The kingdom of Heaven as seen by Swedenborg

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

Introduction i

I. SWEDENBORG A PROBLEM 7

Introduction

It is now some forty years since I began to study Swedenborg's theological works. Being naturally of a sceptical turn of mind, I had gradually discarded the evangelical theology in which I had been brought up ; and, in early manhood, I found myself an unwilling and, now and then, a despairing Agnostic. The universe seemed to me like a vast machine, grinding along its resistless and remorseless way to no end, or to none that man could discern, or, discerning, could either retard or accelerate ; he himself being but a tiny piece of that great mechanism, and helplessly carried along with it, while hugging to himself the illusion that he contributed to its movement.

The first serious shock to this conception came from reading two remarkable articles on Spiritualism, by the late Dr. A. R. Wallace, which were published in The Fortnightly Review in 1874. I began to " investigate " Spiritualism — I am afraid, in the usual slipshod and inconclusive way ; saw many curious and inexplicable things, but none more curious and inexplicable than many conjuring feats I had witnessed ; heard others — and that on good authority and at first hand — still more curious and inexplicable. But in Spiritualism I found no resting-place. Except as to its one fundamental assertion of the existence of an unseen

A world, the abode of men and women who had passed out of this world by death, it was a doctrinal chaos. It was Christian and anti-Christian, High Church, Broad Church, and no-Church. I found it was a road that led anywhere, and therefore nowhere to any purpose.

At this time I had a volume of Swedenborg's works, the True Christian Religion, on my shelves, the gift of a dear old friend, a life-long student of that author, but had never been able to read it. I had made several attempts, from a sense of obligation to the friend who gave it me, but a sentence or two had always been enough. I now made another attempt, and found to my surprise that I could read it with interest, though not by any means with acceptance of all or even the greater part of its teaching. The part of Swedenborg's teaching which most impressed me at this time was his doctrine of the human soul and of the future life. The soul is a spiritual body. It is the man himself. It is clothed with a material body during its first stage of existence, to enable it to live and act in a material world, fixed and stable, independent of its own states. It is so clothed because the material universe is the appointed Divine means for the creation of human beings, and their preparation for their eternal destinies. All angels in heaven, and all evil spirits in hell, have once been men living on this or some other earth. Death is nothing but the separation of the material envelope from the man, who survives it in the plenitude of his manhood. Thenceforward he lives in a world as real as the one he has left, but homogeneous with the spiritual body in which he now for the first time consciously exists. In that world he lives for ever, not by virtue of any power inherent in himself, but because

INTRODUCTION he is maintained in being by God, who creates and sustains from moment to moment all things that are, and because that Divine life will never cease to sustain him. u Here," I thought, " is at least something intelligible and credible." The difficulty was to see how the statements could be verified. What proof could be conceived firm and strong enough to sustain them?' I could see little evidence offered beyond this : ** I have seen. I know." Good — for you, Swedenborg 1 Perfect proof for you 1 But how for me i How are you going to translate your certainties into certainties for me f

I began to read the work entitled Heaven and Hell, from Things Heard and Seen. I found difficulties, obscurities, and, sometimes, what seemed like absurdities, in almost every page. Sometimes I was inclined to throw the book down and read no more. But the writer was obviously honest, and fully persuaded of the truth of his statements, and there was something in them that I could not easily account for as delusion, so I persevered.

I soon saw that, whatever might be the explanation of Swedenborg's experiences, he himself constituted a psychological problem of the first order ; for he asserts gravely, soberly, and evidently with complete conviction, that for the last twenty-eight years of his life he was in constant intercourse with that spiritual world, which, according to him, always surrounds us, but is normally unseen, because our physical eyes are not adapted to perceive it. It was not a case of an occasional " vision " or 44 trance," of which there are numerous instances in connection with persons of all forms of religious belief, Christian and non-Christian. Swedenborg states that his intercourse with the spiritual world took place in a state of complete wakefulness of the bodily senses. And in this intercourse he met with all the deceased people he had known during their earthly life, and great numbers with whom he was acquainted historically. He associated with them familiarly for various periods of time, sometimes for months, and was able to satisfy himself that they were the same persons that he had known before, whether personally or by the reading of history. These statements must be either true — I will not say in every detail, but in substance — or false. If false, they must be due to imposture or hallucination. Now, it is impossible for any candid, open-minded man to read Swedenborg's works with any attention and think him an impostor. His single-hearted determination to state the fact — however unpalatable — as he believed it to be ; his manifest self-forgetfulness and devotion to his work, stamp him an honest man in the eyes of all honest men.

Then, if his statements were in substance untrue, he must have been the victim of hallucinations. In other words, he must have been insane ; and even colossally insane — insane to a degree that no man who has preserved the outward appearance of sanity has ever been before. If Swedenborg was deceived as to the main fact of his intercourse with the unseen world ; if all his experiences of this kind were simply his own dreamings and musings thrown into apparent objectivity ; if the old acquaintances who had died and whom he thought he met again, and with whom he had friendly and long-continued intercourse, and the angels and spirits with whom he talked and the scenery he saw were simply the offspring of his own imagination, then he was mad, and that in a superlative degree.

This question of Swedenborg's complete sanity hung about my mind for many years, and only disappeared

INTRODUCTION from it with my full acceptance of his teaching. I doubt whether it will wholly vanish from any mind on any other terms.

Ever since I became firmly convinced of the truth of Swedenborg's teaching, it has been my desire to present it in the simplest possible form ; and this book is the result. It is not possible to make Swedenborg's doctrines quite easy to understand, for they require a reconstruction of our habitual modes of thought on almost every subject ; but they are in their main outlines simple when understood. It is in the displacement of our own preconceptions that the difficulty principally consists.

The aim of this work is to give a general idea of the main features of Swedenborg's teaching, so that a reader who wishes to go to the fountain-head for his information may have some outline of the system of thought propounded by him in his mind, into which he can fit the various particulars which he meets with in the course of his study. Swedenborg's works are often found difficult to understand because this kind of preparation has been neglected. The reader encounters unfamiliar conceptions and startling statements, which are as unintelligible to him as a single bone would be when detached from the skeleton of which it formed part.

The mental attitude of one who has fully made up his mind with regard to any system of religious doctrine is apt, I think, to be rather unattractive to one who is still entangled in the mazes of doubt, for whose use especially this work is designed. " Ah ! " he thinks, " this man has never felt my difficulties 1 It is all plain sailing to him," If this book has any value it arises from the fact that the difficulties with which it on deals are those through which the author himself had to fight his way during many years of study.

It is a good rule, though one not altogether easy to practise, in commencing the study of Swedenborg's works, not to trouble oneself much about the difficulties one encounters. They often vanish insensibly as one becomes better acquainted with the system, and especially as one becomes convinced of the reality of that spiritual world which Swedenborg describes and which is the necessary postulate of all his teaching. I have often wished that I had kept a record of the difficulties I met with when I first read Heaven and Hell, for I cannot now even remember what they were.

There is, in reality, I think, only one fundamental difficulty involved in Swedenborg's doctrine of the Spiritual World, and that is the difficulty of believing that the mind of man is itself a spiritual body. Matter appeals to our senses and dominates our thought so insistently that we are apt almost unconsciously to become possessed by the idea that it is the essential reality, and this, although we may repudiate materialism as a philosophical theory. Yet mind, and the world of mind, or spiritual world, must be pre-eminently real, for out of it come all the issues of life.

SWEDENBORG A PROBLEM 7

Chapter I Swedenborg A Problem

Emanuel Swedenborg was born in 1688, the third child and second son of Jesper Swedberg, Bishop of Skara in Sweden ; and died in 1772. During the first fifty-six years of his life he devoted himself, after his education was completed, to the duties of his office as assessor of the College of Mines, under Polhem, the famous Swedish engineer, and to the study of mathematics, mechanics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, anatomy, physiology, and psychology, traversing, indeed, the whole range of the science and philosophy of the time ; and this not as a mere student but as an active investigator and theorist.

Throughout this period of his life, devoted to theoretical and practical science and to philosophy, Swedenborg appears to have been a man of deep though unobtrusive religious conviction ; but he had given no special attention to theology, and, in the main, accepted the Lutheran theology which had been instilled into his mind during his childhood and youth. In the year 1744 commenced that open intercourse with the spiritual world which continued without interruption (except for a few days shortly before his death) during the rest of his life. Two years afterwards he resigned his appointment as assessor, and devoted himself wholly to that new office to which he believed he had been called.

The credibility of the statements he made on the basis of this spiritual experience must depend — since they cannot be verified by personal observation — on his own character and conduct, and on the nature of the statements themselves. It is with the first of these — the question of his competence and trustworthiness as a witness — that we have now to deal.

It is clear that if Swedenborg did not come into contact with a real world external to himself and with real people there, and yet had the firmest conviction that he did, he must have been the victim of delusions so sustained and consistent as to constitute a psychological marvel unprecedented in history. This is not a case of occasional apparitions, but of a consistent dual life lived during more than a quarter of a century. Nor was the observer a hysterical or excitable person, but a singularly composed, sedate thinker and investigator of mature years, who carried his habits of careful and methodical research into this strange and unforeseen sphere of labour. The theory of delusion requires us to believe that hallucinations of the most convincing and consistent kind can exist continuously during twenty-eight years in a mind to all appearance calm, logical and systematic. But that is only a part of the problem.

When a man's fancy takes the bit in its teeth and persuades him that its fashionings are objective realities, it may be expected to lead him a pretty dance. Having absolutely nothing to check it, where need it stop < Can unbridled imagination be content to tread the same round, to make the same report as to essential facts, for twenty-eight years < In Swedenborg's experience it may be said there is no trace whatever of inconsistency or variation. Development there was in his insight into and appreciation of his experiences, but as to the facts themselves, his statements from first to last are identical.

SWEDENBORG A PROBLEM

Moreover, these statements are found to embody a philosophy of creation, and man as part of creation, which is the most comprehensive, coherent and harmonious that has ever been given to the world. If Swedenborg had put forward his teachings as theories instead of stating them as facts, I do not doubt that they would have been ranked as one of the most ingenious attempts to deal with those profound problems which from age to age occupy the human mind that has ever been promulgated. Can insight, rationality, order, harmony be evolved from hallucination t

Of course, if Swedenborg's statement that he was in constant intercourse with the denizens of the spiritual world is taken as incontestable proof that he was the subject of hallucinations, inquiry on the subject is barred. But is such an attitude of mind reasonable i It is obviously based on the tacit assumption that there is no spiritual world into which men pass at death. Because, if there were, being a real world and full of real people, it must be cognisable by senses appropriate to its phenomena ; and no one can prove that man does not possess, latent in him during his earthly life, the faculties which will enable him hereafter to sensate that world, nor that those faculties could not possibly become active while he was still living on earth. That Swedenborg's intromission into conscious intercourse with the spiritual world was unprecedented, and resulted in disclosures which, if true, must profoundly modify many of the beliefs current in the Christian world, has no weight as an objection ; for our progress in the knowledge of natural things has by no means taken place along anticipated lines. If our ancestors of even a hundred years ago had been told of the telegraph, the telephone, the photograph, the phonograph, electric lighting and traction, wireless telegraphy, liquid air, radio-activity, and other wonders of modern science, would it not have seemed to them like an incredible fairy tale < Why should we assume that the knowledge of supernatural things, if such things there be, may not surpass and even falsify expectation as much as the great modern developments of natural science have done i We have no means of deciding a priori what is possible and what is not. Every fact is its own proof, and the only evidence of it available or conceivable, outside the range of strict logical deduction, is that of one who knows. We ought, therefore, to be careful not to reject the evidence of a competent witness who states facts within his own experience because they do not accord with our preconceived ideas. The world is too wonderful and too full of unexpected things to permit a thoughtful man to say to fact, " Thus far shalt thou come and no farther."

Swedenborg's conduct with regard to his own abnormal experiences was not at all what we should expect from a man of disordered mind. The enthusiast who believes himself the recipient of a revelation is apt to make his revelation suffice for itself. Swedenborg always asserted that his spiritual experiences were a subordinate though indispensable part of the mission to which he had been called. That mission was to expound the true literal import and to unfold the inner or spiritual meaning of the Word of God. For this end it was necessary that he should be brought into open intercourse with the spiritual world ; see that the Word is there too, in a spiritual form adapted to the state of those who read it ; see that the spiritual substances of which that world consists present to the

SWEDENBORG A PROBLEM n

senses of spiritual beings the same appearances as are seen in a material embodiment on earth, and are causally connected with these — because this is the main basis upon which it is possible to found a definite spiritual exegesis on the letter of the Word.

One would anticipate that a man whose mind was so far unhinged as to mistake its own musings and imaginings for external objects would hasten to proclaim the new and supernatural knowledge he thought he had acquired. But Swedenborg showed no such haste. After the opening of his spiritual senses in 1744 he began to study Hebrew, so that he might be able to read the Old Testament Scriptures in the original. He then set himself to read the Word from beginning to end, many times over, minutely comparing passage with passage, and word with word. It was only after spending two or three years in these preliminary studies that he began to write his first great expository work, Arcana Ccelestia, published in 1749.

Swedenborg never showed a trace of the sense of personal importance which is so characteristic of the enthusiast. He showed no disposition to form a sect. He published his works in Latin, and contented himself with distributing them freely wherever he thought them likely to be useful. He did not even put his name to any of them until four years before his death. His life after his spiritual experiences commenced was passed as it had been before, in the most assiduous work. Though, owing to his incessant labours, he was much of a recluse, in social life he was by universal consent a polished gentleman, accessible, genial, joining freely in conversation on all subjects ; never obtruding his theological convictions or peculiar experiences ; but always ready to talk freely about them to any one who would approach them in a serious spirit, and able to silence with dignity any one who did not.

In fact, Swedenborg displayed none of the characteristics which he ought to have displayed, if he was the victim of such profound delusion as the hallucination theory supposes. Sobriety, dignity, consistency, industry, clear perception, method, marked all he said and did. There are in him, in short, all the indications of a well-balanced mind. There is absolutely nothing to be alleged against his competence as a witness but this : " He said he conversed with the dead, therefore he must have suffered from hallucinations ! " With such a prejudice it is impossible to reason. It cuts itself off from disproof. It is a mere begging of the question.

THI SPIRITUAL WORLD

Chapter II The Spiritual World In General

The Spiritual World includes three great divisions, Heaven, Hell, and an intermediate region which Swedenborg called " the World of Spirits." In the last man lives, as an unconscious denizen of the spiritual world, during his life on earth ; and in this he awakes, after the brief period of unconsciousness which usually accompanies physical death. There are innumerable subdivisions of each of these great primary divisions, but with them we need not now concern ourselves. The central fact of them all is that they are essentially states of the individual and collective human mind ; Heaven being constituted by a confirmed love of good and of the truths which support, enlighten, and direct it ; Hell, by a confirmed love of self, and of the falsities by which it is supported and justified. The World of Spirits is a state in which influences both from Heaven and Hell meet in the same mind ; where, during man's life on earth, his choice is made between them, and after death the results of that choice are fully disclosed.

Swedenborg 's statements about the spiritual world often raise in the same mind two difficulties of an opposite kind. On the one hand, life in that world, as described by him, is so like life in this, that his teaching seems to reduce the vague, emotional ideas which most people who believe in a future life form, by methods of which they are but dimly conscious, to something like commonplace. And on the other hand, the fundamental facts of that world seem so remote from human experience that it is difficult to conceive of a real, stable and vivid human existence subject to such conditions. Whether there be any substance in these difficulties remains to be seen. They at least afford a convenient line of exposition ; and I will, therefore, state briefly in what respects life in the spiritual world, as depicted by Swedenborg, resembles Life in this world, and in what respects it differs.

They are alike in these respects. When the separation of a man from his physical body is completed, which is usually on the third day after his decease, he finds himself, so far as his senses inform him, exactly what he was before, except that the material world and all that it contains have absolutely disappeared from his consciousness. Every bodily and mental faculty is perfect. His heart beats, his lungs respire, he eats, drinks, and sleeps, he mingles in society, converses with others, and amuses himself according to his tastes. He reads, studies and works according to his aptitudes and the habits he has formed. A man is a man, a woman a woman, and a child a child still. He finds himself in a world the scenery and surroundings of which closely resemble those of the world he has left. There are hills and valleys, streams, lakes, seas, animals, plants, houses and cities, and people living in them. In a word, he is surrounded by objects such as he was familiar with during his life on earth. There is no apparent difference whatever. Swedenborg, indeed, repeatedly states that the similarity of the other world to this, in all its outward aspects, is so complete, that a man does not know, unless he reflects on the subject, that he is not still living in his physical body and in a material world. Here, however, in the external appear-

THE SPIRITUAL WORLD 15 ances of things, the similarity ends. The dissimilarity is great, and not so easily described.

Though the objects of that world appear to be separated by spaces, like the objects of the natural world, the spaces are of an entirely different order. The objects sensated there are spiritual objects, though presented under appearances like those of natural objects, and the spaces in which they are seen are spiritual spaces. They are not fixed as material spaces are, because there is no matter or physical sensation there to constitute such fixity. The objects which are sensated by spiritual beings are states of their own minds and of the minds of others with whom they are in more or less close and permanent relations ; that is, the objects of the spiritual world, regarded as a whole, are all the infinite varieties of goodness and truth, and of the perversions of these, which are the substances and forms that constitute it. In other words, angels and spirits sensate spiritual qualities as objective forms ; their sensory state being just the contrary of that of men in the world, who sensate material objects, while spiritual qualities outside their own minds are not sensibly existent to them, except so far as they learn to discern them through the veil of matter.

The conception of the spiritual world as being divested of fixed or limited space, and consequently of definitely measurable time (for all the measures of time depend on the motions of matter in space), is fundamental in Swedenborg's teaching. Unless we can bring ourselves to believe, that at least there may be a real world which is not in space and time such as we know in this world, it is impossible to believe in or even to conceive the nature of his experiences. The conception will, I imagine, present little difficulty to a mind that is somewhat versed in psychology, provided its knowledge is derived from direct inspection of the processes of mind and not merely from text-books.

The spiritual world, considered as an object of sensation, is created by God through the minds of angels and spirits and in correspondence with their states, individual and collective. That world is real because it is His creation, and because it bodies forth the supreme realities of human existence, which are spiritual. The difference between the state of consciousness of angels and good spirits (or those who are becoming angels) and our own is, that whereas we apprehend objects as external to and independent of ourselves, and see little in them that is germane to our spiritual states, their consciousness is primarily fixed on the states of mind out of which the sensible objects are generated and which they embody and depict. And this bent of their minds does not mean, as might be imagined, an everlasting concentration of their consciousness on themselves, but the precise opposite of this. For they know that they receive all the things which constitute Heaven within them and around them as free gifts out of the abundance of the Divine love and mercy, and they love to have it so. It is not, therefore, self that they see when they look within and around them, but something from the Source of all unselfish good, who has moulded them into and keeps them in some resemblance, however remote and imperfect, to Himself.

I am aware how exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, it is for the mind in certain states to grasp the idea of a world devoid of fixed spatial conditions with any confidence. For we instinctively, almost unconsciously, assume that the external world exists, exactly as our sensations reveal it to us, by a self-sustaining power ; in

THE SPIRITUAL WORLD 17 a word, that its existence is extra-mental. How little justification there is for this assumption every student of philosophy is aware. There is no harm, however, in thinking that the things we sensate are exactly like our sensations. That is how we are meant to think for the purposes of our work in the world. It is only when we begin to reason adversely to the Divine from these sense impressions that they become dangerous, and may become fatal ; for they may lead to a practical, if not theoretical, atheism. Beware, then, lest you permit the conception of the external world as existing independently of mind, to dominate your ideas of God and Divine things. Perhaps enough has been said to show that there may be weight in Swedenborg's warning, " Do not, I beseech you, mingle your thoughts about spiritual things with time and space ; for to the degree that time and space are in your thoughts you will not understand them."

Let me beg those to whom such an idea may seem difficult to grasp, to put this question seriously and reverently to themselves, " Ought we to think of God as existing in space and time i " If the answer is ** Yes," one or other of two consequences, both disastrous to clear spiritual thought, will ensue. Either we must conceive of God as a Person located in some spatially measurable portion of His universe ; that is, as being in reality neither infinite nor omnipresent ; or if, shrinking from this, we try to preserve the idea of His omnipresence, it will be difficult to avoid confounding His immanence with some undefined inmost principle of nature. But if the answer is " No " — and this is the doctrinal position of the whole Christian world — if the supreme Source of all being, reality and power is not in space and time, why may there not be worlds of real and orderly being, created and sustained by Him, which also are not in space and time i

If the reality of a non-spatial spiritual world be granted, and that man, as a spiritual being, lives in it, even during his life on earth, Swedenborg's experiences become at once intelligible and even simple. The only condition needed to qualify him to undergo those experiences was, that those faculties which normally remain quiescent till after the death of the earthly body should be quickened into activity during his life on earth, so that he might not only have open, sensible experience of the spiritual world, but be able to make it known by the press. The progressions of that world are as real as those of this ; but they are mental, not physical progressions. A man's spiritual journeys consist in all those states of other minds with which he is brought into more or less sympathetic, or, it may be, antipathetic relations. As Tennyson finely says :