Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence

Front matter

SWEDENBORG'S

DOCTRINE OF CORRESPONDENCE

A KEY TO THE INTERCOURSE BETWEEN THE SOUL AND BODY

The Science of Correspondence

THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

This essay is in fulfilment of the author's promise to set forth the doctrine of Swedenborg in some of its bearings on "Christian Science" and Metaphysical healing. It is hoped also that it may incite to further and fuller study of a subject that is exhaustless, and which in the otherwise abundant literature of the New Church has not so far received proportionate treatment. Above all, the writer indulges a hope that it may prove to those who are interested in these high themes, and who have had their eyes turned expectantly to the writings of Swedenborg, something of a guide and guard against error.

We are living in the days of the Second Coming of the Lord, in which a new thing has happened in the world. A rational revelation concerning God and man and the spiritual world has been given by means of a man prepared to receive it and publish it; and the Divine truths involved aforetime in the Word of God are now evolved by means of the principles and doctrines so revealed. It is a prin as universal as the antagonism of good and evil, that when the Lord comes to do good, the evil are busy to do mischief, and when He reveals new truths, Satanic spirits are active to instill falsities. "Hell hath enlarged herself to meet thee at thy coming," is the inevitable effect of the inauguration of a new Divine Dispensation. We are living in such a time when good and evil are contending on new terms for the mastery of human minds. The Lord has revealed rational truths in great fulness for the establishment of a New Church and a new religion among men. The antecedent effect of the revelation in the spiritual world, is felt in a new freedom of willing and thinking, and an impulse to work out the old problems on new lines. Meanwhile the new truths are abroad in the world. They press upon all minds, reinforced by a new influx from heaven favorable to freedom and reason. They appeal to reason. They open causes in the spiritual world and in human minds, and impel men to inquire, to know, and to understand. But they are divine from the Lord, and they have but one end, that is to lead men to the Lord and to a higher spiritual life. In the nature of things, this new freedom of willing and thinking lets loose the opposing evil and the false. The new truths are met by falsities which are agreeable to man's selfish and sensual life, which masquerade as truths, and blind reason by sophistries, and seek to defeat the Lord's ends, by feeding man's vanity and self-sufficiency in the name of spiritual christianity. It is thus that we find the most transcendent truths in company with mere insanities and falsities, and minds apparently impelled by the best of motives involved in most destructive errors. This is unavoidable in such a time of transition and judgment. The only remedy is instruction in genuine truths. The fountain of the needed truths is the revelation which the Lord has made for His New Church in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.

It has come to pass as Dr. Wilkinson predicted forty years ago, "that while an unbelieving century could see nothing in Swedenborg, its sucessor more truthful and trustful sees more and more; and strong indications exist," he said, "that in another five-and-twenty years the field occupied by this author must be visited by the leaders of opinion en masse, and whether they will or no; because it is not proselytism that will take them there, but the expansion and culmination of the truth and the organic course of events." Accordingly we find his name to-day in all the literature of "new things" and his writings are often quoted; but his teachings get sadly perverted in the process; and his name is used as authority for opinions that otherwise want a character. Nothing but the study of his works, on the line of his unvarying claim for them, that they contain "doctrines received from the Lord alone while reading the Word" can have any weight in deciding upon their contents.

Swedenborg was the son of a Lutheran Bishop, a scholar, a practical engineer, entrusted with high official position, a man of science, a philosopher, a theologian and a seer who lived between 1688 and 1772. This life of fourscore years' untiring energy divides itself, upon superficial observation, into two periods. The first fifty years of it were devoted to the pursuit of natural learning and independent investigations in science and philosophy. In early life his mind was carefully and severely cultivated, and he developed a vigorous and acute intellect, with a capacity for the most profound and sustain thought. He was, during this entire period, the precise type of man which this generation delights to honor; strong, keen, self-reliant, practical. Endowed with a hardy constitution, he had a calm, placid disposition, led an active, laborious, cheerful life, traveling continually and keeping himself posted in the developments of scientific research and practical improvement; composed his works and conducted his literary business unaided; enjoyed the friendship and confidence of his king and fellow-statesmen; held a government position at the head of the College of mines, and developed the mineral wealth of Sweden; discussed politics in the Senate; memorialized the government on finance and other weighty matters; while he was elaborating in private and publishing from time to time the results of the most sublime and extensive philosophical attempts upon which any single man ever ventured. Here, I say, was the type of man which our age believes in. Learned, standing far ahead of his generation; exact, trained in mathematical accuracy and schooled to observation; practical, seeing at once some useful application of every new discovery; a man of affairs, able to take care of his own, and bear his part in the nation's councils; aspiring, ignoring no useful application, but content with no achievement short of a final philosophy of causes; inductive, taking nothing for granted but facts of experiment, and seeking to ascend therefrom to a generalization which shall explain them,—this is the sort of man which in our day we consider sound and useful and grand. Such was Swedenborg, the assessor. A more penetrating, untiring, laborious, and practical man of science never lived.

He possessed a quality of analysis so searching and discriminative as to be altogether microscopic in its character and application, united with a most wonderful power of generalization. By these faculties of his mind he was enabled to combine the strength of both the old and new philosophy, and by a clear analytic and synthetic comparison of every whole with its parts, and of the parts with the whole, he did what had never been done before, and opened science to the light of reason, and to its true position as a servant of rational philosophy. His method not only enabled him to anticipate conclusions which experimental science has been tardy enough in reaching, but it brought him face to face with the problems which in our day have opened to the thought of all, and to many with such appalling suggestion—the search for the soul and the demonstration of the infinite.

The Rev. Frank Sewall, A. M., in the Introduction to his translation of Swedenborg's, De Anima says:

"The one desire and aim animating the entire series of Swedenborg's scientific and philosophical writings, was his 'search for the soul.' This single aim furnishes us the key to Swedenborg's mission in the world of science, of philosophy of theology. To know the nature of spirit and its relation to matter, or, as the author frequently puts it, 'a knowledge of the soul and of its intercourse with the body,' was the two-fold object of his search * * * Where did he seek this knowledge of the soul? In its own realm. In the living (and not in the dead) human body; in the kingdom of uses as exhibited in the beautiful order, harmony and activities of the human anatomy, and physiology. The 'Animal Kingdom' meant to Swedenborg the kingdom of the anima, the realm over which the soul presides as queen. The relation of the soul to her body, or her own kingdom and world, was what he first sought to know; and through that to know the nature of the soul herself. The knowledge he obtained in these labors, while not all that he aimed at, was nevertheless that which peculiarly and preëminently qualified his mind to be recipient of the greater knowledge of the true nature of spirit and of the relation of the spiritual to the natural world."

Swedenborg's method was first to state and study the facts; thus to "elicit from them a vintage of first principle; and then to keep and refine this wine of truths within the vessels of the facts, amplifying it whenever possible to the unfilled capacity of the lat ." In pursuing this method he arrived at certain generalizations, or as he called them "new doctrines," by which he hoped to pass from the material organism of the body, to a knowledge of the soul which is immaterial. Chief among these was the doctrine of Correspondence, resting upon the equally philosophic and scientific doctrines of Series, Orders, Degrees and Modifications. This doctrine of Correspondence as held by him and used in these investigations is thus stated by Mr. Sewall:

"Correspondence as seen in the plane of nature only (and it was only on this plane that Swedenborg up to this time had discovered it,) consists in such a mutual adaptation of inner and outer, higher and lower, grosser and more subtle spheres or bodies, that there may be a reception, communication and transference of motions and affections from one to the other. It is therefore the name we give to that kind of intercourse which is not bodily influx, or to the union that exists, not by continuity or confusion of substance, but by contiguity and modification of state. It is the relation of the affluent waves of ether to the eye; of the eye to the sensory fiber; of the fiber to the cortical gland; of the gland to the common sensory; of the sensory to the imagination; of the imagination to the intellect; of the intellect to the soul; of the soul to God. By correspondence the outer affects the inner without becoming one with it; by correspondence things totally different in degree and in substance are nevertheless so adapted that motions or tremulous vibrations in one may be continued through the other, or converted into some modification of the other's state. So the soul corresponds in general and in every particular to its body."

Swedenborg hoped by the aid of this doctrine, bending his course inward continual , "to open all the doors that lead to her, and at length by the divine permission, contemplate the soul herself." He did not succeed. He came instead to the inner parts of the living body, but not to the soul. The doctrine of Correspondence as he held it at this time, could not reveal it. It needed the opening of spiritual sight to see the soul in its own spiritual body in its own spiritual world; then Correspondence with two experimental terms two visible things, might show their relation and intercourse.

It was at this time while still engaged upon the "Animal Kingdom," at the ripe age of fifty-six, in the full maturity of his powers, that Swedenborg was called, as he declares, "to a holy office by the Lord, who most graciously manifested Himself to me in person and opened my sight to the view of the spiritual world, and granted me the privilege of conversing with spirits and angels." "From that day forth," he says, "I gave up all worldly learning, and labored only in spiritual things, according to what the Lord commanded me to write."

The work of the remaining years of this remarkable life is accessible in English in some thirty volumes of his theological writ . They present a system of psychology as unique as it is logically consistent, resting on an analysis of the spiritual world and of man as a spiritual being, from "things heard and seen in the other world;" they unfold the spiritual sense of the Sacred Scriptures in accordance with the science of Correspondence as now perceived in its fullness in the observation of the laws and phenomena of both worlds at once under the divine guidance; and they present an orderly, rational and spiritual theology, derived from the spiritual sense of the Scriptures and confirmed in their very letter; the whole claiming to be under the call, guidance and inspiration of the Lord Jesus Christ, for the founding of a New Church and the restoration and perfecting of the true Christian Religion.

It is this astounding claim which the ecclesiastical and modern critical spirit, each in its own way and on its own grounds, rejects and ridicules; and yet the doctrines in these writings are continually asserting themselves and attracting, ever and ever, more attention. There is call for rational examination; every mind may challenge the claim, for it is made with appeal to the understanding; but there will be no compromise, for Sweden allows none. The revelations and doctrines are the Lord's, not his. Circumspect we may be, but no one can investigate the teachings to any purpose, without considering the mission of the teacher. Swedenborg's call, his intromission into the spiritual world, the opening of his understanding to the law of Correspondence which rules in that world and explains the origin and order of this world, the revelation of the spiritual sense of the Word, and the formulation of its divine doctrine,—all these things are so bound up and held together, that they must be examined and considered together. Why such a call and mission?

1. He tells us that the Church was dead in a spiritless formalism, and an equally lifeless speculative discussion of dogma, and that the Lord would revive it according to His promise, and restore to the world the spiritual doctrines of faith.

2. That no rational belief in a spiritual and eternal world remained, and that to restore it to men, there was needed the human experience of life in the spiritual world from which to deduce in rational light the true knowledge of that world.

3. That belief in the Word of God, being practically dead, would, under the questioning of natural learning, become more and more rejected in the churches. That to provide against this, it was necessary that the law of divine creation and revelation, which is Correspondence, should be learned by observation and experience in the spiritual world, and rationally applied to the opening of the spiritual sense of the Holy Scriptures.

4. That the doctrines of the Christian religion, being falsified, needed to be re-taught, and in new forms apprehensible to spiritual reason, and that for this was needed a teacher trained in spiritual experience, introduced into the sphere of heavenly wisdom, and submissive to the illuminating guidance of the Lord.

5. That, thus, the old order of the Church having come to its crisis, and being about to pass away in unbelief, the Lord should accomplish his Second Coming in the revelation of the spiritual sense of the divine Word, and its heavenly doctrines to men.

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The Lord always comes with new revelation when the Church He had previously established among men has become perverted by them, and is no longer a means of leading men to the Lord and establishing His kingdom among them. At different periods in the history of His kingdom on earth, He has made use of men as his instruments. Thus, when the time came for the institution of the Jewish Church, He raised up Moses, who had from his very childhood in Egypt been educated and prepared for the mission, to accomplish the work. In like manner, when the Jewish Church had run its course, and the Lord came into the world and took our nature upon Him, He called His twelve disciples around Him, and educated and instructed them, that through their instrumentality the Christian Church might be established. And now in these latter days, after the first Christian Church has finished its course, and fulfilled the prophecy of its end, the Lord in accordance with His promise has accomplished his Second Coming by unveiling the spiritual sense in His Word which is from Him and is Himself.

The Second Coming of the Lord is not in person as at His first advent; for then He assumed a human nature and glorified it for reasons of redemption and salvation, that He might become in His Humanity the visible God, and acquire to His Humanity "all power in heaven and on earth." What He came to do in His Incarnation He perfectly accomplished, and needed not to do again; nay, because it was a Divine work it is, and can not be repeated. What was needed for the sake of separating the evil from the good, that those who have believed and who do believe in Him may be saved, and that there may be formed of them a New Heaven and a New Church on earth, is such a revelation of divine goodness and truth in the Word as will bring the Lord spiritually present in power and glory.

The Lord, who is the Word, did not, therefore, come to men a second time in person on earth, but by revealing the genuine meaning of His written Word in which divine truth is in its light; and in this He is continually present. This is His Second Coming "in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory;" for the literal sense of the Word is as a cloud, and the Spiritual sense as the glory, by which the Lord as the Son of Man is revealed in all things of the Word. Swedenborg says:

Since the Lord can not manifest Himself in person, and yet He has foretold that He would come and establish a New Church, which is the New Jerusalem, it follows that He will do it by means of a man, who is able not only to receive the doctrines of this Church with his understanding, but also to publish them by the press. That the Lord has manifested Himself before me, His servant, and sent me on this office, and that after this He opened the sight of my spirit, and thus let me into the spiritual world, and gave me power to see the heavens and the hells, and also to speak with angels and spirits, and this is now continually for many years, I testify in truth; and also that from the first day of that call, I have not received anything which pertains to the doctrines of that Church from any angel, but the Lord alone while I read the Word.

It seems important to set forth this matter clearly; for on Swedenborg's testimony his theological writings are not in any sense, as they are so often regarded, a continuation of his philosophical speculation. There is an interposition of the Lord, and a new departure. There is the Divine purpose to open the spiritual sense of the Word. It must be accomplished by means of a man; and the man, however naturally endowed and trained, must needs be further prepared by intromission into the spiritual world. Thus he says, the spiritual sense of the Word could not "be comprehended, without knowing how things are in another life, for most things which are in the internal sense of the Word have respect to these things, recount them and involve them." So of the doc which he calls heavenly, "because it is from the spiritual sense of the Word, and this is the same as the doctrine which is in heaven." It could never have been understood and set forth except after experience in the spiritual world. And finally, as to the importance of a knowledge of the spiritual world itself to the man of the Church:

"The man of the church at this day knows scarcely anything about heaven and hell, and his life after death, although they stand forth described in the Word. Yea, also, many who were born within the church deny these things, saying, in their heart, Who has come thence and told us? Lest, therefore, this denial, which reigns especially with those who have much of the wisdom of the world, should also infect and corrupt the simple in heart and faith, it has been given me to be together with the angels, and to speak with them as man with man, and also to see the things which are in the heavens, and the things which are in the hells; and thus now to describe them from things seen and heard, hoping that ignorance may be enlightened and incredulity dissipated. Such immediate revelation is made at this day because this is meant by the coming of the Lord."

At the threshold of his inquiry into Swedenborg's doctrine of Correspondence, and consideration of its bearings on psychological problems, the reader is therefore warned of its dependence upon the fact of his seership, and knowledge attained by his intromission into the other world. Looking back to his scientific career, he tells us that he saw its purpose, that "he had been introduced by the Lord first into the natural sciences, and prepared from 1710 to 1744, when heaven was opened to him; the reason why he, a philosopher, had been chosen to this office, being, that spiritual knowledge, which is revealed at this day, might be reasonably learned and naturally understood; because spiritual truths answer to natural truths, which originate, flow from, and answer as a foundation for them." When he had run the circuit of the sciences, he was introduced to a new world of facts and laws, by the opening of his spiritual senses; and thus to a spiritual science and philosophy which could never have been discovered without these facts, and can never be understood apart from them.

The importance of this experience is finely shown by Dr. Wilkinson in his biography of Swedenborg, when speaking of the intercourse between the soul and the body, and the inability of philosophy to give the soul qualities that warrant us to say what it is, he remarks that "here we see the value of sight on a difficult point. While the soul was unknown, its manner of communication with the body was necessarily occult, but when it was actually seen as the man himself, with all his looks, members and garments about him, the matter took a practical form." "We may illustrate this by man and his ostensible connections with this world. Now we see man, and the manner in which he lays hold upon his objects, which is clearly typified by his actual handling of certain things. But suppose for a moment that we were some other being, and that man was invisible to us, and that still the objects were moved from place to place with an apparent design. In this case we should have a type of what the motions and actions of the body are to an abstract philosopher. It would be a kind of ghostly and fearful galvanism, and the existence of something to be called man, though what could never be known, would be the last induction of philosophy from the strange events which were taking place around. Place the seer, however, the person who can see this powerful and actual man who is creating them, and sight itself without a strained faculty, will account for the whole connection of events. We see them produced and we see the agent. Such is the native and substantial function of eyes, whether those of the spirit or the body, executed in their proper sphere. The man who can see the soul has done with abstract philosophy. The spiritual world is united to the natural by answerable links to the above. So long as the spiritual is kept by the philosophers, and consists of intuition and mathematical points we may well wonder if it be united with nature; for what love can consist between the starry firmaments on one hand and blank being on the other? There is freezing indifference on either side, and of course no union. The addition of an abstract idea to the world, is the world unaltered, though a little blurred; the sinking of the world in the idea, is on the other hand idealism or destruction of thought. There is every reason for 'civil war between the soul and the body,' and discord between the two worlds, under circumstances in which one party to the agreement is essentially unknown, But thanks be to God, spiritual sight has again saved us here."

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What we need to be instructed in is, not merely that the soul is immortal, but what the soul is; and this not alone as regards a future life, but our present existence. Hitherto, perhaps no term in the language has been so indeterminate as this word soul. In the old faiths it is a name with no answering reality; and now in this day, of positive ideas and strict definitions, we need to define the soul, to exhibit it to thought, or cease to use a name for which we have nothing as a relative.

The history of opinion is not a development in this case, but a round of affirmations carrying us back to the point in which it started on its speculative career. If we attempt to reduce the ancient opinions to a general summary we shall find that between the remotest period of history and the dawn of Christianity, speculative philosophy had covered substantially the same ground as that to-day occupied by the metaphysicians and materialists.

1. There were those who believed the soul to be elemental in its nature and therefore attributed body to it; among these, such as believed in a divine, universally pervading element, allowed the soul immortality, which was denied by those who believed in no other elements but such as are tangible to our senses.

2. Another class believed the soul to consist in the harmony of bodily organization, and consequently to be inseparable from it; an opinion which re-appears in our day in very respectable company, and necessarily concludes against immortality.

3. By others the entire intellectual, rational, sensual, and vital force of the whole body was held to be separable and immortal; but it was believed to carry away from the body a pneumatic or ethereal limbus, from which it could only be disengaged by some process of purification, and when thus liberated ceased to have body.

This, of course is not an exhaustive classification of ancient opinion; but it is practically inclusive, and serves to show, that the ancient mind, apart from that kind of experience which philosophers pride themselves in neglecting—the experience of open seership—was unable to conceive of the soul as enjoying any other sensational organization than that of the material body. In so far as they were compelled to admit the reality of some of its sensations, they accounted for the supposed anomaly on the principle of imper development, or abnormal attachment to nature. They could form no conception of an outbirth of ideal forms in any other than a material pabulum, the soul being considered incapable of substantial organization.

The problem descending to later times was taken up by Christianity. The doctrine of the Resurrection, the Transfiguration of Christ, the vision of Moses and Elias, and of the angels at Bethlehem and at the sepulchre, the post-resurrection appearances of the Lord, imparted to the early disciples the conception of a spiritual body. Subsequently the Christian Fathers, Origin, Tertullian and others, made the application to the visions of the Seers, maintaining that the soul is the man himself in a perfectly organized spiritual body. But unfortunately, perhaps unavoidably, these simple and elevating truths of the early faith were soon obscured, and the Fathers treated with neglect. The philosophers overlaid the experimental evidence of the gospel with the traditional speculations which it was intended to supersede. In the darkness which fell upon the Church, the opinions of the pagan world not only divided the schools among themselves, but were discussed with scarcely more regard to the gospel and its revelations than could have prevailed before it was proclaimed. Working apart from the data of revelation, and ignoring the phenomena uncovered to the Bible seers, the devious reasonings of the Christian schools worked round, as I said, to the starting point of the old philosophers. If the thought changed its form it was only to be shorn of its one-time grandeur and poetic freshness. It came at last in the current doctrines of the soul to a logical demonstration of nothing.

There is no conception in modern speculative thought of spiritual form and organization apart from the material body. The mode of induction is to abstract all the qualities of the body and take what is left as our knowledge of the soul; as Dr. Sears said, "You must first go through the process of subtraction, and then look after your remainder." Body has form, organization; take these away and you have pure spirit without form. Denuded to this extent it would be interesting to know what is left of us; and we have for answer, 'thinking principle,' 'pure essence,' 'a metaphysical entity,' 'a substance uncompounded and without parts.' Run this to its last dismal absurdity, and you will see that these are only names for nothing. That which is no substance is nothing. Substance without form is not given. You may talk of virtue, goodness, intellect, and so forth; but they must attach themselves to a living subject, else they fade into nothingness, with a name it may be, but without existence. In the presence of such profitless verbiage, it is not surprising that many strong minds, with keen powers of observation and great respect for things that are open to sense, should define life as "the aggregate of the activities of the physical organism," and thought as a property of the brain.