Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A Happy End
ABOUT Christmas, 1771, Swedenborg was touched by paralysis in one side. Up till then he had been working on additions to his True Christian Religion; 1 now he had to stop. The Shearsmiths and their maid took care of him. He lay in a lethargic state for over three weeks, during which time he ate nothing, except that he had a little tea without milk, cold water, and once "about two teaspoonfuls of red currant jelly." At the end of that time he recovered a little, though he was still partly paralyzed and remained in bed.2 He was then eighty-four years old.
Dr. Messiter attended him, and Mr. Hartley came to see him, though not so often as Mr. Hartley wished. The local Swedish pastor, a good man by the name of Arvid Ferelius, visited him frequently. In a letter to a friend he reported that, although Swedenborg used to talk with great energy to invisible listeners, he was not "eccentric and whimsical; but the very reverse was the case. He was very easy and pleasant in company, talked on every subject that came up, accommodating himself to the ideas of the company; and he never spoke on his own views, unless he was asked about them."
It did worry Ferelius that Swedenborg would mention various celebrated spirits as having just been in the room, but when the pastor asked why no one else enjoyed such revelations and spirit intercourse, Swedenborg said that everyone might, "the real hindrance is that men at the present time are so carnally minded."
Pastor Ferelius asked Swedenborg several times if he felt this was going to be his death, and each time the latter said Yes. The last time this happened, the clergyman declared to Swedenborg that "as quite a number of people thought that his sole purpose in promulgating his new theological system had been to make himself a name, or to acquire celebrity, which object, indeed, he had thereby attained, if such had been the case, he ought now to do the world the justice to retract it either in whole or part, especially as he could not expect to derive any additional advantage from this world, which he would soon leave. He thereupon half rose in his bed, and laying his sound hand upon his breast said with some manifestation of zeal: 'As true as you see me before your eyes, so true is everything that I have written; and I could have said more, had it been permitted. When you enter eternity, you will see everything, and then you and I shall have much to talk about.'" 3
Pastor Ferelius then gave him the last sacrament, which Swedenborg took, in his own words, "with thankfulness." He could: the traditional vessels of the old religion he had filled with a wine of his own.
He did not die till about three weeks later, but some days before his death he told the date of it to Elizabeth Reynolds, the maid at the Shearsmiths', and, she reported, "He was pleased, as if he was going to have a holiday, to go on some merry-making." 4
This did not mean that Swedenborg thought life had been a sojourn in a vale of tears. Once he wrote in his Spiritual Diary: "Some think that they who are in the faith should remove from themselves all the delights of life, and all the pleasures of the body; but this I can assert, that delights and pleasures have never been denied to me; for I have been permitted to enjoy not only the pleasures of the body and the senses, like those who live in the world, but I have also been permitted to enjoy such delights and felicities of life as I believe no persons in the whole world ever before enjoyed, which were greater and more exquisite than any person could imagine and believe." 5
He had felt and continued to feel the peace in comparison with which, as he had said, gladness and tranquillity were as nothing. It shone from his face, and he wanted to share it with others. Let us rise, he had said, above our senses and into a loftier sphere of understanding; if we do this "the more we become neighbors to a higher, spiritual, divine power; the more we become men, the vicarious divinities of the earth." 6
Swedenborg had noticed that when he gave dolls to children he could see that they thought of them and treated them as if they were alive.
He too had that gift. Before his eyes, as before that of the angels of the inmost heaven, all things seemed "to laugh, to play and to live."
He could see the sky covered with dark red roses. If he had seen the ape-men and the leopard—men, he had also seen the angel-men.
Swedenborg enjoyed "a sound mind, memory and understanding to the last hour of his life," so Elizabeth Reynolds and Richard Shearsmith reported, swearing it before the Mayor of London at the Guildhall, on November 24, 1775, because tongues had wagged, saying that Swedenborg had retracted everything just before he died.
In that document, so elegantly lettered by the Guildhall clerk, to which Elizabeth had set her mark and Shearsmith his signature, it was also set forth that they never did, either directly or indirectly, hear Swedenborg express or imply such an idea as that of retraction, nor did any person or persons visit him either the day before or the day on which he died, which was the twenty-ninth of March, 1772.
By his bedside, the document said, were Mrs. Shearsmith (who died soon after) and Elizabeth. The wife of the barber, and the maid: two simple East End Londoners, of those people whom he had described as the best of the Christians.
About five o'clock of that Sunday, Swedenborg asked the two women what time it was. They told him, and he thanked them, saying it was good. "In about ten minutes after, he heaved a gentle sigh and expired in the most tranquil manner."
From every human life, cast into the pool of time, waves circle out, big or little, even after that life has disappeared from time. No one knows how far they reach. The life of Emanuel Swedenborg continued to touch many lives, even after his body, that "outworn garment," had been laid in a triple coffin in the Swedish church in London.
One day the wigmaker and barber Shearsmith was visited by a stranger who begged to see Swedenborg's rooms and asked to be shown where Swedenborg used to stand. The wigmaker told him that in the doorway between the rooms he had often seen Swedenborg talking with his invisible friends. The stranger made sure it was the very spot, then he went and stood there. He left, after handsomely rewarding Shearsmith, nor was anything ever known of him than what he said of himself, that he was from the far West Indian island of St. Croix.7
Another day, in 1908, nearly a century and a half later, the Royal Swedish battleship, the Fylgja (not inaptly named, as that was what the old Scandinavians called the good spirit believed to be every man's double and companion), sailed for London, with one mission only: to bring back to his country, at last mindful of a great son, the body of Emanuel Swedenborg—scientist and mystic.