Origen said that those who would insist on the letter alone were like the Philistines who filled up with earth the wells which the servants of Abraham digged; the spiritual interpreter was, like Isaac, to open up the wells.5
Swedenborg used the same interpretation. And, according to Origen, Jacob did not wrestle with an angel, it was an evil spirit. Swedenborg said the same.6 There were other similarities, and the principles of the "interpretation" were the same.
"On this method," it has been said of Origen, and could equally well be said of Swedenborg in this respect, "the sacred writings are regarded as an inexhaustible mine of philosophical and dogmatic wisdom; in reality the exegete reads his own ideas into any passage he chooses. The commentaries are of course intolerably diffuse and tedious; a great deal of them is now quite unreadable . . ." 7
Nothing could be truer! There probably never has been anything written so overpoweringly alien to normal interest as these Biblical commentaries by Swedenborg, nor anything more foreign to the results of modern Biblical research. Neither has anything served so much to conceal the true greatness of the man. No one who chances to meet him first in these earnest crossword puzzles can be blamed for turning quickly away.
For instance, in the verse referred to above, the "inner" meaning is said to be that by Abraham is to be understood the Messiah. And by the Philistines are to be understood the crew of the Devil who stopped up the fountains of the Divine Word, etc.8 In some other places Abraham represents something else, not so flattering, and so on.
Of course Swedenborg did not sit down and copy Origen or anyone else, consciously. But it might be maintained that when he so desperately needed a new kind of understanding of the Bible, in order to retain "faith," up from his subconscious rose these interpretations, mingled with other elements from the same great creative realm—and, one might concede, perhaps reaching even into other "psychon-systems" of similar beliefs, now passed into the world subconscious.
Even so it is discouraging to try to puzzle out how a man who was capable of such clear, incisive thought, a worshiper of experimental science, could so uncritically accept these symbolisms. Only
