Melanchthon, ‘if they know aught

of those spiritual distresses, those divine births, and deaths, and

sorrows, as of hell.’[206]

Luther receives day by day more alarming intelligence. He fears the

spread of false doctrine—insurrection in the name of reform. He is

anxious lest the elector should persecute the new lights—a step

which the fat, amiable, children-with-sugar-plums-feeding Frederick,

was not very likely to take. He forms the heroic resolve of quitting

his refuge, and suddenly reappears in Wittenberg. He preaches

sermons marvellous for moderation and wisdom—sermons which

accomplish what is so hard, the calming of heated passion, the

reconciliation of adversaries. At his voice Violence and Tumult

slink away—their hounds still in the leash; and Charity descends,

waving her wand of peace, and shedding the light of her heavenly

smile on every face. So triumphs Religion over Fanaticism.

Finally, Luther was called on to hold a discussion with two of the

prophets, Stübner, and one Cellarius, a schoolmaster. The latter,

when called upon by Luther to substantiate his positions from the

Scripture, stamps, strikes the table with his fist, and declares it

an insult to speak so to a man of God. Luther, at last, seeing this

man foaming, roaring, leaping about like one possessed, comes to

believe that there _is_ a spirit in these men—but an unclean one

from beneath. He cries out finally, after his homely fashion, ‘I

smack that spirit of yours upon the snout.’ Howls of indignation

from the Zwickauer side—universal confusion—dissolution of assembly.

The prophets after this find themselves moved to quit Wittenberg

without delay—their occupation gone. Let prosaic or sceptical folk

regard this discussion as they may, to those who look beneath the

surface, it is manifest that there really was a conflict of spirits

going on then and there—the unclean spirit of Arrogance and Misrule

quailing before that of Truth and Soberness.[207]

Carlstadt and his allies of Zwickau exhibit mysticism rampant,

making reformation look questionable. A very fair representative of

the other class of mystic is found in Sebastian Frank. This man,

born at the close of the fifteenth century, seems to have lived a

wandering life in different parts of Germany (often brought into

trouble by his doctrines, probably) for some forty or fifty years.

He was early enamoured of the German Theology, the writings of

Tauler, above all, of Eckart’s speculations. The leading principles

contained in the books he regarded with such veneration, he

elaborated into a system of his own. Starting with the doctrine of

the _Theologia Germanica_, that God is the _substans_ of all things,

he pushes it to the verge of a dreamy pantheism—nay, even beyond

that uncertain frontier. He conceives of a kind of divine

life-process (_Lebens-prozess_) through which the universe has to

pass. This process, like the Hegelian, is threefold. _First_, the

divine substance, the abstract unity which produces all existence.

_Second_, said substance appearing as an opposite to itself—making

itself object. _Third_, the absorption of this opposition and

antithesis—the consummate realization whereof takes place in the

consciousness of man when restored to the supreme unity and rendered

in a sense divine. The fall of man is, in his system, a fall from

the Divinity within him—that Reason which is the Holy Ghost, in

which the Divine Being is supposed first to acquire will and

self-consciousness. Christ is, with him, the divine element in man.

The work of the historic Saviour is to make us conscious of the

ideal and inward, and we thus arrive at the consciousness of that

fundamental divineness in us which knows and is one with the Supreme

by identity of nature.[208] Such doctrine is a relapse upon Eckart,

and also an anticipation of modern German speculation.

Yet, shall we say on this account that Sebastian Frank was before

his age or behind it? The latter unquestionably. He stood up in

defence of obsolescent error against a truth that was blessing

mankind. He must stand condemned, on the sole ground of judgment we

modern judges care to take, as one of the obstructives of his day

who put forth what strength he had to roll back the climbing wheel

of truth. We pardon Tauler’s allegorical interpretations—those

freaks of fancy, so subtile, so inexhaustible, so curiously

irrelevant in one sense, yet so sagaciously brought home in

another—we assent to Melanchthon’s verdict, who calls him the German

Origen; but we remember that every one in his times interpreted the

Bible in that arbitrary style. The Reformers, aided by the revival

of letters, were successful in introducing those principles of

interpretation with which we are ourselves familiar. But for this

more correct method of exegesis, the benign influence of the

Scriptures themselves had been all but nullified; for any one might

have found in them what he would. Yet against this good thing,

second only to the Word itself, Sebastian Frank stands up to fight

in defence of arbitrary fancy and of lifeless pantheistic theory

with such strength as he may. So has mysticism, once so eager to

press on, grown childishly conservative, and is cast out

straightway. Luther said he had written nothing against Frank, he

despised him so thoroughly. ‘Unless my scent deceive me,’ says the

reformer, ‘the man is an enthusiast or spiritualist (_Geisterer_),

for whom nothing will do but spirit! spirit!—and not a word of

Scripture, sacrament, or ministry.’

So Frank, contending for the painted dreams of night against the

realities of day—for fantasy against soberness—and falling,

necessarily, in the fight, has been curtained over in his sleep by

the profoundest darkness. Scarcely does any one care to rescue from

their oblivion even the names of his many books. What is his _Golden

Ark_, or _Seven Sealed Book_, or collection of most extravagant

interpretations, called _Paradoxa_, to any human creature?

For a Chronicle he left behind, the historian has sometimes to thank

him. He had a near-sighted mind. Action immediately about him he

could limn truly. But he had not the comprehensiveness to see

whither the age was tending.

WILLOUGHBY. How admirable is that reply of Luther’s;—an unanswerable

rebuke of that presumptuous mysticism which would boastfully tear aside

the veil and dare a converse face to face with God. Semele perishes.

That the fanatic survives is proof that he has but embraced a cloud.

ATHERTON. A rebuke, rather, of that folly, in all its forms, which

imagines itself the subject of a special revelation that is no fearful

searching of the soul, but merely a flattering reflection of its own

wishes.

GOWER. And what can most men make of that milder form of the same

ambition—I mean the exhortation to escape all image and figure? How else

can we grasp spiritual realities? The figurative language in which

religious truth is conveyed to us seems to me to resemble that delicate

membrane gummed to the back of the charred papyrus-roll, which otherwise

would crumble to pieces in unwinding. The fragile film alone would drop

to dust, but by this means it coheres, and may be unfolded for

inspection.

WILLOUGHBY. And when a scripture figure is pressed too far (the

besetting sin of systematising divines), it is as though your

gold-beater’s skin, or whatever it be, had been previously written on,

and the characters mistaken for those of the roll to which it was merely

the support and lining.

GOWER. I can readily conceive how provoking a man like Sebastian Frank

must have been to Luther, with his doctrines of passivity and apathy,

his holy contempt for rule, for rationality, or practicability, and his

idle chaotic system-spinning, when every hand was wanted for the goodly

cause of Reform.

ATHERTON. Then there was Schwenkfeld, too, who went off from Luther as

pietist in one direction, while Frank departed as pantheist in the

other.

GOWER. A well-meaning man, though; a kind of sixteenth-century Quaker,

was he not?

ATHERTON. Yes. Compound a Quaker, a Plymouth Brother, and an Antipædo

Baptist, and the result is something like a Schwenkfeldian.

WILLOUGHBY. For my enquiries concerning Jacob Behmen, I find that the

most important of the Lutheran mystics was a quiet man of few words,

pastor at Tschopau during the latter half of the sixteenth century, by

name Valentine Weigel.

GOWER. You will give us more information about him when you read your

essay on Jacob Behmen. For the present I confess myself tired of these

minor mystics.

WILLOUGHBY. I shall have to do with him only in as far as he was a

forerunner of Jacob. Weigel’s treatises were published posthumously, and

a very pretty quarrel there was over his grave. He bases his theology on

the _Theologia Germanica_, adds a modification of Sebastian Frank, and

introduces the theosophy of Paracelsus. In this way he brings us near to

Behmen, who united in himself the two species of mysticism—the

theopathetic, represented by Schwenkfeld, on the one side, and the

theosophic, by Paracelsus, on the other.

ATHERTON. As Lutheranism grew more cold and rigid, mysticism found more

ground of justification, and its genial reaction rendered service to the

Church once more.

WILLOUGHBY. I think the sword of the Thirty Years’ War may be said to

have cleared legitimate space for it. In that necessary strife for

opinion the inward life was sorely perilled. It was inevitable, I

suppose, that multitudes should at least have sought, not only

spirituality in mysticism and purity in separation, but wisdom in the

stars, wealth in alchemy, and the communion of saints in secret

societies.

Note to page 46.

Luther writes:—Jam vero privatum spiritum explores etiam, quæras, num

experti sint spirituales illas angustias et nativitates divinas, mortes,

infernosque. Si audieris blanda, tranquilla, devota (ut vocant) et

religiosa, etiamsi in tertium cœlum sese raptos dicant, non approbabis.

Tenta ergo et ne Iesum quidem audias gloriosum, nisi videris prius

crucifixum. A golden rule.—_Luth. Epist._ De Wette, No. 358. Jan. 13,

1522. The language he uses elsewhere concerning such fanatics is strong,

but not stronger than the occasion demanded. It was indeed no time for

compliment—for hesitant, yea-nay utterance upon the question. The

freedom claimed by Carlstadt’s followers led straightway to a lawless

pride, which was so much servitude to Satan—was the death-wound, not the

crown, of spiritual life. It was from the fulness of his charity—not in

lack of it—that Luther uttered his manly protest against that perilous

lie. Michelet selects a passage which shows in a very instructive manner

how the strong mind (in this quarrel, as in so many more) breaks in

pieces, with a touch, the idols which seduce the weak. ‘If you ask

Carlstadt’s people,’ says Luther, ‘how this sublime spirit is arrived

at, they refer you, not to the Gospel, but to their reveries, to their

vacuum. ‘Place thyself,’ say they, ‘in a state of void tedium as we do,

and then thou wilt learn the same lesson; the celestial voice will be

heard, and God will speak to thee in person.’ If you urge the matter

further, and ask what this void tedium of theirs is, they know as much

about it as Dr. Carlstadt does about Greek and Hebrew.... Do you not in

all this recognize the Devil, the enemy of divine order? Do you not see

him opening a huge mouth, and crying, ‘Spirit, spirit, spirit!’ and all

the while he is crying this, destroying all the bridges, roads,

ladders,—in a word, every possible way by which the spirit may penetrate

into you; that is to say, the external order established by God in the

holy baptism, in the signs and symbols, and in his own Word. They would

have you learn to mount the clouds, to ride the wind; but they tell you

neither how, nor when, nor where, nor what; all these things you must

learn of yourself, as they do.’

Footnote 206:

See Note, p. 51.

Footnote 207:

See the account in Ranke’s _History of the Reformation_.

Footnote 208:

See Carriere, _Die philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationzeit_

(1847), pp. 196-203.

CHAPTER III.

_Subtle._ Your _lapis philosophicus_?

_Face._ ’Tis a stone,

And not a stone; a spirit, a soul, and a body;

Which if you do dissolve, it is dissolved;

If you coagulate, it is coagulated;

If you make it to fly, it flieth.

THE ALCHEMIST.

ATHERTON. We are to call on Willoughby to-night, I believe, to conduct

us to Jacob Behmen—or Boehme, more correctly.

WILLOUGHBY. I shall scarcely bring you so far this evening. I have to

trouble you with some preliminary paragraphs on the theosophic mysticism

which arose with the Reformation, some remarks on the theurgic

superstitions of that period, and a word or two about Cornelius Agrippa

and Paracelsus. A very formidable preamble,—yet necessary, I assure you.

And herewith, Willoughby, after solacing himself with a goodly bunch of

grapes, began to read his essay.

ON THE THEOSOPHY OF JACOB BEHMEN.

§ 1. _Mysticism and Science._

I have to trace the advance of mysticism into a new world. Prior to

the Reformation the mystic sought escape in God from all that was

not God. After that epoch he is found seeking at the hands of his

Maker a supernatural acquaintance with all that He has made. Once

his highest knowledge was that surpassing ignorance which swoons in

the glory of the Infinite. Now he claims a familiarity passing that

of common mortals with the mysteries of sea and land, of stars and

elements. Escaping that monastic dualism which abandoned the world

to Satan, mysticism will now dispute the empire of the prince of

this world. Inspired from above, and haply not unaided by angelic

ministries, the master of the hidden wisdom will devoutly elicit the

benign potencies of the universe, and repel the malevolent. No

longer a mere contemplatist—gazing up at the heights of the divine

nature, or down into the depth of the human—the mystic of the new

age will sweep, with all-piercing vision, the whole horizon of

things visible. The theosophist covets holiness still, but knowledge

scarcely less. Virtue (as aforetime) may be regarded by such mystics

too much as the means to an end. But the end is no longer the same.

With the theopathetic mysticism the exercise of the Christian graces

and the discipline of fiery spiritual purgations were the road to a

superhuman elevation—a vision and repose anticipating heaven. With

the theosophic, Faith and Charity and Hope were the conditions of

the higher knowledge. For never to the proud, the greedy, the

impure, would heaven vouchsafe the keys of mystery and hazardous

prerogative in the unseen world. To the contemplative mystic the

three heavenly sisters brought a cloud of glory; for the theosophist

they unclasped nature’s ‘infinite book of secrecy;’ in the hand of

the theurgist they placed an enchanter’s wand.

The sphere of mysticism was not thus extended by any expansive force

of its own. The spirit of a new and healthier age had ventured to

depreciate the morbid seclusion of the cloister. Men began to feel

that it was at once more manly and more divine to enquire and to

know than to gaze and dream. After the servitude of the schools and

the collapse of the cloister, the ambition of the intellect would

acknowledge no limit, would accept of no repose. The highest

aspirations of religion and the most daring enterprise of science

were alike mystical. They coalesced in theosophy. Changes such as

these were wrought by a power from without. Mysticism was awakened

from its feverish dream by the spirit of the time—as Milton’s Eve by

Adam from her troubled morning sleep—and invited to go forth and see

‘nature paint her colours.’

As the revival of letters spread over Europe the taste for

antiquity, and natural science began to claim its share in the

freedom won for theology, the pretensions of the Cabbala, of Hermes,

of the Neo-Platonist theurgy, became identified with the cause of

progress.

That ancient doctrine, familiar to the school of Plotinus, according

to which the world was a huge animal—a living organism united in all

its parts by secret sympathies,—received some fresh development in

the fancy of every adept. The student of white magic believed, with

Iamblichus, in the divine power inherent in certain words of

invocation, whereby the aspirant might hold intercourse with powers

of the upper realm. With the modern, as with the ancient

Neo-Platonists, religion bore an indispensable part in all such

attempts. Proclus required of the theurgist an ascetic purity.

Campanella demands a _fides intrinseca_,—that devout simplicity of

heart which should qualify the candidate at once to commune with

holy spirits and to baffle the delusive arts of the malign.[209]

But the theosophists of Germany were not, like the Alexandrians,

slavish worshippers of the past. They did not resort to theurgy in

order to prop a falling faith. They did not wield that instrument to

prolong, by the spasmodic action of superstitious practice, the life

of an expiring philosophy. Those formulæ of incantation, those

‘symbola’ and ‘synthemata,’ which were everything with Iamblichus,

were with many of them only a bye-work, and by others utterly

abjured. They believed devoutly in the genuineness of the Cabbala.

They were persuaded that beneath all the floods of change this oral

tradition had perpetuated its life unharmed from the days of Moses

downward,—even as Jewish fable taught them that the cedars alone, of

all trees, had continued to spread the strength of their

invulnerable arms below the waters of the deluge. They rejoiced in

the hidden lore of that book as in a treasure rich with the germs of

all philosophy. They maintained that from its marvellous leaves man

might learn the angelic heraldry of the skies, the mysteries of the

divine nature, the means of converse with the potentates of

heaven.[210] But such reverence, so far from oppressing, seemed

rather to enfranchise and excite their imagination. In the tradition

before which they bowed, the majesty of age and the charm of youth

had met together. Hierocles brought to them Pythagoras out of an

immemorial past; and there was no novelty more welcome in that

restless wonder-loving present. Thus the theosophists could oppose

age to age, and reverently impugn the venerable. Antiquity, in the

name of Aristotle, so long absolute, had imposed a shameful bondage.

Antiquity, in the name of Plato, newly disinterred, imparted a

glorious privilege. The chains of the past were being filed away by

instruments which the past had furnished. Ancient prescription

became itself the plea for change when one half of its demands was

repudiated in honour of the other.

This theosophy was a strange mixture of the Hellenic, the Oriental,

and the Christian styles of thought. I shall assume as its emblem

the church of St. John, at Rhodes, which, full of statues of saints

and tombs of knights, broken, or rounded into mounds of sullied snow

by the hand of time, is surmounted by a crescent, and echoes to the

voice of the muezzin, while sheltering beneath its porch the altar

of a Grecian God. But our incongruous theosophic structure, ever

open and ever changing, enlarged its precincts continually. A

succession of eccentric votaries enriched it ceaselessly with quaint

devices, fresh flowers of fancy, new characters in mystical mosaic,

and intricate arabesques of impenetrable significance.

Plotinus, indifferent to the material universe, had been content to

inherit and transmit the doctrine of the world’s vitality. That

notion now became the nucleus of a complex system of sympathies and

antipathies. It suggested remedies for every disease, whether of

mind or body. It prompted a thousand fantastic appliances and

symbols. But at the same time it rendered the enquirer more keenly

observant of natural phenomena. Extolling Trismegistus to the skies,

and flinging his Galen into the fire, Paracelsus declared the world

his book.[211] The leaves of that volume were continents and

seas—provinces, its paragraphs—the plants, the stones, the living

things of every clime, its illuminated letters.

In the dawn of science hovered a meteor, which at once lured onward

and led astray the seekers after truth,—it was the hope of special

illumination. They hastened to generalize on a medley of crude

fancies and of partial facts. For generalization was with them a

sudden impulse, not a slow result. It was an exalted act prompted by

a Divine light that flashed on intuition from without, or radiated

from the wondrous depths of the microcosm within. Hence (as with

bees in dahlias) their industry was their intoxication. It is of the

essence of mysticism to confound an internal creation or process

with some external manifestation. Often did the theosophist rejoice

in the thought that nature, like the rock in the desert, had been

made to answer to his compelling rod,—that a divinely-given stream

welled forth to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. As we look back

upon his labours we can perceive that the impulse was by no means a

wonder, and often anything but a blessing. It was in reality but as

the rush of the water into the half-sunk shaft of his research,

flooding the region of his first incautious efforts, and sooner or

later arresting his progress in every channel he might open. In

fact, the field of scientific enquiry, which had withered under the

schoolman, was inundated by the mystic,—so facile and so copious

seemed the knowledge realized by heaven-born intuition. It was

reserved for induction to develop by a skilful irrigation that

wonder-teeming soil. No steady advance was possible when any

hap-hazard notion might be virtually invested with the sanction of

inspiration.

The admixture of light and darkness during that twilight period

reached precisely the degree of shadow most favourable to the

vigorous pursuit of natural science by supernatural means.

It is true that the belief in witchcraft everywhere prevalent did,

ever and anon, throw people and rulers alike into paroxysms of fear

and fury. But an accomplished student of occult art was no longer in

much danger of being burnt alive as a fair forfeit to Satan. The

astrologer, the alchemist, the adept in natural magic, were in

universal demand. Emperors and nobles, like Rudolph and Wallenstein,

kept each his star-gazer in a turret chamber, surrounded by

astrolabes and alembics, by ghastly preparations and mysterious

instruments, and listened, with ill-concealed anxiety, as the

zodiac-zoned and silver-bearded counsellor, bent with study and

bleared with smoke, announced, in oracular jargon, the junction of

the planets or his progress toward projection. The real perils of

such pretenders now arose from the very confidence they had

inspired. Such was the thirst for gold and the faith in alchemy,

that no man supposed to possess the secret was secure from

imprisonment and torture to compel its surrender. Setonius was

broken on the wheel because the cruel avarice of the great could not

wring out of him that golden process which had no existence. The few

enquirers whose aim was of a nobler order were mortified to find

their science so ill appreciated. They saw themselves valued only as

casters of horoscopes and makers of cunning toys. Often, with a

bitter irony, they assumed the airs of the charlatan for their daily

bread. Impostors knavish as Sir Arthur Wardour’s Dousterswivel,

deceived and deceiving like Leicester’s Alasco, swarmed at the petty

court of every landgrave and elector.

Theurgic mysticism was practically admitted even within the Lutheran

Church, while the more speculative or devotional mysticism of

Sebastian Frank, Schwenkfeld, and Weigel, was everywhere proscribed.

Lutheran doctors, believers in the Cabbala, which Reuchlin had

vindicated against the monks, were persuaded that theurgic art could

draw the angels down to mortals. Had not the heaven-sent power of

the Cabbala wrought the marvels of Old Testament history? Had not

the power of certain mystic words procured for Hebrew saints the

privilege of converse with angelic natures? Had not the Almighty

placed all terrestrial things under the viceregency of the starry

influences? Had He not united all things, animate and inanimate, by

a subtle network of sympathies, and was not man the leading chord in

this system of harmony—the central heart of this circulating

magnetic force? Thus much assumed, a devout man, wise in the laws of

the three kinds of vincula between the upper and lower worlds, might

be permitted to attract to himself on earth those bright

intelligences who were to be his fellows in heaven. Theurgy rested,

therefore, on the knowledge of the _intellectual vinculum_ (the

divine potency inherent in certain words), the _astral_ (the

favourable conjunction of the planets), and the _elementary_ (the

sympathy of creatures). In the use of these was, of course, involved

the usual hocus-pocus of magical performance—talismans, magic

lights, incense, doves’ blood, swallows’ feathers, _et hoc genus

omne_.[212]

Footnote 209:

Horst’s _Zauberbibliothek_, vol. iii. p. 21.

Footnote 210:

Agrippa’s _Vanity of Arts and Sciences_, chap. 47.

Footnote 211:

See M. B. Lessing, _Paracelsus, sein Leben und Denken_, p. 60.

Footnote 212:

The third and fourth volumes of Horst’s _Zauberbibliothek_ contain a

very full account of all these vincula. The vincula of the

Intellectual World are principally formulas of invocation; secret

names of God, of celestial principalities and spirits; Hebrew, Arabic,

and barbarous words; magical figures, signs, diagrams, and circles.

Those of the Elementary World consist in the sympathetic influence of

certain animals and plants, such as the mole, the white otter, the

white dove, the mandrake; of stones and metals, ointments and

suffumigations. Those of the Astral or Celestial World depend on the

aspects and dispositions of the heavenly bodies, which, under the sway

of planetary spirits, infuse their influences into terrestrial

objects. This is the astrological department of theurgy. Meinhold’s

_Sidonia_ contains a truthful exhibition of this form of theurgic

mysticism, as it obtained in Protestant Germany. See Paracelsus, _De

Spiritibus Planetarum_, passim. (Ed. Dorn., 1584.)

CHAPTER IV.

For I am siker that there be sciences,

By which men maken divers apparences,

Swiche as thise subtil tregetoures play.

For oft at festes have I well herd say,

That tregetoures, within an halle large,

Have made come in a water and a barge,

And in the halle rowen up and down.

Sometime hath semed come a grim leoun,

And sometime floures spring as in a mede,

Sometime a vine and grapes white and rede,

Sometime a castel all of lime and ston,

And whan hem liketh voideth it anon.

Thus semeth it to every mannes sight.

CHAUCER.

Give me thy hand, terrestrial; so:—Give me thy hand, celestial; so.

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

WILLOUGHBY’S ESSAY—SECOND EVENING.

§ 2. _Cornelius Agrippa._

Cornelius Agrippa, of Nettesheim, is a favourable specimen of that

daring and versatile order of mind which, in the sixteenth century,

sought adventure and renown in every province of philosophy. His

restless life is picturesque with the contrast of every imaginable

vicissitude. A courtier and a scholar, a soldier and a mystic, he

made the round of the courts of Europe. Patronized and persecuted

alternately, courted as a prodigy and hunted down as a heretic, we

see him to-day a Plato, feasted by the Sicilian tyrant, to-morrow a

Diogenes, crawling with a growl into his tub. He lectures with

universal applause on the _Verbum Mirificum_ of Reuchlin. He forms a

secret association for the promotion of occult science. He is

besieged by swarming boors in some Garde Douloureuse, and escapes

almost by miracle. He enters the service of Margaret, Regent of the

Netherlands, then that of the Emperor, and is knighted on the field

for heroic gallantry in the campaign against the Venetians. He is

next to be heard of as a teacher of theology at Pavia. Plunged into

poverty by the reverses of war, he writes for comfort a mystical

treatise _On the Threefold Way of Knowing God_. The hand of the

Marquis of Montferrat plucks him from his slough of despond, but ere

long he is again homeless, hungering, often after bread, ever after

praise and power. At the court of France, the Queen Mother shows him

favour, but withholds the honour to which such gifts might well

aspire. Then appears the famous book _On the Vanity of Arts and

Sciences_.

It was wormwood to the proud spirit of Agrippa to be treated as a

mere astrologer. To think that he must toil in obscurity like a

gnome, calculating aspects, sextile and quartile, reckoning the

cusps and hours of the houses of heaven, to subserve the ambition of

an implacable intriguante, when his valour might adorn the tourney

and his wisdom sway the council! He would fain have been in France

what that great astrologer of the previous century, Martius

Galeotti, had been in Hungary, to whom the Czar of Russia and the

Khan of Tartary were said to have sent respectful presents of more

than royal magnificence; who was ambassador alike of monarchs and

the stars; who bore a share in the statecraft of the court at Buda,

and charging abreast with the crowned helm of Matthias, rode down

the ranks of the turbaned infidel. So the gallant knight and the

‘courtier of most elegant thread,’ the archimage, the philosopher,

the divine, became for awhile a sceptic and a Timon. The _De

Vanitate Scientiarum_ ravages, with a wild Berserker fury, the whole

domain of knowledge. The monk Ilsan of mediæval fable did not more

savagely trample the roses in the enchanted garden of

Worms,—Pantagruel did not more cruelly roast with fire his six

hundred and nine and fifty vanquished horsemen, than did Agrippa

consume with satire every profession and every calling among men.

With reason might he say in his preface, ‘The grammarians will rail

at me—the etymologists will derive my name from the gout—the

obstreperous rhetoricians will plague me with their big words and

inimical gestures—the intricate geometrician will imprison me in his

triangles and tetragonals—the cosmographer will banish me among the

bears to Greenland.’ Scholastic fanaticism could never pardon the

man whose sarcasm had left nothing standing, save the Holy

Scriptures. The monks and doctors of Lyons hurled back his

tongue-bolts with the dreaded cry of heresy. His disgrace and exile

they could compass, but they could not arrest those winged words or

bow that dauntless spirit.

The treatise _On the Threefold Way of Knowing God_, shows how, by

Divine illumination, the Christian may discern the hidden meanings

of the New Testament, as the Cabbalist evolves those of the Old. It

teaches the way in which the devout mind may be united to God, and,

seeing all things in Him, and participating in His power, may even

now, according to the measure of faith, foretell the future and

controul the elements.

The _De Occulta Philosophia_[213] (a youthful work re-written in his

later years) treats of the three kinds of magic—the _Natural_ (the

science of sympathies and antipathies, whereby the adept accelerates

or modifies the process of nature so as to work apparent miracles);

the _Celestial_, or Mathematical (astrology); and the _Religious_,

or ceremonial (theurgy).

Once on a time, the savans were sorely puzzled by certain irregular

holes on the front of an ancient temple. One, more sagacious than

the rest, suggested that these indentations might be the marks of

nails used to fasten to the stone metallic plates representing Greek

characters. And, in fact, lines drawn from one point to the next

were found to form letters, and the name of the deity stood

disclosed. In like manner, the student of natural magic sought to

decipher the secret language of the universe, by tracing out those

lines of sympathy which linked in a mysterious kindred objects the

most remote. It was believed that the fields of space were threaded

in every direction by the hidden highways of magnetic influence;

traversed from all points by an intricate network of communication

uniting the distant and the near—the celestial and terrestrial

worlds. Science was charged with the office of discovering and

applying those laws of harmony and union which connect the

substances of earth with each other and with the operation of the

stars. Through all the stages of creation men thought they saw the

inferior ever seeking and tending towards the higher nature, and the

order above shedding influence on that below. The paternal sun laid

a hand of blessing on the bowed head of the corn. The longing dews

passed heavenward, up the Jacob’s ladder of the sunbeams, and

entering among the bright ministeries of the clouds, came down in

kindly showers. Each planet, according to its mind or mood, shed

virtues healing or harmful into minerals and herbs. All sweet

sounds, moving by the mystic laws of number, were an aspiration

towards the music of the spheres—a reminiscence of the universal

harmonies. The air was full of phantasms or images of material

objects. These, said Agrippa, entering the mind, as the air the

body, produce presentiments and dreams. All nature is oracular. A

cloudy chill or sultry lull are the Delphi and Dodona of birds and

kine and creeping things. But the sense of sinful man is dull. The

master of the hidden wisdom may facilitate the descent of benign

influences, and aid the travailing creation, sighing for renewal. It

is for him to marry (in the figurative language of the time) the

‘lower and the higher potencies, the terrestrial and the astral, as

doth the husbandman the vine unto the elm.’ The sage can make

himself felt in the upper realm, as on the earth, by touching some

chord whose vibration extends into the skies. From the law of

sympathy comes the power of amulets and philtres, images and

ointments, to produce love or hate, health or sickness, to arrest

the turning arms of the distant mill, or stay the wings of the

pinnace on the Indian seas. Such was Agrippa’s world.

According to Baptista Porta, a certain breath of life, or soul of

the world, pervades the whole organism of the universe, determines

its sympathies, and imparts, when received into the soul of the

inquirer, the capacity for magical research. Similarly, in the

theory of Agrippa, the fifth element, or æther, is the breath of

this World-Soul. Within the spirit thus animating the body of the

world lie those creative powers, or qualities, which are the

producers of all things visible. The instruments of this universal

plastic Power are the stars and the spirits of the elements.

With all the theosophists man is a microcosm—the harmonized epitome

of the universe: a something representative of all that is contained

in every sphere of being, is lodged in his nature. Thus he finds

sympathies everywhere, and potentially knows and operates

everywhere. Since, therefore, the inmost ground of his being is in

God, and the rest of his nature is a miniature of the universe,—a

true self-knowledge is, proportionately, at once a knowledge of God

and of creation. The sources of Religion and of Science are alike

within him.

Agrippa borrows from the Phædrus four kinds of inspiration,—the

Poetic, the Dionysian (revealing visions), the Apollinian (imparting

hidden wisdom), and that of which ascendant Venus is the pure

patroness—Rapturous Love, which carries us to heaven in ecstasy, and

in the mystic union with Deity discloses things unutterable. He

compares the soul, as ordinarily in the body, to a light within a

dark lantern. In moments of mystical exaltation, it is taken out of

its prison-house, the divine element is emancipated, and rays forth

immeasurably, transcending space and time. His Platonism, like that

of so many, led him from the sensual and the formal to the ideal.

Greek was, with reason, accounted dangerous. Plato was a reformer

side by side with Luther among the Germans. How loathsome was

clerkly vice beside the contemplative ideal of Plato.

In those days almost every great scholar was also a great traveller.

The wanderings of Agrippa and his theosophic brethren contributed

not a little to the progress and diffusion of occult science. These

errant professors of magic, like those aërial travellers the

insects, carried everywhere with them the pollen of their mystic

Lily, the symbol of theosophy, and sowed the fructifying particles

in minds of kindred growth wherever they came. Their very crosses

and buffetings, if they marred their plans of study, widened their

field of observation; were fertile in suggestions; compelled to new

resources, and multiplied their points of view,—as a modern

naturalist, interrupted during his observant morning’s walk, and

driven under a tree by a shower, may find unexpected compensation in

the discovery of a new moss upon its bark, or a long-sought fly

among its dropping-leaves.

GOWER. Agrippa’s philosophy gives us a highly imaginative view of the

world.

ATHERTON. A beautiful romance,—only surpassed by the actual results of

modern discovery.

WILLOUGHBY. In those days every fancied likeness was construed into a

law of relationship: every semblance became speedily reality;—somewhat

as the Chinese believe that sundry fantastic rocks in one of their

districts, which are shaped like rude sculptures of strange beasts, do

actually enclose animals of corresponding form. And as for the links of

connexion supposed to constitute bonds of mysterious sympathy, they are

about as soundly deduced as that connexion which our old popular

superstition imagined, between a high wind on Shrove Tuesday night, and

mortality among learned men and fish.

GOWER. And yet how fascinating those dreams of science. What a charm,

for instance, in a botany which essayed to read in the sprinkled or

veined colours of petals and of leaves, in the soft-flushing hues, the

winding lines, the dashes of crimson, amethyst, or gold, in the tracery

of translucent tissues empurpled or incarnadine,—the planetary cipher,

the hieroglyph of a star, the secret mark of elementary spirits—of the

gliding Undine or the hovering Sylph.

WILLOUGHBY. So too, in great measure, with anatomy and psychology; for

man was said to draw life from the central sun, and growth from the

moon, while imagination was the gift of Mercury, and wrath burned down

to him out of Mars. He was fashioned from the stars as well as from the

earth, and born the lord of both.

ATHERTON. This close connexion between the terrestrial and sidereal

worlds was to aid in the approximation of man to God. The aim was

noble—to marry Natural Science, the lower, to Revealed Religion, the

higher; elevating at once the world and man—the physical and the

spiritual; drawing more close the golden chain which binds the world to

the footstool of the eternal throne. While a spirit dwelt in all nature,

transforming and restoring, and benign influences, entering into the

substances and organisms of earth, blessed them according to their

capacities of blessing (transforming some with ease to higher forms of

beauty, labouring long, and almost lost in the grossness and

stubbornness of others), so also in the souls of men wrought the Divine

Spirit, gladly welcomed by the lowly-hearted, darkly resisted by the

proud, the grace of God here an odour of life, and there made a

deepening of death upon death.

WILLOUGHBY. How close their parallel between the laws of receptivity in

the inner world and in the outer. They brought their best,

faithfully—these magi,—gold and frankincense and myrrh.

GOWER. Talking of sympathies, I have felt myself for the last quarter of

an hour rapidly coming into _rapport_ with those old poet-philosophers.

I seem to thirst with them to pierce the mysteries of nature. I imagine

myself one of their aspiring brotherhood. I say, to the dead let nature

be dead; to me she shall speak her heart. The changeful expression, the

speechless gestures of this world, the languors and convulsions of the

elements, the frowns and smiles of the twin firmaments, shall have their

articulate utterance for my ear. With the inward eye I see—here more

dim, there distinct—the fine network of sympathetic influences playing

throughout the universe, as the dancing meshes of the water-shadows on

the sides of a basin of marble——

WILLOUGHBY, (_to Atherton, with a grotesque expression of pity_.) He’s

off! Almost out of sight already.

GOWER, (_apparently unconscious of the interruption_.) Yes, I will know

what legends of the old elemental wars are stored within yon grey

promontory, about whose grandsire knees the waves are gambolling; and

what is the story of the sea—what are the passions of the deep that work

those enamoured sleeps and jealous madnesses; and what the meaning of

that thunder-music which the hundred-handed surf smites out from the

ebon or tawny keys of rock and of sand along so many far-winding

solitary shores. I will know what the mountains dream of when, under the

summer haze, they talk in their sleep, and the common ear can perceive

only the tinkle of the countless rills sliding down their sides. There

shall be told me how first the Frost-King won his empire, and made the

vanquished heights of earth to pass under those ice-harrows which men

call glaciers.

ATHERTON. ‘The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever!’

GOWER. On the commonest things I see astral influences raining

brightness—no homeliness without some sparkle of the upper glory;—as the

wain and shoon of the peasant on some autumn night grow phosphorescent,

and are sown with electric jewellery. With purged eyesight I behold the

nascent and unfledged virtues of herbs and minerals that are growing

folded in this swaying nest named earth, look hungering up to their

parent stars that hover ministering above, radiant in the topmost boughs

of the Mundane Tree. I look into the heart of the Wunderberg, and see,

far down, the palaces and churches of an under-world, see branching

rivers and lustrous gardens where gold and silver flow and flower; I

behold the Wild women, and the jealous dwarfs, and far away, the forlorn

haunts of the cairn-people, harping under their mossy stones; while from

the central depths sounds up to me the rolling litany of those giants

who wait and worship till the Great Restitution-Day. There among those

wilderness rocks I discern, under a hood of stone, a hermit Potency,

waiting for one to lead him up to the sunny multitudinous surface-world,

and send him forth to bless mankind. O long-tarrying Virtue, be it mine

to open the doors of thy captivity! Thou mineral Might, thou fragment

from the stones of the New Jerusalem, thou shalt lodge no more in vain

among us! I have felt thy secret growing up within my soul, as a shoot

of the tree of life, and therewithal will I go forth and heal the

nations![214]

ATHERTON. No, not till you have had some supper. I hear the bell.

GOWER. It is the nineteenth century, then? Ah, yes, I remember.

WILLOUGHBY. Away, you rogue!

Footnote 213:

See Carriere (pp. 89-114), to whom I am indebted as regards the

character of this and the preceding work, having had access to

neither.

Footnote 214:

This distressing outbreak on the part of Gower will scarcely seem

extravagant to those who remember how intensely poetical were many of

the theosophic hypotheses. Analogies which would only occur to

imaginative men in their hours of reverie were solidified into

principles and enrolled in the code of nature. Nothing could be more

opposite to the sifting process of modern investigation than the

fanciful combination and impersonation of those days,—more akin, by

far, to mythology than to science. Conceits such as the following are

those of the poet,—and of the poet as far gone in madness as Plato

could wish him.

The waters of this world are mad; it is in their raving that they rush

so violently to and fro along the great channels of the earth.

Fire would not have burned, darkness had not been, but for Adam’s

fall. There is a hot fire and a cold. Death is a cold fire.—_Behmen._

All things—even metals, stones, and meteors—have sense and

imagination, and a certain ‘fiducial’ knowledge of God in them.

The arctic pole draws water by its axle-tree, and these waters break

forth again at the axle-tree of the antarctic pole.

Earthquakes and thunder are the work of dæmons or angels.

The lightnings without thunder are, as it were, the falling flowers of

the ‘æstival’ (or summer) stars.—_Paracelsus._

Hail and snow are the fruits of the stars, proceeding from them as

flowers and blossoms from herb or tree.—_Paracelsus._

Night is, in reality, brought on by the influence of _dark stars_,

which ray out darkness, as the others light.—_Paracelsus._

The final fires will transform the earth into crystal. (A summary

expression for one of Behmen’s doctrines.)

The moon, planets, and stars are of the same quality with the lustrous

precious stones of our earth, and of such a nature, that wandering

spirits of the air see in them things to come, as in a magic mirror;

and hence their gift of prophecy.

In addition to the terrestrial, man has a sidereal body, which stands

in connexion with the stars. When, as in sleep, this sidereal body is

more free than usual from the elements, it holds converse with the

stars, and may acquire a knowledge of future events.—_Paracelsus._ See

Henry More’s _Enthusiasmus Triumphatus_, § 44.

CHAPTER V.

The reason that Men do not doubt of many things, is, that they never

examine common Impressions; they do not dig to the Root, where the

Faults and Defects lye; they only debate upon the Branches: They do

not examine whether such and such a thing be true, but if it has

been so and so understood. It is not inquir’d into, whether _Galen_

has said anything to purpose, but whether he has said so or

so.—MONTAIGNE.

WILLOUGHBY’S ESSAY—THIRD EVENING.

§ 3. _Theophrastus Paracelsus._

Due place must be given to the influence of that medical Ishmael,

Paracelsus. Born in 1493 at Einsiedeln, near Zurich, he studied

medicine at Basle, and travelled Europe for fourteen years from

Sweden to Naples, and from France to Poland. The jealous hatred

awakened by a most reasonable project of reform drove him from Basle

soon after his return. Vituperated and vituperating, he became a

wanderer throughout Germany, everywhere forming, or followed by,

successive groups of disciples. He died at the age of forty-eight,

in a little inn—but not, as report has long said, drunk on the

taproom floor;—a victim, more probably, to the violence of

assailants despatched against him by some hostile physicians.[215]

Paracelsus found the medical profession of those days more

disastrously incompetent, if possible, than we see it in the pages

of Le Sage and Molière. It was so easy of entrance, he complains, as

to become the tempting resource of knavery and ignorance everywhere.

With a smattering of Greek a doctor might be finished and famous. A

dead language was to exorcise deadly maladies. Diseases were

encountered by definitions, and fact and experiment unheeded amidst

disputes about the sense of Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna. When a

new life began to struggle to the light from beneath the ruins of

scholasticism, the fearless vehemence of such a nature became its

appropriate organ. Paracelsus was the first to lecture in the

vernacular. Instead of reading and commenting on the text of Galen,

or extracting fanciful specifics from Raymond Lully, or John de

Rupecissa, he resolved to observe and judge for himself wherever the

ravages of disease or war might furnish him with facts. Preposterous

as many of his own remedies may have been, he merits the title of a

reformer in effect as well as purpose. He applied, with great

success, mineral preparations before unknown, or little used;

performed celebrated cures by the use of opium, and exposed the

fraudulent pretensions of the alchemist and the astrologer. To the

persecution and gross abuse of the profession he replied in torrents

of undiluted and inexhaustible Billingsgate. While his

velvet-cloaked brethren, with faces blandly inane or portentously

inscrutable, mounted, with step of cat-like softness, to the chamber

of the obese burgomaster or the fashionable lady, Paracelsus gloried

in grandiloquent shabbiness and boisterous vulgarity. He boasted

that he had picked up many a hint while chatting as an equal with

pedlars, waggoners, and old women. He loved to drain his can on the

ale-bench before wayside hostelries with boors such as Ostade has

painted. Ragged and dusty, footing it with his knapsack on his back

under a broiling sun, he would swear that there lay more wisdom in

his beard than in all the be-doctored wiseacres of all the

universities of Europe.

On the basis of principles substantially the same with those

represented by Agrippa, Paracelsus developed, in his own way, the

doctrine of signatures, and the relationships of the macrocosm and

the microcosm.

The special illumination of the Holy Ghost was not more essential to

the monastic perfection of preceding mystics, than to the success of

the theosophist in that devout pursuit of science inculcated by

Paracelsus. The true Physician—he who would be wise indeed in the

mysteries of nature, must seek with ceaseless importunity the light

that cometh from above. In the Scriptures, and in the Cabbala, lies

the key to all knowledge. Medicine has four pillars: (1)

_Philosophy_, generally equivalent, as he uses it, to

physiology,—the study of the true nature of material substances in

their relation to the microcosm, man; (2) _Astronomy_, embracing

especially the influences of the heavenly bodies on the human frame;

(3) _Alchemy_, not gold-making, but the preparation of

specifics—chemistry applied to medicine; (4) _Religion_, whereby the

genuine professor of the healing art is taught of God, and works in

reliance on, and union with, Him.[216] In the spirit of the ancient

mystics he describes the exaltation of one whose soul is inwardly

absorbed, so that the ordinary operation of the external senses is

suspended. A man thus divinely intoxicated, lost in thoughts so

profound, may seem, says Paracelsus, a mere fool to the men of this

world, but in the eyes of God he is the wisest of mankind, a

partaker of the secrecy of the Most High.[217] Like Agrippa (and

with as good reason) Paracelsus lays great stress on Imagination,

using the term, apparently, to express the highest realization of

faith. Bacon observes that Imagination is with Paracelsus almost

equivalent to Fascination. He speaks of the Trinity as imaged in

man, in the Heart, (_Gemüth_), in Faith, and in Imagination,—the

three forms of that spiritual nature in us which he declares a fiery

particle from the Divine Substance. By the disposition of the Heart

we come to God; by Faith to Christ; and by Imagination we receive

the Holy Spirit. Thus blessed (did we but truly know our own hearts)

nothing would be impossible to us. This is the true magic, the gift

of Faith, which, were its strength sufficient, might even now cast

out devils, heal the sick, raise the dead, and remove

mountains.[218]

In the sixteenth century we still trace the influence of that

doctrine, so fertile in mysticism, which Anselm bequeathed to the

schoolmen of the middle age. We are to know by ascending to the

fount of being, and in the primal Idea, whence all ideas flow, to

discern the inner potency of all actual existence. But in

Paracelsus we see especial prominence given to two new ideas which

greatly modify, and apparently facilitate the researches of

theosophy. One of these is the theory of divine manifestation by

_Contraries_,—teaching (instead of the old division of Being and

Non-being) the development of the primal ground of existence by

antithesis, and akin, in fact, to the principle of modern

speculative philosophy, according to which the Divine Being is the

absorption (_Aufhebung_) of those contraries which his

self-evolution, or _lusus amoris_, has posited. This doctrine is

the key-note in the system of Jacob Behmen. The other is the

assumption that man—the micro-cosm, is, as it were, a miniature of

the macro-cosm—the great outer world,—a little parliament to which

every part of the universe sends its deputy,—his body a compound

from the four circles of material existence,—his animal nature

correspondent to, and dependent on, the upper firmament,—and his

spirit, a divine efflux wherein, though fallen, there dwells a

magnetic tendency towards its source, which renders redemption

possible through Christ. There is nothing, accordingly, in the

heavens above, or in the earth beneath, which may not be found in

the minor world of man. On this principle, further, depends the

whole system of signatures in its application to the cure of human

malady.[219]

Paracelsus defines true magic as the knowledge of the hidden virtues

and operations of natural objects. The Cabbala imparts instruction

concerning heavenly mysteries, and teaches the loftiest

approximation to the Supreme. By the combination of these sources of

knowledge we come to understand, and can partially produce, that

marriage between heavenly influences and terrestrial objects,

called, in the language of theosophy, Gamahea.[220] True magic is

founded solely ‘on the Ternary and Trinity of God,’ and works in

harmony with that universal life which, under the influence of the

Holy Spirit, animates all nature,—even the granite, the ocean, and

the flower. The magic of Paracelsus disclaims the use of all

ceremonies, conjurations, bannings, and blessings, and will rest

solely on the power of that faith to which the promise was given,

that spirits should be subject to it, and mountains plucked up at

its fiat.[221] We are here far enough from the theurgic ritual of

Iamblichus. But large room still remained for superstitious

practice, and Paracelsus could not refuse his faith to the potency

of certain magical words, of waxen images, and of pentacula

inscribed with magic characters. The universal life of nature was

mythologically personified in the sylphs and gnomes, the salamanders

and undines, somewhat as the thought of supernatural presence found

its representation in the nymphs, the nereids, and the hamadryads,

of ancient Grecian fable.[222]

In the chemistry of Paracelsus all matter is composed, in varying

proportions, of salt—the firm coherent principle, of quicksilver—the

fluid, and of sulphur—the fiery, or combustible.[223]

The theory of signatures proceeded on the supposition that every

creature bears, in some part of its structure or outward

conformation, the indication of the character or virtue inherent in

it—the representation, in fact, of its idea or soul. Southey

relates, in his _Doctor_, a legend, according to which he who should

drink the blood of a certain unknown animal would be enabled to hear

the voice and understand the speech of plants. Such a man might

stand on a mountain at sunrise, and hearken to their language, from

the delicate voices of wild flowers and grass blades in the dew, to

the large utterance of the stately trees making their obeisance in

the fresh morning airs;—might hear each enumerating its gifts and

virtues, and blessing the Creator for his bestowments. The knowledge

thus imparted by a charm, the student of sympathies sought as the

result of careful observation. He essayed to read the character of

plants by signs in their organization, as the professor of palmistry

announced that of men by the lines of the hand. Such indications

were sometimes traced from the resemblance of certain parts of a

plant to portions of the human frame, sometimes they were sought in

the more recondite relations of certain plants to certain stars.

Thus citrons, according to Paracelsus, are good for heart affections

because they are heart-shaped; and because, moreover, they have the

colour of the sun, and the heart is, in a sort, the sun of the body.

Similarly, the _saphena riparum_ is to be applied to fresh wounds,

because its leaves are spotted as with flecks of blood. A species of

_dentaria_, whose roots resemble teeth, is a cure for toothache and

scurvy.[224]

The theosophists, working on principles very similar to those of the

alchemists, though with worthier and larger purpose, inherited the

extraordinary language of their predecessors. That wisdom of

Gamahea, which was to explain and facilitate the union of the

celestial and terrestrial in the phenomena and processes of nature,

naturally produced a phraseology which was a confused mixture of

theological, astrological, and chemical terms. To add to the

obscurity, every agent or process was veiled under symbolic names

and fantastic metaphors, frequently changing with the caprice of the

adept. Thus the white wine of Lully is called by Paracelsus the glue

of the eagle; and Lully’s red wine is, with Paracelsus, the blood of

the Red Lion. Often the metaphor runs into a kind of parable, as

with Bernard of Treviso. He describes what is understood to be the

solution of gold in quicksilver, under the regimen of Saturn,

leaving a residuum of black paste, in the following oriental style:—

‘The king, when he comes to the fountain, leaving all strangers

behind him, enters the bath alone, clothed in golden robes, which he

puts off, and gives to Saturn, his first chamberlain, from whom he

receiveth a black velvet suit.’[225]

In like manner, in the _Secretum Magicum_ attributed (to

Paracelsus), we find mention of the chemical Virgin Mary, of

chemical deaths and resurrections, falls and redemptions, adopted

from theological phraseology. We read of the union of the

philosophic Sol,—Quintessentia Solis, or Fifth Wisdom of Gold, with

his Father in the Golden Heaven, whereby imperfect substances are

brought to the perfection of the Kingdom of Gold.[226]

The conclusion of Weidenfeld’s treatise on the Green Lion of

Paracelsus may suffice as a specimen of this fanciful mode of

expression, which can never speak directly, and which, adopted by

Jacob Behmen, enwraps his obscure system in sevenfold darkness:—

‘Let us therefore desist from further pursuit of the said Green Lion

which we have pursued through the meads and forest of Diana, through

the way of philosophical Saturn, even to the vineyards of

Philosophy. This most pleasant place is allowed the disciples of

this art to recreate themselves here, after so much pains and sweat,

dangers of fortune and life, exercising the work of women and the

sports of children, being content with the most red blood of the

Lion, and eating the white or red grapes of Diana, the wine of which

being purified, is the most secret secret of all the more secret

Chymy; as being the white or red wine of Lully, the nectar of the

ancients, and their only desire, the peculiar refreshment of the

adopted sons, but the heart-breaking and stumblingblock of the

scornful and ignorant.’[227]

Footnote 215:

See Lessing’s _Paracelsus_, p. 18.

Footnote 216:

Lessing’s _Paracelsus_, § 26.

Footnote 217:

Language to this effect is cited among the copious extracts given by

Godfrey Arnold, _Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie_, Th. ii.

p. 309.

Footnote 218:

_De Occulta Philosophia, Prologus_, p. 30, and p. 58. This is one of

the three treatises edited by Gerard Dorn, and published together in a

small volume, Basle, 1584. Comp. also Arnold, Th. iv. p. 145.

Footnote 219:

Dorn’s _Dictionarium Paracelsi_ (Frankfort, 1583), Art. Microcosmus.

Also the _Secretum Magicum_ of Paracelsus, entire in Arnold, p. 150.

The implanted image of the Trinity, and the innate tendency in man

toward his Divine Origin, are familiar to us as favourite doctrines

with the mystics of the fourteenth century.

Footnote 220:

_De Occ. Phil._ cap. iv. p. 45, and cap. xi. p. 78. Also, _Dict.

Paracels._ Art. Magia. Talis influentiarum cœlestium conjunctio vel

impressio qua operantur in inferiora corpora cœlestes vires, _Gamahea_

Magis, vel matrimonium virium et proprietatum cœlestium cum

elementaribus corporibus, dicta fuit olim.—Paracelsi _Aurora

Philosophorum_, cap. iv. p. 24 (ed. Dorn).

Footnote 221:

_Aurora Phil._ loc. cit.; _De Occ. Phil._ i. ii.; and xi. p. 79.

Footnote 222:

See _De Occ. Phil._ cap. v. Magical powers are ascribed to images, p.

85. A collection of talismanic figures is appended to the treatise. In

the _Thesaurus Philosophorum_ is to be found (p. 145) the arcanum of

the Homunculus and the Universal Tincture. The Homunculus is said to

be a mannikin, constructed by magic, receiving his life and substance

from an artificial principle, and able to communicate to his

fabricator all manner of secrets and mysteries of science.

Footnote 223:

The three continents—Europe, Asia, and Africa—were said to represent

these three constituent principles respectively; the stars contain

them, as in so many vials; the Penates (a race of sapient but mortal

spirits) employ them for the manufacture of thunder.

Footnote 224:

Lessing’s _Paracelsus_, § 58. This fanciful kind of physiognomy

displaces theurgy, among these inquirers. It led, at least, to much

accurate observation. It was a sign of health when the chafing-dish

and conjuring-book were forsaken for the woods and fields. Cardan, who

repudiates the charge of having ever employed incantations or sought

intercourse with dæmons, endeavours to establish chiromancy on what

were then called astronomical principles. Thus, Mars rules the thumb,

wherein lies strength; Jupiter, the forefinger, whence come auguries

of fame and honour, &c.

Footnote 225:

See _Lives of the Alchemistical Philosophers_. This book contains a

collection of the most celebrated treatises on the theory and practice

of the Hermetic Art. The passage from Bernard is in _The Book of

Eirenæus Philalethes_, p. 166.

Footnote 226:

Thus, Cardan declared that the law of Moses was from Saturn; that of

Christ, from Jupiter and Mercury. Over that of Mahomet presided, in

conjunction, Sol and Mars; while Mars and the Moon ruled idolatry. It

was thought no impiety—only a legitimate explanation, to attribute the

supernatural wisdom and works of our Lord to the divinely-ordained

influences of the planetary system.

Footnote 227:

This passage is from the Annotations of Weidenfeld on the _Green Lion_

of Paracelsus; _Lives of the Alchem. Phil._ p. 201. The _Thesaurus

Thesaurorum_ contains another choice specimen of the same sort, p.

124.

CHAPTER VI.

_Men._ I pray thee tell me,

For thou art a great dreamer—

_Chi._ I can dream, sir,

If I eat well and sleep well.

_Men._ Was it never by dream or apparition opened to thee—

What the other world was, or Elysium?

Didst never travel in thy sleep?

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER: _The Mad Lover_.

WILLOUGHBY’S ESSAY—FOURTH EVENING.

§ 4. _Jacob Behmen and his Aurora._

Let us now crave acquaintance with that most notable theosophist,

Jacob Behmen.

It is evening, and in the little town of Görlitz the business of the

day is over. The shopkeepers are chatting together before their

doors, or drinking their beer at tables set out in the open air; and

comfortable citizens are taking wife and children for a walk beyond

the town. There is a shoe-maker’s shop standing close to the bridge,

and under its projecting gable, among the signs and samples of the

craft, may be read the name of Jacob Boehme. Within this house, in a

small and scantily-furnished room, three men are seated at a table

whereon lie a few books and papers and a great heap of

newly-gathered plants and wild-flowers. The three friends have just

returned from a long ramble in the fields which lie without the

Neissethor. That little man, apparently about forty years of age, of

withered, almost mean, aspect, with low forehead, prominent temples,

hooked nose, short and scanty beard, and quick blue eyes, who talks

with a thin, gentle voice, is Jacob.[228] On one side of him sits

Dr. Kober, a medical man of high repute in Görlitz. He it is who

gathered in their walk these flowers, and now he takes up one of

them from time to time, and asks Behmen to conjecture, from its form

and colour, its peculiar properties. Often has he to exchange looks

of wonder with his learned friend on the other side the table, at

the marvellous insight of their uneducated host. This third member

of the trio is Dr. Balthasar Walter, the Director of the Laboratory

at Dresden, a distinguished chemist, who has travelled six years in

the East, has mastered all the scientific wisdom of the West, and

who now believes that his long search after the true philosophy has

ended happily at last, beneath the roof of the Görlitz shoemaker.

He, too, will sometimes pronounce a Greek or an Oriental word, and

is surprised to find how nearly Behmen divines its significance,

from the mere sound and the movement of the lips in the formation of

its syllables.[229] When Walter utters the word _Idea_, Behmen

springs up in a transport, and declares that the sound presented to

him the image of a heavenly virgin of surpassing beauty. The

conversation wanders on—about some theosophic question, it may be,

or the anxious times, or the spread of Behmen’s writings through

Silesia and Saxony, with the persecutions or the praises following;

while good Frau Behmen, after putting a youngster or two to bed, is

busy downstairs in the kitchen, preparing a frugal supper.

Jacob Behmen was born at the village of Alt-Seidenberg, near

Görlitz, in the year 1575. As a child, he was grave and thoughtful

beyond his years. The wonders of fairy tradition were said to have

become objects of immediate vision to the boy, as were the mysteries

of religion, in after years, to the man. Among the weather-stained

boulders of a haunted hill, the young herd-boy discovered the golden

hoard of the mountain folk—fled in terror, and could never again

find out the spot.[230]

While not yet twenty, Behmen saw life as a travelling apprentice.

The tender conscience and the pensive temperament of the village

youth shrank from the dissolute and riotous companionship of his

fellow-craftsmen. Like George Fox, whom at this period he strongly

resembled, he found the Church scarcely more competent than the

world to furnish the balm which should soothe a spirit at once

excited and despondent. Among the clergy, the shameful servility of

some, the immoral life of others, the bigotry of almost all,

repelled him on every hand. The pulpit was the whipping-post of

imaginary Papists and Calvinists. The churches were the fortified

places in the seat of war. They were spiritually what ours were

literally in King Stephen’s days, when the mangonel and the

cross-bow bolts stood ready on the battlemented tower, when military

stores were piled in the crypt, and a moat ran through the

churchyard. The _Augsburg Confession_ and the _Formula Concordiæ_

were appealed to as though of inspired authority. The names of

Luther and Melanchthon were made the end of controversy and of

freedom. The very principle of Protestantism was forsaken when

ecclesiastics began to prove their positions, not by Scripture, but

by Articles of Faith. So Behmen wandered about, musing, with his

Bible in his hand, and grieved sore because of the strife among

Christian brethren, because evil everywhere was spreading and

fruitful, and goodness so rare and so distressed; because he saw,

both near and far away, such seeming waste and loss of human souls.

A profound melancholy took possession of him—partly that the truth

which would give rest was for himself so hard to find, but most for

the sight of his eyes which he saw, when he looked abroad upon God’s

rational creatures. On his return from his travels he settled in

Görlitz, married early, and worked hard at his trade. Everywhere

these anxious questing thoughts about life’s mystery are with him,

disquieting. He reads many mystical and astrological books, not

improbably, even thus early, Schwenkfeld and Paracelsus.[231] But

the cloudy working of his mind is not soon to give place to sunshine

and clear sky. He is to be found still with the pelican and the

bittern in the desolate places where the salt-pits glisten, and the

nettles breed, and the wild beasts lie down, and the cedar work is

uncovered,—among the untimely ruins of that City of Hope which had

almost won back Christendom in the resistless prime of Luther.

At last, upon an ever-memorable day, as he sat meditating in his

room, he fell, he knew not how, into a kind of trance. The striving,

climbing sorrows of his soul had brought him to this luminous

table-land. A halcyon interval succeeded to the tempest. He did not

seek, he gazed; he was surrounded by an atmosphere of glory. He

enjoyed for seven days an unruffled soul-sabbath. He looked into the

open secret of creation and providence. Such seemed his ecstasy. In

Amadis of Greece an enchanter shuts up the heroes and princesses of

the tale in the Tower of the Universe, where all that happened in

the world was made to pass before them, as in a magic glass, while

they sat gazing, bound by the age-long spell. So Behmen believed

that the principles of the Universal Process were presented to his

vision as he sat in his study at Görlitz. We may say that it was the

work of all his after days to call to mind, to develop for himself,

and to express for others, the seminal suggestions of that and one

following glorious dream.

Behmen was twenty-five years of age when the subject of this first

illumination. He stated that he was thrown into his trance while

gazing on the dazzling light reflected from a tin vessel, as the

rays of the sun struck into his room. Distrusting at first the

nature of the vision, he walked out into the fields to dissipate the

phantasmagoria; but the strange hues and symbols were still present,

and seemed to point him to the heart and secret of the universe. For

several years his gift lay hidden. Behmen was known as a quiet,

meditative, hard-working man, fond of books; otherwise scarcely

distinguishable from other cobblers. Ten years after the first

manifestation he believed himself the recipient of a second, not,

like the former, mediated by anything external; and revealing, with

greater fulness and order, what before lay in comparative confusion.

To fix this communication in a form which might be of abiding

service to him, he began to write his _Aurora_.

But he shall tell his own story, as he did tell it, one-and-twenty

years later, to his friend Caspar Lindern.

‘I saw and knew,’ he says, ‘the Being of all Beings, the Byss

(_Grund_) and the Abyss: _item_, the birth of the Holy Trinity; the

origin and primal state of this world and of all creatures through

the Divine Wisdom. I knew and saw in myself all the three

worlds,—_i.e._ (1) the divine angelic or paradisiacal world; then,

(2) the dark world, as the original of nature, as to the fire; and

(3) this external visible world, as a creation and out-birth, or as

a substance spoken forth out of the two inner spiritual worlds.

Moreover, I saw and had cognizance of the whole Being in good and in

evil—how each had its origin in the other, and how the Mother did

bring forth;—and this all moved me not merely to the height of

wonder, but made me to rejoice exceedingly. (Incredible as it may

appear, this passage _has_ a meaning, which may become apparent to

some readers after a perusal of what is said farther on, in

explanation of Behmen’s system.)

‘Soon it came strongly into my mind that I should set the same down

in writing, for a memorial, albeit I could hardly compass the

understanding thereof in my external man, so as to write it on

paper. I felt that with such great mysteries I must set to work as a

child that goes to school. In my inward man I saw it well, as in a

great deep, for I saw right through as into a chaos in which

everything lay wrapped, but the unfolding thereof I found

impossible.

‘Yet from time to time it opened itself within me, as in a growing

plant. For the space of twelve years I carried it about within

me—was, as it were, pregnant therewith, feeling a mighty inward

impulse, before I could bring it forth in any external form; till

afterwards it fell upon me, like a bursting shower that hitteth

wheresoever it lighteth, as it will. So it was with me, and

whatsoever I could bring into outwardness that I wrote down.

‘Thereafter the sun shone on me a good while, yet not steadily and

without interval, and when that light had withdrawn itself I could

scarce understand my own work. And this was to show man that his

knowledge is not his own, but God’s, and that God in man’s soul

knoweth what and how he will.

‘This writing of mine I purposed to keep by me all my life, and not

to give it into the hands of any man. But it came to pass in the

providence of the Most High, that I entrusted a person with part of

it, by whose means it was made known without my knowledge. Whereupon

my first book, the _Aurora_, was taken from me, and because many

wondrous things were therein revealed, not to be comprehended in a

moment by the mind of man, I had to suffer no little at the hands of

the worldly-wise—(_von den Vernunft-weisen_).

‘For three years I saw no more of this said book, and thought it

verily clean dead and gone, till some learned men sent me copies

therefrom, exhorting me not to bury my talent. To this counsel my

outward reason was in no wise willing to agree, having suffered so

much already. My reason was very weak and timorous at that time, the

more so as the light of grace had then been withdrawn from me some

while, and did but smoulder within, like a hidden fire. So I was

filled with trouble. Without was contempt, within, a fiery driving;

and what to do I knew not, till the breath of the Most High came to

my help again, and awoke within me a new life. Then it was that I

attained to a better style of writing, likewise to a deeper and more

thorough knowledge. I could reduce all better to outward form—as,

indeed, my book concerning _The Threefold Life through the Three

Principles_ doth fully show, and as the godly reader whose heart is

opened will see.

‘So, therefore, have I written, not from book-learning, or the

doctrine and science of men, but from my own book which was opened

within me,—the book of the glorious image of God, which it was

vouchsafed to me to read: ’tis therein I have studied—as a child in

its mother’s house, that sees what its father doth, and mimics the

same in its child’s-play. I need no other book than this.

‘My book has but three leaves—the three principles of Eternity.

Therein I find all that Moses and the prophets, Christ and his

apostles, have taught. Therein I find the foundation of the world

and all mystery,—yet, not I, but the Spirit of the Lord doth it, in

such measure as He pleaseth.

‘For hundreds of times have I prayed him that if my knowledge were

not for his glory and the edifying of my brethren, he will take it

from me, only keeping me in his love. But I have found that with all

my earnest entreaty the fire within me did but burn the more, and it

is in this glow, and in this knowledge, that I have produced my

works....

‘Let no man conceive of me more highly than he here seeth, for the

work is none of mine; I have it only in that measure vouchsafed me

of the Lord; I am but his instrument wherewith he doeth what he

will. This, I say, my dear friend, once for all, that none may seek

in me one other than I am, as though I were a man of high skill and

intellect, whereas I live in weakness and childhood, and the

simplicity of Christ. In that child’s work which he hath given me is

my pastime and my play; ’tis there I have my delight, as in a

pleasure-garden where stand many glorious flowers; therewith will I

make myself glad awhile, till such time as I regain the flowers of

Paradise in the new man.’[232]

This letter alludes to the way in which the _Aurora_ was made public

without the knowledge of its author. The friend to whom he showed it

was Karl von Endern, who, struck by its contents, caused a copy to

be taken, from which others were rapidly multiplied. The book fell

into the hands of Gregory Richter, the chief pastor in Görlitz. Well

may Behmen say that the _Aurora_ contained some things not readily

apprehended by human reason. A charitable man would have forgiven

its extravagances, catching some glimpses of a sincere and religious

purpose; a wise man would have said nothing about it; a man the

wisest of the wise would have been the last to pretend to understand

it. But Richter—neither charitable nor wise exceedingly, nor even

moderately stocked with good sense—fell into a blundering passion,

and railed at Behmen from the pulpit, as he sat in his place at

church, crimson, but patient, the centre of all eyes.

Behmen had already rendered himself obnoxious to Richter by a

temperate but firm remonstrance against an act of ecclesiastical

oppression. Now, his pretensions seem openly to militate against

that mechanical religious monopoly with which Richter imagined

himself endowed,—a privilege as jealously watched and as profitably

exercised by such men as that of the muezzins of the mosque of

Bajazet, who are alone entitled to supply the faithful with the

praying compasses that indicate the orthodox attitude. The insolent,

heretical, blasphemous cobbler shall find no mercy. Richter loudly

calls for the penalties of law, to punish a fanatic who has taught

(as he declares) that the Son of God is Quicksilver! Görlitz

magistrates, either of the Shallow family, or, it may be, overborne

by the blustering Rector, pronounce Behmen ‘a villain full of

piety,’ and banish him the town. But by the next day the tide would

appear to have turned, and the exile is brought back with honour.

The shoemaker’s booth is the scene of a little ovation, while

Richter fumes at the parsonage. Behmen, however, must give up the

manuscript of the _Aurora_, and is required for the future to stick

to his last.

His book, as it became known, procured him many influential friends

among men of learning and men of rank throughout Lusatia. He was

exhorted not to hide his talent, and the ensuing five years became a

period of incessant literary activity.[233] The scholarship of

friends like Kober and Walther assisted him to supply some of the

defects of his education; the liberality of others provided for his

moderate wants, and enabled him to forsake his business for his

books.[234] Once more did his old enemy, the primarius Richter,

appear against him, with a pamphlet of virulent pasquinades in Latin

verse. Behmen issued an elaborate reply, entering minutely into

every charge, sending the clerical curses ‘home to roost,’ and

praying for the enlightenment of his persecutor with exasperating

good temper.[235] The magistrates, fluttered and anxious, requested

him to leave Görlitz. Knightly friends opened their castle gates to

him; he preferred retirement at Dresden. There, a public disputation

he held with some eminent divines and men of science, was said to

have excited general admiration. He returned to Görlitz in his last

illness, to die in the midst of his family. He expired early on

Sunday morning, on the twenty-first of November, 1624, in his

fiftieth year. He asked his son Tobias if he heard the beautiful

music, and bade those about him set the doors open that the sounds

might enter. After receiving the sacrament, he breathed his last, at

the hour of which a presentiment of dissolution had warned him. His

last words were, ‘Now I am going to Paradise!‘[236]

Note to page 80.

Behmen’s learned friends were accustomed thus to test the insight they

so revered, and would occasionally attempt to mislead his sagacity by

wrong terms and entrapping questions; but always, we are assured,

without success. See _Ein Schreiben von einem vornehmen Patritio und

Rathsverwandten zu Görlitz wegen seel. Jac. Behmen’s Person und

Schriften_, appended to Franckenberg’s Life of Behmen.

The rationale of this peculiar significance of letters and syllables he

gives in the following passage:—

When man fell into sin, he was removed from the inmost birth and set in

the other two, which presently encompassed him, and mingled their

influences with him and in him (_inqualireten mit ihme und in ihme_), as

in their own peculiar possession; and man received the spirit and the

whole generation of the sidereal, and also of the external birth.

Therefore he now speaks all words according to the indwelling generative

principle of nature. For the spirit of man, which stands in the sidereal

birth, and combines with all nature, and is as all nature itself, shapes

the word according to the indwelling principle of birth. When he sees

anything he gives it a name answering to its peculiar property or

virtue; and if he does this he must fashion the word in the form, and

generate it with his voice in the way in which the thing he names

generates; and herein lies the kernel of the whole understanding of the

Godhead.—_Aurora_, cap. xix. §§ 74-76. On this principle he examines,

syllable by syllable, the opening words of Genesis—not those of the

Hebrew, but the German version (!), as follows:—‘_Am Anfang schuff

Gott_,’ &c. These words we must very carefully consider. The word AM

takes its rise in the heart, and goes as far as the lips. There it is

arrested, and goes sounding back to whence it came. Now, this shows that

the sound went forth from the heart of God, and encompassed the entire

_locus_ of the world; but when it was found to be evil, then the sound

returned to its place again. The word AN pushes forth from the heart to

the mouth, and has a long stress. But when it is pronounced, it closes

in its _sedes_ in the midst with the roof of the mouth, and is half

without and half within. This signifies that the heart of God felt

repugnance at the corruption of the world, and cast the corrupt nature

from him, but again seized and stayed it in the midst by his heart. Just

as the tongue arrests the word, and retains it half without and half

within, so the heart of God would not utterly reject the enflamed

Salitter, but would defeat the schemes and malice of the Devil, and

finally restore the other.—_Aurora_, cap. xviii. §§ 48-52. A similar

precious piece of nonsense is to be found, cap. xviii. §§ 72, &c. of

which _Barmherzig_ is the thema. He declares, in another place, that

when the spiritual Aurora shall shine from the rising of the sun to the

going-down of the same, RA. RA. R.P. shall be driven into banishment,

and with him AM. R. P. These are secret words, he says, only to be

understood in the language of nature.—_Aurora_, xxvi. 120.

Behmen was indebted to his conversations with men like Kober and Walther

for much of his terminology, and probably to the suggestions awakened by

such intercourse for much of the detailed application of his system. See

_Lebens-lauff_, § 20; and compare the _Clavis_, or _Schlüssel etlicher

vornehmen Puncten_, &c.

Footnote 228:

The personal appearance of Behmen is thus described by his friend and

biographer, Abraham von Franckenberg, in the biography prefixed to his

Works, § 27.

Footnote 229:

See Note on p. 88.

Footnote 230:

_Lebens-lauff_, § 4.

Footnote 231:

See his own account of his mental conflict and melancholy, issuing in

the rapturous intuition which solved all his doubts, _Aurora_, cap.

xix. §§ 1-13. He acknowledges having read many astrological books.

_Aurora_, cap. xxv. § 43: Ja, lieber, Leser, ich verstehe der

Astrologorum Meinung auch wol, ich habe auch ein paar zeilen in ihren

Schrifften gelesen, und weiss wol wie sie den Lauf der Sonnen und

Sternen schreiben, ich verachte es auch nicht, sondern halte es

meisten Theil für gut und recht. Compare also cap. x. § 27: Ich habe

viel hoher Meister Schrifften gelesen, in Hoffnung den Grund und die

rechte Tieffe darinnen zu finden, aber ich habe nichts funden als

einen halb-todten Geist, &c. In a letter to Caspar Lindern he mentions

sundry mystical writers concerning whom his correspondent appears to

have desired his opinion,—admits that several of them were men of high

spiritual gifts, not to be despised, though in many respects capable

of amendment,—says that they were of good service in their time, and

would probably express themselves otherwise did they write now,—shows

where he thinks Schwenkfeld wrong in affirming Christ’s manhood to be

no creature, and speaks of Weigel as erring in like manner by denying

the Saviour’s true humanity.—_Theosoph. Sendbr._ §§ 52-60.

Footnote 232:

_Theosoph. Sendbr._ xii. §§ 8-20.

Footnote 233:

A full account of the persecution raised by Gregory Richter against

Behmen, was drawn up by Cornelius Weissner, a doctor of medicine, and

is appended by Franckenberg to his biography. A young man, who had

married a relative of Behmen’s, had been so terrified by the

threatenings of divine wrath launched at him by Richter, about some

trifling money matter, that he fell into a profound melancholy. Behmen

comforted the distressed baker, and ventured to remonstrate with the

enraged primarius, becoming ever after a marked man. For seven years

after the affair of the Aurora, in 1612, Behmen refrained from

writing. Everything he published subsequently was produced between the

years 1619 and 1624, inclusive.

Footnote 234:

Thus he thanks Christian Bernard for a small remittance of

money.—_Theos. Sendbr._ ix. Sept. 12, 1620.

Footnote 235:

_Apologia wider den Primarium zu Görlitz Gregorium Richter_, written

in 1624.

Footnote 236:

Vide Corn. Weissner’s _Wahrhafte Relation_, &c., and Franckenberg’s

account of his last hours, § 29.

CHAPTER VII.

When I myself from mine own self do quit,

And each thing else; then all-spreaden love

To the vast Universe my soul doth fit,

Makes me half equall to all-seeing Jove.

My mighty wings high stretch’d then clapping light,

I brush the stars and make them shine more bright.

Then all the works of God with close embrace

I dearly hug in my enlarged arms,

All the hid pathes of heavenly love I trace,

And boldly listen to his secret charms.

Then clearly view I where true light doth rise,

And where eternal Night low-pressed lies.

HENRY MORE.

WILLOUGHBY’S ESSAY—FIFTH EVENING.

§ 5. _Jacob Behmen—his Materials and Style of Workmanship._

It has been too much the custom to regard Jacob Behmen as a kind of

speculative Melchisedek—a prodigy without doctrinal father or

mother. Let us endeavour to form a correct estimate of the debt he

owes to his mystical predecessors.

The much-pondering shoemaker consulted the writings of Schwenkfeld

and Weigel in his distress. He found these authors crying

unceasingly, ‘Barren are the schools; barren are all forms;

barren—worse than barren, these exclusive creeds, this deadly

polemic letter.’ Weigel bids him withdraw into himself and await, in

total passivity, the incoming of the divine Word, whose light

reveals unto the babe what is hidden from the wise and prudent. By

the same writer he is reminded that he lives in God, and taught that

if God also dwell in him, then is he even here in Paradise—the state

of regenerate souls. Paracelsus extols the power of faith to

penetrate the mysteries of nature, and shows him how a plain man,

with his Bible only, if he be filled with the Spirit and carried out

of himself by divine communication, may seem to men a fool, but is

in truth more wise than all the doctors. Weigel says that man, as

body, soul, and spirit, belongs to three worlds—the terrestrial, the

astral, and the celestial. Both Weigel and Paracelsus teach him the

doctrine of the microcosm. They assure him that as divine

illumination reveals to him the mysteries of his own being, he will

discern proportionately the secrets of external nature. They teach

that all language, art, science, handicraft, exists potentially in

man; that all apparent acquisition from without is in reality a

revival and evolution of that which is within.

These instructors furnish the basis of Behmen’s mysticism. Having

drunk of this somewhat heady vintage, he is less disposed than ever

to abandon his search. He will sound even those abysmal questions so

often essayed, and so often, after all, resigned, as beyond the

range of human faculties. If, according to the promise, importunate

prayer can bring him light, then shall light be his. When he asks

for an answer from above to his speculative enquiry into the nature

of the Trinity, the processes of creation, the fall of angels, the

secret code of those warring forces whose conflict produces the

activity and vicissitudes of life, he does not conceive that he

implores any miraculous intervention. Provision was made, he

thought, for knowledge thus beyond what is written, in the very

constitution of man’s nature. Such wisdom was but the realization,

by the grace of God, of our inborn possibilities. It was making

actual what had otherwise been only potential. It was bringing into

consciousness an implicit acquaintance with God and nature which was

involved in the very idea of man as the offspring of the Creator and

the epitome of creation.

But of what avail is light on any minor province of enquiry, while

the fundamental perplexity is unsolved,—Whence and what is evil, and

why so masterful? How could King Vortigern build his great fortress

upon Salisbury Plain, when every day’s work was overthrown in the

night by an earthquake—the result of that nocturnal combat in the

bowels of the earth between the blood-red and the milk-white

dragons? And how, pray, was Behmen to come to rest about his own

doubts—far less erect a system,—till he had reconciled the

contradiction at the root of all? The eternal opposites must

harmonize in some higher unity. Here Paracelsus is Behmen’s Merlin.

The doctrine of Development by Contraries was passed, in the

torch-race of opinion, from Sebastian Frank to Paracelsus, and from

him to Weigel. According to this theory, God manifests himself in

opposites. The peace of Unity develops into the strife of the

Manifold. All things consist in Yea and Nay. The light must have

shadow, day night, laughter tears, health sickness, hope fear, good

evil, or they would not be what they are. Only by resistance, only

in collision, is the spark of vitality struck out, is power

realized, and progress possible. Of this hypothesis I shall have

more to say hereafter. It is the chief estate of Behmen’s

inheritance. Theosophy bequeathed him, in addition, sundry lesser

lands;—namely, the Paracelsian Triad of Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury;

the doctrine of the vitality of the world, with the ‘Fifth Element,’

or ‘Breath of Life,’ for Mundane Soul; the theory of sympathies,

stellar influence, signatures; and the alchemico-astrotheologico

jargon of the day.

Such, then, were Behmen’s principal materials. His originality is

displayed in a most ingenious arrangement and development of them;

especially in their application to theology and the interpretation

of Scripture.

The description furnished us by Behmen himself of the deciding epoch

of his life, indicates the kind of illumination to which he laid

claim. The light thus enjoyed was not shed upon a mind from which

all the inscriptions of memory had been effaced, to produce that

blank so coveted by the mystics of a former day. The cloud of glory

magnified and refracted the results of those theosophic studies to

which he confesses himself addicted.

The topographer of Fairyland, Ludwig Tieck, tells us that when the

Elf-children scatter gold-dust on the ground, waving beds of roses

or of lilies instantly spring up. They plant the seed of the pine,

and in a moment mimic pine-trees rise under their feet, carrying

upward, with the growth of their swaying arms, the laughing little

ones. So swiftly, so magically—not by labouring experiment and

gradual induction, but in the blissful stillness of one ecstatic and

consummate week,—arose the Forms and Principles of Behmen’s system,

and with them rose the seer. But how, when the season of vision is

over, shall he retain and represent the complex intricacies of the

Universal Organism in the heart of which he found himself? Memory

can only recal the mystery in fragments. Reflection can with

difficulty supplement and harmonize those parts. Language can

describe but superficially and in succession what the inner eye

beheld throughout and at once. The fetters of time and space must

fall once more on the recovered consciousness of daily life. We have

heard Behmen describe the throes he underwent, the difficulties he

overcame, as he persevered in the attempt to give expression to the

suggestions he received.[237] How long it is before he sees

The lovely members of the mighty whole—

Till then confused and shapeless to his soul,—

Distinct and glorious grow upon his sight,

The fair enigmas brighten from the Night.

To us, who do not share Behmen’s delusion, who see in his condition

the extraordinary, but nowise the supernatural, it is clear that

this difficulty was so great, not from the sublime character of

these cosmical revelations, but because of the utter confusion his

thoughts were in. Glimpses, and snatches, and notions of possible

reply to his questions, raying through as from holes in a shutter,

reveal the clouds of dust in that unswept brain of his, where

medical recipes and theological doctrines, the hard names of alchemy

and the super-subtile fancies of theosophy, have danced a whirlwind

saraband. Yet he believed himself not without special divine aid in

his endeavours to develop into speech the seed of thought deposited

within him. He apologises for bad spelling, bad grammar,

abbreviations, omissions, on the ground of the impetuosity with

which the divine impulse hurried forward his feeble pen.[238]

Unfortunately for a hypothesis so flattering, he improves visibly by

practice, like ordinary folk.

It is scarcely necessary to observe that Behmen and the mystics are

partly right and partly wrong in turning from books and schools to

intuition, when they essay to pass the ordinary bounds of knowledge

and to attain a privileged gnosis. It is true that no method of

human wisdom will reveal to men the hidden things of the divine

kingdom. But it is also true that dreamy gazing will not disclose

them either. Scholarship may not scale the heights of the

unrevealed, and neither assuredly may ignorance. There is nothing to

choose between far-seeing Lynceus and a common sailor of the Argo,

when the object for which they look out together is not yet above

the horizon. The latter, at all events, should not regard the

absence of superior endowment as an advantage.

In the more high-wrought forms of theopathetic mysticism we have

seen reason regarded as the deadly enemy of rapture. The surpassing

union which takes place in ecstasy is dissolved on the first

movement of reflection. Self-consciousness is the lamp whereby the

ill-fated Psyche at once discerns and loses the celestial lover,

whose visits cease with secrecy and night. But Behmen devoutly

employs all the powers of a most active mind to combine, to order,

to analyse, to develop, the heavenly data.

Protestant mysticism generally is, like Behmen’s, communicative. The

mysticism of the Reformation and of the Counter-Reformation afford,

in this respect, a striking contrast. That of the Romanists is, for

the most part, a veiled thing, not to be profaned by speech. It is

an ineffable privilege which description would deprive of its awe.

It is commonly a contrivance employed for effect—a flash, and

darkness. It is a distinction, in some cases, for services past; an

individual preparation, in others, for services to come. The special

revelation of the Protestant is a message to some man for his

fellow-men. It at least contemplates something practical. It is

generally reformatory. The vision of the Romish saint is a private

token of favour, or a scar of honour, or a decoration from the court

of heaven, like a cross or star.

The illumination of Behmen differs, again, from that of Swedenborg,

in that he does not profess to have held communication with spirits,

or to have passed into other worlds and states of being. While his

doctrine is, in many respects, less subjective than that of

Swedenborg, his mode of vision, so entirely internal, is more so.

The three-leaved book, says Behmen, is within me; hence all my

teaching. In man are the three gates opening on the three worlds.

Behmen’s heaven is not wholly above the sky. The subterranean

regions cannot contain his hell. The inner and spiritual sphere

underlies everywhere the material and outward.[239] As with those

hollow balls of carved ivory that come to us from the East, one is

to be discerned within the other through the open tracery. The world

is like some kinds of fruit—a plum or apple, for instance,—and has

its rind-men, its pulp-men, and its core, or kernel-men; yet all

with the same faculties,—only the first live merely on the surface

of things; the last perceive how the outer form is determined by the

central life within. Man intersects the spiritual, sidereal, and

terrestrial worlds, as a line from the centre to the outermost of

three concentric circles. Behmen would say that his insight arose

from his being aided by Divine Grace to live along the whole line of

his nature, with a completeness attained by few. He travels to and

fro on his radius. When recipient of celestial truth he is near the

centre; when he strives to give utterance and form to such

intimations, he approaches the circumference. When asked how he came

to know so much about our cosmogony, and about the origin and

œconomy of the angelic world, he would answer, ‘Because I have lived

in that region of myself which opens out upon those regions. I need

not change my place to have entrance into the heavenly sphere. I

took no Mahomet’s flight. The highest and the inmost, in the deepest

sense, are one.’[240] So it is as though man stood at a spot where

three rivers are about to join; as though to drink of the water of

each was to give him knowledge of the kind of country through which

each had passed; how one ran embrowned out of marshy lakes—through

wealthy plains—under the bridges of cities,—washing away the refuse

of manufactures; while the second came ruddy from rocks, red with

their iron rust,—came carrying white blossoms and silver-grey willow

leaves from glens far up the country, deepfolded in hanging woods;

and the water of the third, ice-cold and hyaline, presented to the

soul, as it touched the lips, visions of the glacier-portcullis from

under whose icicles it leaped at first, and of those unsullied

tracts of heavenward snow which fed its childhood at the bidding of

the sun, and watched it from the heights of eternal silence.

* * * * *

The _Aurora_ was the firstfruit of the illumination thus realized.

He composed it, he reminds us, for himself alone, to give him a hold

against any refluent doubt that might threaten to sweep him back

into the waves. It is the worst written of all his treatises. With

respect to it, the answer of Shakspeare’s Roman shoemaker gives to

Marullus may be adopted by our Teuton—‘Truly, sir, in respect of a

fine workman, I am but, as you would say, a cobbler.’ Yet this

botched performance best renders us the genuine Behmen, as he was

when first the afflatus came, before greater leisure for reading and

study, and intercourse with men of station or scholarship had given

him culture. This _Aurora_, then, over which Karl von Endern pored

in his simplicity till he rose therefrom with a bewildered

admiration and a sense of baffled amazement, physically expressed by

a feverish headache,—over whose pages Gregory Richter galloped with

scornful hoof, striking out pishes and pshaws and bahs over its

flinty ruggedness,—this _Aurora_—a dawn opening for Behmen with such

threatening weather within and without—what kind of book does it

appear to us?

It is at first with curiosity, then with impatience, and ere long

with the irritation of inevitable fatigue, that we read those wordy

pages Behmen wrote with such a furious impetus. How wide the

distance between him and his readers now! Behold him early in his

study, with bolted door. The boy must see to the shop to-day; no

sublunary cares of awl and leather, customers and groschen, must

check the rushing flood of thought. The sunshine streams in—emblem,

to his ‘high-raised phantasy,’ of a more glorious light. As he

writes, the thin cheeks are flushed, the grey eye kindles, the whole

frame is damp and trembling with excitement. Sheet after sheet is

covered. The headlong pen, too precipitate for calligraphy, for

punctuation, for spelling, for syntax, dashes on. The lines which

darken down the waiting page are, to the writer, furrows into which

heaven is raining a driven shower of celestial seed. On the chapters

thus fiercely written the eye of the modern student rests, cool and

critical, wearily scanning paragraphs digressive as Juliet’s nurse,

and protesting with contracted eyebrow, that this easy writing is

abominably hard to read. We survey this monument of an extinct

enthusiasm,—this structure, many-chambered, intricate, covering so

broad a space,—as does the traveller the remains of the Pompeian

baths;—there are the cells and channels of the hypocaust, dusty and

open to the day, the fires long since gone out, and all that made

the busy echoing halls and winding passages so full of life—the

laughter, the quarrel, the chatter of the vestibule, imagination

must supply, while Signor Inglese, beneath a large umbrella and a

straw hat, doth gaze and muse, with smarting eyes and liquefying

body.

Behmen does not suffer much more in this respect than all minds of

his class must suffer. Imagination, with its delicate sympathy, will

know how to make allowance for him; but reason will not attempt to

rescue him from condign sentence of unreadableness. It is obvious,

after all, that the good man’s inspiration was not born of the mania

Plato describes as ‘divine transport;’ that it was akin rather to

that morbid activity which is but ‘human distemper.’ It is the

prerogative of genius to transmit through the dead page, with a glow

that can never become quite cold, some rays of that central heat of

heart which burned when the writer held the pen. The power of Behmen

does not reach so far. That rapidity which was to him the witness of

the Spirit, leaves for us only the common signs of unpardonable

haste,—is tediously visible in negligence, disorder, repetitions,

and diffuseness.

As might be expected, Behmen is often best in those parts of his

writings to which he himself would have assigned less value. In many

of his letters, in some of his prefaces, and interspersed throughout

all his works, exhortations are to be found which in their pungency

and searching force recal the burning admonitions of Richard Baxter.

These appeals, summoning to religious simplicity and thoroughness,

exposing the treacheries of the heart, encouraging the

feeble-minded, awakening the sleeper, would be as eloquent and

pathetic as they are earnest and true, did he oftener know where to

stop. Such passages, however, are preludes or interludes neighboured

by heavy monologue, monotonous and protracted beyond all patience.

We descend from those serene uplands, where the air is redolent of

the cedars of Lebanon, and the voices we hear recal the sounds of

Hebrew prophecy or psalm, to the poor flats of his mortal

speculation—muddy, we must say it, in the finest weather, where

chalky streams wind their slow length by stunted pollards, over

levels of interminable verbiage.

The same ideas incessantly recur, sometimes almost in the same

words. Such repetition contributes not a little to the

discouragement and perplexity of the reader, even when most

pertinaciously bent on exploring these recesses,—as in threading his

dim way through the catacombs, the investigator loses count by the

resemblance of so many passages to each other, and seems to be

returning constantly to the same spot. With all his imagination,

Behmen has little power of elucidation, scarcely any original

illustration. The analogies suggested to him are seldom apt to his

purpose, or such as really throw light on his abstractions. To a

mind active in such direction illustrative allusions are like the

breed of ponies celebrated in the _Pirate_, that graze wild on the

Shetland hills, from among which the islander catches, as he needs,

the first that comes to hand, puts on the halter, canters it his

journey, and lets it go, never to know it more. But Behmen, when he

has laid hold of a similitude, locks the stable door upon it—keeps

it for constant service—and at some times rides the poor beast to

death. The obscurity of his writings is increased by his arbitrary

chemico-theological terminology, and the hopeless confusion in which

his philosophies of mind and matter lie entangled. His pages

resemble a room heaped in disorder, with the contents of a library

and laboratory together. In this apartment you open a folio divine,

and knock over a bottle of nitric acid;—you go to look after the

furnace, and you tumble over a pile of books. You cannot divest

yourself of the suspicion that when you have left the place and

locked the door behind you, these strange implements will assume an

unnatural life, and fantastically change places,—that the books will

some of them squeeze themselves into the crucible, and theology will

simmer on the fire, and that the portly alembic will distil a sermon

on predestination.

The _Aurora_ is broken every here and there by headings in capital

letters—promising and conspicuous sign-posts, on which are written,

‘MARK!‘—‘NOW MARK!‘—‘UNDERSTAND THIS ARIGHT!‘—‘THE GATE OF THE GREAT

MYSTERY!‘—‘MARK NOW THE HIDDEN MYSTERY OF GOD!‘—‘THE DEEPEST

DEPTH!‘—and similar delusive advertisements, pointing the wayfarer,

alas! to no satisfactory path of extrication,—places rather of

deeper peril,—spots like those in the lowlands of Northern Germany,

verdurous and seemingly solid, but concealing beneath their

trembling crust depths of unfathomable mire, whence (like fly from

treacle-jar) the unwary traveller is happy to emerge, miserably

blinded and besmeared, with a hundred-weight of mud weighing down

either limb. Often does it seem as though now, surely, a goodly

period were at hand, and Behmen were about to say something summary

and transparent: the forest opens—a little cleared land is

discernible—a solitary homestead or a charcoal-burner’s hut appears

to indicate the verge of this interminable Ardennes forest of

words—but only a little further on, the trees shut out the sky

again; it was but an interstice, not the limit; and the wild

underwood and press of trunks embarrass and obscure our course as

before. It is some poor relief when Behmen pauses and fetches breath

to revile the Devil, and in homely earnest calls him a damned

stinking goat, or asks him how he relishes his prospects; when he

stops to anticipate objections and objurgate the objectors,

dogmatizing anew with the utmost _naïveté_, and telling them to take

care, for they will find him right to a certainty at the last day;

or, finally, when he refreshes himself by a fling at the Papists,

quite Lutheran in its heartiness. For in Behmen’s mysticism there

was nothing craven, effeminate, or sentimental. He would contend to

the death for the open Bible. All spiritual servitude was his

abhorrence. Very different was the sickly mysticism for a short time

in vogue in Germany at a later period of the seventeenth century.

Behmen was no friend to what was narrow or corrupt in the

Lutheranism of his day. But a Lutheran he remained, and a genuine

Protestant. Sickly and servile natures could only sigh over the

grand religious battle of those days, and would have made away their

birthright—liberty, for that mess of pottage—peace. They began by

regarding the strife between tyranny and freedom with unmanly

indifference. They ended by exercising for the last time their

feeble private judgment, and securing themselves with obsequious

haste in the shackles of the infallible Church.

Footnote 237:

While regarding as infallibly certain the main features of the

doctrine communicated to him, Behmen is quite ready to admit the

imperfect character both of his knowledge and his setting forth

thereof. Light was communicated to him, he said, by degrees, at

uncertain intervals, and never un-mingled with obscurity.—_Aurora_,

cap. vii. § 11; cap. x. § 26, and often elsewhere.

Footnote 238:

_Aurora_, x. §§ 44, 45.

Footnote 239:

See _Aurora_, cap. xix. §§ 26-45; cap. xxiii. § 86.

After speaking of the revolt of Lucifer as the cause of the present

imperfection and admixture of natural evil in the world, by corrupting

the influence of the Fountain-Spirits throughout our department of the

universe, and of the blind and endangered condition of man consequent

thereon, he adds,—‘But thou must not suppose that on this account the

heavenly light in the Fountain-Spirits of God is utterly extinct. No;

it is but a darkness which we, with our corrupt eyesight, cannot

apprehend. But when God removes the darkness which thus broods above

the light, and thine eyes are opened, then thou seest even on the spot

where thou sittest, standest, or dost lie in thy room, the lovely face

of God, and all the gates that open upon heaven. Thou needest not

first lift thine eyes upwards to heaven, for it is written, ‘The word

is near thee, even on thy lips and in thine heart;’ Deut. xxx. 14;

Rom. x. 8. So near thee, indeed, is God, that the birth of the Holy

Trinity takes place in thine heart also, and there all three persons

are born,—Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’—_Aurora_, cap. x. §§ 57, 58.

Footnote 240:

‘The spirit of man,’ says Behmen, ‘contains a spark from the power and

light of God.’ The Holy Ghost is ‘creaturely’ within it when renewed,

and it can therefore search into the depths of God and nature, as a

child in its father’s house. In God, past, present, and future;

breadth, depth, and height; far and near, are apprehended as one, and

the holy soul of man sees them in like manner, although (in the

present imperfect state) but partially. For the devil sometimes

succeeds in smothering the seed of inward light.—_Aurora_, _Vorrede_,

§§ 96-105.

According to Behmen, Stephen, when he saw the heavens opened, and

Christ at the right hand of God, was not spiritually translated into

any distant upper region,—‘he had penetrated into the inmost

birth—into the heaven which is everywhere.’—_Aurora_, cap. xix. § 48.

Similarly, he declares that he had not ascended into heaven, and seen

with the eye of the flesh the creative processes he describes, but

that his knowledge comes from the opening within him of the gate to

the inner heavenly world, so that the divine sun arose and shone

within his heart, giving him infallible inward certainty concerning

everything he announces. If an angel from heaven had told him such

things, he must have doubted. It might have been Satan in a garb of

light: it would have been an external testimony: it would have been

beyond his comprehension; but this light and impulse from within

precludes all doubt. The holy Soul is one spirit with God, though

still a creature; sees as the angels see, and far more, since they

discern only heavenly things, but man has experience both of heaven

and hell, standing as he does midway between the two.—_Aurora_, cap.

xi. §§ 68-72 and cap. xii. § 117. Comp. also cap. xxv. §§ 46-48.

CHAPTER VIII.

Μύστας δὲ νόος

Τά τε καὶ τά λέγει,

Βυθὸν ἄρῥητον

Ἀμφιχορεύων.

Σὺ τὸ τίκτον ἔφυς,

Σὺ τὸ τικτόμενον,

Σὺ τὸ φωτίζον,

Σὺ τὸ λαμπόμενον.

Σὺ τὸ φαινόμενον,

Σὺ τὸ κρυπτόμενον

Ἰδιαις α γαῖς.

Ἐν καὶ πάντα

Ἐν καθ᾽ ἑαυτὸ,

Κα διὰ πάντων.[241]

SYNESIUS.

WILLOUGHBY’S ESSAY—SIXTH EVENING.

§ 6. _Jacob Behmen.—Sketch and Estimate of his System._

So our Behmen, rejoicing in his supernatural light, is prepared to

answer more questions than ever the Northern hero, Ganglar, put to

the throned phantoms in the palace roofed with golden shields. Let

us listen to some of his replies. We have been long in the

penumbra—now for the depth of the shadow.

To begin with, Behmen must have an ‘immanent,’ as distinguished from

the revealed Trinity. He attempts to exhibit the _principle_ of that

threefold mode of the divine existence, concerning which we could

have known nothing, apart from Revelation, and which Revelation

discloses only in its practical connexion with the salvation of man.

His theory of the Trinity is not one whit more unsubstantial than

many suggested by modern philosophical divines of high repute. In

the Abyss of the divine nature, the Nothing of unrevealed Godhead,

Behmen supposes that there exists Desire—a going forth, on the part

of what is called the Father. The object and realization of such

tendency is the Son. The bond and result of this reciprocal love is

the Holy Spirit.[242]

Here a marked difference must be noted between Behmen and recent

German speculation. With Hegel, for example, humanity is an

indispensable link in the Trinitarian process. God depends on man

for his self-consciousness and development. The deity of Behmen, on

the contrary, is self-sufficing, and the circle of the divine

blessedness does not stand indebted to man for its completion.

But does not every inward suppose an outward? As, therefore, there

is an Eternal Spirit, so also is there an Eternal Nature. God is not

mere being; He is Will. This Will manifests itself in an external

universe.

The Eternal Nature, or _Mysterium Magnum_, may be described as the

external correlative of the divine Wisdom. In other words, what are

Ideas in the divine Wisdom, assume external form, as natural

properties, in the Eternal Nature. Suso and Spenser sing the praises

of the heavenly Wisdom. Behmen, too, personifies this attribute as

the eternal Virgin. But Nature is distinguished from the maiden

Wisdom as the prolific Mother of the Universe.

In the Eternal Nature, are seven ‘Forms of Life,’ or ‘Active

Principles,’ or ‘Fountain-Spirits’ (_Quellgeister_), or ‘Mothers of

Existence,’—typified in the seven golden candlesticks of the

Apocalypse, and in the many examples of that significant number.

These Forms reciprocally generate and are generated by each other.

Each one of them is at once the parent and offspring of all the

rest. As King Arthur for his knights, so Behmen has a kind of round

table for them, that no one may hold precedence. He compares them to

a skeleton globe, or a system of wheels revolving about a common

centre. This heart or centre is the Son of God, as the sun is the

heart and lord of the seven planets. The antitheses which these

various qualities present to each other, in their action and

reaction, are harmonized in the Supreme Unity. The opposition and

reconciliation of ideal principles manifest the divine

fulness,—constitute a play of love and life in the Divine Nature,

the blessedness of Godhead. But the simultaneous action of these

qualities becomes concrete in the visible universe. On our planet

their operation has been corrupted by moral evil, and is therefore

accompanied by painful strife; so that, with harsh clangour, the

great wheel of life is turned by hostile forces.

The shortest method will be at once to catalogue the mighty

Seven—the besiegers of that Thebes, your patience.

I. _The Astringent Quality._

This first Fountain-Spirit is the principal of all contractive

force. It is desire, and draws, producing hardness, solidity, &c.

Rocks are hard because this quality is dominant, or _primus_ in

them, as Behmen phrases it. In organic nature it produces the woody

fibre. It predominates in the planet Saturn, in salt, in bone, in

wolves.

II. _The Sweet Quality._

The second is the antagonist of the first,—the principle of

expansion and movement. The pliant forms of plants, fluids,

quicksilver,—and, among animals, the subtle fox, are examples of its

characteristic supremacy.

III. _The Bitter Quality._

This is the principle generated from the conflict of those two

contraries, the first and second. It is manifest in the anguish and

strife of being,—in the alterations of the revolving wheel of life.

It may become heavenly rapture or hellish torment. Its influence is

dominant in sulphur, in the planet Mars, in war, in dogs. It

produces red colours, and reigns in choleric temperaments.

IV. _The Quality of Fire._

The first three qualities belong more especially to the kingdom of

the Father—of wrath, necessity, death. The last three to the kingdom

of the Son—of love, freedom, life. The fourth quality is the

intermediate or transition point between the two members of this

antithesis of evolution. In the quality of Fire, light and darkness

meet; it is the root of the soul of man; the source, on either side,

of heaven and hell, between which our nature stands. In this lower

material world, it is manifest in the principle of growth. In the

sidereal world, its planet is the central sun. It produces yellow

colours; reigns, among metals, in gold,—among animals, in the lion.

V. _The Quality of Love._