Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY—SEVEN
Balm in England
THE little paper which Swedenborg slipped into Cuno's hand by way of answer to the famous letter may not have seemed a reply to the Amsterdammer, but it was part of Swedenborg's final answer to the question he had put to himself many years before: "What is the mechanism of the intercourse between the soul and the body?" In a sense he had been discussing it all through the intervening years, and the booklet he had been writing was a summary of his conclusions.
It was probably written as a result of the inquiry of one Immanuel Kant, a professor in Königsberg, Prussia, who had sent Swedenborg a letter asking if the story of the Gothenburg clairvoyance were true. No direct reply was made, but Swedenborg sent word to Kant that he was going to write a book covering every point in Kant's inquiry.1
However, when Swedenborg came to write the little book, which he called The Intercourse between the Soul and the Body, he did not go into the details that, we might say, belong to psychical research; he became absorbed in the problems of philosophy. The book, he said, was to answer the question as to whether the body acts on the soul (physical influx) or the soul acts on the body (spiritual influx), or whether the two kinds of events, mental and physical, act together, as Leibnitz had declared they did, "by preestablished harmony," using his analogy of two clocks perfectly wound up to keep the same time.
Though Swedenborg wrote with clear brevity, the book was too short to be comprehensible to those unacquainted with his work in physics and physiology and his consequent theory of "degrees" of reality, meaning that the force which is "soul" at one level inflows or manifests itself as "mind" on the next, and as body on the next again, there being subject to "natural" or "physical" laws. It was, modernly speaking, "pan-psychism." The soul, Swedenborg said, clothed itself with an organic body "as with a garment," the latter "being in itself dead and only adapted to receive the living forces flowing in through the soul from God."
So it was not, according to Swedenborg, merely a case of the soul acting on the body, though that he regarded as a true answer, but, as "there is only one life," a case of this life flowing "into forms organically adapted to its reception." Elsewhere he had made clear his belief that the soul, a fragment of divine vitality, itself created these organic forms, endowing matter (which was energy) with life—which was something more than energy.
In effect, then, Swedenborg was an interactionist of the kind who was also a monist—if one may use terms suggested by Professor Gardner Murphy,2 with whom Swedenborg certainly would have agreed that "the mind-body problem" (which is the problem of psychical research) "need no longer be stated in terms of two irreconcilable elements, physical and mental. Rather it may be a problem of two types of psychical functioning, one defined by the spatial and temporal orders, the other lying beyond them."
"Life in successive order," Swedenborg called it in this book, and he sketched his view of the psychophysical so that one could make a diagram of it.
The origin of life was the Godhead, imagined and "seen" by Swedenborg as by other mystics in the guise of a "sun" that radiated love, wisdom, life, "soul." "Soul" created "mind" and "body." "Mind" had "two lives, one of will and one of understanding." In the mind, will was usually more powerful than the understanding, yet, Swedenborg said, "man is man in that his will is under obedience to his understanding, but a beast is a beast, because its desires impel it to do whatever it does."
The drama of man, for Swedenborg, therefore took place in the mind, as he had long ago stated in The Economy of the Animal Kingdom. If men could "restrain the lusts of their will by means of the understanding," not by blindly accepting authority in moral matters, then they could receive the "influx" of divine love into their wills and the influx of divine wisdom into their understanding, via the soul, which, being "a superior spiritual substance," could receive the divine influx directly. The human mind, being open to bodily influence as well, was of an "inferior spiritual substance" and it could also receive influx, both good and bad, through the spiritual world, which if good was, of course, originally from God. The body received its influence from God through the "natural world."
Swedenborg saw it as his duty to make known these things. He said so, in this book, with an attitude reminiscent of his position long ago in regard to trade secrets—that there ought to be none.
"Now, because I have been permitted to be in the spiritual world and in the natural world at the same time, I am obliged by my conscience to make known these things; for what is the use of knowing, unless what is known to one be also known to others?"
He said he did not mean to be spiritually avaricious, and when he left Amsterdam with the manuscript of this book it was, probably, to have it published in Paris. Perhaps he saw that Cuno was right and that the Dutch might catch on to the fact that they had a dangerous heretic in their midst.
One did not fly to Paris in those days. It must have taken the venerable man a good week to arrive there by canalboat and stage-coach. And when he arrived in the still royal city he was told by the royal censor that his book might indeed be published in Paris, but only on one condition. This was that "the title-page, as was usual, declared that the book was printed either in London or in Amsterdam." 3
Swedenborg would not consent to this polite lie, and he packed his two suits together again and took the stagecoaches and the channel-boat for England, arriving in London early in the summer.
That summer was undoubtedly balm to him after his association with the kind but openly incredulous Cuno, for here in London he met people who made no difficulties about accepting the truth of what he said about his "mission."
He had met only silence when he sent his books to the English bishops, the House of Lords, the Royal Society, or the great universities, but now he found other Englishmen, at least he found two of them—the Reverend Thos. Hartley, and Dr. Messiter.4
England was not only the country of the almost openly atheistic, it was also the land of almost every shade of religious credulity. Not that Hartley and Messiter belonged to the class of ignorant fanatics, or to the simple who could be stirred by revivalists. Hartley was a clergyman of the Church of England, which has held so many scholars, and he was well thought of both as to heart and head. Dr. Messiter was reputed to be an eminent physician.
The Reverend Mr. Hartley seems to have belonged to the type who, like the believers in the Lost Tribes (British Israelites), are able to block off a vault in their minds where they house their favorite "key" to some theological problem, preferably an involved and "revealed" interpretation of the Bible. And there is no use in denying the fact that, with all Swedenborg's belief in reason, he had come to resent its application in the evaluation of his "mission" to explain "the internal sense" of Scripture, which he inexorably continued to see as necessary for proving the truth of his lofty ethical and religious philosophy.
In Hartley he found the right disciple, a man with the peculiar gift of being an intellectual who was able to suspend his intellect on the one point of accepting Swedenborg's "authority" for the Bible exegesis.
After meeting Swedenborg, apparently for the first time, in the summer of 1769, the English parson wrote a letter in which one may say that, putting it mildly, he showed himself as overwhelmed.5
Thanking Swedenborg for the honor of having been allowed to converse with him, Hartley said, "But your charity towards the neighbor, the heavenly benignity shining from your countenance, and your childlike simplicity, devoid of all vain show and egotism, are so great, and the treasure of wisdom possessed by you is so sweetly tempered with gentleness, that it did not inspire in me a feeling of awe, but one of love which refreshed me in my innermost heart. Believe me, o best of men, that by my intercourse with you I consider myself crowned with more than royal favor . . ."
Hartley did not stop at words alone; he offered, together with Dr. Messiter, to provide asylum for him in England in case he should be persecuted by the Swedish clergy on return to his own country, and he also begged Swedenborg to give him some biographical data, so that, if need be, they could defend him against "malignant slanderers" in England.
Swedenborg answered a little stiffly, thanking Mr. Hartley for the praises, but taking them as "love for the truths contained in my writings," and he then gave him a short autobiography and a list of his offices, honors, and his more eminent relatives. He assured Hartley that as he had influential friends he was in no danger of persecution, nor did he need money, he had as much "of this world's wealth" as he needed.
This letter Mr. Hartley said he received "as reverently as if it had come down from heaven," congratulating Sweden (a little prematurely) on receiving the Lord in His Apostle, and begging Swedenborg to instruct, exhort, and dispose of him in any way whatever.
To begin with, Hartley translated The Intercourse of the Soul and Body, which Swedenborg had just published in Latin in London, and the translation was also published. Hartley made himself Swedenborg's translator and defender in England, while he and Dr. Messiter, together with a Mr. Hampe, are said to have been his most intimate friends in London. They brought others to see the old man, among them good Mr. Cookworthy, a Quaker, who also was impressed.6 Swedenborg's circle in London does not seem ever to have been as extensive, fashionable, and gay as it was in Amsterdam, but it made up in uncritical devotion what it lacked in entertainment.
Swedenborg was not, however, one of those who, feeling "unappreciated" in their own country, avoid their compatriots abroad. He always visited and kept up with the Swedish colony wherever he went, and in London he had a special friend in Mr. Christopher Springer.7
Mr. Springer, when he talked about it in later years, was himself surprised that he, who was "not a learned man," should have known Swedenborg. He said that although they had been friends in Sweden he had not expected that the friendship should have become as constant as it proved to be. But perhaps he was a relief from uncritical devotion, in any case he affords another example of the width of Swedenborg's human interests. Christopher Springer was one of those unofficial and adventurous diplomats for his country which our own time was also to see. He took part, successfully, in the most secret negotiations between England, Russia, Sweden, and Prussia, and there was no doubt in his mind as to Swedenborg's clairvoyant power.
"All that he has told me of my deceased friends," he said, "and enemies and of the secrets I had with them is almost past belief. He even explained to me in what manner peace was concluded between Sweden and the King of Prussia; and he praised my conduct on that occasion. He even specified the three high personages whose services I made use of at that time, which was nevertheless a profound secret between us."
When Springer asked Swedenborg who had told him these things, the latter said, "Who told me about your affair with Count Claes Ekeblad? You cannot deny that what I have told you is true."
Count Ekeblad had attempted to bribe Mr. Springer with the sum of ten thousand Rix-daler, after having quarreled with him on a political matter, but they had made it up and sworn never to mention these things to anyone. But Swedenborg told Springer about both the particular sum and all the circumstances.
Swedenborg kept up his acquaintance too with Eric Bergström,8 a Swede who kept the King's Arms (Charles XII), a tavern in Wellclose Square, where Swedenborg once had stayed for ten weeks.
When the innkeeper talked about his customer, in after years, he said he never observed anything in Swedenborg "but what was very reasonable and bespoke the gentleman." The latter had told him the various stories that proved his clairvoyance. "Some of his friends here spoke against him, and some were for him; for my own part," said the innkeeper, "I think he was a reasonable, sensible and good man; he was very kind to all and generous to me. As to his peculiar sentiments, I do not meddle with them."
Swedenborg often went to spend an evening in Poppin's Court where the partner of his publisher lived, a Mr. Hart; and he was equally friendly with Hart's son and successor, taking particular notice of the little daughter.9 He used to distribute gingerbread to the children in the square.
In the summer of 1769 Swedenborg lived at the house of Mr. Shearsmith, the barber and wigmaker, in Great Bath Street, Coldbath fields, where he had lived before, and where his hosts greatly appreciated him, though at first Mr. Shearsmith said he was "affrighted" when Swedenborg would stand in the doorway between his two rooms and, although alone, talk "as if he was holding a conversation with some person," but as it was in a foreign language poor Mr. Shearsmith was no wiser. He said that times and seasons, days and nights, meant little to his lodger; he only rested when nature required it. When he went out he usually wore a suit of black velvet, made after an old fashion; a pair of long ruffles, a curious hilted sword and a gold-headed cane. He ate little or no animal food, except a few eels sometimes. He was fond of very sweet coffee and tea and he took a great deal of snuff.10
In the autumn of 1769 Swedenborg returned to Stockholm, where, besides protesting against the Dean of Gothenburg's treatment of him, he busied himself with another book, the last he was to publish, the one that was to be the compendium of the doctrines of the New Church as well as of everything he had learned and concluded about earth, hell, heaven, spirit world, and the conduct leading to each, with "memorable relations" illustrating his points. Taking a rough draft of this in hand, the eighty-two-year-old man left Stockholm again for Amsterdam in July, 1770, in order to finish it and have it printed.
This brought him once more within the orbit of that good reporter, Mynheer Iohan Christian Cuno, who met him on the Stock-Exchange where Swedenborg had gone with his Swedish friend, Joachim Wretman.
Cuno was in amazement at the amount of writing Swedenborg managed to do, although he also slept some twelve hours a night, and although he continued to lead a social life. As Cuno said, "He is reserved to no one. If anyone is curious to see him, he has no great difficulty; all that is necessary for him to do is to go to his house, where he admits everyone. It can easily be seen that the numerous calls which he thus receives draw largely upon his time; and so much the less can I understand, how he, nevertheless, accomplishes his design of having printed every week two closely set up sheets, and to compose ten sheets of manuscript, without having a single line in reserve. He says," Cuno added, "that his angel dictates to him, and that he can write fast enough."
The work appeared in Amsterdam in July, 1771. Cuno was shocked that on the title page Swedenborg described himself as the servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, to which Swedenborg replied, "I have asked, and have received not only permission but express command." 11
Hardly was the book published before he took it with him to London.