Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Amsterdam Report
JOHAN CHRISTIAN CUNO (born in Berlin) also kept a diary—of four thousand folio pages, bound in four volumes in morocco. Otherwise the manuscript would scarcely have been sold to a dealer in second-hand books and eventually found its way to a learned Brussels librarian in the middle of the nineteenth century.1 Cuno's life, though it had vivid ups and downs, since he began as a soldier and ended as a merchant and banker, would not have concerned very many people except that late in 1768 he met Emanuel Swedenborg and put that in his diary too.
Cuno was interested in theology and he had read Conjugial Love, which caused in him "an irresistible curiosity to make the acquaintance of the author." He confessed that the title of the book made him think the author was insane, as did the claims of the latter to have been in the other world, but "occasionally I found him uttering such thoughtful things, as I had never before heard from academical desks and pulpits, and which never before had entered my thoughts." Therefore he looked for the author and decided to give an account in his diary "of the most singular saint who has ever lived, Mr. Emanuel Swedenborg."
Cuno did not rush to know Swedenborg, however, before he had inquired "most particularly" about his character from the Swedish merchants in Amsterdam, especially from the highly respected Joachim Wretman, with whom Swedenborg dined nearly every Sunday. As the result was most favorable to Swedenborg, Cuno called on him, having first met him in a French bookshop in Amsterdam. In Swedenborg's two comfortable rooms, Cuno almost at once asked him if he had no valet to wait on him in his old age and to accompany him on his travels. "He answered that he needed no one to look after him, because his angel was ever with him . . ."
Cuno comments, "If another man had uttered these words he would have made me laugh; but I never thought of laughing when this venerable man, eighty-one years old, told me this; he looked far too innocent, and when he gazed on me with his smiling blue eyes, which he always did in conversing with me, it was as if truth itself was speaking from them."
And, as has been mentioned before, Cuno told how Swedenborg's eyes seemed to have the faculty of imposing silence on everyone, even scoffers, when he told them about the other world.
"He lived with simple burgher folk, who kept a shop in which they sold chintz, muslin, handkerchiefs, and the like, and who had quite a number of little children. I inquired of the landlady whether the old gentleman did not require very much attention. She answered 'He scarcely requires any; the servant has nothing else to do for him, except in the morning to lay the fire for him in the fire-place. Every evening he goes to bed at seven and gets up in the morning at eight. We do not trouble ourselves any more about him. During the day he keeps up the fire himself; and on going to bed takes great care lest the fire should do any damage. He dresses and undresses himself alone, and waits upon himself in every thing so that we scarcely know whether there is anyone in the house or not. I should like him to be with us during the rest of his life. My children will miss him most; for he never goes out without bringing them home some sweets; the little rogues also dote on the old gentleman so much they prefer him to their own parents. I imagine that he is very rich.'"
Cuno thought so too, because Swedenborg gave his books away so liberally. But in Amsterdam, at any rate, Swedenborg lived very simply. Chocolate and biscuits served in his room were his usual dinner, of which the people he lived with got the better part; if he were hungry he went to a restaurant near by. "He was far from being misanthropical and obstinate. Whoever invited him to his house was sure to have him."
Cuno invited Swedenborg to his own house. He should have liked, he said, to introduce him into his club, since Swedenborg said he was fond of a game of cards now and then, but there was the obstacle of the seven o'clock bedtime. So Cuno arranged for an early dinner, and Swedenborg was in very good spirits, frank and openhearted.
Cuno also brought Swedenborg to the house of a friend, Mr. Konauw. Among other guests there were the two Misses Hoog, educated "beyond the common sphere of woman." "Mr. Swedenborg's deportment was exquisitely refined and gallant. When dinner was announced, I offered my hand to the hostess, and quickly our young man of eighty-one had put on his gloves and presented his hand to Mademoiselle Hoog, in doing which he looked uncommonly well. Whenever he was invited out, he dressed properly and becomingly in black velvet, but ordinarily he wore a brown coat and black trousers. I never saw him dressed otherwise than in one of these two suits of clothes.
"Our old gentleman was seated between Madame Konauw and the elder Demoiselle Hoog, both of whom understood thoroughly well how to talk; but they had promised me beforehand that, at least during dinner, they would allow the old gentleman to eat in peace. This promise they kept faithfully, and he seemed to enjoy very much to be so attentively served by the ladies. This time he displayed such a good appetite that I was quite surprised. They could not prevail on him to take more than three glasses of wine, which were besides half filled with sugar, of which he was more than ordinarily fond. During the dessert the talk went on very freely, and it continued afterwards while we took tea and coffee, and thus uninterruptedly until seven o'clock, when I had taken care that the carriage should be ready to take us home.
"It is astonishing what a number of questions the ladies addressed to him; all of which he answered." Cuno, to our regret, did not feel inclined to record these, except one, which certainly had the ladies in a flutter.
"The conversation turned upon a certain distinguished personage, I think an ambassador, who had died some time ago at the Hague. 'I know him,' exclaimed Mr. Swedenborg, 'although I never saw him in his lifetime. As you mention here his name, d'Abricourt, I know him and that he left a widow. But he has already married again in the spiritual world, and he has now a wife for all eternity who is more perfectly in harmony with his disposition than the one he left behind in this world.' "
Cuno dined several times with him again at the same house, and also at another where Swedenborg told him that a new set of teeth was growing in his mouth. Cuno was inclined to believe it. Swedenborg was, he said, "for his years a perfect wonder of health." Although though he was twenty years older than Cuno the latter said, "I should be afraid to run a race with him, for he is as quick on his legs as the youngest man."
But it was of course the other-world stories which interested the Amsterdammers as it did the Stockholmers. Cuno writes that Swedenborg told him he had recently been in the spirit world where in a certain society a newcomer had appeared whom none of the other spirits could identify and about whom they were all very curious. They asked Swedenborg to accost the unknown and inquire about his name. Which Swedenborg obligingly did, and it was King Stanislaus of Poland.
Another time a young man to whom Cuno had given an introduction to Swedenborg mentioned that the King of Portugal had hanged the Bishop of Coimbra.
"It is not true," Swedenborg said, "the Bishop has not been hanged, or else I should have known it; only recently I spoke concerning him with the one lately deceased and I rallied the Pope on that case."
The young man hastened with this plum to a bookshop near the Stock-Exchange where, among others, Cuno was present. Most of them exclaimed that the hanging was only too true; they knew it, for had they not read it in the newspapers "with all the attendant circumstances." And one of them said that the old gentleman really was crazy, whereupon he gave a detailed account of Swedenborg's whereabouts and doings and sayings during a certain period—an account which Cuno then and there proved to be false in every vivid particular, finishing up by saying, "I am not at all willing to go security for the old gentleman to the extent that everything he tells in his writings should be believed; but I am willing to remain responsible for this statement that what I have just heard concerning him is an arrant and manifest falsehood."
But in a few days the papers retracted the news of the hanging of the Bishop of Coimbra, and, Cuno says, "the old gentleman was once again regarded as a prophet."
Swedenborg merely smiled when Cuno told him of the falsehoods circulating about him, and said, "How people will lie! In respect to the Bishop of Coimbra, other rational people besides myself, probably doubted the story. A bishop is not so easily hanged; it is nevertheless true that he is a prisoner, and that I have spoken respecting him with the late pope."
Cuno did not contradict him. Cuno was not so worried by Swedenborg's stories of the other world, he said, nor even by Swedenborg's claim that he was an "entirely new teacher." What worried Cuno extremely was that the old gentleman would "teach things contrary to old truths, which, however, to my great sorrow, he frequently does."
Even from liberal Amsterdam people had been banished who came out too vigorously against the received Christian dogmas, and Cuno was cautious, as well as a true believer in the dogmas. When Swedenborg announced that he was going to publish a brief summary of the doctrines of the New Church, Cuno was thoroughly alarmed and begged him to postpone it, "or you will expose yourself to the danger of being banished from the city."
Swedenborg nevertheless published his little book, and, to Cuno's intense surprise, the clergy seemed to take no notice of it, though they had busily refuted a far less worthy antagonist, as Cuno judged him.
It does not surprise the modern reader that the clergy had nothing to say against Swedenborg's Summary Exposition of the Doctrine of the New Church. Perhaps it was because they regarded a spirit-seer as beneath their notice; more likely it was because Swedenborg was very difficult to refute. For the book which Cuno had so dreaded was a dreadful book. Both Catholics and Protestants might have risen up in horror and burned Swedenborg as Calvin did Servetus, for in this short, dry treatise he knocked all their dogmatic heads together, making them sound like empty barrels, so far as any ethical foundation for their theologies was concerned.
Out of their own words he did it; quoting from the Council of Trent in regard to the Roman Catholics, and from the Augsburg Confession and the "Formula Concordia" in regard to the Protestants. He asserted that in spite of apparent differences both sides really taught the same things: a Trinity of persons in the Godhead, original sin, the imputation of the merit of Christ and justification by faith therein—the only difference being, as he saw it, that the Catholics did insist that faith be joined with charity or good works.
Both sides were wrong, he said; if anything the Protestants a little more so, since, in order to secede thoroughly from Rome, they had given up good works, relying on being saved (justified) by the faith that the merits of Christ would be credited (imputed) to them, if they applied for them at what we might call the Bank of Grace.
This Bank of Grace existed, according to the theologians, because Jesus had sacrificed himself on the Cross to conciliate God, the Father, angry with mankind because of its original sin. Such was the doctrine of the vicarious atonement, so abhorred by Swedenborg as a calumny against Love and Wisdom. He also saw it as an invitation to humanity to go ahead and sin, and all spots could be washed out at the end by a deathbed conversion.
He, who was far from friendly to the Roman Catholic Church, said quaintly enough that its members might enter the New Church more easily than the Reformed, because although the Catholics officially still believed in being saved through Christ's merits, they did not in reality know much about it, so thoroughly had the doctrine been "removed out of sight, and withdrawn from memory, that it is like something buried in the earth, and covered over with a stone, which the monks have set a watch over, to prevent its being dug up and revived. For were it revived, the belief of their possessing a supernatural power of forgiving sins, and of thus justifying, sanctifying and bestowing salvation would cease, and therewith all their sanctity, pre-eminence and abundant gains." 2
Swedenborg had promised that he would elaborate the doctrines of the New Church in a big book soon, but Cuno was not going to wait; he frankly confessed that he was a little anxious about his being known as a friend of the author of the Summary, and he wrote a long letter to refute it, circulating it among his friends, but, honorably, sent it first to Swedenborg.
It was a clever letter, evidently meant for public consumption. Cuno did not at all answer the main contentions of Swedenborg, as stated above; he left those explosive matters alone. Instead he pleaded with the author to prove his authority for what he said, to "adduce a Divine Testimony in Divine matters." How do we know, he said, that you yourself are not like one of those persons you mention in your writings who dwell so incessantly on religious subjects that they come to see them inwardly and to hear spirits speaking to them? You call them "visionaries and enthusiasts." "But where is that specific difference which distinguishes you from them?"
It appeared a sensible question. But it must be remembered that Cuno was not at all asking it from a modern point of view. He thought that Swedenborg was out of his head because he did not believe in all the accepted Christian dogmas. Swedenborg thought Cuno was out of his to accept them.
Cuno had, however, doubted Swedenborg's "mission." He says he waited a few days, then when no answer came, he went to see him, and for the first time he found him quite cold, "Nay, to say the truth, he appeared to me even a little angry."
Swedenborg might well have been angry because Cuno bad side-stepped an answer to the charges against both Protestants and Catholics, but undoubtedly there was also another reason. As in the case of the Gothenburg clergy, his gentle tranquillity was broken when doubt was cast on his possession of "divine testimony" for the reinterpretation of the Bible.
On the contrary, if people doubted his ability to converse with spirits, there are many witnesses to the effect that this did not anger him in the least. He wrote once, "I am unable to put the state of my sight and speech into their heads, in order to convince them." 3
But his anger with Cuno was short-lived. Soon he came to him and put a little piece of paper into his hand. It was the last paragraph of a new book he was writing. In it he stated that it was the study of natural truth (or science) which led him to study divine truth. And at the end he said that his whole theology consisted in two principles: That God is One, and that there is a conjunction of charity and faith.4 Or, as he sometimes also put it, the union of love and wisdom is God.
In April, 1769, Swedenborg left for Paris and London, but first he came to take leave of his friend. "I shall never forget, as long as I live, the leave which he took of me in my own house," Cuno wrote. Swedenborg hoped to see Cuno once more in Amsterdam, "for I love you." Cuno said that he at least did not expect a long life, and Swedenborg replied that we were obliged to remain as long as Divine Providence and Wisdom see fit. "If anyone is conjoined with the Lord, he has a foretaste of the eternal life in this world; and if he has this he no longer cares so much for this transitory life. Believe me, if I knew that the Lord would call me to himself tomorrow, I would summon the musicians today, in order to be once more really gay in this world."
Cuno noted that Swedenborg looked "so innocent and joyful out of his eyes" as he had never seen him look before, and after a little more talk Swedenborg embraced and kissed his Amsterdam friend "most heartily" and departed.