Chapter I

What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought.

MILTON.

Here follow extracts from a section in Atherton’s Note-book, entitled ‘Remarks on Swedenborg.’

The doctrine of Correspondence is the central idea of Swedenborg’s
system. Everything visible has belonging to it an appropriate
spiritual reality. The history of man is an acted parable; the
universe, a temple covered with hieroglyphics. Behmen, from the
light which flashes on certain exalted moments, imagines that he
receives the key to these hidden significances,—that he can
interpret the _Signatura Rerum_. But he does not see spirits, or
talk with angels. According to him, such communications would be
less reliable than the intuition he enjoyed. Swedenborg takes
opposite ground. ‘What I relate,’ he would say, ‘comes from no such
mere inward persuasion. I recount the things I have seen. I do not
labour to recall and to express the manifestation made me in some
moment of ecstatic exaltation. I write you down a plain statement of
journeys and conversations in the spiritual world, which have made
the greater part of my daily history for many years together. I take
my stand upon experience. I have proceeded by observation and
induction as strict as that of any man of science among you. Only it
has been given me to enjoy an experience reaching into two
worlds—that of spirit, as well as that of matter.’

A mysticism like that of Tauler strives, and strives in vain, to
escape all image and ‘figuration.’ A mysticism like that of
Swedenborg clothes every spiritual truth in some substantial
envelope, and discerns a habitant spirit in every variety of form.
The follower of Plato essays to rise from the visible to the
invisible. But he spurns each ladder in succession by which he has
ascended. The follower of Swedenborg seeks a similar ascent; but he
never flings away, as common, the husk which guards the precious
spiritual kernel. He will not shun the material, or diminish his
relations to it. Rather will he surround himself by those objects
and those ties of earth which, spiritually regarded, speak
constantly of heaven. To look thus on life, I need not enter the
school of Swedenborg.

But in this freedom from asceticism,—this tendency to see the
spiritual, not beyond, but in, the natural,—the mysticism of
Swedenborg, like that of Behmen, has advanced far beyond its
mediæval type. Religion no longer plays the despot toward science;
the flesh is no longer evil; this beautiful world no longer yielded
over to that father of lies who called it his.

As regards the scriptures, I find Swedenborg less one-sided than
mystics like Frank, Weigel, or the more extreme among the Quakers.
He displays no inclination to depreciate the letter of scripture in
favour of the inward teaching of the Word. Without this
‘book-revelation,’ he tells us, man would have remained in gross
ignorance concerning his Maker and his future destinies. The literal
sense of the word is the basis of the spiritual and celestial sense;
and the word, for this very reason, holy in every syllable. He sets
up no doctrine based on arbitrary or fantastical interpretations.
His doctrinal system is drawn from the literal sense, and calmly, if
not always satisfactorily deduced, by citation, exegesis, and
comparison of passages, without any mysticism whatever. Thus the
balance between the letter and the spirit is maintained in his
theology with a fairness almost unparalleled in the history of
mysticism.[388]

According to Swedenborg, all the mythology and the symbolisms of
ancient times were so many refracted or fragmentary
correspondences—relics of that better day when every outward object
suggested to man’s mind its appropriate divine truth. Such desultory
and uncertain links between the seen and the unseen are so many
imperfect attempts toward that harmony of the two worlds which he
believed himself commissioned to reveal. The happy thoughts of the
artist, the imaginative analogies of the poet, are exchanged with
Swedenborg for an elaborate system. All the terms and objects in the
natural and spiritual worlds are catalogued in pairs. This method
appears so much formal pedantry. Our fancies will not work to order.
The meaning and the life with which we continually inform outward
objects,—those suggestions from sight and sound, which make almost
every man at times a poet,—are our own creations, are determined by
the mood of the hour, cannot be imposed from without, cannot be
arranged like the nomenclature of a science. As regards the inner
sense of scripture, at all events, Swedenborg introduces some such
yoke. In that province, however, it is perhaps as well that those
who are not satisfied with the obvious sense should find some
restraint for their imagination, some method for their ingenuity,
some guidance in a curiosity irresistible to a certain class of
minds. If an objector say, ‘I do not see why the ass should
correspond to scientific truth, and the horse to intellectual
truth,’ Swedenborg will reply, ‘This analogy rests on no fancy of
mine, but on actual experience and observation in the spiritual
world. I have always seen horses and asses present and
circumstanced, when, and according as, those inward qualities were
central.’[389] But I do not believe that it was the design of
Swedenborg rigidly to determine the relationships by which men are
continually uniting the seen and unseen worlds. He probably
conceived it his mission to disclose to men the divinely-ordered
correspondences of scripture, the close relationship of man’s
several states of being, and to make mankind more fully aware that
matter and spirit were associated, not only in the varying analogies
of imagination, but by the deeper affinity of eternal law. In this
way, he sought to impart an impulse rather than to prescribe a
scheme. His consistent followers will acknowledge that had he lived
in another age, and occupied a different social position, the forms
under which the spiritual world presented itself to him would have
been different. To a large extent, therefore, his _Memorable
Relations_ must be regarded as true for him only,—for such a
character, in such a day, though containing principles independent
of personal peculiarity and local colouring. It would have been
indeed inconsistent, had the Protestant who (as himself a Reformer)
essayed to supply the defects and correct the errors of the
Reformation,—had he designed to prohibit all advance beyond his own
position.

There is great depth and beauty in that idea of Dante’s, according
to which he represents himself as conscious of ascending from heaven
to heaven in Paradise, not by perception of a transit through space,
but by seeing his Beatrice grow more and more lovely:—

Io non m’accorsi del salire in ella;
Ma d’esserv’ entro mi fece assai fede
La donna mia ch’ io vidi far più bella.

What is an imagination with Dante, acquires, in the theosophy of
Swedenborg, the constancy of law. According to him, the more I have
of goodness in me, the more shall I discern of the loveliness
belonging to the form of a good angel. If I am evil, the hideous
forms of evil natures will not be repulsive to me; and if I were
placed in heaven, the glory would afflict me with pain. To three
persons, in three different states of holiness and knowledge, a
fourth would present three several aspects in the spiritual world.
Thus, spirits see as they themselves are; their character modifies
their vision; their nature creates for them their world. All this
seems so much mere idealism, extended from this life into the next.
I ask, Where is the absolute truth, then? My German neighbour
quietly inquires, ‘Is there, or is there not, any _Ding an sich_?’
The Swedenborgian replies, ‘Swedenborg is no idealist, as you
suspect. The absolute truth is with God; and the more goodness and
wisdom the creatures have from him, the more truly do they see. The
reality external to self, I do not take away; yea, rather I
establish it on a divine basis. For the reality is even this divine
order, which the Omniscient hath established and maintains,—that
form and vision shall answer exactly to spirit and insight. Such
correspondence is but partial in this masquerading world of ours, so
full of polite pretences and seemly forms. But in the spiritual
world every one appears by degrees only what he is. He gravitates
towards that circle or association of spirits where all see as much
as he does. His character is written, past all disguise, in his
form; and so ‘the things spoken in the ear in closets are proclaimed
upon the housetops.’

Humanity stands high with Behmen, higher yet with Swedenborg. The
Divine Humanity is at once the Lord and pattern of all creation. The
innumerable worlds of space are arranged after the human form. The
universe is a kind of constellation _Homo_. Every spirit belongs to
some province in Swedenborg’s ‘Grand Man,’ and affects the
correspondent part of the human body. A spirit dwelling in those
parts of the universe which answer to the heart or the liver, makes
his influx felt in the cardiac or hepatic regions of Swedenborg’s
frame before he becomes visible to the eye. Evil spirits, again,
produced their correspondent maladies on his system, during the time
of his intercourse with them. Hypocrites gave him a pain in the
teeth, because hypocrisy is spiritual toothache. The inhabitants of
Mercury correspond to a province of memory in the ‘grand man:’ the
Lunarians to the ensiform cartilage at the bottom of the
breast-bone. With Swedenborg likeness is proximity: space and time
are states of love and thought. Hence his journeys from world to
world;—passing through states being equivalent to travelling over
spaces. Thus it took him ten hours to reach one planet, while at
another he arrived in two, because a longer time was required to
approximate the state of his mind to that of the inhabitants of the
former.[390]

The thoughts of Swedenborg have never to struggle for expression,
like those of the half-educated Behmen. The mind of the Swedish seer
was of the methodical and scientific cast. His style is calm and
clear. He is easily understood in detail. The metaphors of poets are
objects of vision with him: every abstraction takes some concrete
form: his illustrations are incessant. He describes with the graphic
minuteness of Defoe. Nothing is lost in cloud. With a distinct and
steady outline he pourtrays, to the smallest circumstance, the
habitations, the amusements, the occupations, the penalties, the
economy, the marriages of the unseen world. He is never amazed, he
never exaggerates. He is unimpassioned, and wholly careless of
effect. Those of his followers with whom I have come in contact,
partake of their master’s philosophy. They are liberal in spirit,
and nowise impatient of unbelief in others. Swedenborg never pants
and strives—has none of the tearful vehemence and glowing emotion
which choke the utterance of Behmen. He is never familiar in this
page, and rhapsodical in that. Always serene, this imperturbable
philosopher is the Olympian Jove of mystics. He writes like a man
who was sufficient to himself; who could afford to wait. He lived
much alone; and strong and deep is the stream of this mysticism
which carries no fleck of foam.

Other mystics seem to know times of wavering, when enthusiasm burns
low. To Swedenborg sunrise and sunset are not more constant and
familiar than the divine mission which he claims. Other mystics are
overpowered by manifestations from the unseen world. Horror seizes
them, or a dizzy joy, or the vision leaves them faint and trembling.
They have their alternations; their lights and shadows are in
keeping; they will topple headlong from some sunny pinnacle into an
abysmal misery. But Swedenborg is ‘in the spirit’ for near two score
years, and in his easy chair, or at his window, or on his walks,
holds converse, as a matter of course, with angels and departed
great ones, with patriarchs and devils. He can even instruct some of
the angels, who have had experience only of their own world, and are
guileless accordingly.

Footnote 388:

See Swedenborg’s _True Christian Religion_, chap. iv.

Footnote 389:

See _E. Swedenborg, a Biography_, by J. G. Wilkinson, p. 99; a
succinct and well-written account of the man, and the best
introduction to his writings I have met with.

Footnote 390:

Wilkinson, pp. 187, 118.