things, and the neighbor as oneself is a holy thing, inasmuch as holiness then comes from God Messiah." 23
The gist of Swedenborg's belief then and later was that the essence of divine life, therefore of all life, was love. Men, whether in or out of the material body, were mere dead forms unless animated by love. They might appear alive if animated by selfishness, but they were in a state of spiritual death.
Such crystal statements are the heart of "Perennial Philosophy," and they appear fairly frequently in the automatic scripts of The Word Explained. When they do, it is as if Swedenborg himself were speaking, or at least those parts of his psychon-system of which he still had control. But much of the matter in the Notes is so strange, so unlike anything one knows of his background and way of thinking, that one is almost forced to fantastic speculations.
He had certainly long been occupied in studying the Bible, and as late as 1744 he had written A Hieroglyphic Key, and Correspondences and Representations, in which he foreshadowed an allegorical method of interpreting the Bible. In that it can be seen that he had already studied theories, such as Origen's, that claimed the Old Testament as essentially a prophecy of the New. But nowhere is there any trace of the curious sectarian ferocity dominant in much of the script "dictated" to Swedenborg.
Things foreign to him, dogmas he did not at all approve of, stick up like thistles, such as a very literal idea of the Trinity, of the Devil, of the Blood-Atonement, and, strangest of all, a violent barrage of anti-Judaic propaganda.
Swedenborg cannot be classed as an anti-Semite. One of his friends in Amsterdam has mentioned with a shade of reproach that Swedenborg went to the houses of all kinds of people, he even "associated with Jews and Portuguese." He was certainly not a "racist." According to him Africans were better liked in "heaven" than anybody else.
Yet here in these notes, or in long sections of them, it seems necessary to trample on and discredit the pillars of Judaism—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and more especially Moses, the chief pillar.24 He is shown as a bad character entirely, and so are David and Solomon. The only exception is when these figures can be made to "represent" or symbolize something in the New Testament.
