Emmanuel Swedenborg

“ Swedenborg is retrospective, nor can we divest him of his mattock and shroud. Some minds are for ever restrained from descending into nature; others are for ever prevented from ascending out of it. With a force of many men, he could never break the umbilical cord which held him to nature, and he did not rise to the platform of pure genius.
It is remarkable that this man, who, by his perception of symbols, saw the poetic construction of things and the primary relation of mind to matter, remained entirely devoid of the whole apparatus of poetic expression, which that perception creates. ”

“ If, especially, he has vexed and worn himself in reading the profitless controversies and lucubrations of learned divines on the Trinity, his fretted and heated mind will experience a spiritual relief similar to the natural one which results when patience has become exhausted in vain endeavors to unfasten a lock, and a skilled mechanic draws near, takes the work out of our hands, and with dexterity and ease accomplishes the task in a moment. Swedenborg lays his hand on the tangled mass of mysticism and perverted Scripture, and straightway the Gordian knot is untied. ”

“ When he mounts into the heaven, I do not hear its language. A man should not tell me that he has walked among the angels; his proof is that his eloquence makes me one. Shall the archangels be less majestic and sweet than the figures that have actually walked the earth? These angels that Swedenborg paints give us no very high idea of their discipline and culture: they are all country parsons: their heaven is a fete champetre, an evangelical picnic, or French distribution of prizes to virtuous peasants. ”

“ Swedenborg's system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is dynamic, not vital, and lacks power to generate life. There is no individual in it. The universe is a gigantic crystal, all whose atoms and laminae lie in uninterrupted order and with unbroken unity, but cold and still. What seems an individual and a will, is none. There is an immense chain of intermediation, extending from centre to extremes, which bereaves every agency of all freedom and character. The universe, in his poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only reflects the mind of the magnetizer. ”

“ Swedenborg had to have a revelation from heaven to enable him to catch a glimpse of his malady which he ought to have known by intuition. His nature was all the time complaining, and what an expression that is when men speak of their "complaints," when by pains, which are warnings, nature is reporting her grievances at head-quarters. But the heavens were opened and Swedenborg went into ecstasy over the kindness of the angel whose message to him was a warning not to eat so much. ”

“ These grand rhymes or returns in nature,- the dear, best-known face startling us at every turn, under a mask so unexpected that we think it the face of a stranger, and carrying up the semblance into divine forms,- delighted the prophetic eye of Swedenborg; and he must be reckoned a leader in that revolution, which, by giving to science an idea, has given to an aimless accumulation of experiments, guidance and form and a beating heart. ”

“ From that time to the hour of his death, he was one of the greatest supporters of the doctrine of the New Church of the Lord, and declared openly, that the theological writings of Swedenborg were the most precious treasures given for the welfare of mankind. ”

“ Our books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bonmots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature;- being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means. But Swedenborg is systematic and respective of the world in every sentence ”

“ Thus it appears that Swedenborg, after as before his introduction into his spiritual office and into visible heavenly companionship, was alive to the important questions of the day to which he was called by love for his country and his duty as a member of its Diet. With spiritual eyes open to all his spiritual surroundings, his natural eyes were wide open also to all real needs of this world. He lived much alone, as his constant absorbing labors required, but he was not a recluse. He had many friends among statesmen and men of learning, with whom he enjoyed pleasant intercourse. ”

“ Few men in those days were capable of sympathy or communion with the elevated and spiritualized mind of Swedenborg. Yet though living as it were alone, he could not have been melancholy or desolate. Under the care and guidance of the Lord, favored with the company and converse of angels, and enjoying the consciousness of fulfilling high and holy duties, he had every reason to be the cheerful and contented man that contemporary testimony represents him. ”

“ Possibly Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted faculties. Success, or a fortunate genius, seems to depend on a happy adjustment of heart and brain; on a due proportion, hard to hit, of moral and mental power, which perhaps obeys the law of those chemical ratios which make a proportion in volumes necessary to combination, as when gases will combine in certain fixed rates, but not at any rate. It is hard to carry a full cup ”

“ If an angel were to derive the least particle from natural heat and light he would perish; for it is totally discordant with his life. As to the interiors of the mind every man is a spirit. When he dies he withdraws entirely from the world of nature, leaving behind him all its belongings, and enters a world where there is nothing of nature. In that world he lives so separated from nature that there is no communication whatever by continuity, that is, as between what is purer and grosser, but only like that between what is prior and posterior ”

“ The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the translator of nature into thought. I do not know the man in history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorphosis continually plays. Everything on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature. The figs become grapes whilst he eats them. ”

“ Swedenborg conceives man to be an organized receptacle of truth and love from God. He is an imperishable spiritual body placed for a season of probation in a perishable material body. Every moment receiving the essence of his being afresh from God, and returning it through the fruition of its uses devoutly rendered in conscious obedience and joyous worship, he is at once a subject of personal, and a medium of the Divine, happiness. The will is the power of man's life, and the understanding is its form. ”

“ But at the very threshold their eyes began to be darkened by the inflowing of the light of heaven, and their understanding to be disturbed, and at length they began to gasp as if at the point of death; and as soon as they felt the heat of heaven, which is heavenly love, they began to be inwardly tormented. They were therefore cast down, and afterwards were taught that knowledges do not make an angel, but the life itself, which is gained by means of knowledges, for knowledges regarded in themselves are outside of heaven; but life acquired by means of knowledges is within heaven. ”

“ Yet the proximity of these geniuses, one or other of whom had introduced all his leading ideas, makes Swedenborg another example of the difficulty, even in a highly fertile genius, of proving originality, the first birth and annunciation of one of the laws of nature.
He named his favorite views the doctrine of Forms, the doctrine of Series and Degrees, the doctrine of Influx, the doctrine of Correspondence. His statement of these doctrines deserves to be studied in his books. Not every man can read them, but they will reward him who can. ”

“ Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses so much earth and so much fire, by weight and meter, to make a man, and will not add a pennyweight, though a nation is perishing for a leader? Therefore the men of God purchased their science by folly or pain. If you will have pure carbon, carbuncle, or diamond, to make the brain transparent, the trunk and organs shall be so much the grosser: instead of porcelain they are potter's earth, clay, or mud.
In modern times no such remarkable example of this introverted mind has occurred as in Emanuel Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, in 1688. ”

“ After this, the angel informed him concerning the ground and origin of the changes of the state of his sights; saying, "I perceive that in the world, from which you are come, you have been two-fold, in internals having been quite a different man from what you were in externals; in externals you have been a civil, moral, and rational man; whereas in internals, you have been neither civil, moral, nor rational, because a libertine and an adulterer: and such men, when they are allowed to ascend into heaven, and are there kept in their externals, can see the heavenly things contained therein ”

“ It is but just here to say that Swedenborg does not profess to give all the internal meaning of which the Word is the repository. So far from it, he represents the Word to be infinite; to contain even profounder depths of wisdom than can be expressed in the language of men; adapted, by successive unfoldings, to the angels of all the heavens,—to the highest state of intelligence that finite minds can ever, to all eternity, attain; and extending upwards even to God Himself, as the rays of light extend to the sun. ”

“ It is an axiom in history that "a religion that does not propagate itself and its sacred books is either dying or dead." If the converse of this be true, that the religion that does propagate itself and its sacred books is alive and flourishing, there is no branch of the Christian Church that exhibits more vitality than that with which the name of Swedenborg has been associated.
It is more than a century since this illustrious Swede commenced the publication of his theological writings. They were all written in the Latin tongue ”

“ Until I saw this book, I had not conceived it possible to carry an atmosphere so earthy, and steaming with the vapours of earth, into regions which, by early connexion in our infant thoughts with the sanctities of death, have a hold upon the reverential affections such as they rarely lose. In this view, I should conceive that Swedenborg, if it were at all possible for him to become a popular author, would, at the same time, become immensely mischievous. He would dereligionize men beyond all other authors whatsoever. ”

“ Of late years it has become common to talk of Swedenborg [69] as a clairvoyant, to associate him with mesmeric subjects, and make him a kinsman of French and American spiritualists, such as Cahagnet, and Andrew Jackson Davis. This mistake is made through ignorance. It is a law of the spiritual world that every man is associated with his like. Supposing, therefore, that any man’s spiritual sight were opened, he would come into conjunction only with spirits like himself ”

“ So too, Swedenborg tells us, those who are internally prepared for heaven and who have been delivered from all evil except that which belongs to the infirmities of the body, are taken up into heaven immediately after death. That from this time forth he himself enjoyed a remarkable protection from spirits who would have excited vain thoughts about his own works and the grace vouchsafed him, is manifest in everything he wrote, if we except a certain floridity of style in this work already in hand on the Worship and Love of God, in which he himself later detected "somewhat of egotism." ”

“ As the human form, then, is such that all its parts form a community which acts as a whole, some one thing cannot be moved out of place or altered in state except with adaptation of the rest, for if it were, the form which acts as a whole would suffer. Hence it is plain that the Lord never acts on any one thing without acting on all. So He acts on the total angelic heaven since in His view it is like one man; so He acts on each angel, for each angel is heaven in least form; so He acts also on each man, most nearly on all things of man's mind and by these on all things of his body ”

“ Over and above the merit of his particular discoveries, is the capital merit of his self-equality. A drop of water has the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as of a flute; strength of a host, as well as of a hero; and, in Swedenborg, those who are best acquainted with modern books will most admire the merit of mass. ”

“ He had not only spoken with Swedenborg himself, but had also visited him at his house; and he is now in the greatest astonishment respecting such a remarkable case. Swedenborg is a reasonable, polite, and open-hearted man ; he is also a man of learning ”

“ As the angels of that heaven are such they never reason about Divine truths, still less do they dispute about any truth whether it is so or not; nor do they know what it is to believe or to have faith. They say, "What is faith? for I perceive and see that a thing is so." This they illustrate by comparisons; for example, that it would be as when any one with a companion, seeing a house and the various things in it and around it, should say to his companion that he ought to believe that these things exist, and that they are such as he sees them to be ”