THE SOCIAL SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY.
MR. BERNARD HOLLAND has made a selection from the works of the German mystic, Jacob Behmen, "Dialogues of the Supersensual Life," by Jacob Behmen,
Edited by Bernard Holland (London : Methuen and Co., 3s. Gd.), who was born in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Mr. Holland prefaces his little book by a life and criticism of the theologian, and this introduction is not the least thoughtful and suggestive part of a book which suggests thought from cover to cover. The object with which Jacob Behmen wrote his meditations was to prove the reality of the "supersensual life,"—of that life which is independent of the body, and will continue to exist after its decay. The cultiva- tion of this life of the soul became his one preoccupation, and he believed that it could only be profitably pursued by com- plete withdrawal from the life of the world. The method of this withdrawal is the subject of his dialogues. Unlike his spiritual brethren in the Catholic Church, Jacob Behmen sought no help from outward circumstances in preparing his inner solitude. He retired into no cloister but that of his own heart. He sought to attain "the true quiet of the soul wherein no creature can molest thee, nor even so much as touch thee," all the while continuing "in the honest practice of his craft and attentive to his domestic affairs." He believed that only in complete loneliness of spirit, in moments of complete passivity both of the intellect and the will could be heard the divine voice which teaches spiritual things. Those who would seek the higher life must resign "their wills up to Him and Suffer Him to play upon them what music He will." They must strive to bring the soul into a region "where nothing cleaves to it," for "it is nothing but our own willing hearing and seeing which hinder us from coming to the supersensual life." Wholly destroy," he teaches, "that which thou called thine, as when thou sayest I or myself do this or that." God he describes as the Universal All, Nature as the Universal Want. That man, he tells us, "who hath entered with his will into Nothing hath found All Things." In the matter of dogma, Jacob Behmen's position is a very modern one. He looked behind the formularies of the Churches to those truths which they embody and preserve; consequently he refused all polemical discussions, declaring that "he who is born anew of the Spirit of Christ is in the simplicity of Christ, and hath no strife or contention with any man about religion," for "the Kingdom of God consisteth not in knowing and supposing but in Power," not in intellectual acquiescence but in the new birth. to which we must come by "the melting down of the will." Heaven and hell, he says, are not places, but states. "Whither goeth the soul when the body dieth ? " asks the scholar of Theophorus, his master, at the beginning of the Third Dialogue. "There is no necessity for it to go any whither" is the reply. There is no entering into Heaven or hell; "as a man entereth into a house, or as one goeth through a hole or casement into an unknown place." Heaven is to be found "without travelling one foot for it wheresoever thou findest God manifesting Himself in love," while hell is "the eternal forgetting of all good." All places are alike to the soul, "for what place can bound a thought."
The sedative charm of this book is difficult to describe, or even in short; quotations to illustrate. The reader as he goes from chapter to chapter seems to be breathing a perfumed atmosphere alive with harmonious sounds, such as seemed occasionally to enwrap the mystic after long reverie. But as the spell, which Behmen undoubtedly knows how to cast, begins to wear off, he cannot fail to ask himself whether this state of complete detachment, this readiness to "leave all things that love and entertain us," this endeavour "to throw ourselves by faith beyond all creatures above, and beyond all sensual perception and apprehension above dis- course and reasoning into the mercy of God and into the sufferings of our Lord," is an essential part of the Christian life. For our part, we do not believe that it is. A preoccupied existence, dead to every feeling but that of religious emotion, cannot surely be the "more abundant life" which Christ came to bring to us. A capacity for religious ecstasy may be the end and aim of Buddhism, but it is not the end and aim of Christianity. The knowledge of God is the common object of all religions, which are diversified by their methods of seeking that knowledge. The speciality of the Christian religion is the identification of the service of God with the service of man. St. James declares the love of God to be incompatible with hatred towards men. The first object of Christianity is to produce "the fruit of good works," by which fruit alone, Christ tells us, can we judge the value of any religious teaching. Undoubtedly inward with- draival—the throwing of the mind into a state of religious trance—must tend to hinder this dual service. Christianity
teaches altruism, but not the destruction of the ego ; it seeks to bend, not to "melt down," the individual will. If we "enter into nothing with our will" we shall do nothing worth having. To seek to lose our individuality is moral suicide. Christianity reveals to us, in a glass darkly, through perhaps an anthropomorphic medium, the essential
element of personality in the all-pervading spirit of good, from which element we also draw the inestimable gift of our own personalities. We are not using against Jacob Behman's theory of the spiritual life the common argument used against the Mystics, that by separating too entirely the outer and inner life they fall into laxity of morals. Not a trace of this element of decay is to be found in his writings. Absolute purity of life he considered necessary to the "quiet of the soul," and those who desire to enter the supersensual state must experience "a mighty hunger and longing desire after penitential sorrow." But it was resignation rather than righteousness that he sought, submission to the Christian law rather than activity in accordance with that law. He sought the health of his soul only by preserving it from sin and contamination, as a man might seek the health of his body only by preserving it from germs and infection. Such a system, while avoiding disease, does not tend to robust
strength. Inward isolation, even if it exists together with
outward benevolence, is not, we believe, consistent with the highest Christian ideal. Christ founded upon earth a society —a brotherhood — which would, he taught, ultimately embrace mankind. The secret of its strength was to lie in union. Its members were willingly to share each
other's joys and sorrows, and were to believe in some
mystical power inherent in their corporate life. "Where too or three are gathered together there am I," said Christ.
Strength in the troubles of life was to be found in religion, but the religious spirit was to be in some mysterious way the outcome of human sympathy. Who in trouble would care for the cold sympathy of a soul apart,—shut up in its own devotional peace? Is it not unmanly to withdraw from the battle of life, whose issue can never be a matter of certainty, but only of faith and of hope, in which we are enjoined to "rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep ?" St. Paul paradoxically affinned the strength of his Christianity when he declared that "I could wish myself accursed from Christ for my brethren's sake." He knew that no such position was possible, because in "the love of the brethren" lay the essence of Christianity. In the parable of the sheep and the goats Christ claims all acts of charity as done to Himself, not because they were done thinking of Him; evidently they were not in the in- stances he mentions, for those men whom he calls "the blessed of my Father" deny that their good acts were consciously so done. "When saw we thee sick, or in prison, or hungry" they ask ? The distinction between worship and right action is nowhere emphasised by Christ. Christianity aims not at separating, but at fusing, the outward and inward life. Men are to glorify God by their good works. It is no doubt terribly trite that the more a man cultivates good relations with his fellows, the more he loves his friends, the more keenly he is interested in his work and in the progress of events, the harder must be the wrench of death, which may separate him from them all. But faith demands of us, not complete assurance, not an easy bargain, but willingness to risk all for "the hope that is in us." We are to put our talents out to usury rather than lay them up in a napkin. If we destroy our mental and sympathetic powers, forgetting that "every good gift cometh from above," we shall slip half-dead out of this world, having "forestalled the agony," as Newman advised, but we may awake half-alive in the world unseen ; a passage without pain may mean an arrival without joy. Why was the larger half of Christ's teaching directed to the training of men for brotherhood, if by it he only intended to prepare them for isolation ?
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