Swedenborg’s stay in London at this time must have been brief; for on the 28th of November, 1768, we meet him again in Amsterdam, whither he had gone to print another important work, “Conjugial Love, and its chaste Delights; also Adulterous Love and its insane Pleasures.” This book he published with his name, as written “by Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swede.” This is the first of his theological works to which he affixed his name. His reason for giving it in this instance, is said to have been, that no other person might be censured for writing on this delicate subject. We will now examine the contents of this wondrous book.
CHAPTER XXII.
Conjugial Love.
A wise man might well suspect the soundness of any system of morals which did not take into careful consideration the conjugial relation. Marriage—the most important event in life, the relation which occupies the whole thought of one sex, and the most serious regards of the other, the institution around which all that is highest find holiest in life groups itself, family, home, all that human hearts hold dear—must ever hold a prominent place in a true code of moral and spiritual laws. How then could the subject be omitted from the heavenly writings of the New Jerusalem? or how could its apostle forget or pass it by.
Swedenborg, in his treatise on Conjugial Love, first speaks of marriages in heaven. He shows that a man lives a man after death, and that a woman lives a woman; and since it was ordained from creation that the woman should be for the man, and the man for the woman, and thus that each should be the other’s,—and since that love is innate in both, it follows that there are marriages in heaven as well as on earth.
Marriage in the heavens is the conjunction of two into one mind. The mind of man consists of two parts, the understanding and the will. When these two parts act in unity, they are called one mind. The understanding is predominant in man, and the will in woman; but in the marriage of minds there is no predominance, for the will of the wife becomes also the will of the husband, and the understanding of the husband is also that of the wife; because each loves to will and to think as the other wills and thinks, and thus they will and think mutually and reciprocally. Hence their conjunction; so that in heaven, two married partners are not called two, but one angel. When this conjunction of minds descends into the inferior principles which are of the body, it is perceived and felt as love, and that love is conjugial love.
To this doctrine of marriage in heaven will arise an objection from the Lord’s words to the Sadducees, when they asked Him whose wife, in the resurrection, a woman should be, who had been married in succession to seven brethren. The Lord replied: “The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage; but they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage.”—Luke xx. 34, 35. To understand this reply, we must bear in mind the nature of the question. A woman had been married, quite in accordance with worldly usage, to seven husbands. Of course, nothing of this kind takes place in heaven; for, as the Lord says, there “neither can they die any more.” After that fashion indeed there is no marrying or giving in marriage in heaven. In truth, marriages, such as they are in heaven, could never have been comprehended by the gross and carnal-minded Jews; and had the Lord entered into detail, He would have been as grossly misapprehended by them as when He said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” And they said: “Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?” not knowing that he “spake of the temple of his body.” John ii. 19-21. Now Swedenborg very plainly shows that Christians think as naturally of marriage as the Jews did of the temple, if they suppose that the true marriage of minds does not take place in heaven, or that it was any but the carnal and sensual connections of earth that the Lord declared had no place in eternity. In the spiritual sense of the Lord’s words, by the marriage that does not take place in heaven, is meant the spiritual marriage, or union of goodness and truth in the mind; in other words, regeneration: this must be accomplished in this life, or not at all. When the spiritual sense of the Word is understood, this interpretation becomes manifest as the only true and rational mode of understanding the text; and all the rest of Scripture goes to confirm it.
Moreover it is true that there is no marriage in heaven in the exact sense of the word. Partners are born into this world, and by life in it are disciplined for each other. Separate, they are but parts of one whole; and in each there is a continual longing for unition. Seen by the eye of Omniscience, they are ever married; they are one, however divided they may be by space or circumstances. Their meeting in heaven and recognition of each other is only the external completion of what had before in essentials been effected. And in this sense it may be said that there are no marriages in heaven; for all are married, in reality, before they reach heaven.
Marriages on earth, Swedenborg teaches, are at this day entered upon so generally from merely worldly and sensual motives, and with so little regard for similarity of mind, that, save in few cases, they are not maintained and perpetuated in the other life. Married partners commonly meet after death; but as their internal differences of mind are manifested, they separate; for no married partners can be received into heaven, except such as have been interiorly united, or are capable of being so united into one; which is understood by the Lord’s words: “They are no longer two, but one flesh.” Such as are thus separated—possibly both very good people—meet, in due time, congenial partners, whose souls incline to union with their own, so that they no longer wish to be two lives, but one.