The Other Life/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
OUR LANGUAGE HEREAFTER.
MYRIADS of souls being given, inhabiting spiritual bodies which see, hear and feel; organized into heavenly societies; each soul full of affections and thoughts flowing down by interior ways from the divine source of all life; some method of communicating their ideas is an imperative necessity.
Hence speech and writing in heaven as well as upon earth.
There is no life without motion, circulation, communication, interchange. The subtile currents of heat, light, electricity, and of aromal and effluvial particles are continually coming and going to and from every object in the material universe both great and small. Everything receives something from all other things and gives something to them. The light of the stars visits not only the planets in their majestic sweep around the sun, but every leaf that trembles in the wood and every pebble that lies upon the shore. The wing of the bee in the garden beats at the palace-gate of the cloud, and the dew-drop on the flower holds up its little mirror to the sky.
So it is with affections and thoughts, which are spiritual things.
It is the life of heaven to receive affections and thoughts from the divine love and wisdom of the Lord, and to communicate them to others. This involves the love of God and of the neighbor, which is all the law and the prophets.
Affection and thought are united like soul and body, and correspond to each other. Every thought contains an affection as its secret essence and soul. Every idea which one spirit communicates to another, embodies something of his emotional as well as his intellectual nature. Angels continually yearn to give themselves away to others.
There are three great modes of expression by which the spiritual life of one soul manifests itself to others.
The first is by the variations of the face and the movements of the body. These changes in the bodily form are symbolical of the affections and thoughts which produce them. What a world of meaning lies in the smile, the frown, the tear, the laugh, and in the numberless gestures of the body! Our perception of these meanings is very obscure and faint; but the celestial angels who can read a man's entire life in the sound of his voice or the shape of his hand, find them a means of perfect communication. The face of nature also is as intelligible to them as the face of man, and through it God speaks to them a language of infinite wisdom and beauty.
This enables us in some degree to comprehend Swedenborg's statement, that this mode of expressing ideas, which seems to us a mere pantomime, is the most thorough and wonderful method of interchanging thought. Swedenborg says: "This speech as far excelled vocal speech as the sense of seeing excels that of hearing—that is, as the sight of a fine country excels a verbal description of it."
The first men of our earth conversed with the angels in this manner. This perception of the spiritual meanings involved in external forms and motions has various degrees of power. It is one thing in the celestial, another in the spiritual, and a far lower and more imperfect faculty in the natural degree. It is perception with spirits; intuition with men; instinct with animals. It is the means whereby creatures without speech communicate with each other, and seem to exercise both that thought and forethought which we ascribe to reason.
The body in its minutest movements was once a perfect effigy of the soul and its affections. Evil has so far closed our internal or spiritual forms, and separated the internal from the external, that little of this correspondence is left or understood. We still sometimes feel that the eye is more eloquent than the tongue; that a smile or a kiss conveys something which language could but feebly portray; that actions speak louder than words; and that the deeds done in the body are a pantomime involving the secret things of our spiritual life.
Speech, face to face, is the second and most common method of communicating ideas in the spiritual realm. There as here we have all the pleasures of conversation, which is the sunshine of social life. There are happy gatherings of congenial spirits for recreation and the interchange of affections and thoughts. There are schools of instruction where knowledge is imparted with a facility and a fullness, which amazes our torpid understandings. There are assemblies where words of angelic wisdom fall from pure lips and illumine the mind with a heavenly radiance. There are churches where the Word of God is unfolded with a beauty and glory, of which the human intellect has never yet dreamed.
What language, then, is spoken in the spiritual world?
Earthly language is constructed by the slow and tedious process of passing from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation, certain sounds which represent things or states of feeling, until their meaning becomes fixed and permanent. These slowly-accumulated words, or signs of our ideas, differ and have given rise to different languages, according as the races of men have started from different centres; were surrounded by different natural objects and influences; and were of different mental and spiritual constitutions.
At the very best, the richest, most copious and flexible languages in the world, but feebly represent or bring to view the powers and wonders of human thought and imagination.
The language of the spiritual world is the language of ideas, and is therefore common to all spirits. The word used by a spirit to convey his idea, contains in it innumerable things necessary to its perfect representation. When we use the word "mountain," we have the visual image of a mountain in the mind's eye; but this image is not conveyed by the sound to a foreigner unacquainted with our language. The word used by a spirit to convey the idea of "mountain" to the mind, would involve not only its form and color, height and distance, but the very causes of its formation, the spiritual states represented by it, and its connection, near and remote, with all other things.
Ideas, which appear to us so simple, are inconceivably complex. The spiritual microscope applied to ideas, as we apply the natural microscope to physical objects, will show us that every idea, apparently but one thing, is composed of innumerable other ideas; and that further analysis, instead of bringing us to some definite end, only opens before us new worlds of wonder.
A spiritual word, therefore, contains and represents thousands of thoughts. The inconceivable richness and fullness of such language make clear what Swedenborg says, that angels can express more in a minute than we can in an hour; and can convey in a few words what it would take us many pages to express.
We have new names given to us in heaven. No material word, not even the names of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, can penetrate into the spiritual spheres. Our name in heaven will represent our entire spiritual quality. Names in the Bible always represent spiritual qualities. The "new name" written on the white stone is the new nature given to us by obedience to spiritual truth. The name inscribed in the Lamb's book of life, is the spiritual innocence of the regenerate. The name of the beast written on the forehead is the quality of evil inscribed on the interior life. The name of God was called unpronounceable by the Jews, indicating that the divine quality or essence is incomprehensible by man.
The words of this spiritual language were not constructed arbitrarily, or adopted by common consent as fixed signs of angelic ideas. They are created instantaneously by the influx of the divine life into and through the spiritual mind, and represent perfectly the affections and thoughts which have come down from within, to embody themselves in communicable sounds without, and be thereby transmitted to the neighbor.
This spiritual language, or language of ideas, is not therefore learned or taught like human languages, but it is organically implanted in every one. We come into conscious possession of it after death, by a spontaneous process, because we have it here. When we are thinking intently to ourselves, our spiritual body is talking earnestly in the spiritual language, of which we are unconscious. If the Lord were to open the door between the two worlds, and let some angel friend look in upon us as we sit in profound reverie, our tacit thoughts would come to him as rich and beautiful words spoken aloud.
This language has three discrete degrees, and we come into that degree of it which is opened in us by our life upon earth. The angels in the first heaven cannot understand the speech of the angels in the second heaven, nor can those in the second heaven comprehend the celestial speech of the third heaven. This depends upon their different degrees of affection and thought, from successively more interior grounds, and a corresponding difference in ideas and, words. The celestial, spiritual and natural degrees of life differ so fundamentally in the forms of their affections and thoughts, that each is a distinct world, cosmos or universe of its own, without any necessary consciousness of the existence of any other.
Still they communicate; for there is a steady stream of influent life all the way from the Divine Centre through all the spheres down to the lowest and last things of the mineral kingdom in the physical world. Nothing stands alone in the universe. All things cohere, and every cause is traceable to the first Great Cause. How it is that all the heavens and hells, the world of spirits and all the innumerable worlds of men are held together in one vast chain of being, and governed by the same laws and controlled by one Divine Order, can only be comprehended by the system of ontology given to us through Swedenborg.
Man who is born corporeal and sensual and therefore without language like a beast, can ascend through the successive degrees of affection and thought by the opening of the rational, spiritual and celestial faculties, which lie folded away in the mysterious depths of his spiritual being. As he ascends he becomes capable of more and more interior thought and life, and of understanding the language of successively higher states.
The descent of affection and thought from the higher to the lower planes is a very different phenomenon. The spirit has left the corporeal, sensual sphere behind it, has ceased to think and feel on the external, rational and natural plane. It thinks spiritually in the degree next above the one it has left. It has receded from our earthly speech, and cannot reproduce a word of it in the new sphere into which it has risen. The higher it ascends the more it leaves behind, until the celestial angel stands on the serenest summits in the light of God, with thoughts, feelings, language differing from everything beneath him.
How can a celestial angel communicate with a spiritual angel, or an angel of the lower heaven communicate with a man upon earth? By a descent during which the higher being leaves his own interior spheres behind him, and enters into the sphere of the lower degree. When a celestial angel appears and speaks to a spiritual angel, he descends to his level, assumes the form of his affection and thought which exists in his interior memory, and speaks to him in his own language. So when a spiritual angel descends to a lower degree, he takes on the mental states and interior memory of that degree and speaks in a lower and feebler language.
Angels and spirits, however, cannot descend into the natural degree of our life, so as to see our natural forms and speak to us externally in our earthly tongues. Why? Because they have dropped the natural body for ever. They can approach our spiritual bodies, be seen by our spiritual eyes and beard by our spiritual ears. They then speak to us in our native tongue.
How can a spirit who thinks and speaks from the universal language of ideas, address a man in an earthly language, so that if a dozen men of different nationalities were listening, each one would hear his own language spoken? This apparent mystery is easily explained.
A man cannot see or hear an angel or spirit unless his spiritual senses are open. When a spirit comes to such a man, he takes upon himself the man's interior or spiritual memory, and enters into everything the man possesses as if it were his own. His ideas clothe themselves with words derived from the man's memory, because the spirit has assumed the spiritual state of the man's life and now thinks from his standpoint. When he leaves the man, he forgets every word of human language, and thinks that the message he delivered was couched in his own spiritual speech.
The Divine Wisdom, which is the source of all thought, in passing through the minds of the celestial angels is finitely manifested as the thought or wisdom of that degree of life. The angelic thought, passing down to the next degree below it, becomes the spiritual wisdom of the middle degree. This, flowing down into the world of spirits, shorn in a great measure of its beauty and power, becomes the thought of that sphere. Passing lastly into the spiritual-natural form of man, it is human thought, reason, speech.—Thus all things are bound together in a golden chain.
When God would speak to man, his idea first takes on the forms of the celestial sphere, and is a communication understood only by the celestial angels. The same idea passing through the spiritual degree takes on a covering or mode of expression peculiar to that sphere, and is a revelation to a lower form of spiritual life. The same divine idea reaches man upon earth and is dimly shadowed forth in some homely phrase of human speech.
This fact, that forms of expression are changed according to the descent of ideas from the higher to the lower degrees, explains our doctrine that the Word of God has meaning within meaning, sense within sense, adapted to the different degrees of life, and that its last and lowest sense, our literal Scripture, necessarily takes on the forms and imperfections of human thought and the limitations and feebleness of human speech.
This Word of God is the Mind of God, the divine wisdom, one and the same, filling all the heavens and reaching down to the earth.
This is the reason why God is omniscient. He is omnipresent, and He takes on or assumes the states of thought and feeling which exist in all the spheres and every infinitesimal fraction of a sphere throughout the entire universe. He therefore knows everything, just as the angel knows the contents of the mind of the spirit whose sphere he approaches.
We see only the letter of the Divine Word. We cannot lift our eyes above the feet of the Divine Man, which are "like unto fine brass." We cannot lift them to his right hand which grasps "the seven stars;" nor to his eyes, which are "as a flame of fire."
This letter of the Word is signified by the "clouds of heaven," for it veils the splendors of celestial and spiritual wisdom, and accommodates the descending light to the natural and even sensual states of the children of men. When the spiritual sense of the Divine Word is opened, when it speaks to us in the angelic language, the Lord is said to come in the clouds of heaven (not in the clouds of earth) with power and great glory, accompanied by his holy angels.
Such is the language of God to man.
The words of spirits and angels represent in objective forms their affectional and intellectual life. Their forms of speech and power of expression differ, therefore, according to their own interior states. Whilst all are wise and beautiful, some are far wiser and more beautiful than others; and the highest delight of those who have much wisdom is to impart it, so far as possible, to those who have less.
Spiritual thought, so full and so symbolic of emotional life, has a strong tendency to take on a rhythmical, poetic, and musical form. The language of angels is more in the style of the psalms of David and of the prophets, than in that of our prose compositions. In some heavenly societies, indeed, their speech is poetry and the sound of it is music. It is probable that the souls of poets and musicians are brought into contact with these harmonic spheres, and derive from their very cradles, by conjunction with such spirits, their constitutional passion for music and song.
Swedenborg says the reason why the speech of angels has a tendency to measured cadence and rhythmical terminations, is that they can feel and think in societies, or all at once. We can only sing together perfectly. If we had choral thoughts, and choral affections, how much nearer we would be to the angels! How the music and thought of heaven would stream forth from our private and public lives!
The division of thoughts into measured lines containing the same number of feet, represents the unity and harmony of opinion in which the thinkers live; and the termination in rhymes or similar sounds, represents the spiritual affinity or likeness of their affections. This is the reason why music is some heavenly affection struggling for expression in our hearts and lives; and why the poet, whose choral thoughts and feelings reach out to all his race, is the great interpreter of mankind.
In the spiritual world one society can speak to another society, no matter how great their number, as readily and fluently as man speaks to man. They all feel and think so harmoniously that some one spirit speaks for them all; or, to put it more forcibly, they all speak through him as a passive medium.
Evil spirits also can unite for wicked ends, and many speak and act through one. This explains the answer given to the Lord, who asked the name of the evil spirit controlling the poor maniac:
"My name is Legion; for we are many."
The third method of communicating ideas in the spiritual world is by objective means, of which writing is the type.
In the first method, by signs and gestures, the soul speaks through the face and the whole body. We see a faint shadow of it in the wonderful facility with which our educated deaf and dumb interchange ideas. In the second method the soul speaks through the lungs, involves an idea in a sound, and passes it from one to another. In the third it works with the hand or other means, giving the thought an ultimate and objective form and shape, more or less fixed and permanent, thus transmitting it to others without the personal presence of the thinker.
The first method corresponds to the celestial, the second to the spiritual, and the third to the natural spheres of life and thought, all of which exist or may exist in every man, spirit or angel.
Swedenborg says that communication by writing was provided by the Lord for the sake of a written Word, dictated by Himself, involving all the mysteries of his Love and Wisdom, to remain for ever as the fixed source and centre of life, power and thought to the spiritual universe, and by different senses, opening out into the different degrees of being, accommodated to the highest and lowest forms and capacities of his entire creation.
What a magnificent conception of the nature and bearings of the Holy Scripture!
Between the vocal speech of spirits and their written communications, there is an intermediate or pictorial mode of conveying thought, really the first step toward writing. By a spiritual process, entirely impossible in our physical sphere, the ideas or visual images in the mind's eye, are thrown outward or made objective in the spiritual atmospheres, assuming a photographic or rather a stereoscopic distinctness and beauty.
In this manner every form latent upon the canvas of the interior memory, may be re-awakened to life, and brought out again in apparent externeity. Thus every action, event, word and thought of our lives can be reproduced and presented visibly before us. Spirits by this objective method can also illustrate and beautify their thoughts, so as vastly to enhance the delight and instructiveness of their conversations.
Swedenborg says on this subject:
"Once also some spirits discoursed with me by nothing but visual representatives, such as flames of various colors, luminous appearances, clouds ascending and descending, different kinds of small houses and stage-scenes, articles of furniture, persons variously clothed and many other things: all of which were representative of spiritual ideas from which alone their meaning might be known."
Sometimes the thoughts or wisdom of angels in a superior heaven are let down through the minds of those in a lower degree, and presented outwardly to them under these symbolic forms in their own spiritual atmospheres. It is thus, indeed, that the whole creation is a grand representative mirror, a visible symbol of the wisdom and glory of God. It was thus that John saw in the world of spirits, into which his senses had been opened, the magnificent panorama of spiritual symbols constituting the Apocalypse, and to which Swedenborg has given us the key.
God has spoken to man through the Book of Revelation just as angels speak to each other by means of these visual representations. Apocalypse means the unveiling of something which is hidden. The projection outwardly of something which is concealed interiorly, is the same idea in a spiritual sense. But the Book of Revelation is no revelation to us without a key to the interpretation of its symbols. The meaning of these symbols can only be given us through the agency of some human mind divinely empowered to teach them. This is the secret of Swedenborg's illumination.
The fact that ideas may be made objectively visible in the spiritual atmospheres, is an important element in the philosophy of dreaming, of hallucinations and of many curious mental phenomena. It is strikingly illustrated in some of the mesmeric or biological experiments. In what is called the mesmeric state, the external senses seem to be partially asleep or paralyzed, while the spiritual senses are partially opened. The operator can then make the subject see whatever he chooses; that is, he can project the visual images in his own mind by his mere will, so that the subject, sees them as external things. They can be made to see serpents, houses on fire, children drowning, and various terrible scenes,—and their intense excitement and involuntary gesticulations show unmistakably that they conceive them to be as real as this outer world is to our waking perceptions.
A rude system of drawing and painting arose from the attempt to imitate or repeat on parchment or other substance these visual images made upon the mind by the objects of nature. This pictorial writing preceded the alphabet and books. It corresponds to the pictorial speaking of the spiritual world already described. The Aztec artists thus informed the Mexican government of the landing of the Spaniards, by sending forward rude paintings of their ships, horses, arms, clothing and banners, articles which they had never seen before.
Our highest products in art, in painting, sculpture, and architecture, flow from the effort of the human mind to make its ideas visible.
By abbreviations, condensations, etc., of this pictorial writing, an alphabet and finally words were obtained, representative of things and significative of our ideas. In that spiritual language into which we shall all consciously come after death, every letter, point, iota and little curve, not only represents things, states, qualities, and affections, but involves mysteries of wisdom incommunicable to man whose thought is still limited by the shackles of time and space.
There are writings in heaven not produced by the intervention of the hand. These are correspondences of the thoughts and soon fade away. Those written out or printed are permanent, and the mechanical work is done with such celerity, that Swedenborg says the thoughts apparently throw themselves upon paper.
He saw the books and writings in all the heavens. In the celestial spheres a character somewhat resembling the Hebrew and the Arabic is used. In the spiritual spheres it is more like our Roman alphabet. The vowels predominate in the celestial heavens; the consonants in the spiritual heavens.
He was not permitted to read these books, but only to glance at them, so as to see their general structure and character. He gives as a reason, that it is against the laws of the divine order for man, still living in the natural world, to be instructed by spirits or angels. He must derive his spiritual light from the Divine Word, and from those who are authorized to interpret it. So important is it that man should be protected from all the fantasies, hallucinations, visible images, involuntary writing, aerial voices, clairvoyance, and mesmeric excitations by which spirits would impose themselves upon him as messengers of divine truth!
Whoever doubts that there are books and writings in heaven must also doubt the evidence of Ezekiel the prophet.
He says:
"Now it came to pass that the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God."
With his spiritual sight thus opened into heaven, he describes his wonderful experiences, one of which was the following:
"And when I looked, behold! a hand was sent unto me; and lo! a roll of a book was therein;
"And he spread it before me; and it was written within and without."
Some spiritual writings are composed wholly of numbers following one after another, like words. This seems utterly incomprehensible to the natural man; but such writings convey to those who have the key of correspondence, ideas which are wholly incommunicable by speech. All the numbers in the Bible represent spiritual states and qualities, which have been so clearly unfolded by Swedenborg, that one who has been blest with light from that source can readily imagine that whole volumes of spiritual ideas may be conveyed by numbers arranged in certain series and orders.
In diseased states of the body, when the orderly connection and influx of the soul is partially interrupted, we frequently have the strangest mental phenomena, which receive great light from the psychology of Swedenborg. I once saw a remarkable case which seemed to have some relation to the curious fact stated in the foregoing paragraph. The patient, who was slowly recovering from an apoplectic stroke, was found to have totally lost his memory of words. When he began attempting to express his ideas, he repeated one number after another at considerable length, as if he was using words. He evidently thought that he was clothing his ideas in the usual and proper manner, for he was surprised and indignant that his meaning was not comprehended. He continued thus speaking in numbers, never, however, in their numerical order, for several months. He was probably connected interiorly with some of those spiritual societies which speak and write in numbers.
There are books and libraries in heaven to which all the literary treasures upon earth are absolutely insignificant. It is pleasant to think that our most charming and ennobling pleasures here are to be continued and intensified hereafter. The sons and daughters of art will pursue their delightful vocations for ever. Every book ever written upon earth might be reproduced in the spiritual world from the imperishable memories of those who have read it. Few, if any, of them will attain this honor. Homer has continued to sing and Cicero to speak and Bacon to philosophize and Addison to write; but the works which gave them their terrestrial fame are but the scribblings of childhood in comparison with the labors of their spiritual life, which, will charm the ears and gladden the hearts of their angelic friends for ever.
In view of all these beautiful things, how silly and vain is the pride of learning, the pomp of philosophy and the pretensions of science, with which we strut our little hour on the dark stage of this earthly life!
The apparently gifted, wise and eloquent here are not always so hereafter. They are sometimes very stupid, and even imbecile. No wisdom remains with a man after death, except that which corresponds to sweet and heavenly affections flowing from the love of God and the neighbor. All else is evanescent; mere shadow and fantasy. The pure and humble are always wise and brilliant in the light of heaven. In that kingdom, the last in this world are frequently the first.