Swedenborg.

— Swedenborg is one of those figures more widely known by name than in fact, at least to the common public. His works, very voluminous and, in general, very abstract, are read almost exclusively by scholars. Thus, the majority of those who refer to them would be greatly embarrassed to say what he was. To some, he is a great man, the object of profound veneration, without their knowing why; to others, he is nothing but a charlatan, a visionary, a wonder-worker. [see Bulletin] Like all men who profess ideas not shared by the majority, especially when such ideas wound certain prejudices, he had and still has his contradictors. Had the latter limited themselves to refuting him, they would have been within their rights. But the spirit of partisanship respects nothing, and the noblest qualities find no favor before it. Swedenborg could not be an exception. His doctrine, no doubt, leaves much to be desired. He himself, today, is far from approving of it on all points. Nevertheless, however refutable it may be, it will not for that reason cease to make him one of the most eminent men of his century. The following information has been drawn from the interesting account that Mme. P… sent to the Parisian Society for Spiritist Studies:

Emmanuel Swedenborg was born in 1688, in Stockholm, and died in London, in 1772, at 84 years of age. His father, Joeper Swedenborg, bishop of Skava, was notable for his merit and his learning; the son, however, surpassed him.

He distinguished himself in all the sciences, especially in Theology, in Mechanics, in Physics, and in Metallurgy. His prudence, wisdom, modesty, and simplicity earned him the high reputation that he enjoys even today. Kings called upon him for their counsels. In 1716, Charles XII appointed him his assessor at the School of Metallurgy of Stockholm.

Queen Ulrica ennobled him, and he occupied the most prominent posts, with distinction, until 1743, the time at which he had his first Spiritist revelation.

He was then 55 years old. He resigned and wished henceforth to occupy himself only with his apostolate and with the establishment of the doctrine of the New Jerusalem — Google Books. Here is how he himself recounts his first revelation:

— “I was in London and was dining very late, at my usual inn, where I had reserved a room, in order to have the freedom to meditate at my pleasure. I felt hungry and ate with much appetite. As I was finishing, I noticed that a kind of fog was spreading before my eyes and I saw the floor of the room covered with horrid reptiles, such as serpents, toads, lizards, and others. I was seized with fear as the darkness increased; nevertheless, it soon dissipated. I then saw clearly a man amid a vivid and radiant light, seated in a corner of the room; the reptiles had vanished with the darkness. I found myself alone; imagine the dread that took hold of me when I heard him pronounce distinctly, but in a tone of voice capable of imparting terror: “Do not eat so much!” At these words, my sight grew clouded, but, little by little, it was restored, and I saw myself alone in the room. Still somewhat terrified by all that I had seen, I hastened to retire to my lodging, without saying anything to anyone about what had happened. There I gave myself over to reflection, without being able to admit that this was the effect of chance or of any physical cause. “On the following night, the same man, radiant with light, presented himself again and said to me: “I am God, the Lord, Creator and Redeemer; I have chosen you to explain to men the inner and spiritual meaning of the Holy Scripture. I will dictate what you are to write.”

“This time I was not so terrified. The light that enveloped him, although vivid and resplendent, produced no painful impression upon my eyes. He was dressed in purple and the vision lasted a good quarter of an hour. That same night the eyes of my inner man were opened and predisposed to see heaven, the world of the Spirits, and the hells; I found everywhere various persons of my acquaintance, some dead a long time, others recently. From that day on I renounced all worldly occupations so as to occupy myself henceforth only with spiritual things, submitting myself to the order I had received. Later, it happened to me several times to have the eyes of the Spirit opened, perceiving, in broad daylight, what was happening in the other world, speaking to the angels and to the Spirits, just as I speak to men.”

— One of the fundamental points of Swedenborg's doctrine rests upon what he calls the correspondences. According to him, the spiritual and natural worlds being linked to one another, as the interior to the exterior, it results that spiritual things and natural things constitute a unity, through influx, and that there is between them a correspondence. Such is the principle; but what is to be understood by this correspondence and this influx is difficult to grasp.

The Earth, says Swedenborg, corresponds to man. The various products that serve for man's nourishment correspond to various kinds of goods and of truths, namely: solid foods to kinds of goods, and liquid foods to kinds of truths. The house corresponds to the will and the understanding, which constitute the human mind. Foods correspond to truths or to falsehoods, according to the substance, the color, and the form they present. Animals correspond to the affections; the useful and gentle ones, to good affections; the noxious and evil ones, to bad affections; gentle and beautiful birds, to intellectual truths; the bad and ugly ones, to falsehood; fishes, to the sciences that originate from sensual things; and noxious insects, to the falsehoods that come from the senses. Trees and shrubs correspond to various kinds of knowledge; herbs and grass, to various scientific truths. Gold corresponds to the celestial good; silver, to spiritual truth; bronze, to natural good, etc., etc. Thus, from the lowest degrees of creation up to the celestial and spiritual sun, everything is sustained, everything is linked together by the influx that produces the correspondence. The second point of his doctrine is this: There is but one God and but one person, who is Jesus Christ.

Created free, according to Swedenborg, man abused his freedom and his reason. He fell; but his fall had been foreseen by God and was to be followed by his rehabilitation, since God, who is love itself, could not leave him in the state into which his fall had plunged him. Now, how was such a rehabilitation to be accomplished? To restore him to his primitive state would be to take away his free will and, thus, to annihilate him. It was by subordinating him to the laws of His eternal order that He proceeded to the rehabilitation of the human race. There follows, next, a very diffuse theory of the three suns transposed by Jehovah, in order to draw near to us and prove that he is man himself. Swedenborg divides the world of the Spirits into three different places: heavens, intermediate places, and hells. He says: “After death we enter the world of the Spirits; the saints betake themselves voluntarily to one of the three heavens and the sinners to one of the three hells, from which they will never come out.” This despairing doctrine annuls the mercy of God, for it refuses Him the power to pardon the sinners overtaken by a violent or accidental death.

Even while rendering justice to the personal merit of Swedenborg, as a scientist and as a man of good, we cannot constitute ourselves defenders of doctrines that the most elementary good sense condemns. What stands out most clearly, according to what we now know of Spiritist phenomena, is the existence of an invisible world and the possibility of our communicating with it. Swedenborg enjoyed a faculty that in his time seemed supernatural, which is why fanatical admirers regarded him as an exceptional being. In more remote times, they would have raised altars in his honor; of those who did not believe in him, some considered him an overexcited brain, and others, a charlatan. To us, he was a seer medium and an intuitive writer, of whom there are thousands, a faculty that belongs to the number of natural phenomena.

— He committed a hardly pardonable error, notwithstanding his experience of the things of the occult world: that of blindly accepting all that was dictated to him, without submitting it to the severe control of reason. Had he weighed maturely the pros and the cons, he would have recognized principles irreconcilable with logic, however little rigorous it might be. Today, he would probably not fall into the same fault, since he would have at his disposal the means to judge and appreciate the value of communications from beyond the grave. He would know that they constitute a field where not all the herbs can be gathered, and that between some and others good sense, which was not given to us by chance, must know how to choose. The quality that the Spirit who manifested himself to him attributed to himself would suffice to put him on his guard, especially if we consider the triviality of his presentation. That which he himself did not do, it falls to us to do now, drawing from his writings only what they contain that is rational. His very errors should be a lesson for the overly credulous mediums whom certain Spirits seek to fascinate, flattering their vanity or their prejudices by a pompous language or by deceptive appearances. The following anecdote proves the bad faith of Swedenborg's adversaries, who sought every occasion to denigrate him. Knowing the faculties with which he was endowed, Queen Louisa Ulrica had charged him, one day, with learning from the Spirit of her brother, the prince of Prussia, why, some time before his death, he had not replied to a letter she had sent him to ask for counsel. At the end of twenty-four hours Swedenborg is said to have reported to the queen, in a secret audience, the prince's reply, conceived in such a way that she, fully convinced that no one, except herself and her deceased brother, knew the contents of that letter, was seized with the most profound stupefaction, recognizing the miraculous power of the great man. Here is the explanation that one of his antagonists, the chevalier Beylon, the queen's reader, gives of this fact: “The queen was considered one of the principal authors of the attempted revolution that occurred in Sweden, in 1756, and that cost the lives of Count Barhé and Marshal Horn. It needed little for the party of the hats, n which then triumphed, to hold her responsible for the blood shed. In this critical situation, she wrote to her brother, the prince of Prussia, to ask him for counsel and assistance. The queen received no reply. As the prince had died soon afterward, she never knew the cause of his silence, which is why she charged Swedenborg with interrogating the Spirit of the prince in this regard. Just at the arrival of the queen's message, the senators Count T… and Count H… were present. The latter, who had intercepted the letter, knew as well as his accomplice, Count T…, why that letter had remained without reply, and the two resolved to take advantage of the circumstance so that their counsels, concerning many things, might reach the queen. They went, then, at night to seek out the visionary and dictated the reply to him. For lack of inspiration, Swedenborg accepted it readily. The next day he hastened to the queen's house and, in the silence of her cabinet, told her that the Spirit of the prince had appeared to him and had charged him with announcing to her his displeasure and assuring her that, if he had not answered the letter, it was because he disapproved of her conduct and that her imprudent policy and her ambition were the cause of the blood shed; that she was guilty before God and that she would have to expiate that guilt. He made her promise no longer to involve herself in the affairs of State, etc., etc. Convinced by this revelation, the queen believed in Swedenborg and embraced his defense with ardor. This anecdote gave rise to a continual polemic between the disciples of Swedenborg and his detractors. A Swedish ecclesiastic, named Malthesius, who went mad, had published that Swedenborg, of whom he was a declared enemy, had recanted before dying. The rumor spread in Holland, in the autumn of 1785, which led Robert Hindmarck to institute an inquiry in this regard and to demonstrate the entire falsity of the calumny invented by Malthesius.

The history of Swedenborg's life proves that the spiritual vision with which he was endowed in no way impaired the exercise of his natural faculties. His eulogy, pronounced after his death by the academician Landel before the Academy of Sciences of Stockholm, shows how vast his erudition was and, by the discourses pronounced in the Diet, in 1761, we see the part he took in the direction of the public affairs of his country.

Swedenborg's doctrine made numerous proselytes in London, in Holland and even in Paris, where it gave rise to the Societies of which we treated in our number of the month of October, that of the Martinists, of the Theosophists, etc. If not all accepted it in all its consequences, it had, at least, the merit of propagating the belief in the possibility of communication with the beings of beyond the grave, a belief quite ancient, as is known, but until now hidden from simple persons by the mysterious practices in which it was wrapped. The incontestable merit of Swedenborg, his profound learning, his high reputation for wisdom had a great weight in the propagation of these ideas, which today are becoming more and more popular, for they grow in full light and, far from seeking the shadow of mystery, make appeal to reason. Despite the errors of his system, Swedenborg does not cease to be one of those great figures whose memory will remain bound to the history of Spiritism, of which he was one of the first and most zealous promoters.

COMMUNICATION FROM SWEDENBORG PROMISED IN THE SESSION OF SEPTEMBER 16.

(Society, September 23, 1859.)

My good friends and faithful believers. I desired to come among you to encourage you in the path you follow with so much firmness, regarding the Spiritist question. Your zeal is appreciated in the world of the Spirits. Continue, but do not be neglectful, because the obstacles will still hinder you for some time; you will not lack detractors, as also occurred with me. A century ago I preached Spiritism and had enemies of every kind; but I also had fervent adherents, and that sustained my courage. My Spiritist morality and my doctrine are not exempt from great errors, which today I recognize. Thus, the punishments are not eternal; I see that God is too just and too good to punish eternally the creature who does not have sufficient strength to resist the passions. What I also said of the world of the angels, which is what is preached in the temples, was nothing but an illusion of my senses; I believed I saw it, I acted in good faith, but I was mistaken. You, indeed, are on the better path, because you are more enlightened than we were in my time. Continue, but be prudent, so that your enemies may not have weapons too strong against you. See the ground you gain every day. Take courage, then, because the future is guaranteed to you. What gives you strength is the fact that you speak in the name of reason. Have you questions to address to me? I will answer them for you. Swedenborg.

SWEDENBORG.

It was in 1745, in London, that you had your first revelation. Did you desire it? At that time were you already occupying yourself with theological questions?

Answer. – I was already occupying myself with that, but I had not at all desired that revelation: it came to me spontaneously.

Which was the Spirit that appeared to you, saying he was God himself? Was it really God?

Answer. – No. I believed what he told me because in him I saw a superhuman being and I was flattered.

Why did he take the name of God?

Answer. – To be better obeyed.

Can God manifest himself directly to men?

Answer. – Certainly He could, but He no longer does so.

Then there was a time when He would have manifested himself?

Answer. – Yes, in the first ages of the Earth.

That Spirit made you write things that today you recognize as erroneous. Did he do so with good or with bad intention?

Answer. – He did not do so with bad intention; he himself was mistaken, because he was not sufficiently enlightened. Now I perceive that the illusions of my own Spirit and of my intelligence influenced him, in spite of himself. Nevertheless, in the midst of some errors of system, it is easy to recognize great truths.

The principle of your doctrine rests upon the correspondences. Do you continue to believe in those relations that you found between each thing of the material world, and each thing of the moral world?

Answer. – No; it is a fiction.

What do you understand by these words: God is Man himself?

Answer. – God is not man, but man is an image of God.

Could you develop your thought?

Answer. – I say that man is the image of God because the intelligence, the genius that he receives sometimes from heaven is an emanation of the Divine Omnipotence. He represents God on Earth by the power he exercises over the whole of Nature and by the great virtues that it is in his power to acquire.

Should we consider man as a part of God?

Answer. – No, man is not a part of the Divinity: he is only its image.

Could you tell us in what manner you received the communications of the Spirits? Did you write that which was revealed to you in the manner of our mediums, or by inspiration?

Answer. – When I found myself in silence and in recollection, my Spirit became as if marveling, in ecstasy, and I saw clearly an image before me, which spoke to me and dictated what I was to write; sometimes my imagination mingled itself in it.

What should we think of the fact narrated by the chevalier Beylon, concerning the revelation that you made to Queen Louisa Ulrica?

Answer. – That revelation is true. Beylon distorted it.

What is your opinion about the Spiritist Doctrine, such as it is today?

Answer. – I told you that you are on a more certain path than mine, in view of the fact that your lights are in general more ample. I had to struggle against a greater ignorance and, above all, against superstition.

[1]

The two opposing parties were that of the Hats and that of the Caps.

See: The origin of the French parliamentary system.