The Project Gutenberg eBook, Jacob Behmen, by Alexander Whyte

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Title: Jacob Behmen
an appreciation

Author: Alexander Whyte

Release Date: July 16, 2005 [eBook #16306]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JACOB BEHMEN***

Transcribed from the 1895 Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

Jacob Behmen
an Appreciation
by Alexander Whyte

author of 'Characters and Characteristics of William Law' etc.

Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier
30 St. Mary Street, Edinburgh, and
24 Old Bailey, London
1895

This lecture was delivered at the opening of my Classes for the study of
the pre-Reformation, Reformation, and post-Reformation Mystics during
Session 1894-5. A Lecture on WILLIAM LAW was delivered at the opening of
a former Session as an Introduction to the whole subject of Mysticism.

A. W.

ST. GEORGE'S FREE CHURCH,
5_th November_ 1894.

Jacob Behmen

Jacob Behmen, the greatest of the mystics, and the father of German
philosophy, was all his life nothing better than a working shoemaker. He
was born at Old Seidenberg, a village near Goerlitz in Silesia, in the
year 1575, and he died at Goerlitz in the year 1624. Jacob Behmen has no
biography. Jacob Behmen's books are his best biography. While working
with his hands, Jacob Behmen's whole life was spent in the deepest and
the most original thought; in piercing visions of GOD and of nature; in
prayer, in praise, and in love to GOD and man. Of Jacob Behmen it may be
said with the utmost truth and soberness that he lived and moved and had
his being in GOD. Jacob Behmen has no biography because his whole life
was hid with CHRIST in GOD.

* * * * *

While we have nothing that can properly be called a biography of Jacob
Behmen, we have ample amends made to us in those priceless morsels of
autobiography that lie scattered so plentifully up and down all his
books. And nothing could be more charming than just those incidental and
unstudied utterances of Behmen about himself. Into the very depths of a
passage of the profoundest speculation Behmen will all