CHAPTER I.
What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought.
Milton.
Here follow extracts from a section in Atherton’s Note-book, entitled ‘Remarks on Swedenborg.’
The doctrine of Correspondence is the central idea of Swedenborg’s system. Everything visible has belonging to it an appropriate spiritual reality. The history of man is an acted parable; the universe, a temple covered with hieroglyphics. Behmen, from the light which flashes on certain exalted moments, imagines that he receives the key to these hidden significances,—that he can interpret the Signatura Rerum. But he does not see spirits, or talk with angels. According to him, such communications would be less reliable than the intuition he enjoyed. Swedenborg takes opposite ground. ‘What I relate,’ he would say, ‘comes from no such mere inward persuasion. I recount the things I have seen. I do not labour to recall and to express the manifestation made me in some moment of ecstatic exaltation. I write you down a plain statement of journeys and conversations in the spiritual world, which have made the greater part of my daily history for many years together. I take my stand upon experience. I have proceeded by observation and induction as strict as that of any man of science among you. Only it has been given me to enjoy an experience reaching into two worlds—that of spirit, as well as that of matter.’
A mysticism like that of Tauler strives, and strives in vain, to escape all image and ‘figuration.’ A mysticism like that of Swedenborg clothes every spiritual truth in some substantial envelope, and discerns a habitant spirit in every variety of form. The follower of Plato essays to rise from the visible to the invisible. But he spurns each ladder in succession by which he has ascended. The follower of Swedenborg seeks a similar ascent; but he never flings away, as common, the husk which guards the precious spiritual kernel. He will not shun the material, or diminish his relations to it. Rather will he surround himself by those objects and those ties of earth which, spiritually regarded, speak constantly of heaven. To look thus on life, I need not enter the school of Swedenborg.
But in this freedom from asceticism,—this tendency to see the spiritual, not beyond, but in, the natural,—the mysticism of Swedenborg, like that of Behmen, has advanced far beyond its mediæval type. Religion no longer plays the despot toward science; the flesh is no longer evil; this beautiful world no longer yielded over to that father of lies who called it his.
As regards the scriptures, I find Swedenborg less one-sided than mystics like Frank, Weigel, or the more extreme among the Quakers. He displays no inclination to depreciate the letter of scripture in favour of the inward teaching of the Word. Without this ‘book-revelation,’ he tells us, man would have remained in gross ignorance concerning his Maker and his future destinies. The literal sense of the word is the basis of the spiritual and celestial sense; and the word, for this very reason, holy in every syllable. He sets up no doctrine based on arbitrary or fantastical interpretations. His doctrinal system is drawn from the literal sense, and calmly, if not always satisfactorily deduced, by citation, exegesis, and comparison of passages, without any mysticism whatever. Thus the balance between the letter and the spirit is maintained in his theology with a fairness almost unparalleled in the history of mysticism.[[388]]
According to Swedenborg, all the mythology and the symbolisms of ancient times were so many refracted or fragmentary correspondences—relics of that better day when every outward object suggested to man’s mind its appropriate divine truth. Such desultory and uncertain links between the seen and the unseen are so many imperfect attempts toward that harmony of the two worlds which he believed himself commissioned to reveal. The happy thoughts of the artist, the imaginative analogies of the poet, are exchanged with Swedenborg for an elaborate system. All the terms and objects in the natural and spiritual worlds are catalogued in pairs. This method appears so much formal pedantry. Our fancies will not work to order. The meaning and the life with which we continually inform outward objects,—those suggestions from sight and sound, which make almost every man at times a poet,—are our own creations, are determined by the mood of the hour, cannot be imposed from without, cannot be arranged like the nomenclature of a science. As regards the inner sense of scripture, at all events, Swedenborg introduces some such yoke. In that province, however, it is perhaps as well that those who are not satisfied with the obvious sense should find some restraint for their imagination, some method for their ingenuity, some guidance in a curiosity irresistible to a certain class of minds. If an objector say, ‘I do not see why the ass should correspond to scientific truth, and the horse to intellectual truth,’ Swedenborg will reply, ‘This analogy rests on no fancy of mine, but on actual experience and observation in the spiritual world. I have always seen horses and asses present and circumstanced, when, and according as, those inward qualities were central.’[[389]] But I do not believe that it was the design of Swedenborg rigidly to determine the relationships by which men are continually uniting the seen and unseen worlds. He probably conceived it his mission to disclose to men the divinely-ordered correspondences of scripture, the close relationship of man’s several states of being, and to make mankind more fully aware that matter and spirit were associated, not only in the varying analogies of imagination, but by the deeper affinity of eternal law. In this way, he sought to impart an impulse rather than to prescribe a scheme. His consistent followers will acknowledge that had he lived in another age, and occupied a different social position, the forms under which the spiritual world presented itself to him would have been different. To a large extent, therefore, his Memorable Relations must be regarded as true for him only,—for such a character, in such a day, though containing principles independent of personal peculiarity and local colouring. It would have been indeed inconsistent, had the Protestant who (as himself a Reformer) essayed to supply the defects and correct the errors of the Reformation,—had he designed to prohibit all advance beyond his own position.
There is great depth and beauty in that idea of Dante’s, according to which he represents himself as conscious of ascending from heaven to heaven in Paradise, not by perception of a transit through space, but by seeing his Beatrice grow more and more lovely:—
Io non m’accorsi del salire in ella;
Ma d’esserv’ entro mi fece assai fede
La donna mia ch’ io vidi far più bella.
What is an imagination with Dante, acquires, in the theosophy of Swedenborg, the constancy of law. According to him, the more I have of goodness in me, the more shall I discern of the loveliness belonging to the form of a good angel. If I am evil, the hideous forms of evil natures will not be repulsive to me; and if I were placed in heaven, the glory would afflict me with pain. To three persons, in three different states of holiness and knowledge, a fourth would present three several aspects in the spiritual world. Thus, spirits see as they themselves are; their character modifies their vision; their nature creates for them their world. All this seems so much mere idealism, extended from this life into the next. I ask, Where is the absolute truth, then? My German neighbour quietly inquires, ‘Is there, or is there not, any Ding an sich?’ The Swedenborgian replies, ‘Swedenborg is no idealist, as you suspect. The absolute truth is with God; and the more goodness and wisdom the creatures have from him, the more truly do they see. The reality external to self, I do not take away; yea, rather I establish it on a divine basis. For the reality is even this divine order, which the Omniscient hath established and maintains,—that form and vision shall answer exactly to spirit and insight. Such correspondence is but partial in this masquerading world of ours, so full of polite pretences and seemly forms. But in the spiritual world every one appears by degrees only what he is. He gravitates towards that circle or association of spirits where all see as much as he does. His character is written, past all disguise, in his form; and so ‘the things spoken in the ear in closets are proclaimed upon the housetops.’
Humanity stands high with Behmen, higher yet with Swedenborg. The Divine Humanity is at once the Lord and pattern of all creation. The innumerable worlds of space are arranged after the human form. The universe is a kind of constellation Homo. Every spirit belongs to some province in Swedenborg’s ‘Grand Man,’ and affects the correspondent part of the human body. A spirit dwelling in those parts of the universe which answer to the heart or the liver, makes his influx felt in the cardiac or hepatic regions of Swedenborg’s frame before he becomes visible to the eye. Evil spirits, again, produced their correspondent maladies on his system, during the time of his intercourse with them. Hypocrites gave him a pain in the teeth, because hypocrisy is spiritual toothache. The inhabitants of Mercury correspond to a province of memory in the ‘grand man:’ the Lunarians to the ensiform cartilage at the bottom of the breast-bone. With Swedenborg likeness is proximity: space and time are states of love and thought. Hence his journeys from world to world;—passing through states being equivalent to travelling over spaces. Thus it took him ten hours to reach one planet, while at another he arrived in two, because a longer time was required to approximate the state of his mind to that of the inhabitants of the former.[[390]]
The thoughts of Swedenborg have never to struggle for expression, like those of the half-educated Behmen. The mind of the Swedish seer was of the methodical and scientific cast. His style is calm and clear. He is easily understood in detail. The metaphors of poets are objects of vision with him: every abstraction takes some concrete form: his illustrations are incessant. He describes with the graphic minuteness of Defoe. Nothing is lost in cloud. With a distinct and steady outline he pourtrays, to the smallest circumstance, the habitations, the amusements, the occupations, the penalties, the economy, the marriages of the unseen world. He is never amazed, he never exaggerates. He is unimpassioned, and wholly careless of effect. Those of his followers with whom I have come in contact, partake of their master’s philosophy. They are liberal in spirit, and nowise impatient of unbelief in others. Swedenborg never pants and strives—has none of the tearful vehemence and glowing emotion which choke the utterance of Behmen. He is never familiar in this page, and rhapsodical in that. Always serene, this imperturbable philosopher is the Olympian Jove of mystics. He writes like a man who was sufficient to himself; who could afford to wait. He lived much alone; and strong and deep is the stream of this mysticism which carries no fleck of foam.
Other mystics seem to know times of wavering, when enthusiasm burns low. To Swedenborg sunrise and sunset are not more constant and familiar than the divine mission which he claims. Other mystics are overpowered by manifestations from the unseen world. Horror seizes them, or a dizzy joy, or the vision leaves them faint and trembling. They have their alternations; their lights and shadows are in keeping; they will topple headlong from some sunny pinnacle into an abysmal misery. But Swedenborg is ‘in the spirit’ for near two score years, and in his easy chair, or at his window, or on his walks, holds converse, as a matter of course, with angels and departed great ones, with patriarchs and devils. He can even instruct some of the angels, who have had experience only of their own world, and are guileless accordingly.