The secret of Swedenborg: ...

Front matter

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Introduction

Creation the fundamental problem of philosophy. — Difficulties of the problem. — Kant's attempt to reconcile them. — A supernatural creation, that is, a creation which does not conform to the order and methods of nature, inconceivable. — The moral hypothesis of creation untenable. — Morality not a creative end, but only a creative means. — Swedenborg and Hegel contrasted. — Swedenborg's analysis of consciousness, establisning the superiority of its objective to its subjective element, and giving the key to the philosophy of creation, in his doctrine of the lord, or maximus homo. 1-11

Chapter I

Swedenborg's private history and intellectual character. — His biography, by William White. — His doctrine of the lord, or divine natural humanity, briefly stated 11-15

Chapter II

Creation, according to Swedenborg, is a composite, not a simple, movement, being bound to provide the creature with subjective or conscious existence no less than objective or unconscious being. — The truth of creation wholly contingent upon the truth of the creature's identity. — Our subjective existence, or constitutional identity, just as indispensable to our objective individuality, or the being we have in God, as the marble is to the statue, or the mother to the child. — Creation is practically a formative or redemptive process, exhibiting such a sheer immersion and obscuration of creative substance in created form as will insure the eventual transfiguration of that form with all divine perfection. How shall creation ever be seen to justify this pretension 1 — Here it is that what Swedenborg calls the opening of his spiritual sight, and his consequent discovery of the internal sense of the Scriptures, makes itself available. — The literal sense of Scripture alone is doctrinal. — The spiritual sense is not another literal or doctrinal, but a living or spiritual sense, having no relation to time, space, or person, and incapable, therefore, of being learned by rote, or being ritually administered 15-19

Chapter III

It is, therefore, idle to conceive of the new or living church as a new ecclesiasticism, in antagonism with those already existing. — The new

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church is hased upon the truth of the divine natural humanity, and hence has no recognition of a deity outside of the conditions of human nature. — The incarnation is a domestication of the divine perfection in human nature, and through that in animal, vegetable, and mineral. — Swedenborg illustrates this truth rather than argues it. — Distinction between living and dead truth, or truths of conscience which belong to the life, and truths of science which belong to the memory. — Swedenborg's doctrine of nature — Nature exists only to sense, and has no rational reality. — Thus it is a purely phenomenal or apparitional world, although in the infancy of our intelligence we suppose it to be the only reality, and are incapable of lifting our thought above it. — We suppose creation accordingly to be a physical achievement of God, — a magical exhibition of his power in space and time, whereas it is a wholly spiritual operation in the sphere of human affection and thought. — Philosophy demands consequently that we allow nature only a subjective force, or regard it as strict involution of the human mind. . . . 20-25

Chapter IV

The same subject continued and illustrated. — Swedenborg's vindication of nature and the part it plays in creation. — The divine love and wisdom cannot but be and exist in other beings or existences created from itself; and nature is the logical background of such existences, as giving them self-consciousness. — Remarkable definition of love. — Consists in one's willing what is one's own to be another's, and feeling another's delight as one's own. — Other quotations from Swedenborg. — If love be of this essentially unselfish quality, the creative love must be infinitely pure; binding the creator to make himself over without stint to the creature, or to allow the latter to effloresce in all his native selfishness and worldliness, to the utmost limit compatible with his eventual spiritual reaction towards the creator. — Creation is the practical immersion consequently of creative perfection in created imperfection, so that the more the creator alone is, the more the creature alone appears. Hence the origin of nature. It expresses the obligation the creature is under to appropriate the creator, or to make him his own. It is the nuptial couch of creator and creature ; the marriage ring that consecrates the espousals of infinite and finite. Thus its virtue is purely ceremonial, shadowy, reflective, as giving the creature — not being — but self-consciousness, or such an appearance of being as may eventually induct him into the acquaintance of being itself. 25-31

Chapter V

A closer exposition of Swedenborg's doctrine of creation. — The law of the creature's subjective constitution. — Nature the realm neither of being nor of not being, but of existence, and hence the tertium quid of which philosophy has always been in search to reconcile God and man. It is not the spiritual creation itself, but the shadow of it projected upon a finite intelligence. — Our intelligence conditioned upon nature. — Swedenborg makes nature a theatre of revelation exclusively, and denies it any other worth. 31-37

CONTENTS.

CHAPTEE VI.

Swedenborg not properly chargeable with pantheistic or idealist tendencies ; being separated from them by his doctrine of creation, which makes nature no being but only a seeming, no substance but only a shadow. 38-40

Chapter VII

The nature of selfhood or proprium. — What is meant by man being said to be created male and female. — What it is to be an image of God. — It is to be an inverse or negative representation of the divine perfection. 40 - 47

Chapter VIII

■ Creator and creature subjectively opposed, the one possessing all fulness in himself, the other being destitute of everything. — To give natural form or selfhood to the creature is to vivify the infinite void he is in himself, or render him conscious of it. — Our natural creation, then, without our subsequent spiritual redemption, would be a great blemish upon the divine name. — The male and female man, the homo and the vir, constitute the machinery of that redemption, — the one representing the universal or created element, the other the individual or creative one, and their marriage constituting human society or fellowship, in which the redemption of our nature is complete. — The mistakes of philosophy in this direction. — The angel would gladly be without selfhood if he could. . . 47-51

Chapter IX

Why the creative love wears of necessity an aspect of crucifixion to our regard. Because we, being created existences, are forms of self-love, and self-love can only recognize pure love under a form of opposition to itself, that is, when it appears to deny self, instead of favor it. — Nature a descending life of God in man, history an ascending one. They are both alike mere portals of the spiritual world, nature reflecting to our spiritual or cultivated intelligence that inward absorption of infinite in finite which is necessary to the finite becoming outwardly clad with infinite lustre. Hence the antagonism in human nature of the public and private life, the reconciliation of these things constituting our redemption, or social destiny. 51-57

Chapter X

History resolves itself into the existence of the church on earth, which means a divine purgation of human nature. — Self-love and the love of the world religiously consecrated ab initio, because out of them as an earth will eventually spring the loves of goodness and truth which unite man spiritually with God. — God never quarrels with his creature for his moral defects, but accepts them cordially as the needful purchase of his spiritual mercy. — His love or mercy is the salvation of the whole human race from spiritual poverty, and he has no quarrel with any but the reputed rich or righteous, who claim his mercy to themselves. — Thus heaven and hell are conditioned upon a church on earth, which, outwardly professing xu CONTENTS.

to love God and the neighbor, inwardly loves self and the world. — The devil is the man in whom ritual religion, or the church-consciousness, is at its highest; the angel is the man in whom it is at its lowest. — Does Swedenborg report an absolute contrariety between heaven and hell, or a contingent one ? Citation of passages from Swedenborg bearing upon this topic 57-64

Chapter XI

Heaven and hell, as contrasted issues of human destiny, totally unintelligible, if nature is regarded as the sphere of being or substance, and not exclusively as that of appearance or shadow. — Swedenborg utterly rejects it as having any ontological bearing, and restricts all its issues, therefore, celestial and infernal alike, to a servile revelation of the truth, hitherto discredited, or rather unsuspected, of God's natural humanity. — The necessity of revelation fundamental to creation. — What does revelation mean? Differs from information. — An unrevealed God is practically no God. — No direct or immediate knowledge of God practicable to us, save upon the basis of a previous mediate one. This truth demonstrated from the limitations of knowledge. 64-71

Chapter XII

Method of the divine revelation very gradual, beginning with the family, and ending with the social, unity of man ; a temporary or provisional form of it being supplied by the conventional society called the church. — The church, as a visible or ritual economy, has never had any real but only a representative worth ; and at the present time is sadly behind "the world" in spiritual intelligence. But it has had an inestimable use in keeping alive men's conscience of unrest towards God, and so preparing the way for his consummate achievement in our nature, which is the evolution of the social sentiment. — Swedenborg's conception of the technical church. Has no quarrel with the persons composing it, but only with its unrighteous animus 71-79

CHAPTER XHI.

The purely negative office of the church in history illustrated and argued,

from reason and scripture 79-85

Chapter XIV

Nature and history of no account in themselves, or on independent grounds, but only as furnishing a theatre for God's revelation of himself in humanity. — Swedenborg's intellectual advantage here over the ordinary religionist and scientific rationalist. 85-90

Chapter XV

Philosophy of the religious instinct. — The religious life — where it is not a mere ritual luxury — is a sincere effort of the worshipper to reconcile the divine holiness to his selfishness and worldliness, and hence is fertile only

CONTENTS. Xlll

in anguish of conscience ; because the divine purpose is to exhaust selfishness and worldliness as factors of human nature, by endowing man with an exclusively social and aesthetic or productive consciousness. — The moral instinct. — Morality the badge of human nature, or what man has only in common with others, and not in distinction from them. — Opposed, therefore, to spirituality, because the individual element in it is in bondage to the universal element. — Our natural regeneration contingent upon the marriage of these two elements, whereby the former becomes exalted to the first place, and the latter deposed. — Sifting function of the church. — Heaven and hell ; their subjective antagonism, and objective harmony, in the divine natural humanity 90-99

Chapter XVI

Transition from the ritual to the real church. How effected. Elements of the problem. Swedenborg's solution of it. — Utterly irreconcilable opposition otherwise between science and faith. — Illustrations. . 100 - 105

Chapter XVII

Bearing of Swedenborg's disclosures upon our existing controversies. All these controversies proceed upon the tacit assumption of nature's absoluteness, while Swedenborg makes it a strict involution of man. — Man, or moral existence, the culmination of nature. — Moral differences between men accordingly do not argue any corresponding spiritual differences. — Morality distinguishes man from the brute, and identifies him with his fellow. — What dignity it confers consequently does not accrue to the individual subject of it, but to his nature. — It is intended to base the sentiment of fellowship or Mnd-ness among men, and so promote the social destiny of the race. — This sentiment of kind-ness unknown to the animal. — Our social destiny, or the marriage of the divine and human natures, hinges upon the universal element in existence becoming secondary and subservient to the individual element. 105-111

Chapter XVIII

No miracle possible on Swedenborg's principles, provided miracle involves a violation of the laws of nature. — Our ignorance of natural law the only reason for that imagination. — Christ's nativity. — The creative law explained and enforced. — The visible universe not the true or spiritual creation, but only a lively image or correspondence of it to a sensibly organized intelligence. — Swedenborg's practical attitude towards our existing controversies. — They, both sides alike, make nature a divine terminus ; Swedenborg makes it a mere starting-point of the creative energy. . 111-120

Chapter XIX

Fundamental discrepancy between Messrs. Mansel and Mill, for example, on the one hand, and Swedenborg on the other. One party supposes nature to be a substantive work of God achieved in space and time, and being, therefore, its own raison d'etre ; the other regards it as a mere phenomenal

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manifestation, or correspondence to sense, of a spiritual work of God transacting in the realm of mind. — Nature to Swedenborg has no ontological significance. — Creation a marriage-tie between creator and creature 120-127

Chapter XX

Further exposition of Swedenborg's doctrine of nature. — Creation subservient to redemption. — The church the symbol of this subserviency. — The church utterly unintelligent as to its own nature and offices. Has always identified itself with man's selfishness and covetousness, and, by obstinately claiming a divine sanction to these things, awakens at length a spiritual reaction towards God in the secular bosom, which is tantamount to our natural regeneration. 127 - 135

Chapter XXI

The homo and the vir. The one unconscious, the other conscious. God creates the homo, and begets the vir. — Exposition of consciousness. — The vir, or moral man, divinely begotten of the homo, or physical man. — The moral world involves the physical, and is evolved by it, as form is evolved by substance. — The generic or identical element in all existence phenomenal or fallacious, the specific or individual element real. — The method of extrication of the vir from the homo 1.35 - 142

Chapter XXII

The logical situation out of which the preceding question proceeds. — The sphere of God's creative action, strictly speaking, is identical with the physical realm. — He creates the homo alone, but he begets the vir. — Adam impotent and imbecile until vivified by Eve. — How does the vir or moral man become born of the homo or physical man 1 Through the instrumentality of conscience. — Conscience is the spirit of God in the created nature, seeking to become the creature's own spirit. — Exposition of conscience 142-157

Chapter XXIII

Further exposition of conscience. It masks the actual divine presence itself in human nature. It is a foe to our moral or infinite righteousness, being intended to superinduce a spiritual or infinite one upon us. — The social bearings of conscience. It derives all its force from the fact that my spiritual relation to God involves, incidentally to itself, my relation to my own kind or nature; and this latter relation must be adjusted before the former avouches itself satisfied 157-169

Chapter XXIV

The author's intellectual experience before and after his acquaintance with Swedenborg. — Conflict between letter and spirit. — The deistic and revealed notion of God. * 170-

CONTENTS.

Chapter XXV

Superiority of the objective to the subjective element in existence. The former qualitative, the latter quantitative. Fallacies popularly entertained on this subject. — Creation inconceivable on any other hypothesis. — Creator and creature strictly correlated existences. — Creation impossible, consequently, unless such a practical equation of the two take place, as that the higher nature merge itself in the lower. . . . 180-:

Chapter XXVI

The sole philosophic function of nature to furnish a logical background or basis to the mind in its approaches towards God. — Swedenborg vacates the entire ontologic problem by insisting upon the literal veracity of creation. — Man alone is by God, and nature is a mere implication of man ; a mere shadow or reflection of the infinite and eternal being he alone has in God. — Conclusion. — Application of the principles established in the essay to idealism 191 — :

Appendix

Notes A to H 207-238

THE SECRET OF SWEDENBORG.

The fundamental problem of Philosophy is the problem of creation. Does our existence really infer a divine and infinite being, or does it not ? This question addresses itself to us now with special emphasis, inasmuch as speculative minds are beginning zealously to inquire whether creation can really be admitted any longer, save in an accommodated sense of the word ; whether men of simple faith have not gone too far in professing to see a hand of power in the universe absolutely distinct from the universe itself. That being can admit either of increase or diminution is philosophically inconceivable, and affronts moreover the truth of the creative infinitude. For if God be infinite, as we necessarily hold him to be in deference to our own finiteness, what shall add to, or take from, the sum of his being ? It is indeed obvious that God cannot create or give being to what has being in itself, for this would be contradictory. He can create only what is devoid of being in itself : this is manifest. And yet what is void of being in itself can at best only appear to be. It can be no real, but only a phenomenal existence. Thus the problem of creation is seen to engender many speculative doubts. How reconcile the antagonism of real and phenomenal, of absolute and contingent, of which the problem is so full ? By the hypothesis of creation, the creature derives all he is from the creator. But the creature is essentially not the creator, is above all things himself a created being, and therefore the utter and exact opposite of the creator. How then shall the infinite creator give his finite creature projection, endow him with veritable selfhood or identity, and yet experience no compromise of his own individuality ? Suffice it to say that what has hitherto called itself Philosophy has had so little power fairly to confront these difficulties, let alone solve them, as to have set Kant upon the

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notion of placating them afresh by the old recipe of Idealism ; that is, by the invention of another or noumenal world, the world of " things-in-themselves." No doubt this was a new pusillanimity on the part of Philosophy, but what better could the philosopher do ? He saw plainly enough that things were phenomenal ; but as he did not see that this infirmity attached to them wholly on their subjective or constitutional side, while on their objective or creative side they were infinite and absolute, he was bound to lapse into mere idealism or scepticism, unrelieved by aught but the dream of a noumenal background.

We may smile if we please at the superstitious shifts to which Kant's philosophic scepticism reduced him ; but after all, Kant was only the legitimate flower of all the inherited culture of the world, the helpless logical outcome of bewildered ages of philosophy. Philosophy herself had never discriminated the objective or absolute and creative element in knowledge from its subjective or merely contingent and constitutional element. And when Kant essayed to make the discrimination, what wonder that he only succeeded in more hopelessly confounding the two, and so adjourning once more the hope of Philosophy to an indefinite future ? But Kant's failure to vindicate the philosophic truth of creation has only exasperated the intellectual discontent of the world with the cosmological data supplied by the old theologies. Everywhere men of far more tender and reverential make even than Kant are being driven to freshness of thought ; and thought, though a remorseless solvent, has no reconstructive power over truth. Men's opinions are being silently modified in fact, whether they will or not. The crudities, the extravagances, the contradictions of the old cosmology, now no longer amiable and innocent, but aggressive and overbearing, are compelling inquiry into new channels, are making it no longer possible that the notions which satisfied the fathers shall continue to satisfy the children. A distinctly supernatural creation, once so fondly urged upon our faith, is quite unintelligible to modern culture, because it violates experience or contradicts our observation of nature. Everything we observe in nature implies to our understanding a common or identical substance, being itself a particular or individual form of such substance. If then the objective form of things were an outward or supernatural communication to them, it would no longer be their own form, inasmuch as it would lack all subjective root, all natural basis, and confess itself an imposition. Thus, on the hypothesis of a supernatural creation, every natural object would disclaim a natural genesis ; and nature, consequently, as denoting the universal or subjective element in existence, would disappear with the disappearance of her proper forms.

Now if nature, in her most generic or universal mood, return us at best a discouraging answer to the old problem of creation, what answer does she yield in her most specific — which is the human or moral — form ? A still more discouraging one even ! In fact, the true motive of the intellectual hostility now formulating to the traditional notion of creation, as an instantaneous or magical exhibition of the divine power, as an arbitrary or irrational procedure of the divine wisdom — by which the universal or substantial element in existence is made, by a summary outward fiat, to involve its higher or individual and formal element — is supplied by our moral consciousness, by the irresistible conviction we feel of our personal identity. That moral or personal existence should be outwardly generated, should be created in the sense of having being communicated to it supernaturally, contradicts consciousness. For moral or personal existence is purely conscious or subjective existence, and consciousness or subjectivity is a strictly natural style of existence, and hence disowns all supernatural interference as impertinent. It is preposterous to allege that my consciousness or subjectivity involves any other person than myself, since this would vitiate my personal identity, and hence defeat my possible spiritual individuality or character. If, being what I am conscious of being, namely, a moral or personal existence invested with self-control or the rational ownership of my actions, I yet am not so naturally or of myself, but by some supernatural or foreign intervention, then obviously I am simply what such intervention determines me to be, and my feeling of selfhood or freedom is grossly illusory. Thus morality, which is the assertion of a selfhood in man commensurate with all the demands of nature and society upon him, turns out, if too rigidly insisted on — if maintained as a divine finality, or as having not merely a constitutional, but a creative truth, not merely a subjective or phenomenal, but also an objective or real validity — to be essentially atheistic, and drives those who are loyal rather to the inward spirit than the outward letter of revelation to repugn the old maxims of a supernatural creation and providence as furnishing any longer a satisfactory theorem of existence.

Faith must reconcile herself to this perilous alternative, if she obstinately persist in making our natural morality supernatural by allowing it a truth irrespective of consciousness, or assigning it any objectivity beyond the evolution of human society or fellowship. It is not its own end, but a strict means to a higher or spiritual evolution of life in our nature ; and they accordingly who persist in ignoring this truth must expect to fall intellectually behind the time in which they live. Some concession here is absolutely necessary to save the religious instinct. For men feel a growing obligation to co-ordinate the demands of freedom or personality with the limitations of science ; and since Kant's remorseless criticism stops them off — under penalty of accepting his impracticable noumenal world — from postulating any longer an objective being answering to their subjective seeming, they must needs with his successors give the whole question of creation the go-by, in quietly resolving the minor element of the equation into the major, man into God, or making the finite a mere transient experience of the infinite, by means of which that great unconsciousness attains to selfhood. For this is the sum of the Hegelian dialectic, to confound existence with being, or make identity no longer serve individuality, but absorb or swallow it up : so bringing back creation to intellectual chaos, which is naught.

I myself, in common w T ith most men doubtless, feel an instinctive repugnance to these insane logical results ; but instinct is not intelligence, and sophistry can be combated only by intelligence. Now, to my mind, nothing so effectually arms the intellect against error, whether it be the error of the sceptic or the error of the fanatic, whether it reflect our prevalent religious cant or our almost equally prevalent scientific cant, as a due acquaintance and familiarity with the ontological principles of Swedenborg. Emanuel Swedenborg, I need not say, is by no means as yet " a name to conjure with " in polite circles, and, for aught I opine, may never become one. Nevertheless nu-

THE SECRET OF SWEDENBORG. O

merous independent students are to be found, who, having been long hopeless of getting to the bottom of our endless controversies, confess that their intellectual doubts have at last been dispersed by the sunshine of his ontology. It would be small praise of Swedenborg to say that he does not, like Hegel, benumb our spiritual instincts, or drown them out in a flood of vainglorious intoxication brought about by an absurd exaltation of the subjective element in life above the objective one. This praise no doubt is true, but much more is true ; and that is, that he enlightens the religious conscience, and so gives the intellect a repose which it has lacked throughout history — a repose as natural and therefore as sane and sweet as the sleep of infancy. Admire Hegel's legerdemain as much as you will, his ability to make light darkness and darkness light in all the field of man's relations to God ; but remember also that it is characteristic of the highest truth to be accessible to common minds, and inaccessible only to ambitious ones. Tried by this test, the difference between the two writers is incomparably in favor of Swedenborg. For example what a complete darkening of our intellectual optics is operated by Hegel's fundamental postulate of the identity of object and subject, being and thought. " Thought and being are identical." Such indeed is the necessary logic of idealism. Now doubtless our faculty of abstract thought is chief among our intellectual faculties ; but when it is seriously proposed to build the universe of existence upon a logical abstraction, one must needs draw a very long breath. For thought by itself affords a most inadequate basis even to our own conscious activity ; and when, therefore, our unconscious being is in question, it confesses itself a simply ludicrous hypothesis.

But in reality Hegel, in spite of his extreme pretension in that line, never once got within point-blank range of the true problem of ontology ; and this because he habitually confounded being with existence, spirit with nature. By being he never meant being, but always existence, the existence we are conscious of; so that when he would grasp the infinite, he fancied he had only to resort to the cheap expedient of eliminating the finite. It is precisely as if a man should say : " All I need in order to procure myself an intuitive knowledge of my own visage, is not to look at its reflection in the looking-glass."

Think the finite away, said Hegel, and the infinite is left on your hands. Yes, provided the infinite is never a positive quantity, but only and at most a thought-negation of its own previously thought-negation. But really, if the infinite be this mere negation of its own negation, that is, if being turns out to be identical with nothing, with the absence of mere tiring, then I must say, in the first place, that I do not see why any sane person should covet its acquaintance. Being which has been so utterly compromised, and indeed annihilated, by its own phenomenal forms, as to be able to reappear only by their disappearance, is scarcely the being which unsophisticated men will ever be persuaded to deem infinite or creative. But then I must also say, in the second place, let it be true, as Hegel alleges, that being is identical with the absence of thing, that is, with nothing, I still am at an litter loss to understand how that leaves it identical with pure thought. I need not deny that I hold thing and thought to be by any means identical ; but I am free to maintain nevertheless that if you actually abstract things from thought, you simply render thought itself exanimate. For thought has no vehicle or body but language, and language owes all its soul or inspiration to things. Abstract things then, and neither thought nor language actually survives. You might as well expect the body to survive its soul.

But in truth this metaphysic chatter is the mere wantonness of sense. The infinite is so far from being negative of the finite, that it is essentially creative — and hence exclusively affirmative — of it. The finite indeed is only that inevitable diffraction of itself which the infinite undergoes in the medium or mirror of our sensuous thought, in order so to adapt itself to our dim intelligence. It is accordingly no less absurd for us to postulate a disembodied or unrevealed infinite — an infinite unrobed or unrepresented by the finite — than it would be to demand a father unavouched by a child. The infinite is the sole reality which underlies all finite appearance, and in that tender unobtrusive way makes itself conceivable to our obtuse thought. Should we get any nearer this reality by spurning the gracious investiture through which alone it becomes appreciable to us ? Is a man's intelligence of nature improved, on the whole, by putting out his eyes ? If, then, the infinite reveals itself to our nascent understanding only by the finite — i. e. by what we already sensibly know — how much nearer should we come to its knowledge by rejecting such revelation ? We who are not infinite cannot know it absolutely or in itself, but only as it veils or abates its splendor to the capacity of our tender vision, — only as it reproduces itself within our finite lineaments. In a word, our knowledge of it is no way intuitive, but exclusively empirical. Would our chances of realizing such knowledge be advanced, then, by following Hegel's counsel, and disowning that apparatus of finite experience by which alone it becomes mirrored to our intelligence ? In other words, suppose a man desirous to know what manner of man he is : were it better for him, in that case, to proceed by incontinently smashing his,looking-glass, or by devoutly pondering its revelations ? The question answers itself. The glass may be by no means achromatic ; it may return indeed a most refractory reply to the man's interrogatory ; but nevertheless it is his only method of actually compassing the information he covets, and in the estimation of all wise men he will stamp himself an incorrigible fool if he breaks it.