Chapter II
He that misbelieves and lays aside clear and cautious reason in things that fall under the discussion of Reason, upon the pretence of hankering after some higher principle, (which, a thousand to one, proves but the infatuation of Melancholy and a superstitious hallucination), is as ridiculous as if he would not use his natural eyes about their proper object till the presence of some supernatural light, or till he had got a pair of Spectacles made of the Crystalline Heaven, or of the Cœlum Empyreum, to hang upon his nose for him to look through.—HENRY MORE.
ATHERTON. I ought to acknowledge, I suppose, that I have by me a rough draught, made some time since, representing the first strife between Mysticism and Reformation. But, as to reading it, I scarcely think——
WILLOUGHBY. You will not do so, I beg.
ATHERTON. Willoughby, you shall suffer for that. I’ll begin.
WILLOUGHBY. Pelt away. I thought I should get a cocoa-nut for my stone. (Atherton reads.)
Luther and the Mystics.
The estimate to be formed of the mystics who lived before the Reformation differs very widely from that which is due to those who appeared after it. Previous to the Reformation, there was a far larger amount of truth with the mystics than with any other party in the Romish Church. They were, in reality, men of progress, and belonged to the onward element in their day and generation. For reform of some sort many of them laboured—all of them sighed. They protested against the corruptions of religion. Many an Augean stable would they have cleansed, could they but have found their Hercules. In France, Briconnet, Gerard, and Roussel were men of this class—not so outspoken as Luther and his followers, but led by mysticism to sympathy with reforming views, and enabled by that very mysticism to retain their connexion with Rome, regarding externals as indifferent.
When Luther comes with his doctrine of justification by faith, and his announcement that the Scriptures are the sufficient standard of Christian truth, a great change takes place. Mystics of the more thoughtful, rightly earnest sort, are among the first to embrace the new doctrines. Here they have the guide they longed for—here they find what mysticism could never give. They are, some of them, like Justin Martyr, who waited long among the schools of the Platonists for their promised immediate intuition of Deity, and then discovered among Christians that God was to be known in another way far better—through the medium of his written Word, by the teaching of his Spirit. But those who when a fuller light came, refused to quit for its lustre that isolated and flickering torch, about which men had gathered for lack of anything brighter, such were given over to the veriest absurdity, or speedily consigned to utter forgetfulness. By the mystic of the fourteenth century, the way of the Reformation was in great part prepared. By the mystic of the sixteenth century it was hindered and imperilled. In that huge ship of the state ecclesiastic, which all true hearts and hands in those troublous times were concerned to work to their very best, a new code of regulations had been issued. Such rule came in with Luther. Now some of those who would have been among the very best sailors under the old management, proved useless, or worse than useless under the new. One set of them were insolent and mutinous—had a way of reviling the captain in strange gibberish—and a most insane tendency to look into the powder-room with a light. Another class lay about useless, till having been tumbled over many times by their more active comrades, they got kicked into corners, whence they were never more to emerge. So fared it with mysticism, attempting to persist in existence when its work for that time was done. The mystic so situated was either a caricature of reform or a cipher, either a fanatical firebrand or an unheeded negation.
We need not go far for examples. Dr. Bodenstein of Carlstadt (best known as simple Carlstadt) is professor at Wittenberg, and a thorough reformer. He is a little, swarthy, sunburnt man, crotchety to the last degree. He follows his intuitions—now this whim, now that—right to-day, wrong to-morrow—a man whom you never know where to find. He must spring to his conclusion at once; he will not first pause for satisfying reasons,—for clear ideas on the various bearings of his thought or deed. So his life is a series of starts; his actions incongruous and spasmodic, unlinked, unharmonized by any thoughtful plan or principle.
But Carlstadt is a man of books as well as of action. He writes treatises, repeating the doctrines of Tauler and the German Theology, all about abandonment, and not seeing God or enjoying Him more in this than in that event or employment; about the sin of enjoying ordinances and media, rather than God immediately; about the blessed self-loss in the One; about the reduction of ourselves to nothing. Ah, Dr. Bodenstein, thou mayest write for ever that way, and no one now will read! Men have left all this behind. A ripe full vintage invites their thirst; thine acrid and ascetic grape is now deserted. Gladly do they, for the most part, exchange the refined and impracticable requirements of mysticism, its vagueness, its incessant prohibition, for the genial, simple truth of that German New Testament which Luther is giving them.
At the juncture of which we are about to speak, Luther lay hidden in the Wartburg. In the small town of Zwickau, in the Erzgebirge, there arose a knot of enthusiasts for whom Luther did not go half far enough. There was Storch, a weaver, to whom Gabriel had made very wonderful communications one night; another weaver, named Thomas, and a student, Stübner, who had forsaken the toil of study for the easier method of supernatural illumination. To these should be added the more notorious Thomas Münzer, who has been erroneously regarded as the founder of the party. ‘Why such a slavish reverence for what the Bible says?’ cry these mystics. ‘What is a mere book?’ ‘Have we not immediate voices, impulses, revelations from the Holy Spirit, dictating all we should do? Better this than your Bible reading and college work.’ Then, next, they prophesy terrible woes and judgments to come on Christendom, mainly through the Turks; they themselves, perhaps, in fitting time, may draw the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, and win the land for the saints.
These worthies were put down by the magistrates of Zwickau. Shaking off the Zwickau dust against their enemies, several of them seek a ‘larger sphere of usefulness’ in Wittenberg. They found the city already in no small excitement concerning certain reforms which Carlstadt was making at full speed. He fraternizes with the Zwickau prophets at once. Indeed, he had been heard to say of the whole body of Scripture what divines were accustomed to say of the law only, that it was a killing letter, leading to nothing more than a sense of guilt and deserved condemnation. Faster and faster come his changes, so well-meant, but so ill-advised. With a few strokes he abolishes auricular confession, makes it incumbent to violate the fast days, and renders it customary to come to the sacrament without preparation. Next an iconoclast riot is raised. Carlstadt declares that the magistrates have power to render criminal those observances which the popular voice declares contrary to the Word of God; that if they refuse, the community may take the law into its own hands.
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.
This principle, in its higher operations, is the source of wisdom and glory. It predominates in all sweet things, in birds, in the intercourse of the sexes; and its star is Venus. Behmen, in some places, assigns this quality especially to the gracious Son.
VI. The Quality of Sound.
Hence, in heaven, the songs of the angels, the harmony of the spheres; in man, the five senses, understanding, and the gift of speech. This quality is primus in jovial temperaments, and produces blue colours.
VII. The Quality of Corporeity, or Essential Substance.
This is the quality by which all the rest come to manifestation. It falls, with the preceding, more peculiarly under the province of the Holy Spirit, as the searching and formative principle. It is the source in the heavenly world of the beautiful forms of Paradise, as the preceding is of its sweet sounds. On earth it is the plastic power ruling matter—the operative spirit of nature.[243]
* * * * *
It is curious to observe how Behmen’s theory takes hold of Chemistry with one hand, and Theology with the other. Paracelsus pronounced all matter composed of salt, mercury, and sulphur. Behmen adds, ‘It is even so, considering salt as the representative of the astringent or attractive principle—mercury, of the fluent or separative,—and sulphur, of nature’s pain in the resultant process of production.’ Again, the Father is the dark or fiery principle; the Son, the principle of light or grace; and the Holy Ghost, the creative, formative, preserving principle—the outbirth or realization of the two former. There are no materials so incongruous that a dexterous use of imaginative or superficial analogies cannot combine them. In this way, a medley of terms from the nomenclature of every science may be catalogued and bracketed in symmetrical groups of twos and threes. Behmen was too much in earnest, however, to carry such artificial method very far. He was more concerned about thought than orderly form. He could not postulate a fact to fill a gap in a synopsis. Though he mingles in much confusion the sciences of mind and matter, he does not confound their subjects, and regard them as different states of one substance. He would not affirm, with Schelling, that matter was mind dormant; and mind, matter realized and self-conscious.
We have seen that Behmen assigns the first three principles to the dark kingdom of the Father. When he describes that as a realm of wrath and darkness, he speaks chiefly from the human point of view. God is love. The Father regarded as the wrath-principle, cannot strictly be called God. But the very principle which makes love what it is, becomes, in respect to sin, so much wrath.
Yet, independently of man, and of such wrath as he may know, God would still have manifested himself in contraries. The divine One, the unmanifested Subject, seeking an object—desiring, as it were, to find himself, becomes what, for lack of better terms, Behmen has to call a craving darkness, or burning sense of want. Not that Deity suffers pain; but a certain passion must form the base of action. Realizing that object, the darkness becomes light. That light—the Son—had not been, but for the darkness—the Father. Then from the two, which are one, arise, in the Holy Spirit, the archetypal Forms of the universe. Thus, from the depth of the divine nature itself spring these opposites, Power and Grace, Wrath and Love, Darkness and Light; and thence, by a combination of forces, the manifestation of God in the quickened, changeful universe. But for such antithesis God had remained unrevealed. Without so much of antagonism as is essential to action, the Divine Being had not realized the glory of his nature.
At the same time, Behmen carefully excludes the notion of modern pantheism, that the Divine Idea develops itself by a process, and grows as the world grows.[244] ‘I have to relate in succession,’ he would say, ‘what takes place simultaneously in God,—to describe separately what is one in Him. He needs no method, no medium. The Eternal Nature is not his instrument for creating the visible universe. Thought and realization, with God, take place together, and are in Him identical.’ So, in describing a landscape, we have to relate severally the sounds and appearances of birds and clouds, hills and waters. But to him who is on the spot, the birds sing, the waters shine, the clouds fly, the trees bow on the hill, and the corn waves along the valley, at one and the same time. His senses are the focus of the whole: he sits in the centre. But description must travel the circumference.
We now arrive once more at Behmen’s ‘Yea and Nay’—that theory of antithesis before noticed: his explanation of the origin of Evil. These Contraries are his trade-winds, whereby he voyages to and fro, and traverses with such facility the whole system of things. He teaches that the Divine Unity, in its manifestation or self-realization, parts into two principles, variously called Light and Darkness, Joy and Sorrow, Fire and Light, Wrath and Love, Good and Evil. Without what is termed the Darkness and the Fire, there would be no Love and Light. Evil is necessary to manifest Good. Not that anything is created by God for evil. In everything is both good and evil: the predominance decides its use and destiny. What is so much pain and evil in hell, is, in heaven, so much joy and goodness. The bitter fountain and the sweet flow originally from one divine Source. The angels and the devils are both in God, of whom, and in whom, all live and move. But from their divine basis, or root, the former draw joy and glory, the latter shame and woe. The point of collision is the gate of anguish and of bliss.
Thus Behmen, from far away, echoes Heraclitus, and declares Strife the father of all things. What were Virtue, he would ask, without temptation? In life’s warfare lies its greatness. Our full wealth of being is only realized by a struggle for very life. Not till the height of the conflict between Siegfried and the dragon—not till the mountain is all flames and earthquake with that fearful fight, do the dwarfs bring out their hoard, and untold riches glitter round the victor.
Behmen was by no means the first to devise a hypothesis so plausible. We meet with it in quarters widely remote—in the pantheism of Jelaleddin Rumi and of John Scotus Erigena. But nowhere does it occupy so central a place, undergo such full development, receive such copious illustration, as in the theosophy of the Görlitz shoemaker.
Like most of those attempts to explain the inexplicable which have proved more than usually attractive, this theory has its truth and its falsehood. It is true that the harmonious development of life is neither more nor less than a successive reconciliation of contraries. The persistent quality, representing our individuality and what is due to the particular self, must not exist alone. The diffusive quality, or fluent, having regard only to others, must not exist alone. The extreme of either defeats itself. Each is necessary to, or, as Behmen would say, lies in the other. The two factors are reconciled, and consummated in a higher unity when the command is obeyed—‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ Towards this standard all moral development must tend. Pairs of principles, like the Personal and the Relative, the Ideal and the Actual, &c.—at once twin and rival—where each is the complement of the other, are very numerous. They are designed for union, as heat and cold combine to produce a temperate or habitable clime. Had Behmen confined his theory of contraries within such limits, we might have questioned his expressions;—we must, I think, have admitted his principle.
But when he takes good and evil as the members of such an antithesis, he is deceived by an apparent likeness. It would be a strange thing should any one declare courage and meekness, lowliness and aspiration, the work of God and the work of man, incapable of harmony. It is still more strange to hear any man pronounce any harmony possible between good and evil, sin and holiness. The former set of terms belong to one family, the latter are reciprocally destructive, totally incompatible. Here lies Behmen’s fallacy.
To regard goodness as a quality which would remain inert and apathetic were it not endowed with individuality and consistence by evil, and goaded to activity by temptation, is altogether to mistake its nature. An adequate conception of Virtue must require that it be benignly active within its allotted range.
The popular saying that a man should have enough of the devil in him to keep the devil from him, expresses Behmen’s doctrine. But the proverb has truth only as it means that of two evils we should choose the less: supposing imperfection inevitable, better too much self-will than too much pliability. It is true that greatness of soul is never so highly developed or so grandly manifest as amid surrounding evils. But it is not true that the good is intrinsically dependent on the evil for its very being as goodness. No one will maintain that He in whom there was no sin lacked individuality and character, or that he was indebted to the hostility of scribes and Pharisees for his glorious perfectness. Indeed, such a position would subvert all our notions of right and wrong; for Evil—the awakener of dormant virtue—would be the great benefactor of the universe. Sin would be the angel troubling that stagnant Bethesda—mere goodness, and educing hidden powers of blessing.
Moreover, we must not argue from the present to the original condition of man. Nor can any one reasonably rank among the causes by which he professes to account for sin, that which God has seen fit to do in order to obviate its consequences. To say, ‘where sin abounded, grace did much more abound,’ is not to explain the origin of evil.
Once more, if evil be a necessary factor in our development, that world from which all evil will be banished cannot be an object of desire. Heaven seems to grow wan and insipid. To exhort us to root out the evil of our nature is to enjoin a kind of suicide. It is to bid us annihilate the animating, active seed of moral progress. So death is life, and life death. Again, if man’s nature be progressive and immortal, his immortality must be one of unending conflict. Modern Pantheism escapes this conclusion by annihilating personality, and by resolving the individual into the All. A poor solution, surely—dis-solution. To Behmen, no consequence could have been more repugnant. No man could hold more strongly than did he, the doctrine of a future and eternal state, determined by the deeds done in the body. Yet such a cessation of personality might be logically urged from the theory which seemed to him triumphantly to remove so much perplexity.[245]
A tale of chivalry relates how fair Astrid wandered in the moonlight, seeking flowers for the wreath she was twining, but always, when the last had just been woven in, the garland would drop asunder in her hands, and she must begin again her sad endeavour, ever renewed and ever vain. Human speculation resembles that ghostly maiden. Each fresh attempt has all but completed the circuit of our logic. But one link remains, and in the insertion of that the whole fabric falls to pieces. It is a habit with fevered Reason to dream that she has solved the great mystery of life. And when Reason does so dream, her wild-eyed sister, Imagination, is sober and self-distrustful in comparison.
Neither the theist nor the pantheist can claim Behmen as exclusively his own. He would perhaps have reckoned their dispute among those which he could reconcile. Certain it is, that he holds, in combination, the doctrine which teaches a God within the world, and the doctrine which proclaims a God above it.
Says the pantheist, ‘Do you believe in a God who is the heart and life of the universe, the soul of that vast body, the world?’ Behmen answers, ‘Yes; but I do not believe in a God who is a mere vital force—a God of necessary process—a God lost in the matter He has evolved.’
Says the theist, ‘Do you believe in a God who has Personality and Character; who creates of self-conscious free-will; who rules, as He pleases, the work of his hands?’ Behmen answers, ‘Yes; but I do not relegate my Deity beyond the skies. I believe that He is the life of all creatures, all substance; that He dwelleth in me; that I am in His heaven, if I love Him, wherever I go; that the universe is born out of Him and lives in Him.’
Like Erigena, Behmen supposed that the ‘Nothing,’ out of which God made all things, was his own unrevealed abstract nature, called, more properly, Non-being.
And, now, to Behmen’s version of the story of our world. He tells us how God created three circles, or kingdoms of spirits, corresponding to the three persons of the Trinity. To each a monarch and seven princes were assigned, corresponding to the seven Qualities or Fountain-Spirits. One of these angelic sovereigns, Lucifer, fell, through pride, and all his kingdom with him. Straightway, as the inevitable consequence of sin, the operation of all the seven Qualities throughout his dominion became perverted and corrupt. The Fiery principle, instead of being the root of heavenly glory, became a principle of wrath and torment. The Astringent quality, instead of ministering due stability, or coherence, became hard and stubborn; the Sweet, foul and putrescent; the Bitter, fierce and raging. So with all the rest. Now, it so happened that the seventh Quality of Lucifer’s realm coincided, in space, with this world of ours. This earth, therefore,—once a province of the heavenly world,—was broken up into a chaos of wrath and darkness, roaring with the hubbub of embattled elements. Before man was created, nature had fallen. The creative word of God brought order into the ruins of this devastated kingdom. Out of the chaos He separated sun and planets, earth and elements.[246]
In the Black Forest lies a lake, bordered deep with lilies. As the traveller gazes on that white waving margin of the dark waters, he is told that those lilies, on the last moonlighted midnight, assumed their spirit-forms,—were white-robed maidens, dancing on the mere; till, at a warning voice, they resumed, ere daybreak, the shape of flowers. Similarly, on Behmen’s strange theory, all our natural has been previously spiritual beauty. The material of this world was, erewhile, the fine substance of an angel realm. All our fair scenes are as much below the higher forms of celestial fairness, as are the material flowers of lower rank in loveliness than the phantom dancers of that haunted lake. The ‘Heavenly Materiality,’ or ‘Glassy Sea,’ of the angelic kingdom, was a marvellous mirror of perfect shapes and colours, of sounds and virtues. Therein arose, in endless variety, the ideal Forms of heaven—jubilant manifestations of the divine fulness, gladdening the spirits of the praising angels with a blessedness ever new. All the growth and productive effort of our earth is an endeavour to bring forth as then it brought forth. Every property of nature, quickened from its fall by the divine command—‘Be fruitful and multiply,’ strives to produce in time as it did in eternity.[247] But for that fall, this earth had never held perilous sands nor cruel rocks; never put forth the poisonous herb, nor bred the ravenous beast; and never would earthquake, pestilence, or tempest, the deadly outbreaks of water or of fire, have accompanied the warfare of disordered elements. The final fires will redeem nature, purging away the dross, and closing the long strife of time.
Adam was created to be the restoring angel of this world. His nature was twofold. Within, he had an angelic soul and body, derived from the powers of heaven. Without, he had a life and body derived from the powers of earth. The former was given him that he might be separate from, and superior to the world. He was endowed with the latter, that he might be connected with, and operative in the world. His external nature sheltered his inner from all acquaintance with the properties of our corrupted earth. His love and his obedience surrounded him with a perpetual paradise of his own. He could not feel the fierceness of fire, the rigour of cold; he was inaccessible to want or pain. He was designed to be the father of a like angelic-human race, who should occupy and reclaim the earth for God,—keeping down the ever-emerging Curse, and educing and multiplying the Blessing which God had implanted.
But the will of Adam gradually declined from the inward paradisiacal life towards the life of this world. He commenced his downward course by desiring to know the good and evil of the world about him. Then Eve was fashioned out of him, and the distinction of sex introduced. This was a remedial interposition to check his descent. It was deemed better that he should love the feminine part of his own nature rather than the external world.[248] Each step of decline was mercifully met by some new aid on the part of God, but all in vain. He ate of the earthly tree, and the angelic life within him became extinct.
Behmen contends stoutly that no arbitrary trial or penalty was imposed on Adam. No divine wrath visited his sin on his descendants. His liability to suffering and death was the natural consequence (according to the divine order) of his breaking away from God, and falling from the angel to the animal life. It is characteristic of Behmen’s theology to resolve acts of judgment, or of sovereign intervention, as much as possible, into the operation of law. Thus, he will not believe that God inflicts suffering on lost souls or devils. Their own dark and furious passions are their chain and flame. He shares this tendency in common with most of the Protestant mystics. And I am by no means prepared to say that our mystics are altogether wrong on this matter.
No sooner had man fallen, than the mercy of God implanted in him the seed of redemption. He lodged in the depths of our nature a hidden gift of the Spirit, the inner light, the internal ‘serpent-bruiser,’ the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. All our beginnings of desire towards God and heaven are the working of this indwelling seed of life. Thus, salvation is wholly of grace. At the same time, it rests with us whether we will realize or smother the nascent blessing. Man is the arbiter of his own destiny, and voluntarily develops, from the depths of his nature, his heaven or his hell.
Lessons of self-abandonment, similar to those of the Theologia Germanica, are reiterated by Jacob Behmen. We are never to forget the ‘Nothingness’ of man, the ‘All’ of God. He pronounces means and ordinances good only as they lead us directly to God,—as they prepare us to receive the divine operation. With Behmen, as with the mystics of the fourteenth century, redemption is our deliverance from the restless isolation of Self, or Ownhood, and our return to union with God. It is a new birth, a divine life, derived from Christ, the true vine.[249]
But to this idea the theosophists add another. They have a physical as well as a spiritual regeneration, and believe in the revival, within the regenerate, of a certain internal or angelic body. The Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation gave much encouragement to such fancies. According to Weigel, Christ had a twofold body—one truly human; another, called the heavenly, a procession from the divine nature. Furthermore, theosophy extends the influence of redemption to external nature. In the latter-day, ‘the time of the Lilies,’ all men will be the true servants of Christ, our race will have recovered its lost lordship over nature, and the Philosopher’s Stone will be discovered. That is, man will be able to extract from every substance its hidden perfectness and power.
The strongly subjective bent of Behmen’s mind has its good as well as its evil. He never long loses sight of his great aim—the awakening and sustenance of the inward life. That life was imperilled by formalism, by fatalism, by dogmatical disputes, by the greedy superstition of the gold-seeker. So Behmen warns men incessantly, that no assent to orthodox propositions can save them.[250] He argues against the Hyper-Calvinist, and against what he regarded as the Antinomian consequence of the doctrine of ‘imputed righteousness.’[251] He was a man of peace,—little disposed to add one more to so many controversies; seldom entering the lists unless challenged.[252] He justly condemned as profitless the Millenarian speculations in which some about him were entangled.[253] He had no sympathy with those who endeavoured to make ancient Jewish prophecy the fortune-teller of the present day. He declared that the true Philosopher’s Stone, to be coveted by all, was ‘the new life in Christ Jesus.’[254] Only by victory over Self could any win victory over nature. To the selfish and the godless no secrets would be revealed. Such men were continually within reach of wonders they might not grasp. So the sinful Sir Launcelot slept by the ruined chapel, and had neither grace nor power to awake, though before him stood the holy vessel of the Sangreall on its table of silver. The treatise on the Three Principles abounds in counsels and exhortation designed to promote practical holiness. The Büchlein vom heiligen Gebet is a collection of prayers for the private use of ‘awakened and desirous souls,’ somewhat after the manner of those in Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion.
When Behmen finds that Scripture contradicts his scheme, on some minor point, he will frequently, instead of resorting to a forced allegorical interpretation, break away without disguise from the authority of its text. Thus, he says more than once, concerning passages in the Mosaic account of the creation, ‘It is evident that the dear man Moses did not write this, for it is contrary to,’ &c., &c.[255]
Such, then, is the track of Behmen’s journeying across the speculative wilderness, following the fiery pillar of an imaginary illumination—a pillar, be it observed, much like that column of glory which, as we stand upon the sea-shore, descends to us from the setting sun,—a luminous line which moves as we move, and which, whatever point we occupy, glows from the ripples at our feet up to the fiery horizon beneath which day is sinking. Behmen’s work was done chiefly among the educated. Had his mission been to the lower orders, we should probably have heard of him as the founder of a sect. His object was, however, at once to awaken the life and expound the philosophy of religion, within the Lutheran Church. He called attention to aspects of Christian truth which the systematic theology of that day had too much overlooked. The extensive circulation of his books, and the general welcome given to the main positions of his doctrine, show that his teaching supplied a real want in those times. There can be little doubt that one considerable class of minds, repelled by the assumption or the harshness of the current orthodoxy, was attracted once more to religion under the more genial form in which Behmen presented it. Others were shaken from the sleep of formalism by his vehement expostulations. When the Creed had so largely superseded the Word,—when Protestants were more embittered against each other than brave against the common foe, the broader, deeper doctrine of Behmen would offer to many a blessed refuge. For gold and precious stones shine among his wood and stubble. The darker aspect which some theologians had given to the Divine Sovereignty seemed to pass away, as the trembler studied Behmen’s reassuring page. Apart from scientific technicalities, and the nomenclature of his system, Behmen’s style and spirit were mainly moulded upon Luther’s German Bible. Any one who will take the trouble to look, not into the Aurora, but into the Book of the Three Principles, will find, along with much clouded verbosity and a certain crabbed suggestiveness, a racy idiomatic cast of expression, a hearty manliness of tone, indicating very plainly that Behmen had studied man, and the book which manifests man.
Though his voice is, for us, so faint and distant, we feel how near he must have come to the hearts of his time. Through volumes of speculative vapour, glance and glow the warm emotions of the man, in his apostrophes, appeals, and practical digressions. His philosophy is never that of the artificial abstraction-monger, or the pedantic book-worm. He writes of men and for them as though he loved them. Modern idealism expresses itself with a grace to which the half-educated craftsman was a total stranger. But its rhetorical adornment is a painted flame compared with Behmen’s fire. Unlike the earlier mystics, his theosophy embraces the whole of man. Unlike so much recent speculation, it is wrought out more by the aspiration of the soul than the ambition of the intellect. Amidst the fantastic disorder of his notions, and the strange inequalities of his insight—now so clear and piercing, now so puerile or perverse,—a single purpose stands unquestionable,—he desired to justify the ways of God to men. His life was a waking dream; but never did mystical somnambulist more sincerely intend service to man and praise to God.
Note to page 107.
Behmen derives Qualität from quallen, or quellen (our well), and understands by it the characteristic virtue or operation of anything. Thus the seven Qualities are the seven Fountain-Spirits—the prolific sources of their several species of influence. Aurora, i. § 3. The notion of pain (qual) in giving birth enters also into his conception of Quality.
The description of these seven Qualities occupies (amidst many digressions) a considerable portion of the Aurora, and is repeated, with additions and varieties of expression, throughout all his larger works. The summary here given is derived principally from the account in the Aurora, and the Tabula Principiorum, Wercke, vol. iv. p. 268. Similar classifications and definitions are contained in the three first chapters of the Drei Principien, and with more clearness and precision in the Mysterium Magnum, cap. vi. Compare also especially Aurora, cap. iv. §§ 8, 9; xiv. §§ 89, &c.; and xiii. 70-78.
These seven Fountain-Spirits, or Mothers of Nature, are a contrivance really novel. Paracelsus bequeathed to Behmen the term Mysterium Magnum, applying it to the Chaos whence he supposed light and darkness, heaven and hell, to derive their origin. But Behmen’s furniture or fitting-up of the idea is wholly original. Of the early Gnostics he could know nothing, and his Heptarchy of Nature is totally distinct from theirs. Basilides has seven intellectual and moral impersonations,—the first rank of successive emanations of seven, comprised in his mystical Abraxas. Saturninus has seven star-spirits—the lowest emanations in his scheme, and bordering on matter. Ancient Gnosticism devised these agencies to bridge the space between the supreme Spirit and Hyle. But Behmen recognises no such gulph, and requires no such media. With him, the thought becomes at once the act of God. Matter is not a foreign inert substance, on which God works, like a sculptor. The material universe exhibits, incorporate, those very attributes which constitute the divine glory. Nature is not merely of, but out of, God. Did there lie no divineness in it, the Divine Being would (on Behmen’s theory) be cut off from contact with it. With the Sephiroth of the Cabbala Behmen may possibly have had acquaintance. But, in the Cabbala, each Sephira is dependent on that immediately above it, as in the hierarchies of Proclus and Dionysius Areopagita. Behmen’s seven equal Qualities, reciprocally producing and produced, are not links in a descending chain,—they are expressions for the collective possibilities of being. Compare with them the seven lower Sephiroth of the Cabbala, called Might, Beauty, Triumph, Glory, Foundation, and Kingdom. Here we have mere arbitrary personifications of the magnificence displayed in creation. Behmen’s qualities are arbitrary, it is true. They might have been different in name, in nature, in number, and the fundamental principles of the system still retained. But who could have resisted the obvious advantages of the sacred planetary number, seven? Behmen, however, goes much deeper than the Cabbalists. He does not idly hypostatise visible attributes. His attractive and diffusive Qualities are the results of generalisation. His Fountain-Spirits are the seminal principles of all being. They are, he believes, the vital laws of universal nature. They are Energies operative, through innumerable transformations, in every range of existence,—in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.
Note to page 108.
In the following passage, Behmen endeavours to explain himself, and repels the charge of material pantheism.
‘I know the sophist will accuse me for saying that the power of God is in the fruits of the earth, and identifies itself with the generative processes of nature. But, harkye, friend, open thine eyes a moment. I ask thee—How hath Paradise existence in this world?.... Is it in this world or without it? In the power of God, or in the elements? Is the power of God revealed or hidden?.... Tell me, doth not God live in time also? Is He not all in all? Is it not written, “Am not I He that filleth all things,” and “Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever?”
‘Here I bethink myself. I would stand clear of all blame from your misconception. I say not that Nature is God, far less that the fruits of the earth are He. I say God gives to all life its power—be that power used for good or evil,—gives power to every creature according to its desire. He Himself is all, yet is not in all natures to be called God, but only where there is light, in respect of that (nach dem Liechte) wherein He Himself dwells, and shines with power throughall his nature. He communicates his power to all his nature and works (allen seinen Wesen und Wercken), and everything appropriates that power of his according to its property. One appropriates darkness, another light: the appetite of each demands what is proper to it, and the whole substance is still all of God, whether good or evil. For from Him, and through Him, are all things; and what is not of his love is of his wrath.
‘Paradise is still in the world, but man is not in Paradise, unless he be born again of God; in that case he stands therein in his new birth, and not with the Adam of the four elements,’ &c., &c.—De Signatura Rerum, cap. viii. §§ 45-47.
Note to page 117.
In his practical writings, and especially in his letters, Behmen handles well the great theme of the life of Christ in us. The prayer of salutation in most of his letters is—‘The open fountain in the heart of Christ Jesus refresh and illumine us ever.’
Hear him, on this matter, in a letter to N. N., dated 1623:—
‘That man is no Christian who doth merely comfort himself with the suffering, death, and satisfaction of Christ, and doth impute it to himself as a gift of favour, remaining still himself a wild beast, and unregenerate.... I say, therefore, that no show of grace imputed from without can make a true Christian. Sin is not forgiven him by the speaking of a word once for all from without, as a lord of this world may give a murderer his life by an outward act of favour. No, this availeth nothing with God.
‘There is no grace whereby we can come to adoption, save simply in the blood and death of Christ. For Him alone hath God appointed to be a throne of grace in His own love, which He hath set in Him, in the sweet name Jesus (from Jehovah). He is the only sacrifice God accepteth to reconcile His anger.
‘But if this said sacrifice is to avail for me, it must be wrought in me. The Father must communicate or beget His Son in my desire-of-faith (Glaubensbegierde), so that my faith’s hunger may apprehend Him in His word of promise. Then I put Him on, in His entire process of justification, in my inward ground; and straightway there begins in me the killing of the wrath of the devil, death, and hell, from the inward power of Christ’s death.
‘For I can do nothing; I am dead to myself; but Christ worketh in me when He ariseth within. So am I inwardly dead, as to my true man; and He is my life; the life I live, I live in Him, and not in mine-hood (Meinheit), for grace slays my will and establisheth itself lord in place of my self-hood (Ichheit), so that I am an instrument of God wherewith He doth what He will.
‘Henceforth I live in two kingdoms;—with my outward mortal man, in the vanity of time, wherein the yoke of sin yet liveth, which Christ taketh on Himself in the inward kingdom of the divine world, and helpeth my soul to bear it.... The Holy Scripture everywhere testifieth that we are justified from sin, not by meritorious works of ours, but through the blood and death of Christ. Many teach this, but few of them rightly understand it.’
The other kingdom which, in his haste, Behmen forgot to specify, is the inward world of spiritual and eternal life, which he calls Paradise.—Theosophische Sendbriefe, xlvi. §§ 7, &c. He inveighs frequently against an antinomian Calvinism. But if any one will compare this letter with Calvin’s Institutes III. i. and III. ii. 24, he will find that, on the doctrine of union with Christ, Calvin and Behmen, in spite of all their differences, hold language precisely similar.
Note to page 117.
Behmen was well entitled to teach that lesson of tolerance which his age had so forgotten. In one of his letters he says, ‘I judge no man; that anathematizing one of another is an empty prating. The Spirit of God Himself judgeth all things. If He be in us, why need we trouble ourselves about such idle chatter? On the contrary, I rejoice much rather in the gifts of my brethren, and if any of them have received another gift to utter than have I, why should I therefore condemn them? Doth one herb, or flower, or tree, say to another, Thou art sour and dark; I cannot stand in thy neighbourhood? Have they not all one common Mother, whence they grow? Even so do all souls, all men, proceed from One. Why boast we of ourselves as the children of God, if we are no wiser than the flowers and herbs of the field,’ &c.—Theos. Sendbr. 12, §§ 35, 36. Again, in the same letter (§ 61), ‘Doth not a bee gather honey out of many flowers; and though some flowers be far better than others, what cares the bee for that? She takes what serves her purpose. Should she leave her sting in the flower, if its juices are not to her taste, as man doth in his disdainfulness? Men strive about the husk, but the noble life-juice they forsake.’
Exhortations to try the spirits, and warnings like those adverted to, not lightly to take whatever fancies may enter the brain, for special revelation, are given in Theos. Send. xi. § 64. The test he gives for decision between a true and a false claim to revelation, is the sincerity of desire for the divine—not self-glory; a genuine charity towards man; a true hunger, ‘not after bread, but God.’-Compare Aurora, cap. xix. § 77.
Note to page 118.
Carriere, in an excellent summary of Behmen’s doctrine, is inclined to idealize his expressions on this point. He would regard Behmen’s language concerning the fall and restitution of nature as symbolical, and understand him only in a subjective sense. But such, I feel persuaded, was not Behmen’s meaning. The idea that man, himself disordered, sees nature and the world as out of joint,—that the restoration of light within him will glorify the universe without, is comparatively modern. The original design of man, in Behmen’s system, requires a restitution in which man shall be once more the angelic lord of life,—the summoner and monarch of all its potencies. Carriere has pointed out, with just discrimination, the distinction between Behmen’s position and that of German pantheism in our times. But on some points he seems to me to view him too much with the eyes of the nineteenth century, and his judgment is, on the whole, too favourable. See his Phil. Weltanschauung der Reformationzeit, chap. xi.
The De Signatura Rerum abounds in examples of that curious admixture of chemical or astrological processes and phenomena with the facts of the gospel narrative, to which allusion has been made. The following specimen may suffice:—
‘Adam had brought his will into the poison of the external Mercury. So, then, must Christ, as Love, yield up his will also in the venomous Mercury. Adam ate of the evil tree; Christ must eat of the wrath of God; and as it came to pass inwardly in the spirit, so must it also outwardly in the flesh. And even thus is it in the philosophic work. Mercury, in the philosophic work, signifieth the Pharisees, who cannot endure the dear child. When he sees it, it gives him trembling and anguish. Thus trembles Venus also, before the poison of the wrathful Mercury: they are, one with the other, as though a sweat went from them, as the Artista will see. Mars saith, ‘I am the fire-heart in the body: Saturn is my might, and Mercury is my life: I will not endure Love. I will swallow it up in my wrath.’ He signifies the Devil, in the wrath of God; and because he cannot accomplish his purpose, he awakens Saturn, as the Impression, who signifies the secular government, and therewith seeks to seize Venus, but cannot succeed; for she is to him a deadly poison. Mercury can still less bear the prospect of losing his dominion,—as the high priests thought Christ would take away their dominion, because He said He was the Son of God. So Mercury is greatly troubled about the child of Venus,’ &c., &c.—De Signatura Rerum, cap. xi. §§ 18-22.
Note to page 118.
A word or two should find place here concerning the fate of Behmen’s doctrine. His friends, Balthasar Walther and Abraham von Franckenberg, were indefatigably faithful to his memory. The son of the very Richter who had so persecuted him, became their fellow-labourer in the dissemination of his writings. Throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century, Germans, Swiss, Hollanders, Englishmen, were busy with translations, commentaries, or original works, in exposition and development of his philosophy. Gichtel published the first complete edition of his writings in 1682, and afterwards went off on his own account into one of the craziest phases of mysticism. Orthodox Lutheranism long continued to assail the doctrine, as it had assailed the man. But the genial piety of Spener, and the large charity of Arnold—that generous advocate of ecclesiastical outcasts—did justice to the devout earnestness of the theosophist. In France, St. Martin became at once a translator and a disciple. His best representative in England is William Law. That nonjuring clergyman was elevated and liberalised by his intercourse with the mind of the German mystic, and well did he repay the debt. Law may be said to have introduced Behmen to the English public, both by his services as a translator, and by original writings in advocacy of his leading principles. As might be expected, the educated and more practical Englishman frequently expresses the thoughts of the Teuton with much more force and clearness than their originator could command. Several other Englishmen, then and subsequently, speculated in the same track. But they met with small encouragement, and their names are all but forgotten. Here and there some of their books are to be found among literary curiosities, whose rarity is their only value. If any would make acquaintance with Behmen’s theology, unvexed by the difficulties of his language or the complexity in which he involves his system, let them read Law. The practical aspect of Behmen’s doctrines concerning the fall and redemption are well exhibited in his lucid and searching treatise entitled The Spirit of Prayer; or, The Soul rising out of the Vanity of Time into the Riches of Eternity.
In Germany Behmen became the great mystagogue of the Romantic school. Novalis and Tieck are ardent in their admiration; but they are cold to Frederick Schlegel. This unconscious caricature of Romanticism (always in some frantic extreme or other) places Behmen above Luther and beside Dante. A plain translation of the Bible, like that of Luther, he could scarcely account a benefit. But a symbolical interpretation, like that of Behmen, was a Promethean gift. Christian art was defective, he thought, because it wanted a mythology. In Behmen’s theosophy he saw that want supplied. Alas, that Thorwaldsen did not execute a statue of the Astringent Quality—that Cornelius did not paint the Fiery—that Tieck has never sung the legend of the Mysterium Magnum—and that a Gallery of the Seven Mothers should be still the desideratum of Europe! Hegel condescends to throw to Behmen some words of patronising praise, as a distant harbinger of his own philosophical Messiahship. Carriere declares that Schelling borrowed many choice morsels from his terminology without acknowledgment. Franz Baader published a course of lectures on Behmen—revived and adapted him to modern thought, and developed a theosophy, among the most conspicuous of recent times, altogether upon Behmen’s model. Baader assures us that had Schelling thought less of Spinosa and more deeply studied Behmen, his philosophy would have been far more rich in valuable result than we now find it. Carriere, pp. 721-725.—Hegel’s Encyclopædie, Vorr. z. zweiten Aufl. p. 22. Hoffman’s Franz Baader im Verhältnisse zu Spinosa, &c. p. 23.
The judgment of Henry More concerning Behmen is discriminating and impartial. ‘But as for Jacob Behmen I do not see but that he holds firm the fundamentals of the Christian religion, and that his mind was devoutly united to the Head of the Church, the crucified Jesus, to whom he breathed out this short ejaculation with much fervency of spirit upon his death-bed,—Thou crucified Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, and take me into thy kingdom....
‘But the case seems to me to stand thus:—There being two main ways whereby our mind is won off to assent to things: viz., the guidance of reason, or the strength and vigour of fancy; and according to the complexion or constitution of the body, we being led by this faculty rather than by that, suppose, by the strength or fulness of fancy rather than the closeness of reason (neither of which faculties are so sure guides that we never miscarry under their conduct; insomuch that all men, even the very best of them that light upon truth, are to be deemed rather fortunate than wise), Jacob Behmen, I conceive, is to be reckoned in the number of those whose imaginative faculty has the pre-eminence above the rational; and though he was an holy and good man, his natural complexion, notwithstanding, was not destroyed, but retained its property still; and therefore his imagination being very busy about divine things, he could not without a miracle fail of becoming an enthusiast, and of receiving divine truths upon the account of the strength and vigour of his fancy: which being so well qualified with holiness and sanctity, proved not unsuccessful in sundry apprehensions, but in others it fared with him after the manner of men, the sagacity of his imagination failing him, as well as the anxiety of reason does others of like integrity with himself.
‘Which things I think very worthy of noting, that no man’s writings may be a snare to any one’s mind; that none may be puzzled in making that true which of itself is certainly false; nor yet contemn the hearty and powerful exhortations of a zealous soul to the indispensable duties of a Christian, by any supposed deviations from the truth in speculations that are not so material nor indispensable. Nay, though something should fall from him in an enthusiastic hurricane that seems neither suitable to what he writes elsewhere, nor to some grand theory that all men in their wits hitherto have allowed for truth, yet it were to be imputed rather to that pardonable disease that his natural complexion is obnoxious to, than to any diabolical design in the writer; which rash and unchristian reproach is as far from the truth, if not further, as I conceive, than the credulity of those that think him in everything infallibly inspired.—Mastix, his Letter to a private Friend, appended to the Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, &c., p. 294 (1656).
It will be sufficient to enumerate the mere names of several minor mystics, whose fancies are of little moment in the history of mystical doctrine. In the sixteenth century appeared David Joris, a Dutchman, who had almost fatal ecstasies and visions, and wrote and exhorted men, in mystical language, to purity and self-abandonment. Also Postel, a Frenchman, more mad than the former, who believed in a female devotee, named Johanna, as the second Eve, through whom humanity was to be regenerated. Guthmann, Lautensack, and Conrad Sperber, were theosophists who mingled, in hopeless confusion, religious doctrine and alchemic process, physics and scripture, tradition, vision, fancy, fact. During the first half of the seventeenth century, Brunswick was agitated by one Engelbrecht, a sickly hypochondriacal weaver, who imagined himself translated to heaven and hell, and commissioned to expound and preach incessantly. During the latter part of the same century, the madman Kuhlmann roved and raved about Europe, summoning sovereigns to his bar: Conrad Dippel improvised a medley of Paracelsus, Schwenkfeld, and Behmen; and John George Gichtel, a fanatical Quietist, bathed his soul in imaginary flames, believed himself destined to illumine all mankind, founded the sect of the Angel-Brethren, and seems to have ended in sheer madness. An account of these and other mystics, even less notable, will be found in Arnold’s Kirchen-undKetzergeschichte, Th. iii.
Footnote 241:
The initiate mind saith this and saith that, as it circles around the unspeakable Depth. Thou art the bringer-forth, thou too the offspring; thou the illuminer, thou the illuminate; thou art the manifest, thou art the hidden one,—hid by thy glories. One, and yet all things, one in thyself alone, yet throughout all things!
Footnote 242:
Von den drei Principien des Göttlichen Wesens, cap. vii. §§ 22, &c., cap. ix. 30, et passim. Aurora, cap. ii. § 41; cap. xxiii. 61-82. Compare Aurora, cap. xx. §§ 49, &c. Drei Princip. cap. vii. 25. Aurora, cap. x. § 58. Also cap. iii. throughout. There he describes the way in which every natural object—wood, stone, or plant, contains three principles,—the image, or impress of the divine Trinity; first, the Power (Krafft) whereby it possesses a body proper to itself; secondly, the sap (Safft) or heart; thirdly, the peculiar virtue, smell, or taste proceeding from it; this is its spirit (§ 47). So, in the soul of man, do Power, and Light, and a Spirit of Understanding—the offspring of both—correspond to the three persons of the Trinity (§ 42).
Footnote 243:
See Note on p. 120.
Footnote 244:
See Note on p. 121.
Footnote 245:
Here I am much indebted to the masterly discussion of the theory in question, contained in Müller’s Lehre von der Sünde, Buch ii. cap. 4.
Footnote 246:
Aurora, cap. ix. § 42; cap. xviii. § 10-15; cap. xxiii. §§ 92, &c. The remarks in the text, concerning Behmen’s position as between theism and pantheism, are only true if the word theism be there understood as equivalent to deism. For theism, understanding by it belief in a personal deity, does not remove God from the universe. Theism ought to represent the true mean between the deism which relegates a divine Mechanician far from the work of his hands, and the pantheism which submerges him beneath it.
Footnote 247:
Aurora, cap. iv. §§ 10, 11. Comp. § 15, and also cap. xxi. § 37.
Footnote 248:
Aurora, cap. v. § 4; cap. xvii. § 16.
Footnote 249:
Aurora., § 27; cap. xiv. § 104; cap. x. §§ 42, 65; xix. § 50.
Footnote 250:
For example, in the Drei Principien, cap. xxvi. §§ 13-34, and in the Aurora, cap. xii. § 65.
Footnote 251:
See Note on p. 121.
Footnote 252:
Theos. Sendbr. 46, §§ 51-54. See also Note on page 122.
Footnote 253:
Behmen supposed the latter day not far distant (Aurora, iv. 2), but his remarks on the vanity of eschatological speculations generally might be read with advantage by some of our modern interpreters of prophecy. See the letters to Paul Kaym, Theos. Send. viii. and xi.
Footnote 254:
Theos. Sendbr. x. § 20. See also Note on page 123.
Footnote 255:
Aurora, cap. xx. § 1; xxii. 26. See also second Note on page 123.
Chapter IX
O sola, mica, rama lamahi, Volase, cala, maja, mira, salame, Viemisa molasola, Rama, Afasala. Mirahel, Zorabeli, Assaja!
Citation for all Spirits, from the BLACK RAVEN.
A strict regard for historical accuracy compels me to state that the following conversation took place in the drawing-room, and not in the library. By such an arrangement, that bright feminine presence was secured which, according to Gower, deprived mysticism itself of half its obscurity.
‘Did Jacob Behmen frighten you away?’ asked Willoughby of Mrs. Atherton, somewhat remorsefully. ‘I think Atherton and Gower will bear me out in saying that it was not easy to render the worthy shoemaker entertaining.’
MRS. ATHERTON. Mr. Gower was telling us just before you came in, that he found him, from your account, a much more imaginative personage than he had supposed—quite a poetical philosopher.
GOWER. Behmen holds a poet’s doctrine, surely, when he represents all nature as struggling towards an ideal,—striving to bring forth now, as it once did—ere Lucifer had fallen,—longing and labouring, in fellowship with our human aspiration.
WILLOUGHBY. Such a notion must tend to remove from the mind that painful sense we sometimes have of the indifference of nature to our thoughts and doings.
ATHERTON. To remove that feeling from the imagination, at least.
WILLOUGHBY. And that is enough; for only in imagination can it have existence. Man is so much greater than nature.
GOWER. It does, indeed, make all the difference to poets and artists, whether they read sympathy or apathy in the face of creation. Think of the various forms and agencies of nature—of the swart Cyclopean forces under the earth—of the deftly-woven threadwork of the tissues—of vapour-pageantries, and cloud-cupolas, and fairy curls of smoke—of the changeful polity of the seasons, advancing and disgracing frost or sunshine—of the waves lashing at the land, and the land growing into the waves,—of all these ministries as working, like thoughtful man, toward a divine standard; as rejoicing, in their measure, through every descending range of being, under the restoring hand of the Divine Artificer, and panting to recover the order and the beauty of the Paradise which shines above,—of the Eden which once blossomed here below. Think of the earth, resigning herself each winter to her space of sleep, saying inwardly, ‘I have wrought another year to bring the offspring of my breast nearer to the heavenly pattern hidden in my heart. I rest, another circuit nearer to the final consummation.’ Then there is that upper Paradise—substantial, yet ethereal,—as full of beauty, for finer senses, as earth’s fairest spots for more gross, without aught that is hurtful or discordant. Fill up Behmen’s outline. Picture the heavenly hills and valleys, whispering one to another in odorous airs,—a converse only broken sweetly, from time to time, by the floating tones of some distant angel-psalm, as the quiet of a lake by a gliding swan. There run rivers of life—the jubilant souls of the meditative glens through which they wend. There are what seem birds, gorgeous as sunset clouds, and less earthly,—animal forms, graceful as the antelope, leaping among crags more lustrous than diamond,—creatures mightier than leviathan; and mild-eyed as the dove couching among immortal flowers, or bathing in the crystal sea. The very dust is dazzling and priceless, intersown with the sapphire, the sardonyx, the emerald of heaven; and all the ground and pavement of that world branching with veins as of gold and silver, an arborescent glory, instinct with mysterious life.
WILLOUGHBY. Thank you, Gower.
GOWER. Thank you, Willoughby. You are my informant. I never read a line of Behmen on my own account, and, what is more, never will.
KATE. Helen and I want you very much to tell us something about the Rosicrucians.
ATHERTON. You have read Zanoni——
KATE. And we are all the more curious in consequence. How much of such a story may I think true?
ATHERTON. As an ideal portraiture of that ambition which seeks lordship within the marches of the unseen world, I think Zanoni perfect.
MRS. ATHERTON. The Rosicrucians pretended, did they not, that they could prolong life indefinitely,—laid claim to all sorts of wonderful power and knowledge? Have you not once or twice met with a person, or heard of one, who would certainly have been suspected of being a Rosicrucian by superstitious people? I mean, without any pretence on his part, merely from a singular appearance, or a mysterious manner, or uncommon cleverness.
ATHERTON. Oh, yes; such men would keep up the Rosicrucian tradition bravely among the common folk.
WILLOUGHBY. And among great folk, too, if they took the pains.
MRS. ATHERTON. I was thinking of Colonel Napier’s description of George Borrow, which we were reading the other day. He pictures him youthful in figure, yet with snow-white hair; inscrutable, therefore, as to age, as the Wandering Jew; he has deep-black mesmeric eyes, terrible to dogs and Portuguese; he is silent about himself to the most tantalizing height of mystery, no man knowing his whence or whither; he is master of information astoundingly various, speaks with fluency English, French, German, Spanish, Greek, Hindee, Moultanee, the gipsy tongue, and more beside, for aught I know. So equipped, within and without, he might have set up for a Zanoni almost anywhere, and succeeded to admiration.
ATHERTON. How small the charlatans look beside such a specimen of true manhood. But where shall we find the distance wider between the ideal and the actual than in this very province of supernatural pretension? What a gulf between the high personage our romance imagines and that roving, dare-devil buccaneer of science, or that shuffling quacksalver which our matter-of-fact research discovers. Don’t you agree with me, Willoughby?
WILLOUGHBY. Altogether. Only compare the two sets of figures—what we fancy, and what we find. On the one side you picture to yourself a man Platonically elevated above the grossness and entanglement of human passions, disdaining earth, dauntlessly out-staring the baleful eyes of that nameless horror—the Dweller on the Threshold; commanding the prescience and the power of mightiest spirits; and visited, like Shelley’s Witch of Atlas, as he reads the scrolls of some Saturnian Archimage, by universal Pan, who comes with homage ‘out of his everlasting lair,’—
‘Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant.’
This is the theurgist, as imagination paints him. Now turn, on the other side, to the actual gallery of theosophic and theurgic worthies, as history reveals them. Baptista Porta dwells in a house which is the triumph of legerdemain,—the palace of Puck, the most intricate nest of traps, surprises, optical delusions, grotesque transformations,—throwing host and guests into paroxysms of laughter or of fear. You see Cornelius Agrippa, in threadbare bravery, with his heart upon his sleeve, and every expression by turns upon his brow, save that of the Platonic serenity. Paracelsus swears worse than my uncle Toby’s comrades in Flanders, and raves about his Homunculus. But from such men we cannot withhold sympathy, respect, even a certain admiration. In that eighteenth century, behold that grand magnet for all the loose and dupable social particles in every class and country—the soi-disant Count Cagliostro, with his Seraphina, his Egyptian Lodge, his elixirs and red powder, his magical caraffes, his phosphorous glories, his Pentagon and Columbs, his Seven Planetary Spirits, his Helios, Mene, Tetragrammaton. In that age of professed Illuminism, in the times of Voltaire and Diderot, when universal Aufklärung was to banish every mediæval phantasm, you see Father Gassner, with his miraculous cures, followed by crowds through Swabia and Bavaria;—Mesmer attracting Paris and Vienna to his darkened rooms and hidden music, to be awe-stricken by the cataleptic horrors there achieved;—the Count St. Germain declaring himself three hundred years old, and professing the occult science of diamond-manufacturing Brahmins;—the coffee-house keeper, Schröpfer, deluding Leipsic and Frankfort with his pretended theurgic art;—and St. Maurice, swindling the sceptical wits and roués who flutter in the drawing-rooms of Mesdames Du Maine and De Tencin, pretending to open converse for them with sylphs and Salamanders, invoking the genius Alaël, and finally subsiding into the Bastille. Such are some among the actual caricatures of the artistic conception embodied in the character of Zanoni.
ATHERTON. Truly a bad symptom of the general disease, when men grow unable to see that the highest dignity lies close at hand.
WILLOUGHBY. As though man could never exhibit magnanimity unless in some thrilling dramatic ‘situation.’
GOWER. Or could not believe in the unseen world save by help of necromancers, miracle-mongers, and clairvoyantes.
ATHERTON. The ancient saying abides true,—He that ruleth his own spirit is greater than he that taketh a city,—greater than even he who should carry the cloud-capital of the whole world of spirits, pull down its meteor-flag, and make all the weird garrison his thralls. I think, if I were a preacher, I should some day take up the phase of man’s mental history we have now reviewed as a practical exposition of Christ’s words—‘Nevertheless, in this rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rather that your names are written in heaven.’
KATE. I should like to know, after all, precisely who and what these Rosicrucians were. When did they make their first appearance?
WILLOUGHBY. They were originally neither more nor less than the ‘Mrs. Harris’ of a Lutheran pastor.
MRS. ATHERTON. Mr. Willoughby!
ATHERTON. Fact, Lily. Willoughby never said anything truer.
WILLOUGHBY. Allow me to tell you the story.—About the year 1610, there appeared anonymously a little book, which excited great sensation throughout Germany. It was entitled, The Discovery of the Brotherhood of the Honourable Order of the Rosy Cross, and dedicated to all the scholars and magnates of Europe.[256]
It commenced with an imaginary dialogue between the Seven Sages of Greece, and other worthies of antiquity, on the best method of accomplishing a general reform in those evil times. The suggestion of Seneca is adopted, as most feasible, namely, a secret confederacy of wise philanthropists, who shall labour everywhere in unison for this desirable end. The book then announces the actual existence of such an association. One Christian Rosenkreuz, whose travels in the East had enriched him with the highest treasures of occult lore, is said to have communicated his wisdom, under a vow of secresy, to eight disciples, for whom he erected a mysterious dwelling-place called The Temple of the Holy Ghost. It is stated further, that this long-hidden edifice had been at last discovered, and within it the body of Rosenkreuz, untouched by corruption, though, since his death, one hundred and twenty years had passed away. The surviving disciples of the institute call on the learned and devout, who desire to co-operate in their projects of reform, to advertise their names. They themselves indicate neither name nor place of rendezvous. They describe themselves as true Protestants. They expressly assert that they contemplate no political movement in hostility to the reigning powers. Their sole aim is the diminution of the fearful sum of human suffering, the spread of education, the advancement of learning, science, universal enlightenment, and love. Traditions and manuscripts in their possession have given them the power of gold-making, with other potent secrets; but by their wealth they set little store. They have arcana, in comparison with which the secret of the alchemist is a trifle. But all is subordinate, with them, to their one high purpose of benefiting their fellows both in body and soul.
MRS. ATHERTON. No wonder the book made some noise.
WILLOUGHBY. I could give you conclusive reasons, if it would not tire you to hear them, for the belief that this far-famed book was written by a young Lutheran divine named Valentine Andreä. He was one of the very few who understood the age, and had the heart to try and mend it. You see him, when his college days are over, starting on his travels—his old mother giving him her tearful ‘God bless you,’ as she puts into his hand all the treasure of her poverty,—a rusty old coin, and twelve kreuzer. From the cottage-door her gaze follows with many a prayer the good son, whose beloved form lessens along the country road. Years after, he comes back, bringing with him the same old coin, and with it several hundred gulden. He has seen the world, toiling, with quick observant eye and brave kindly heart, through south and western Germany, among the Alps, through Italy and France. He has been sometimes in clover as a travelling tutor, sometimes he has slept and fared hard, under vine-hedges, in noisy, dirty little inns, among carriers, packmen, and travelling apprentices. The candidate becomes pastor, and proves himself wise in men as well as books. A philanthropist by nature, he is not one of those dreamers who hate all that will not aid their one pet scheme, and cant about a general brotherhood which exempts them from particular charity. Wherever the church, the school, the institute of charity have fallen into ruin or disorder by stress of war, by fraud, or selfish neglect, there the indefatigable Andreä appears to restore them. He devises new plans of benevolence,—appealing, persuading, rebuking. He endures the petulence of disturbed indolence, the persecution of exposed abuse; bearing with, and winning over, all sorts of hopeless crabbed people, thrusting men’s hands into their pockets, they know not how. He is an arch bore in the eyes of miserly burgomasters and slumberous brother clergy—a very patron-saint for the needy and distressed, the orphan and the widow. To this robust practical benevolence was added a genial humour, not uncommon in minds of strength like his, and a certain trenchant skill in satirical delineation which renders some of his writings among the most serviceable to the historian of those times.
GOWER. Oh, how I love that man!
WILLOUGHBY. Well, this Andreä writes the Discovery of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, a jeu-d’esprit with a serious purpose, just as an experiment to see whether something cannot be done by combined effort to remedy the defect and abuses—social, educational, and religious, so lamented by all good men. He thought there were many Andreäs scattered throughout Europe—how powerful would be their united systematic action!
KATE. But why mix up with his proposal all this idle fabling about Rosenkreuz and his fraternity?
WILLOUGHBY. But for that spice of romance, this notion of his could never have done more than chip the shell or sprawl helpless in the nest. The promise of supernatural powers awakened universal attention—fledged, and gave it strength to fly through Europe.
MRS. ATHERTON. But the hoax could not last long, and would, after all, encourage those idle superstitions which were among the most mischievous of the errors he was trying to put down.
WILLOUGHBY. So indeed it proved. But his expectation was otherwise. He hoped that the few nobler minds whom he desired to organize would see through the veil of fiction in which he had invested his proposal; that he might communicate personally with some such, if they should appear; or that his book might lead them to form among themselves a practical philanthropic confederacy, answering to the serious purpose he had embodied in his fiction. Let the empty charlatan and the ignoble gold-seeker be fooled to the top of their bent, their blank disappointment would be an excellent jest; only let some few, to whom humanity was more dear than bullion, be stimulated to a new enterprise.
GOWER. The scheme was certain, at any rate, to procure him some amusement.
WILLOUGHBY. Many a laugh, you may be sure, he enjoyed in his parsonage with his few friends who were in the secret, when they found their fable everywhere swallowed greedily as unquestionable fact. On all sides they heard of search instituted to discover the Temple of the Holy Ghost. Printed letters appear continually, addressed to the imaginary brotherhood, giving generally the initials of the candidate, where the invisibles might hear of him, stating his motives and qualifications for entrance into their number, and sometimes furnishing samples of his cabbalistic acquirements. Still, no answer. Not a trace of the Temple. Profound darkness and silence, after the brilliant flash which had awakened so many hopes. Soon the mirth grew serious. Andreä saw with concern that shrewd heads of the wrong sort began to scent his artifice, while quacks reaped a rogue’s harvest from it. The reality was ridiculed as fiction, and the fiction hailed as reality. Society was full of the rotten combustible matter which his spark had kindled into a conflagration he could not hope to stay. A cloud of books and pamphlets issued from the press, for and against the fraternity, whose actual house lay beneath the Doctor’s hat of Valentine Andreä. Medical practitioners of the old school, who denounced the spagiric method, and to whom the name of Paracelsus was an abomination, ridiculed the Rosicrucian secrets, and scoffed at their offer of gratuitous cures. Orthodox divines, like Libavius, swinging a heavy club, cruelly demolished the little book,—which, of a truth, was not fit to sustain rough handling. They called down fire from heaven on its unknown authors, and declared that their rosa should be rota—their rose, the wheel. Meanwhile a number of enthusiasts became volunteer expositors of the principle and aim of this undiscoverable brotherhood. Andreä saw his scheme look as ridiculous in the hands of its credulous friends as it seemed odious in those of its enemies. A swarm of impostors pretended to belong to the Fraternity, and found a readier sale than ever for their nostrums. Andreä dared not reveal himself. All he could do was to write book after book to expose the folly of those whom his handiwork had so befooled, and still to labour on, by pen and speech, in earnest aid of that reform which his unhappy stratagem had less helped than hindered.
MRS. ATHERTON. And was no society ever actually formed?
WILLOUGHBY. I believe not; nothing, at least, answering in any way to Andreä’s design. Confederacies of pretenders appear to have been organized in various places; but Descartes says he sought in vain for a Rosicrucian lodge in Germany. The name Rosicrucian became by degrees a generic term, embracing every species of occult pretension,—arcana, elixirs, the philosopher’s stone, theurgic ritual, symbols, initiations. In general usage the term is associated more especially with that branch of the secret art which has to do with the creatures of the elements.
ATHERTON. And from this deposit of current mystical tradition sprang, in great measure, the Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism of the eighteenth century,—that golden age of secret societies. Then flourished associations of every imaginable kind, suited to every taste. The gourmand might be sure of a good dinner in one; the alchemist might hope to catch his secret in a second; the place-hunter might strengthen his interest in the brotherhood of a third; and, in all, the curious and the credulous might be fleeced to their hearts’ content. Some lodges belonged to Protestant societies, others were the implements of the Jesuits. Some were aristocratic, like the Strict Observance; others democratic, seeking in vain to escape an Argus-eyed police. Some—like the Illuminati under Weishaupt, Knigge, and Von Zwackh, numbering (among many knaves) not a few names of rank, probity, and learning—were the professed enemies of mysticism and superstition. Others existed only for the profitable juggle of incantations and fortune-telling. The lodges contended with each other and among themselves; divided and subdivided; modified and remodified their constitutions; blended and dispersed; till, at last, we almost cease to hear of them. The best perished at the hands of the Jesuits, the worst at the hands of the police.
WILLOUGHBY. At Vienna, the Rosicrucians and Freemasons were at one time so much the rage that a modification of the mason’s apron became a fashionable part of female dress, and chatelaines were made of miniature hammers, circles, and plumblines.
KATE. Very pretty, some of them, I dare say.
ATHERTON. Do you remember, Gower, that large old house we saw at Vienna, called the Stift?
GOWER. Perfectly, and the Stift-gasse, too, leading to it, for there I got wet through.
ATHERTON. That building is the relic of a charity founded by a professed Rosicrucian. He took the name of Chaos (after their fashion)—every brother changing his name for some such title as Sol, Aureus, Mercurius, and so on, according to his taste. He came to Vienna in the seventeenth century, and somehow, whether by his alchemy or not I cannot say, acquired both fortune and nobility. Ferdinand III. made him Hofkammerath, and prefixed a Von to the Chaos. This good man founded an institution for orphans, who were once educated in that house, since converted into a military academy, and bearing still, in its name and neighbourhood, traces of the original endowment.
MRS. ATHERTON. Andreä would have taken some comfort could he but have seen at least that practical fruit of his Rosicrucian whim. How his heart would have rejoiced to hear the hum of the orphan school-room, and to see their smoking platters!
KATE. My curiosity is not yet satisfied. I should like to know something more about those most poetical beings, the creatures of the elements,—Sylph, Undine, and Co.
ATHERTON. On this subject, Kate, I am happy to be able to satisfy you. I can conduct you at once to the fountain-head. I will read you the process enjoined in the Comte de Gabalis for attaining to converse with some of these fanciful creations. (Taking down a little book.) Here is the passage.[257] (Reads.)
‘If we wish to recover our empire over the salamanders, we must purify and exalt the element of fire we have within us, and restore the tone of this chord which desuetude has so relaxed. We have only to concentrate the fire of the world, by concave mirrors, in a globe of glass. This is the process all the ancients have religiously kept secret; it was revealed by the divine Theophrastus. In such a globe is formed a solar powder, and this, self-purified from the admixture of other elements, and prepared according to the rules of art, acquires, in a very short time, a sovereign virtue for the exaltation of the fire within us, and renders us, so to speak, of an igneous nature. Henceforth the inhabitants of the fiery sphere become our inferiors. Delighted to find our reciprocal harmony restored, and to see us drawing near to them, they feel for us all the friendship they have for their own species, all the respect they owe to the image and vicegerent of their Creator, and pay us every attention that can be prompted by the desire of obtaining at our hands that immortality which does not naturally belong to them. The salamanders, however, as they are more subtile than the creatures of the other elements, live a very long time, and are therefore less urgent in seeking from the sage that affection which endows them with immortality....
‘It is otherwise with the sylphs, the gnomes, and the nymphs. As they live a shorter time, they have more inducement to court our regard, and it is much easier to become intimate with them. You have only to fill a glass vessel with compressed air, with earth, or with water, close it up, and leave it exposed to the sun’s rays for a month. After that time, effect a scientific separation of the elements, which you will easily accomplish, more especially with earth or water. It is wonderful to see what a charm each of the elements thus purified possesses for attracting nymphs, sylphs, and gnomes. After taking the smallest particle of this preparation every day for a few months, you see in the air the flying commonwealth of the sylphs, the nymphs coming in crowds to the waterside, and the guardians of hidden treasure displaying their stores of wealth. Thus, without magical figures, without ceremonies, without barbarous terms, an absolute power is acquired over all these people of the elements. They require no homage from the philosopher, for they know well that he is their superior.... Thus does man recover his natural empire, and become omnipotent in the region of the elements, without aid of dæmon, without illicit art.’
Of course you have all learnt from Undine that the creatures of the elements are supposed to obtain a soul, and become immortal by alliance with one of our race. There is a double advantage, too, for these happy philosophers may not only raise their nymph or sylphide to a share with them in the happiness of heaven, if they reach it, but if the sage should be so unfortunate as not to be predestined to an immortality of blessedness, his union with one of these beings will operate on himself conversely,—that is, will render his soul mortal, and deliver him from the horrors of the endless second death. So Satan misses his prey in either sphere.
WILLOUGHBY. I never knew before that these cabbalists were Calvinists.
ATHERTON. This touch of Jansenism excites the same astonishment in the author of the Comte de Gabalis. A delightful wag, that Abbé Villars!
The philosophers are described by the Count as the instructors and the saviours of the poor elementary folk, who, but for their assistance in forming liaisons with mortals, would inevitably at last fall into the hands of their enemy, the devil. As soon, he says, as a sylph has learnt from us how to pronounce cabbalistically the potent name NEHMAHMIHAH,[258] and to combine it, in due form, with the delicious name ELIAEL, all the powers of darkness take to flight, and the sylph enjoys, unmolested, the love he seeks!
WILLOUGHBY. How universal seems to have been the faith in the magical efficacy of certain words, from the earliest to the latest times, among the more sober as well as the most extravagant theurgists. A long list of them might be drawn up. There is the Indian O-U-M; there are the Ephesian letters; with Demogorgon, ‘dreaded name,’ as Milton reminds us; the barbarous words, too, which the Chaldean oracles and Psellus declare must on no account be Hellenised.
GOWER. And the word AGLA, I remember, in Colin de Plancy, which, when duly pronounced, facing the east, makes absent persons appear, and discovers lost property.[259] I suppose the potency is in proportion to the unintelligibility of the terms.
ATHERTON. The Comte de Gabalis tells us how the Salamander Oramasis enabled Shem and Japhet to restore the patriarch Noah to his former vigour by instructing them how to pronounce six times alternately, walking backward, the tremendous name JABAMIAH.
But the word above every word is the SHEMHAMPHORASH of the Talmud.[260] The latter rabbins say that Moses was forty days on Mount Sinai, to learn it of the angel Saxael. Solomon achieved his fiend-compelling wonders by its aid. Jesus of Nazareth, they say, stole it from the Temple, and was enabled by its virtue to delude the people. It is now, alas! lost; but could any one rightly and devoutly pronounce it, he would be able to create therewith a world. Even approximate sounds and letters, supplied by rabbinical conjecture, give their possessor power over the spirit-world, from the first-class archangel to the vulgar ghost: he can heal the sick, raise the dead, and destroy his enemies.
WILLOUGHBY. It is curious to see some of these theosophists, who cry out so against the letter, becoming its abject bondsmen among the puerilities of the Cabbala. They protest loudly that the mere letter is an empty shell—and then discover stupendous powers lying intrenched within the curves and angles of a Hebrew character.
ATHERTON. Our seventeenth century mystics, even when most given to romancing, occupied but a mere corner of that land of marvel in which their Jewish contemporaries rejoiced. The Jews, in their dæmonology, leave the most fantastic conceptions of all other times and nations at an immeasurable distance. Their affluence of devils is amazing. Think of it!—Rabbi Huna tells you that every rabbi has a thousand dæmons at his left hand, and ten thousand at his right: the sensation of closeness in a room of Jewish assembly comes from the press of their crowding multitudes: has a rabbi a threadbare gabardine and holes in his shoes, it is from the friction of the swarming devilry that everywhere attends him.[261]
GOWER. To return to societies—did you ever hear, Willoughby, of the Philadelphian Association?[262]
WILLOUGHBY. That founded by Pordage, do you mean—the doctor who fought the giant so stoutly one night?
GOWER. The same. I picked up a book of his at a stall the other day.
KATE. Who was he? Pray tell us the story of the battle.
GOWER. A Royalist clergyman who took to medicine under the Protectorate. The story is simply this.—Pordage, whose veracity even his enemies do not impugn, declares that he woke from sleep one night, and saw before his bed a giant ‘horrible and high,’ with an enormous sword drawn in one hand, and an uprooted tree in the other. The monster evidently means mischief. The Doctor seizes his walking-stick. Round swings the lumbering tree-trunk, up goes the nimble staff——
ATHERTON. What became of the bedposts?
GOWER. Hush, base materialist! The weapons were but the symbols of the conflict, and were symbolically flourished. The real combat was one of spirit against spirit—wholly internal; what would now be called electro-biological. Each antagonist bent against his foe the utmost strength of will and imagination.
WILLOUGHBY. Somewhat after the manner of the Astras which the Indian gods hurled at each other—spells of strong volition, which could parch their object with heat, freeze him with cold, lash him with hail, shut him up in immobility, though hundreds of miles away.
ATHERTON. Surpassing powers those, indeed; not even requiring the present eye and will of the operator to master the imagination of the subject mind.
KATE. And the battle in the bedroom?
GOWER. Lasted half an hour; when the giant, finding Dr. Pordage a tough customer, took his departure.
WILLOUGHBY. Pordage was a great student and admirer of Behmen; but, unlike his master, an inveterate spirit-seer. I dare say he actually had a dream to the effect you relate.
GOWER. But he and the whole Philadelphian Society—a coterie of some twenty ghost-seers—profess to have seen apparitions of angels and devils, in broad daylight, every day, for nearly a month.
MRS. ATHERTON. What were they like?
GOWER. The chief devils drove in chariots of black cloud, drawn by inferior dæmons in the form of dragons, bears, and lions. The spirits of wicked men were the ugliest of all,—cloven-footed, cats-eared, tusked, crooked-mouthed, bow-legged creatures.
ATHERTON. Did the Philadelphians profess to see the spirits with the inward or the bodily eye?
GOWER. With both. They saw them in whole armies and processions, gliding in through wall or window-pane—saw them as well with the eyes shut as open. For, by means of the sympathy between soul and body, the outer eye, says Pordage, is made to share the vision of the inner. When we cease to use that organ, the internal vision is no less active. I should add that the members were conscious of a most unpleasant smell, and were troubled with a sulphurous taste in the mouth while such appearances lasted.
WILLOUGHBY. Mrs. Leade is one of the most conspicuous of their number,—a widow of good family from Norfolk, who forsook the world and retired into her inmost self, holding intercourse with spirits and writing her revelations.
GOWER. She, I believe, carried to its practical extreme the Paracelsian doctrine concerning the magical power of faith.
WILLOUGHBY. That is her one idea. By union with the divine will, she says, the ancient believers wrought their miracles. Faith has now the same prerogative: the will of the soul, wholly yielded to God, becomes a resistless power, can bind and loose, bless and ban, throughout the universe. Had any considerable number among men a faith so strong, rebellious nature would be subdued by their holy spells, and Paradise restored.
ATHERTON. Some of the German Romanticists have revived this idea—never, perhaps, wholly dead. Some stir was made for awhile by the theory that the power of miracle was native in man—and haply recoverable.
WILLOUGHBY. Such a doctrine is but one among the many retrogressions of the mediæval school.
Footnote 256:
See, concerning the history of this book, and its author, Valentine Andreä, J. G. Buhle, Ueber den Ursprung und die Vornehmsten Schiksale der Orden der Rosenkreuzer und Freymaurer (Göttingen, 1804), chapp. iii. and iv. Arnold gives a full account of the controversy, and extracts, which appear to indicate very fairly the character of the Fama Fraternitatis, Kirchen-und-Ketzergeschichte, Th. ii. Buch xvii. cap. 18.
The derivation of the name Rosicrucian from ros and crux, rather than rosa and crux, to which Brucker alludes (Hist. Phil. Per. III. Pars i. lib. 3, cap. 3), is untenable. By rights, the word, if from rosa, should no doubt be Rosacrucian; but such a malformation, by no means uncommon, cannot outweigh the reasons adduced on behalf of the generally-received etymology. See Buhle, pp. 174, &c.
Footnote 257:
Le Comte de Gabalis, ou Entretiens sur les Sciences Secrètes (Metz, an cinq. républicain), pp. 53-56.
The following passage is a sample of those high-sounding promises with which the pretenders to the Rosicrucian science allured the neophyte:—
‘You are about to learn (says the Count to the author) how to command all nature: God alone will be your master; the philosophers alone your equals. The highest intelligences will be ambitious to obey your desire; the demons will not dare to approach the place where you are; your voice will make them tremble in the depths of the abyss, and all the invisible populace of the four elements will deem themselves happy to minister to your pleasures.... Have you the courage and the ambition to serve God alone, and to be lord over all that is not God? Have you understood what it is to be a man? Are you not weary of serving as a slave,—you, who were born for dominion?‘—(p. 27.)
Footnote 258:
Comte de Gabalis, p. 185. See the story of Noah’s calamity, and the salamander Oromasis, p. 140.
Footnote 259:
See Colin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, Art. Cabale. Horst furnishes a number of such words, Zauberbibliothek, vol. III. xvi. 2.
Footnote 260:
Horst inserts in his Zauberbibliothek the whole of a once famous cabbalistic treatise, entitled Semiphoras et Shemhamphoras Salomonis Regis, a medley of astrological and theurgic doctrine and prescription. The word Shemhamphorash is not the real word of power, but an expression or conventional representative of it. The Rabbis dispute whether the genuine word consisted of twelve, two-and-forty, or two-and seventy-letters. Their Gematria or cabbalistic arithmetic, endeavours partially to reconstruct it. They are agreed that the prayers of Israel avail now so little because this word is lost, and they know not ‘the name of the Lord.’ But a couple of its real letters, inscribed by a potent cabbalist on a tablet, and thrown into the sea, raised the storm which destroyed the fleet of Charles V. in 1542. Write it on the person of a prince (a ticklish business, surely), and you are sure of his abiding favour. Eisenmenger gives a full account of all the legends connected therewith, Entdecktes Judenthum, vol. i. pp. 157, 424, 581, &c. (Ed. 1711).
The rationale of its virtue, if we may so call it, affords a characteristic illustration of the cabbalistic principle. The Divine Being was supposed to have commenced the work of creation by concentrating on certain points the primal universal Light. Within the region of these was the appointed place of our world. Out of the remaining luminous points, or foci, he constructed certain letters—a heavenly alphabet. These characters he again combined into certain creative words, whose secret potency produced the forms of the material world. The word Shemhamphorash contains the sum of these celestial letters, with all their inherent virtue, in its mightiest combination.—Horst, Zauberbibliothek, vol. iv. p. 131.
Footnote 261:
See Das transcendentale magie und magische Heilarten im Talmud, von Dr. G. Brecher, p. 52. Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, ii. pp. 445, &c.
The Tractat Berachoth says the devils delight to be about the Rabbis, as a wife desireth her husband, and a thirsty land longeth after water,—because their persons are so agreeable. Not so, rejoins Eisenmenger, but because both hate the gospel and love the works of darkness.—(p. 447.)
Footnote 262:
See Horst’s Zauberbibliothek, vol. i. pp. 314-327.
BOOK THE NINTH THE SPANISH MYSTICS