The Secret of Swedenborg

Cambkidge, Mass., January, 1869, CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. Creation the fundamental problem of philosophv. — Difficulties of the problem. — Kant's attempt to reconcile them. — A supernatural creation, that is, a creation which does not conform to the order and methods of nature, inconceivable. — The moral h}-pothesis of creation untenable. — Morality not a creative end, but only a creative means. — Swedenborg and Hegel contrasted. — Swedenborg's analysis of consciousness, establisning the superiority of its objective to its subjective element, and giving the key to the philosophy of creation, in his doctrine of the lord, or maximus homo. 1-11 CHAPTER I. Swedenborg's private history and intellectual character. — His biography, by "William White. — His doctrine of the lord, or divine natural human- ity, briefly stated 11-15 CHAPTER n.

church is based upon the truth of the divine NATrrRAL, humanity, and hence has no recognition of a deity outside of the conditions of human nature. — The incarnation is a domestication of the divine perfection in human nature, and through that in animal, vegetable, and mineral. — Swedcnborg illustrates tiiis truth rather than argues it. — Distinction between living and dead truth, or truths of conscience which belong to the life, and truths of science which belong to the memory. — Sweden- borg's doctrine of nature — Nature exists only to sense, and has no rational reality. — Thus it is a purely phenomenal or apparitional world, although in the infancy of our intelligence we suppose it to be the only reality, and are incapable of lifting our thought above it. — We suppose creation accordingly to be a physical achievement of God, — a magical ex- hibition of his power in space and time, whereas it is a wholly spiritual operation in the sphere of human affection and thought. — Philosophy de- mands consequently that we allow nature only a subjective force, or re- gard it as strict involution of the human mind. . . . 20-25

The same subject continued and illustrated. — Swedenborg's vindication of nature and the part it plays in creation. — The divine love and wisdom can- not but be and exist in other beings or existences created from itself; and nature is the logical background of such existences, as giving them self- consciousness. — Remarkable definition of love. — Consists in one's wil- ling what is one's own to be another's, and feeling another's delight as one's own. — Other quotations from Swedcnborg. — If love be of this essentially unselfish quality, the creative love must be infinitely pure; binding the creator to make himself over without stint to the creature, or to allow the latter to effloresce in all his native selfishness and worldliness, to the utmost limit compatible with liis eventual spiritual reaction towards the creator. — Creation is the practical immersion consequently of crea- tive perfection in created imperfection, so that the more the creator alone is, the more the creature alone appears.. Hence the origin of nature. It expresses the obligation the creature is under to appropriate the creator, or to make him his own. It is the nuptial couch of creator and creature ; the marriage ring that consecrates the espousals of infinite and finite. Thus its virtue is purely ceremonial, shadowy, reflective, as giving the creature — not being — but self-consciousness, or such an appearance of being as may eventually induct him into the acquaintance of being itself 25-31

CHAPTER V. A closer exposition of Swedenborg's doctrine of creation. — The law of the creature's subjective constitution. — Nature the realm neither of being nor of not being, but of existence, and hence the iertium quid of which philosophy has always been in search to reconcile God and m:in. It is not the spiritual creation itself, but the shadow of it projected upon a finite intelligence. — Our intelligence conditioned upon nature. — Swe- dcnborg nuikes nature a theatre oi recelatiun exclusively, and denies it any other worth. 31-37 CONTENTS. Sa CHAPTER VL Swedenborg not properlr chargeable with pantheistic or idealist tendencies ; being separated from them by his doctrine of creation, -which makes nature no being but only a seeming, no substance but only a shadow. 38-40 CHAPTER VII.

Method of the divine revelation very gradual, beginning with the family, and ending with the social, unity of man ; a temporary or provisional form of it being supplied by the conventional society called the church. — The church, as a visible or ritual economy, has never had any real but only a representative worth ; and at the present time is sadly behind "the world" in spiritual intelligence. But it has had an inestimable use in keep- ing alive men's conscience of unrest towards God, and so preparing the way for his consummate achievement in our nature, which is the evolution of the SOCIAL sentiment. — Swedenborg's conception of the technical church. Has no quarrel with the persons composing it, but only with its un- righteous animus 71-79 CHAPTER XIII. The purely negative office of the church in history illustrated and argued, from reason and scripture 79-85 CHAPTER XIV.

Faith must reconcile herself to this perilous alternative, if she obstinately persist in making our natural morality supernatural by allowing it a truth irrespective of consciousness, or assigning it any objectivity beyond the evolution of human society or fel- lowship. It is not its own end, but a strict means to a higher or spiritual evolution of life in our nature; and they accordingly who persist in ignoring this truth must expect to fall intellectual- ly behind the time in which they live. Some concession hei-e is absolutely necessary to save the religious instinct. For men feel a growing obligation to co-ordinate the demands of freedom or personality with the limitations of science ; and since Kant's re- morseless criticism stops them off — under penalty of accepting his impracticable noumenal world — from postulating any longer an objective being answering to their subjective seeming, they must needs "svith his successors give the whole question of crea- tion the go-by, in qiiietly resolving the minor element of the equation into the major, man into God, or making the finite a mere transient experience of the infinite, by means of which that great unconsciousness attains to selfhood. For this is the sum of the Heo;elian dialectic, to confound existence with beinxr, or make identity no longer serve individuality, but absorb or swallow it up : so bringing back creation to intellectual chaos, which is naught.

ual form or objectivity in him, as the statue has ideal form or objectivitv in the genius of the sculptor, or the child moral form or objectivity in the loins of his father, but they must actually go forth from him, or exist in their own proper sub- stance, in their own constitutional identity, just as the statue exists in the appropriate constitutional substance which the marble gives it, or the child in the proper constitutional linea- ments with which the mother invests it. The legal maxim is, de non apparentibus et non existentibiis eadem est ratio. The philosophic demand is broader. It says, no esse without exis- tere ; no reality without corresponding actuality ; no soul with- out body ; no form without substance : no being without mani- festation ; in short, no creation on God's part save in so far as there is a rigidly constitutional response and reaction on ours.

Certainly we have no right after this to attribute to Swe- denborg an obscure or mystical conception of nature. Nature bears the same servile relation to the spiritual creation that a man's body bears to his soul, that the material of a house bears to the house itself, or that the substance of a statue bears to its form, namely, a merely quantifying, by no means a qualifving, relation. It fills out the spiritual creation, substantiates it, gives it subjective anchorage, fixity, or identification, incorpo- rates it, in a word, just as the marble incorporates the statue. For the statue is primarily an ideal form, affiliating itself to the artist's genius exclusively, and is only derivatively thence f a material existence. So I primarily am a spiritual form, that is to say, a form of affection and thought, directly affiliated to the creative love and wisdom; and what my body does is 26 THE SECEET OF SWEDENBOKG.

prejudices. You both alike maintain in truth, whatever you may do in fact, that nature is the hmit, not the starting-point, of creation ; that it is the controlhng end, not the servile means or pliant method, of the creative power: the consequence being that you, ]\[r. Mansel, from your point of view, have no occasion for a god who is not the jealous and implacable rival of nature ; nor you, Mr. INlill, from your point of view, any occasion for one who is not its unlimited servant, its idle and abject tool." The regeneration, then, which Swedenborg's spiritual dis- closures bring to faith and to science quite equally consists in a totally new conception of the creative power, whereby, on the one hand, nature, or the cosmos, is turned from an objective into a subjective work of God, which alone it is ; and man, on the other hand, is turned from a subjective work of God, which he is not, into an objective work, which alone he truly is.

It thus appears that Mr. Mansel and Mr. Mill cannot help differing egregiously from Swedenborg in the estimate they make of Christ's nativity, inasmuch as they both alike look upon nature as an absolutely fixed existence, as an essentially finite quantity, wholly incapable of any adjustment or approx- imation to the infinite ; while Swedenborg regards it as an essen- tially indeterminate quantity, or indefinite existence, being in itself neither infinite nor finite, but the exact neutrality or indif- ference of the two, and standing therefore in equal and unforced proximity to either interest. Both Mr. Mansel and Mr. Mill conceive nature herself — the cosmos — whatever they may make of her shifting specific forms, to be her own end, to exist upon her own absolute basis, as exhibiting no normal subser- viency to a distinctly superior style of life.