Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Swedenborg's Religion
THE title of the new work was The True Christian Religion, 541 quarto pages. It was truly a feat, what Swedenborg had done, but Cuno did not know about the rough draft and what writers are capable of when they have made up their minds what they are going to write. Even without angel guidance they have been known to do a chapter a day, and, though Swedenborg undoubtedly was in good faith when he said his angel dictated to him, it must be taken that both for him and for the angel it was a task made easier by the amount of repetition to be found in the new book from former works. More than half of the "memorable relations" had already appeared, and nearly all of the teachings.1
But still the book was an almost incredible feat, first of mere physical writing (it runs to about a thousand pages in a modern edition), and then of the system and structure which the man of eighty-two had imposed on this mass of crowded material. It was not, to our way of thinking, a rational system, except within itself, for naturally Swedenborg could not furnish a guide to the different levels of his consciousness by which or through which the book had been written. It had a good deal of the verbose repetitiousness of much automatic writing, but most of the matter was sound enough, from whatever point of view one regards it—whether as a product of Swedenborg entirely, or as at least partly due to the "angels and spirits" who, he felt, had guided his hand or whispered into his "internal" hearing or shown pictures to his inner sight of spiritual realities, ranging from the subtlest of Perennial Philosophy to rigid Bible worship by means of highly dubious personal exegesis.
As for the latter, it must not be forgotten, of course, that Swedenborg both wanted to and was required (given his times) to keep the doctrines of the New Church within the Christian framework. And that he had interpreted the Delft vision as being a manifestation of Jesus Christ to him.
Even before the new book, as well as in it, he had worked out a brief creed of five articles that sounded almost orthodox, if one did not read his explanations of what was meant by each article in it.
One was: "God is one in whom there is a divine Trinity, and the Lord God the Savior Jesus Christ is that one."
The gist of his explanations of this was that God, the invisible, unmanifest, spaceless and timeless,2 (the Godhead of Eckhart), seeing the state into which His creatures had fallen through their injudicious use of freewill, manifested Himself in time by descending into a human body so that the invisible could become visible, and act materially in a world of matter, for, said the practical Swede, "no one can scale a fish without a knife or pluck a crow without fingers or descend to the bottom of a lake without a diving bell." 3
The "Trinity" in the Man-God was his soul from the eternal and timeless Father, his body as the Son of Mary, and the Holy Spirit as the "operation," or action, caused by the union of that soul and body. "They make one," Swedenborg said, "as soul, body and operation make one in man." He devoted considerable skill to showing how all the polytheism had come about through the "trinity of persons" introduced by the Nicene creed.4
Two was: "That a saving faith is to believe in Him," something to which no heresy-hunter could object. But Swedenborg insisted that the only way by which "faith" could become "saving" was in accordance with "the laws of order." They required that unless a man regenerated himself "naturally," even God could not regenerate him "spiritually." 5 Man had to drag himself as far as he could by rational reflection and by genuine, self-examining repentance before the way would be leveled and the door open for God to come in and do His part, in accordance with His own laws of order, filling the truths acquired by man with divine light and warmth.
Salvation was coöperative. But Swedenborg had to include "redemption," or the orthodox would be after him. He said that redemption consisted in the subjugation by the Lord of the hells and the reëstablishment of order in the heavens. But he was not nearly so insistent on what redemption consisted in as on what it did not.
Mankind was not redeemed, he said, through the passion (or suffering) of Jesus on the cross. That passion was the completion of something that had been gradually taking place, the union of the human Jesus with the Divine from which his soul had sprung, or with his, symbolic, "Father" (or with his Real Self). As a man he had combated the temptations of men, not turning aside even from the cross, though, humanly, he had had the desire to do so. But that was his last temptation, and he conquered it.6
For, Swedenborg said dryly, but with much autobiographical feeling behind his words, "it is by means of temptation that conjunction is effected." Though man feels bitterly, left to himself, God is really with him in this struggle of the "internal and external" man, and therefore "when man conquers temptation he is inmostly conjoined with God."
How Swedenborg felt about the doctrine that God had to be propitiated for the sins of mankind by having His Son die horribly, and that men's "salvation" consisted in crediting them with the "merits" of Christ, he expressed, or let an "angel" express, in this book.
"Can the Christian world be so insane, and wander away from sound reason into such madnesses, and from such paradoxes draw conclusions about the fundamental dogma of salvation? Who does not see that these things are diametrically opposed to the very Divine essence, that is to God's Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, and at the same time to his omnipotence and omnipresence? No good master could so deal with his manservants and maidservants, nor even a wild beast or a bird of prey with its young. It is horrible. Is it not contrary to God's Divine essence to annul that call which has been made to the whole human race and to each individual? Is it not contrary to the Divine essence to change the order established from eternity, which is that every man is to be judged by his life?" 7
Three was: "Evils should not be done, because they are of the devil and from the devil."
It was indeed hard to tell from article three that Swedenborg had not believed in any personal "Devil" for a great many years. He seems to have done so in the brief attack of orthodoxy he had while he was undergoing his "temptations" in the religious crisis period, but he very soon dropped the Devil. He believed, however, in devils—that is, in human beings who had so consistently chosen evil that everything which made them human had died. In the other world these constituted "hell" or the bells, but by choice, not because they had been "sent" there by God.
Swedenborg had thought a great deal about evil, and his reflections were much subtler than article three seemed to show. He had long maintained that evil was "sin." Not the other way around, that "sin" was evil. He was aware that "sin" is a terribly elastic word. It can be stretched to include the breaking of all sorts of rules, not in themselves ethical, such as food rules or attendance at ceremonies. But the Decalogue in its widest significance should, he said, leave no one unaware of what were real evils.
But why shouldn't you commit evil?
"Why shouldn't I kill my neighbor and eat him, if I'm strong enough to do it and clever enough to get away with it?" Moralists of all ages find it far too easy to answer this question, but not so that their answers convince the questioner, whose neighbor remains theoretically safe only so long as steaks from a cow are preferred to human chops.
Swedenborg had not only a negative but a positive answer to the question; not his own answers, naturally, but those he had made his own. He said first that the Ten Commandments were not only "civic and moral but also spiritual laws." "Unless evils are shunned as sins," he said, man is not leading a good life according to spiritual laws. Sin is the breaking of a spiritual law, and therefore "evil is hurtful to the soul." Swedenborg had done his best to prove to men "from experience" that he was not talking about theological niceties, but about consequences that, as inevitable as a chemical reaction, followed the "soul" into the other world.
But in the other world, he admitted, he had met with "devils" that frankly preferred the stenches of hell to the fragrances of heaven. Did he leave the question then as a matter of taste, or of taste in smell?
No. All through his works he said in effect that the best reason for not being evil was that being good opened the way to infinitely greater pleasures. He knew both. Early in his Spiritual Diary he had confessed that he used to feel revengeful.8 (It might be said that some of the diary notes in which his former enemies were represented as in a sad state in the other world were projections from a not wholly sublimated layer of his subconscious.) He considered that he had been too ambitious. He knew that those states of self-occupation had been misery compared to those "ineffable felicities" he had enjoyed when he had labored with himself enough to feel he was able to be with angelic beings who were more nearly in a selfless state.
This black knot of the ego Swedenborg often referred to as man's "proprium," and he saw its annihilation as true religion. He wrote once in his diary that spirits "supposed that by losing those things which were most peculiarly their own, they would be left so entirely destitute that neither man nor spirit would be intelligently master of himself, but be like a machine, devoid of all sense and reflection . . ." but he explained that only by becoming "nothing" could one become "something." Nothing in this case meant, he said, that a man should lose all that was "his own," namely his "cupidities and so his iniquities," and then he would "come to exist as another person . . ." Other delights "in boundless variety" would then be his. As he wrote of the skeptical spirits "the sensation and perception which they thought would be extinguished are infinitely heightened when self-love ceases to be the ruling principle of their delights." 8a
Still he knew very well that it was no use to tell someone who preferred the smell of a rotten fish to that of a rose that the rose ought to be preferred, so, on the whole, he contented himself by telling the stench-lover that his main punishment would consist in gravitating irresistibly to his like in the other world. They dealt with each other.
But—why did God "permit" evil, as Swedenborg so often said? "Evil happens by permission," as it happened often enough to him, by his own accounts of his "infestation" by evil spirits.
On this crucial question he referred his readers back to his book on Divine Providence, in which he had made a very fair list of the miseries of mankind, including wars.
The answer he made, on behalf of Providence, was consistent with his belief in God as Order rather than God as Omnipotence. He said: "When God is said to permit, it is not meant that He wills, but that on account of the end, which is salvation, He cannot avert." 9
Man, he insisted, had freedom of choice in spiritual things, or "salvation" would not be possible.10 That implied freedom to choose evil in preference to good. All the evil in the world was man-made, none of it from God.
Four, in literal translation, was: "Goods should be done because they are of God and from God."
And Five was: "These should be done by man as if by himself; but it should be believed that they are done by the Lord in man and through man."
Four and five were really the same. Swedenborg was confronted by the problem of "self—merit": how not to "take credit" for doing good, and thus become self-righteous, and yet leave man the amount of free choice that was necessary for salvation. He solved it quite logically by going back to the impersonal conception of God, as one might say. God was Good and Truth, but you could also say that Good and Truth were God. Therefore, naturally, if a man divided his last crust with another, or gave him the whole of it, God was acting through him. Man had in a sense done it himself, but he must never allow the "self" to boast about it, nor would he if he could continue to remember that all true good and all good truth were God.
There was, however, another point in article four. One might say that "humanitarians" had come up in the eighteenth century, people who from the noblest motives felt that "the good" was so good in itself it needed no "acknowledgment of the divine" to enforce it, a quite natural result of the spectacle that a power-loving church afforded. Swedenborg felt, due to his personal experience, that if the good were no longer regarded as "God," very soon it would be reduced to a level of utility. He had had a talk about that once, recorded in his diary, with an English bishop, whom he told that being good to one's neighbor for the sake of utility was Machiavellianism.11 And utility was also a word, like "sin," which could be stretched to cover a great many different things.
Swedenborg said, in effect, to orthodox Christians: By subjecting the understanding to "faith," you have destroyed true religion. He said to the atheist: By denying the divine, by putting the good into the same class as the useful, you've opened the way to the breaking of spiritual laws. There are spiritual laws. I have seen them in operation.
Long before the melancholy Kierkegaard, Swedenborg propounded "existentialism," if that rubbery word be taken to mean that you can't know until you try.
Swedenborg was visiting, he reported, one of the lower societies in the spirit world where excessively learned men were arguing about religion. He asked: "What kind of religion is necessary for the salvation of mankind?" They answered: "We will divide this question into several; and until these are decided we can give no reply. The investigation will proceed as follows: (1) Is religion anything? (2) Is there such a thing as salvation or not? (3) Is one religion more efficacious than another? (4) Is there a heaven and a hell? (5) Is there an eternal life after death? besides other questions."
They admitted that it would take at least a hundred years to decide the first point, and, Swedenborg said, "Meanwhile you are without religion." He reproached them for doing nothing but argue "whether a thing is so or not so." That, he said, "is to reason about the fit of a cap or shoe without ever trying it on . . . have a care for yourselves, lest your minds, while standing outside the door of judgment, grow hard within and become like pillars of salt."
Then they threw stones at him.12
One might say that Swedenborg in his unremittent emphasis on practical, do-something-about-it, religion was Western and Christian. But he was also, probably without knowing it, and via the Platonists, not far from Hinduism in his worship of God in His Avatar, and he was at one with Buddhism in his insistence on the reality of spiritual law, or Karma. With Buddhism too he believed in the power of the understanding to change wrong feeling to right feeling, so that man would keep the commandments because he "desires to do so," like a free man and not like a slave. Nor was he far from the Dhamma, the Good Law, of Buddha, when he declared in The True Christian Religion: "The Christian world does not yet know that there is an order, and it knows still less what this order is which God introduced into the world at the same time that He created it, and that God cannot act contrary to it, for if he did that, he would be in conflict with himself, for God is that very Order."