The Gist of Swedenborg.
by Emanuel Swedenborg.
FOREWORD
The reason for a compilation such as is here presented should be obvious. Swedenborg"s theological writings comprise some thirty or more substantial volumes, the result of the most concentrated labor extending over a period of twenty-seven years. To study these writings in their whole extent, to see them in their minute unfoldment out of the Word of G.o.d, is a work of years. It is doubtful if there is a phase of man"s religious experience for which an interpretation is not here to be found. Notwithstanding this immense sweep of doctrine there are certain vital, fundamental truths on which it all rests:--the Christ-G.o.d, Man a spiritual being, the warfare of Regeneration, Marriage, the Sacred Scriptures, the Life of Charity and Faith, the Divine Providence, Death and the Future Life, the Church. We have endeavored to press within the small compa.s.s of this book pa.s.sages which give the gist of Swedenborg"s teachings on these subjects.
The compilers would gladly have made room for the interpretative and philosophical teachings which contribute so much to the content and form of Swedenborg"s theology; but they have confined their effort to setting forth briefly and clearly the positive spiritual teachings, where these seemed most packed with religious meaning and moment.
The translation of the pa.s.sages here brought together has been carefully revised.
JULIAN K. SMYTH.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Emanuel Swedenborg was born at Stockholm, January 29, 1688.
A devout home (the father was a Lutheran clergyman, and afterwards Bishop of Skara) stimulated in the boy the nature which was to become so active in his culminating life-work. A university education at Upsala, however, and studies for five years in England, France, Holland and Germany, brought other interests into play first. The earliest of these were mathematics and astronomy, in the pursuit of which he met Flamsteed and Halley. His gift for the detection and practical employment of general laws soon carried him much farther afield in the sciences. Metallurgy, geology, a varied field of invention, chemistry, as well as his duties as an a.s.sessor on the Board of Mines and of a legislator in the Diet, all engaged him, with an immediate outcome in his work, and often with results in contributions to human knowledge which are gaining recognition only now. The _Principia_ and two companion volumes, dedicated to his patron, the Duke of Brunswick, crowned his versatile productions in the physical sciences. Academies of science, at home and abroad, were electing him to membership.
Conspicuous in Swedenborg"s thought all along was the premise that there is a G.o.d and the presupposition of that whole element in life which we call the spiritual. As he pushed his studies into the fields of physiology and psychology, this premised realm of the spirit became the express goal of his researches. Some of his most valuable and most startling discoveries came in these fields. Outstanding are a work on _The Brain_ and two on the _Animal Kingdom_ (kingdom of the _anima_, or soul). As his gaze sought the soul, however, in the light in which he had more and more successfully beheld all his subjects for fifty-five years, she eluded direct knowledge. He was increasingly baffled, until a new light broke in on him. Then he was borne along, in a profound humiliation of his intellectual ambitions, by another way. For when the new light steadied, he had undergone a personal religious experience, the rich journals of which he himself never published. But what was of public concern, his consciousness was opened into the world of the spirit, so that he could observe its facts and laws as, for so long, he had observed those of the material world, and in its own world could receive a revelation of the doctrines of man"s spiritual life.
It was now, for the first time, too, that he gave a deep consideration to the condition of the Christian Church, revealed in otherworld judgment to be one of spiritual devastation and impotency. To serve in the revelation of "doctrine for a New Church" became his Divinely appointed work. He forwent his reputation as a man of science, gave up his a.s.sessorship, cleared his desk of everything but the Scriptures.
He beheld in the Word of G.o.d a spiritual meaning, as he did a spiritual world in the world of phenomena. In revealing both of these the Lord, he said, made His Second Coming. For the rest of his long life Swedenborg gave himself with unremitting labor but with a saving calm to this commanding cause, publishing his great Latin volumes of Scripture interpretation and of theological teaching at Amsterdam or London, at first anonymously, and distributing them to clergy and universities. The t.i.tles of his princ.i.p.al theological works appear in the following compilation from them. Upon his death-bed this herald of a new day for Christianity solemnly affirmed the reality of his experience and the reception by him of his teaching from the Lord.
Swedenborg died in London, March 29, 1772. In 1908 his remains were removed from the Swedish Church in that city to the cathedral at Upsala, where they lie in a monument erected to his memory by the Swedish Parliament.
WILLIAM F. WUNSCH.
_Doc.u.ments Concerning the Life and Character of Swedenborg_ (3 vols.) 1875-1877, R.L. Tafel, is the main collection of biographical material; _The Life and Mission of Emanuel Swedenborg_, 1883, Benjamin Worcester, and _Emanuel Swedenborg, His Life, Teachings and Influence_, 1907, George Trobridge, are two of the better known biographies.
THE GIST OF SWEDENBORG
"At this day nothing but the self-evidenced reason of love will re-establish the Church."--_Canons_, Prologue.
G.o.d THE LORD
"Believe in G.o.d: believe also in Me."
_John_, XIV, 1
"My Lord, and my G.o.d!"
_John_, XX, 28
ONE AND INFINITE
G.o.d is One, and Infinite. The true quality of the Infinite does not appear; for the human mind, however highly a.n.a.lytical and exalted, is itself finite, and the finiteness in it cannot be laid aside. It is not fitted, therefore, to see the Infinity of G.o.d, and thus G.o.d, as He is in Himself, but can see G.o.d from behind in shadow; as it is said of Moses, when he asked to see G.o.d, that he was placed in a cleft of the rock, and saw His hinder side. It is enough to acknowledge G.o.d from things finite, that is, created, in which He is infinitely.
--_True Christian Religion, n._ 28
"INTO HIS MARVELLOUS LIGHT"
We read in the Word that Jehovah G.o.d dwells in light inaccessible.
Who, then, could approach Him, unless He had come to dwell in accessible light, that is, unless He had descended and a.s.sumed a Humanity and in it had become the Light of the world? Who cannot see that to approach Jehovah the Father in His light is as impossible as to take the wings of the morning and to fly with them to the sun?
--_True Christian Religion, n._ 176
THE CHRIST-G.o.d
We ought to have faith in G.o.d the Saviour, Jesus Christ, because that is faith in the visible G.o.d in Whom is the Invisible; and faith in the visible G.o.d, Who is at once Man and G.o.d, enters into man. For while faith is spiritual in essence it is natural in form, for everything spiritual, in order to be anything with a man, is received by him in what is natural.
--_True Christian Religion, n._ 339
Man"s conjunction with the Lord is not with His supreme Divine Being itself, but with His Divine Humanity, and by this with the supreme Divine Being; for man can have no idea whatever of the supreme Divine Being of the Lord, utterly transcending his thought as it does; but of His Divine Human Being he can have an idea. Hence the Gospel according to John says that no one has at any time seen G.o.d except the only-begotten Son, and that there is no approach to the Father save by Him. For the same reason He is called a Mediator.
--_Arcana Coelestia, n._ 4211
G.o.d-MAN
In the Lord, G.o.d and Man are not two but one Person, yea, altogether one, as soul and body are. This is plain in many of the Lord"s own utterances; as that the Father and He are one; that all things of the Father are His, and all His the Father"s; that He is in the Father, and the Father in Him; that all things are given into His hand; that He has all power; that whosoever believes in Him has eternal life; that He is G.o.d of heaven and earth.
--_Doctrine Concerning the Lord, n._ 60
There is one G.o.d, and the Lord is He, His Divinity and Humanity being one Person.
--_Divine Providence, n._ 122
They who think of the Lord"s Humanity, and not at the same time of His Divinity, by no means allow the expression "Divine Humanity"; for they think of the Humanity by itself and of the Divinity by itself, which is like thinking of man apart from his soul or life, which, however, is no conception of man, still less of the Lord.
--_Apocalypse Explained, n._ 26