Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 10

by Signe Toksvig

 

CHAPTER TEN

Anatomy of Soul

OF all the references with which The Economy of the Animal Kingdom is so liberal there are only four to the Bible. Two of those are in the last lines. They have no obvrous connection with what precedes them, but a man like Swedenborg did not finish a book of such importance to him without intending to convey the gist of the matter at its end.

The first reference is to the Second Epistle of Paul to Timothy, chapter 3, verses 1—10. Looking it up, one finds that Paul summarizes the vices of men living in the last "perilous times." Among other things such men are, the Apostle says, "without natural affection, truce-breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good . . . ever learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth."

Looking up the second reference, from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 17, verses 18—20, one finds that it describes Paul's sermon to the Athenians about the Unknown God, at which some of the Athenians mocked, but among those "who clave unto him and believed" was one "Dionysius, the Areopagite."

The name of Dionysius was taken by or affixed to a writer of mystical theology, who was probably a Syrian monk of the fifth century AD. His writings were the chief Christian channel through which Neoplatonism flowed into Christianity. His religious philosophy, a modern scholar has said, "is in fact Neoplatonic philosophy slightly sprinkled with baptismal water from a Christian font." ¹

To prove that Swedenborg knew Dionysius it is not necessary to point to a reference to him in the Economy.² The whole trend of the book is that of Neoplatonism, down to specific details such as many Plotinian similes. Swedenborg had first met this philosophy when he was young, both in Sweden ³ and in England. In England, as already intimated, he met it through the so-called Cambridge Platonists, to one of whom, Henry More (Morinus), he also refers in the Economy. He had read John Norris, the interpreter of the French Platonist Malebranche, whom he had also read. He knew the so-called Theology of Aristotles, really a work of a disciple of Plotinus. Swedenborg quotes St. Augustine liberally, and Thomas Aquinas and other Neoplatonist church fathers; ⁴ he quotes, of course, Plato, the father of them all, and he weaves in Aristotle (calling him often merely "the Philosopher," as was usual) whenever it suits him. It suits him well, because he uses him to support his saying that "the action of God," the law by which He acts, "is God himself." And he knew Spinoza.⁵

Swedenborg did not invent a religion, any more than he invented the science of anatomy.

His discoveries in regard to the human body were based, he tells us, on his study of what the experts in anatomy had set forth, with only a little of his own experience in dissection thrown in. As far as religion is concerned the order was probably reversed, and a spark of personal experience preceded his study of it, but he would have been the last to deny that in his spiritual search he consulted the experts. He did not always put quotation marks around what he used from them—most of it was well known—and he was not concerned to get a doctor's degree for his knowledge.

He was concerned with harmonizing his scientific conscience and his religious yearning, and with the aid of Neoplatonism he was able to sketch out a system, a picture of the whole, which began to fulfill this purpose.

The Hindu, Buddhist ⁶ and Greek predecessors of Plotinus and his Christian and Kabbalistic successors saw the created world as having emanated as force or radiated as light from the unknowable, uncreated Source, called God or Law or Light, matter being the radiation farthest from the Divine Center.

Neoplatonism ⁷ often spoke of this procession as a ladder reaching from God to the material world, but until Swedenborg had convinced himself that an immaterial force directing the development of an embryo could produce a material body he was probably not sure, as a physicist, that the ladder really rested on solid ground. He had identified this force, with the soul, and he saw the soul as created by the divine light and capable of receiving it.

Once when he was young, Swedenborg had tried hard to meet Leibnitz, in vain. Now, in effect, he had accepted what, as Aldous Huxley has told this age, Leibnitz called "the Perennial Philosophy"—"the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being." ⁸

That metaphysic, psychology, and ethic Swedenborg tried to work out for himself in the last part of his book, but not without grave misgivings. At the beginning of this part he makes one of his rare personal appearances. He speaks of his doubts as to whether the human soul was "accessible to any reach of mind." If it were, he said, it must be either by way of philosophy "or, more immediately, by the anatomy of the human body. But, upon making the attempt, I found myself as far from my object as ever; for no sooner did I seem to have mastered the subject than I found it again eluding my grasp, though it never absolutely disappeared from my view. Thus my hopes were not destroyed but deferred; and I frequently reproached myself with stupidity in being ignorant of that which was yet everywhere most really present to me; since by reason of the soul it is that we hear, see, feel, perceive, remember, imagine, think, desire, will; or that we are, move and live.

"The soul it is because of which, by which, and out of which, the visible corporeal kingdom principally exists; to the soul it is that we are to ascribe whatever excites our admiration and astonishment in the anatomy of the body; the body being constructed according to the image of the soul's nature, or according to the form of its operations. Thus did I seem to see, and yet not to see, the very object with the desire of knowing which I was never at rest. But at length I awoke as from a deep sleep, when I discovered that nothing is farther removed from the human understanding than what at the same time is really present to it; and that nothing is more present to it than what is universal, prior and superior; since this enters into every particular and into everything posterior and inferior. What is more omnipresent than the Deity—in him we live and are and move—and yet what is more remote from the sphere of the understanding?" ⁹

In vain, he said, did the mind strive to know the Deity's nature beyond what it had pleased Him to reveal "in proportion to each man's individual exertions."

How should those exertions be applied? Swedenborg scored man's wish to mount at once "from the lowest sphere to the highest." Man, he said, no sooner learns the rudiments of geometry than he wants to square the circle, the rudiments of mechanics than he looks for perpetual motion, the rudiments of chemistry than he wants to make gold. And as for the love of the world, who does not strive for honor after honor and for estate upon estate? "Can you point out any considerable number in civil society who place a check or limit to efforts of this kind . . . ?"

Every son of earth still desires to touch the heavens with his finger, he concluded, but there is an order in these things. The progress must be made step by step, by degrees. When nature seems to have left us altogether in the dark, he reaflirmed, we need science in tracing out her steps. And this science he called his Doctrine of Series and Degrees or of Order. The people who don't know this ladder of nature and make their leaps without it, he said, will be found flat on the earth in some obscure cavern, "for instance in some occult position . . ." ¹⁰

Resolutely rationalist, he admitted that even the doctrine of degrees was not enough with which to understand the reciprocal action of soul and body. "A knowledge of anatomy, pathology and psychology, nay even of physics and of the auras of the world" was necessary, for unless we "mount from phenomena thus, we shall in every age have to build new systems, which in their turn will tumble to the ground . . ." ¹¹

Uncertain, really, of his scheme, wavering in his terms and filling in blank spaces imaginatively much as ancient geographers used to fill in blanks on the map with fancy figures, Swedenborg nevertheless committed himself to a system.

As a physicist we know he had decided that there were four kinds of "forces of the nature of the universe." ¹² (The first, or the universal, and the source of gravity; the second, or the magnetic, and the source of magnetism; the third, or ether, and the source of electricity, light, heat; the fourth, the air.)

Although these forces originally had started through the setting in motion and finiting of the "mathematical point" by the Uncreated Infinite, they were inanimate, but they were the means by which life streaming from the Infinite could embody itself. The "soul," or particle of life from the Infinite, Swedenborg said, must descend into matter by the same number of degrees as there are "auras" or forces—that is, by four degrees—and adapt itself to each, and form a kind of organism corresponding to each.

When he wrote the Principia, he had considered the mind as divided into "mens," or the rational mind, and "animus," or a lower, instinctual mind. He still held to that division, but above both minds he now put "soul" or "anima." The soul, and here he agreed with Neoplatonic philosophy, "is a faculty distinct from the intellectual mind, prior and superior to, and more universal and perfect than the latter." He again and again repeats that it is so high above the other faculties that it is "their order, truth, rule, law, science, art." Consciousness belongs to it, so does intuition (he quoted Locke to back him up). "And it flows into the intellectual mind much after the manner of light." ¹³

The first aura furnishes the material for the organism of the soul.

"The next organ under the soul" is the intellectual mind, "whose office is to understand, to think and to will." It is developed from the material of the second aura.

The third organ is the animus, or the seat of sensuous desires and sensuous imagination. It belongs to the third aura.

The five external senses are in our material, airborne world. These, with the motor organs, "constitute the body, whose office it is to feel, to form looks and actions, to be disposed and to do what the higher lives determine, will and desire. Although there are this number of degrees, yet the animal system consists of nothing but the soul and the body, for the intermediate organisms are only determinations of the soul, of which as well as of the body they partake. Such now is the ladder, by which every operation and affection of the soul and body descend and ascend." ¹⁴

Swedenborg held to it that the soul was the formative force causing the body, and that it was lucky for mankind it was not identical with man's so-called rational mind. For even in an insane person, he declared, "all the economic functions of the body proceed according to laws in the truest order. The government would be utterly at an end, if the soul were insane at the same time as the mind." ¹⁵

The mind, he stops to tell us, is really the operation of the soul "in the organic, cortical substance," and, being this, the mind "partakes at once of the soul and of the body," ¹⁶ but Swedenborg usually treats it as an independent organism. At birth, he believes, the mind has no innate ideas, it has to acquire them from the material brought to it by the lower mind, or animus, which "conceives or takes in those things that the organs of the body feel." But the higher mind (mens) is able to recognize and to judge the material correctly only because the soul, being in touch with universal wisdom, pours "an intellectual light . . . into the sphere of our minds, by means of which we are enabled to derive instruction from ourselves." It is the soul which has the innate ideas. "Unless this soul flowed in from science, while from itself, into every point of our intellect, it would be impossible for us to perceive anything in order, or to reduce anything we had perceived to order, we should therefore look in vain for understanding in intellect or judgment in thought." ¹⁷

Swedenborg again cites Locke: "Locke has abundantly proved that there are no innate ideas in the mind, not even ideas of moral laws. This author has traced the interior operations of the mind with as much care as anatomists have examined the structure of the body; but, after having pursued them to their origin, he remarks that it must be acknowledged that something flows in from above by which the mind is rendered capable of reflecting upon ideas acquired a posteriori" or by experience. Something perceives "the operations of our own minds within us," Locke says and Swedenborg triumphantly quotes, "which Operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas which could not be had from the things without." ¹⁸

As the rational mind functions by means of the cortical substance, so the lower mind or animus functions through the "common sensorium," or cerebrum, Swedenborg says. He calls it "an inferior or middle kind of intellect." It can imagine external objects and sensations, and therefore it is the seat of desire for pleasant sense impressions. It has passions of joy, anger, sadness, fear, envy, "and the like," but not as the thoughtful, purposeful mind has them.¹⁹

The bodily sensations (of the fourth degree, or the material world) Swedenborg regards as distinct from "internal sensations." The only question, he says, is as to how the external communicate with the internal, and this he has already explained as taking place by influx through intermediate degrees (levels of organization).

That the sensations of the body are independent of those of the internal sensations of the lower mind is proved, he says, by the fact that when the external impressions are cut off in sleep the imagination is still able to present sense images, thus showing that the internal are awake.²⁰

And that the lower mind or animus is distinct from the higher or rational mind is shown in sleepwalkers, "in whom . . . the corporeal machine is set in motion without any light flowing in from the sphere of reason."—"So also in many who may be compared to somnambulists as being led solely by the instinct of the animus and by little or no instinct of understanding." Then, after such people have rushed into action blindfold "from mere lust or cupidity," they "appeal to the mind as judge, and bring reasons from it to justify themselves to themselves and to others from the charge of irrationality." ²¹ (As we should say, they "rationalize.")

But the mind then may, if "by practice and cultivation" it has kept a channel of communication open to the influx and light from the soul, refuse to justify the animus, may "combat with the animus as with an enemy," and fight for victory.

That the mind is distinct from the soul is evident, Swedenborg says, from this conflict of the mind with its lower self, "also from a certain intimate consciousness that twinges and solicits from principles unknown, very often in merely natural things, originating deeply from self-love."

"One thing is clear," he grimly admits, "there is in us an internal man that fights with the external; a manifest proof that as the mind may be in collision with the animus, so may the soul with the mind, and the essential life that comes from the spirit of God, with the soul." ²²

How can such struggles take place?

Swedenborg founds his system of ethics on his belief that man can choose what he will do; he has free will. Then he hurries to ask and to answer what "the will" is. The will is a function of the rational mind, and the mind's office is to understand, "to revolve, what things it has understood," then "to draw a line under its judgments and sum them up," to conclude something. "To say it is concluded or to will amounts to the same thing." "Will is the closing act of the thoughts." ²³

But what is free choice? This, Swedenborg indicates, depends on man's ability to judge. "Thus, the more intelligent the man, the more free his will." There is only a shadow of free will "in maniacs and idiots, a small share in the lowest grades of mankind; in all a larger measure according to their degree of intelligence . . ." ²⁴

He does not think it is for lack of mental equipment that intelligent men so often choose evil. The rational mind is well equipped, he contests. It can draw on the soul, which is "essential science and natural intelligence," and which itself is instructed by Infinite Wisdom. From below, the mind has the reports of the senses "which are so many masters to instruct us in the nature of the world . . . And that we may know all things that all men know, speech is given us; also the memory of the past, and perpetual experience; wonders too familiar and too closely environing us to allow us to wonder at them." ²⁵

But to be able to choose the better side more is needed than knowledge. Swedenborg says there has to be also "a reacting force to enable the mind to turn itself either to the one or the other" side. He sees the mind as sitting in the center of forces that usually oppose each other: "the soul acting on it from above, and the spirit of life acting on the soul; and the animus acting on it from below and the body on the animus."

You can think of it also as the mind holding the balance between the two forces. Then the trouble is, as he sees it, that the physical sensations weight the scales heavily, but not so the "spiritual" weights at the other side—they seem to be incomprehensible and intangible. Not so the "infinitely varied amusements of human societies," or the pleasures of the body, or "the loves emanating from every man's self-hood," or necessary economic cares, "for to seek our bread with anxious solicitude and to withdraw the mind from the body are two opposites." ²⁶ (He had found that out during the years it took him to reach independence.)

Set this, he insists, against the fact that we cannot feel or even be conscious always of what gives pleasure to the subtle body of the soul. Its "supereminent fibrils" which were "delineated by the first aura of the world" are within our nerves and vessels, but not in them,²⁷ and hence their sensations cannot be perceived by our senses. We can only sense the soul through the imperfect material medium of the brain.

"Hence it follows that we are more capable of understanding what is true than of willing it, and that the liberty of acting, or the wife, is very easily divorced from the understanding, or the husband. And this separation in the marriage-bed of the mind is often more complete in the intelligent than in the simple-minded, for the former persuade themselves by various intellectual reasons to take the part of the lower senses and speciously cloak the merest vices under the garb of virtues." ²⁸

Is it a bad thing then that the forces from below are so tangible and strong? No, Swedenborg says. "Victory is estimated according to the number and valor of the enemy . . ." He is thinking here in Neoplatonic terms. The reason for the soul's entanglement in matter is for the sake of experience gained in struggle, so that it may return ultimately to the Source bringing its share of "harmonic variety." The cause of what he calls "equilibration," or the mental weighing business, is that "nothing is acceptable or grateful that does not proceed from free choice—what is done from necessity has no merit." ²⁹

And, though "high and divine things . . . do not come home to our mental consciousness at all by way of sensation," yet we can still be instructed by teachers, by sciences, "in some measure" by our power to reflect, "but principally from the Holy Scriptures." They provide "the code of rules for obtaining the end by the means." ³⁰

Man has indeed got free will in proportion to his intelligence, and every kind of knowledge is available for him, but whether he chooses the better or the worse, ethically speaking, also depends on something else. Swedenborg says it depends on desire. "The freedom of willing depends upon the love of the end, which results in desire." ³¹

The lower agents, working through "the love of self" in the mind, have great advantage over the higher when it comes to instilling desire. "There are always incentives at hand to persuade it [the mind] to descend, and to dissuade it from rising above itself to something that is incomprehensible, that hides its delights in secret places, and remits them away from the present to the future." ³²

The worse is chosen in place of the better, not for lack of knowledge, but because "the desire resulting from love is not present whenever the mind begins to exert its choice. Although here above all a surpassing love should be present, to put out the flames of other loves." ³³

Rigorously honest, Swedenborg admits that he thinks we have no power to light this sacred fire ourselves; worse still, we have hardly the power to want it to be lit, except with a kind of passive wish.

But from somewhere in his reading or experience Swedenborg finds that which at all times he craves, a law. He says, as Plotinus did, that God will compel no man, but if he finds even the faintest spark of reciprocity in man he can kindle it into the sacred fire. "Granting this, it follows that there is a universal law," and if we obey this we shall at last be able to "desire that which at first we tacitly and coldly wish. This law, of His ordaining, appears to be that our willing should excite His willing . . ." ³⁴

The struggle between the internal and the external man was in the last instance decided by man himself. He had at least to show a minimum of interest before God could help him without violating the divine principle of freedom.

In this picture of the whole that Swedenborg had drafted, he was sometimes inconsistent, not from lack of intelligence but from a kind of swiveling excess of it. He was able to take in too many points of view; perhaps he was now and then dazzled by too many facets of a subject. In his anxiety to bring out a truth, he often became repetitious, doubling and redoubling on his track like a meandering brook that with each new turn reflects the same sky a little differently.

But it was always the same sky. Slightly wavering as his conclusions and terminology were, a whole and essentially consistent picture does emerge from the wealth of scintillant detail in The Economy of the Animal Kingdom. It was not a particularly Christian one. Not one dogma is visible in it. Swedenborg showed himself as caring more for the spirit of Jesus than for Christian dogma. At the end he gave it as his conviction (not as anything he had direct knowledge of) that the soul survives the death of the body, happily rid of all interference from the "non-intellectual spheres," living beyond time and almost free from space. Heaven would be a "society of souls" and the City of God on earth the seminary of it. "The most universal law of its citizens is that they love their neighbor as themselves and God more than themselves. All other things are means, and are good in proportion as they lead directly to this end." ³⁵

It was the creed of a calm scientist and of a good man. It was really summed up when he said, during the discourse on free will: "If then we strive to the utmost of our power to will and to be able, it follows as a matter of course that a higher power then breathes upon us, and raises our efforts to powers not human; and thereby brings us back into a state emulous of that liberty which we have lost." ³⁶

Swedenborg was far from believing, however, that he personally had reached this state. Here and there on the pure white snow of his intellectual arguments an odd stain and some scattered feathers mark a struggle. After he had pointed out that anger and revenge consign us from liberty to slavery he admitted that "similar remarks apply to inclination and love, by which we are frequently consigned to chains, and the mind itself sees its own will put in fetters, and sometimes smiles with bitterness the while, but without having the power to shake off the yoke." ³⁷

Physical passion, we can surmise from his diaries, had galled him, but he did not think of physical pleasure as immoral in itself. From his system it flowed naturally that the soul had not created the body to torment it. The delights of the world and of the sensual part of man served, he said, as "the fuel and incentive of bodily life." He condemned those persons as "somewhat beside themselves who aim not to moderate but altogether to exterminate the pleasures of the senses and the delights of the world as if they were so many deadly and pernicious poisons." ³⁸

Taste and flavor, he said, stimulated the body to repair its tissues. And "the desire for sexual connection descends from an innocent and burning desire of the soul to multiply the individuals of its kind . . ." ³⁹ By what he seems to deem a fortunate dispensation, he considered that the delights and hence the keenness of desire increased in proportion to the universality of the purpose, so that those delights "which if legitimate are known as connubial" ⁴⁰ were the most alluringly delightful of all.

He was in no morbid state of hatred of the body. Though he was well aware of its weight in the scales as against spiritual force, he was even more conscious of the power of egoism. "I know not what darkness overspreads the rational faculties when the mind begins to swell with pride . . . it is like pouring a liquor on some exquisite wine, which throws it into a froth, sullies its purity, and clouds its translucence." ⁴¹

An ardent and ambitious man, he had had the normal struggles with body and with mind. But in nothing he had so far written was there any arrow pointing to even an unconscious conflict of the kind that make potential mystics appeal so hard to higher powers for help that they dream strange dreams and see lights from beyond sun, moon, and candle power.

Yet these phenomena had already puzzled Emanuel Swedenborg.