Jacob Behmen | Page 2

and had helped him. 'And then, when I had wholly hazarded
my life upon what I was doing, my whole spirit seemed to me suddenly
to break through the gates of hell, and to be taken up into the arms and
the heart of GOD. I can compare it to nothing else but the resurrection
at the last day. For then, with all reverence I say it, with the eyes of my
spirit I saw GOD. I saw both what GOD is, and I saw how GOD is

what He is. And with that there came a mighty and an incontrollable
impulse to set it down, so as to preserve what I had seen. Some men
will mock me, and will tell me to stick to my proper trade, and not
trouble my mind with philosophy and theology. Let these high matters
alone. Leave them to those who have both the time and the talent for
them, they will say. So I have often said to myself, but the truth of
GOD did burn in my bones till I took pen and ink and began to set
down what I had seen. All this time do not mistake me for a saint or an
angel. My heart also is full of all evil. In malice, and in hatred, and in
lack of brotherly love, after all I have seen and experienced, I am like
all other men. I am surely the fullest of all men of all manner of
infirmity and malignity.' Behmen protests in every book of his that
what he has written he has received immediately from GOD. 'Let it
never be imagined that I am any greater or any better than other men.
When the Spirit of GOD is taken away from me I cannot even read so
as to understand what I have myself written. I have every day to wrestle
with the devil and with my own heart, no man in all the world more.
Oh no! thou must not for one moment think of me as if I had by my
own power or holiness climbed up into heaven or descended into the
abyss. Oh no! hear me. I am as thou art. I have no more light than thou
hast. Let no man think of me what I am not. But what I am all men may
be who will truly believe, and will truly wrestle for truth and goodness
under JESUS CHRIST. I marvel every day that GOD should reveal
both the Divine Nature and Temporal and Eternal Nature for the first
time to such a simple and unlearned man as I am. But what am I to
resist what GOD will do? What am I to say but, Behold the son of thine
handmaiden! I have often besought Him to take these too high and too
deep matters away from off me, and to commit them to men of more
learning and of a better style of speech. But He always put my prayer
away from Him and continued to kindle His fire in my bones. And with
all my striving to quench GOD'S spirit of revelation, I found that I had
only by that gathered the more stones for the house that He had
ordained me to build for Him and for His children in this world.'
Jacob Behmen's first book, his Aurora, was not a book at all, but a
bundle of loose leaves. Nothing was further from Behmen's mind, when
he took up his pen of an evening, than to make a book. He took up his

pen after his day's work was over in order to preserve for his own
memory and use in after days the revelations that had been made to him,
and the experiences and exercises through which GOD had passed him.
And, besides, Jacob Behmen could not have written a book even if he
had tried it. He was a total stranger to the world of books; and then,
over and above that, he had been taken up into a world of things into
which no book ever written as yet had dared to enter. Again, and again,
and again, till it came to fill his whole life, Behmen would be sitting
over his work, or walking abroad under the stars, or worshipping in his
pew in the parish church, when, like the captive prophet by the river of
Chebar, he would be caught up by the hair of the head and carried away
into the visions of GOD to behold the glory of GOD. And then, when
he came to himself, there would arise within him a 'fiery instigation' to
set down for a 'memorial' what he had again seen and heard. 'The gate
of the Divine Mystery was sometimes so opened to me