CHAPTER II.
We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from Thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.
Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster.
Tennyson.
I find Swedenborg, in the midst of his spiritual interviews and voluminous authorship, taking his part for some time in the Diet of 1761, and presenting three memorials with high repute for practical sagacity. He publishes ‘A New Method of finding the Longitude,’ simultaneously with the ‘Apocalypse Revealed.’
He appears to have possessed a remarkable power of inward respiration. He says that he received from the Lord a conformation enabling him to breathe inwardly for a long time, without the aid of the external air, while his outward senses continued their operation.[[391]]
Swedenborg is strongly opposed to ascetic practice in every form. He contradicts all the cloistered contemplative mystics, when he declares that ‘man cannot be formed for heaven except by means of the world.’ He represents the ‘religious,’ and devotees who have renounced the world for pious meditation, as by no means agreeable or enviable personages in the other life. They are of a sorrowful temper, despising others, discontented at not having been honoured with superior happiness, selfish, turning away from offices of charity (the very means of conjunction with heaven), soon betaking themselves to solitary places. Truly, many of the first in the heaven of the Romish calendar are the last in the heaven of Swedenborg. And I doubt not that his arrangement is, in such cases, the more near the truth of the two. For, as he justly says, ‘a life of charity towards our neighbour (which consists in doing what is just and right in every employment) can only be exercised in general as man is engaged in some employment.’ Such a life, he declares, tends heavenward,—not so a life of piety without a life of charity.[[392]]
‘In heaven,’ says Swedenborg, ‘instruction is committed, not to memory, but to life;‘—a goodly saying.
Swedenborg’s ‘Christian Religion’ is a system of theology, calm and orderly throughout, illustrated with plates—the Memorable Relations. I interpret these marvellous narratives much as Swedenborg does the Mosaic record. I do not question their historic truth, for Swedenborg. Such things he saw and heard; for to such a mind all abstraction takes substantial form. His mental transitions are journeys. Every proposition has its appropriate scenery; every group of verities incorporates itself in a drama, and becomes a speech and action. But I put an inner sense into these Relations, and so reading them, find charming allegories, just in moral and elegant in style.
What Swedenborg tells us about a future state I am certainly not in a position to contradict, for I know nothing about such matters. The general conviction of the Christian world seems to me true in the main,—that the silence of the scriptures concerning such details is an argument for their inspiration—was wisely designed to check curiosity and to exercise faith. Yet it cannot be denied that after all Swedenborg’s disclosures, the Christian conflict, and the motives to that holy warfare, remain very much as the Bible presents them. Selfishness is still the root of evil; God the sole foundation of truth and goodness; faith alone, working by love, can overcome the world. If the arrangements he relates as finding place in heaven and hell, be regarded as the unconscious creation of his own brain, an extraordinary genius for legislature must be allowed him by all. There is generally an obvious fitness in the economy he describes. Here and there he is whimsical and Quevedo-like. Sometimes a certain grim satire peeps out. As regards individuals, we suspect prejudice or caprice. He represents Melanchthon as faring but poorly, for a long time, in the other world, because he would not let go his doctrine of justification by faith. He elevates Mahomet in his heaven, and lowers Paul. Who does not think of Dante, carrying the feud of Guelph and Ghibelline beyond the grave?[[393]]
It shocks such preconceived ideas as we may most of us have formed concerning heaven, to find it represented as so like earth. That in the spiritual world there should be towns and cities, gymnasia and theological discussions, sermons and book-writing, courts of law, and games, yea marriage, of a refined species, the progeny whereof are inward joys and virtues;—all this is novel.[[394]] Our notions here are mostly taken from Milton, and his, in considerable measure, from ecclesiastical and scholastic tradition. After the sublimity of the poet, the homely circumstantialities of the theosophist appear cruelly prosaic. Yet Swedenborg’s view of the future state may be regarded as, in many respects, a wholesome corrective to the popular conception. The truth, I should dimly surmise, may lie between the two. The general apprehension does perhaps make the transition at death too abrupt; forgets too much the great variety of degrees and societies of spirits which must distinguish the inhabitants of hell and heaven,—how completely the inward tendency will make the grief or the joy,—how little mere change of scene and mode of existence can constitute the bliss or woe,—and how various must be the occupations and enjoyments of a world which is to consummate, not our adoration merely, but active love and knowledge.
Very beautiful is Swedenborg’s description of infants in heaven, and the instruction they receive ‘from angels of the female sex, who in the life of the body, loved infants tenderly, and at the same time loved God.’[[395]]
Even wicked men, immediately after death, are kindly received by good angels—such mercy is there for our poor mortality at the last trying hour. But the evil nature of such persons soon resumes its former ascendancy. The society of those pure associates grows irksome, and is forsaken by the sinful for evil companionship similar to themselves.
Swedenborg cannot be considered mystical in his doctrine concerning spiritual influence—that customary seat of mysticism. Such influence he pronounces immediate on the divine part, but not perceptible on ours, nor such as to exclude the necessity of instruction and the use of means. The good we do, God alone worketh in us; but we are conscious only of effort on our own part, though believing that we receive divine assistance. There is to be no tarrying, he says, for magical grace; no crying ‘Wash me!’ while the divinely given means of purification lie unused at our side. The proprium, or own-hood of every angel, spirit, or man, is only evil. (All angels and devils were once good and bad men.) To live only from God and not from self, is the true purity. Every man is an organ of life, deriving his life and free-will from God, and receptive of the Divine influx—enjoying more or less, as he opens or closes his nature thereto. If the lower regions of his spiritual nature be closed against this influx, God is still in him, but he is not in God.[[396]]
Swedenborg declares that the Church has been corrupted by the doctrine of three divine persons existing from eternity. He maintains that such a belief must in reality involve the conception of three several gods, however loudly those who hold it may profess to acknowledge the Divine Unity. In his theology, the Father, Son, and Spirit, are ‘the three essentials of one God, which make One, like Soul, Body, and Operation in man.’
The doctrine of Swedenborg concerning the work of Christ appears to have received its peculiar complexion, at least in great measure, from his repugnance to Calvinism. He saw that the theology of the Reformation had unduly elaborated into doctrine, the forensic and pecuniary metaphors of Scripture, concerning justification and redemption. In his reaction, he is too much inclined to give to those figures a meaning considerably short of that which a consistent interpretation must assign them. Yet the results at which he arrives are not so decidedly opposed to those reached by the theology usually termed evangelical, as might have been anticipated. But the process of redemption in Swedenborg’s system differs widely. He says he cannot believe that the Father, in his wrath, condemned the human race, and in his mercy sent his Son to bear their curse; that out of love for his suffering Son he cancelled the sentence of damnation, yet only in favour of those for whom the Son should intercede, who was thus to be a perpetual Mediator in the presence of the Father.[[397]] He declares it a fundamental error of the Church to believe the passion of the Cross to be redemption itself. He pronounces imputed righteousness a subversion of the divine order.—So much for what he denies. On the other hand, he affirms that in the fulness of time, Jehovah assumed humanity to redeem and save mankind. Both in the spiritual regions and among men, evil had been gradually outgrowing and threatening to overpower good. The equilibrium between the heavenly and hellish worlds was lost. It was as though a dyke had been broken down, and sin were about to overflow the universe. Then God took to himself our nature, to subjugate the hells and to restore to order the heavens. Every victory gained by Christ over the temptations which assailed Him, distanced and enfeebled the powers of evil everywhere. It was the driving back of ravenous beasts to their dens,—the delivery and feeding of his flock, both men and angels. This victory of the Saviour is our victory, is that redemption in virtue of which we are able, believing in Him, to resist and vanquish evil. Mediation, Intercession, Atonement, Propitiation, are forms of speech ‘expressive of the approach which is opened to God, and of the grace communicated from God, by means of His Humanity.’ Thus Swedenborg also believes in a violated order and an impending perdition; in the redemption of the race from such a fate by the incarnate One; in the vindication or restoration of the divine law and order by his conflict and victory on our behalf; and in a life lived for us, which becomes also a life quickened in us. He appears to object to the idea of sacrifice as necessarily concentrating the work of redemption in the shedding of the Saviour’s blood. Such may have been the limited conception of sacrifice in the theology he opposed; but that error could be no good reason for explaining away the idea of sacrifice altogether. The language of Christ concerning himself must be strangely misinterpreted if no such idea is to be found there. But that sacrifice was constituted by his whole life, as well as by its last act—the laying down thereof. The distinction drawn by some divines between the active and passive obedience—as though the death alone were our atonement, and the life alone our example—is a most unhappy refinement.
In Swedenborg’s doctrine concerning union with Christ there is nothing mystical. From the passionate and sensuous union of some mystics, and from the pantheistic confusion of others, he is completely free.
It is to be regretted that the work of redemption should still be so partially regarded by opposing sections of the Church. On the one side are those who hold the doctrine of an exact satisfaction (the commercial theory); who suppose that, in virtue of imputed righteousness, God sees in his people no sin; and who would say that men may, rather than that they must, be exhorted to maintain good works. This covert and generally theoretical antinomianism is happily rare. Yet there are some well-meaning men, desirous of doing a reforming work among us, who actually imagine such an extreme as this to be the ordinary evangelical doctrine. On the other side are those whose tendency is to resolve the historical into the inward Christ. From any such leaning Swedenborg is more free than George Fox. On this side, too, stand those with whom Christ’s work is rather a first sample of restored humanity than the way of restoration, and who seem to suppose that in admitting God to be just, they make Him cruel. In this extreme aversion to acknowledge an external law, and an external danger consequent on its violation, Swedenborg does not share. But, like most of the mystics, he conceives of redemption as wrought for us only as it is wrought in us; takes justification for granted, if we have but sanctification; and regards our sins as remitted just in proportion as we are reclaimed from them. If we must lean towards some extreme, this is the more safe, because containing the larger measure of truth. It appears to me that the ‘divine order’ requires that man be accepted of God in a way consistent with the divine righteousness; and so also as, at the very same time, to become conformed to that righteousness. The sacred writers constantly combine those two aspects of redemption which our systems are so prone to separate. On the one side, Christ’s example is pressed upon us, even in those very acts which are peculiar to Himself as divine. On the other, the blood of Christ is represented as sanctifying us—purging our consciences from dead works to serve the living God; while it is also stated expressly that He died, the just for the unjust.
Similar as Swedenborg’s theology is in its spirit to that of Behmen, I find him expressly stating that he had never read the German theosophist.
Concerning the Church of the New Jerusalem, Swedenborg says, ‘Since the Lord cannot manifest himself in person (to the world), which has just been shown to be impossible, and yet He has foretold that He would come and establish a New Church, which is the New Jerusalem, it follows that He will effect this by the instrumentality of a man, who is able not only to receive the doctrines of that Church in his understanding, but also to make them known by the press. That the Lord manifested Himself before me His servant, that He sent me on this office, and afterwards opened the sight of my spirit, and so let me into the spiritual world, permitting me to see the heavens and the hells, and also to converse with angels and spirits; and this now continually for many years, I attest in truth; and farther, that from the first day of my call to this office, I have never received anything appertaining to the doctrines of that Church from any angel, but from the Lord alone, whilst I was reading the Word.’—True Christian Religion, § 779.