Representative Men: Seven Lectures
Greeks, collected in Ovid, and in the Indian Transmigration, and is
there objective, or really takes place in bodies by alien will,--in
Swedenborg's mind, has a more philosophic character. It is subjective,
or depends entirely upon the thought of the person. All things in the
universe arrange themselves to each person anew, according to his
ruling love. Man is such as his affection and thought are. Man is man
by virtue of willing, not by virtue of knowing and understanding. As
he is, so he sees. The marriages of the world are broken up. Interiors
associate all in the spiritual world. Whatever the angels looked upon
was to them celestial. Each Satan appears to himself a man; to those
as bad as he, a comely man; to the purified, a heap of carrion. Nothing
can resist states; everything gravitates; like will to like; what we
call poetic justice takes effect on the spot. We have come into a world
which is a living poem. Every thing is as I am. Bird and beast is not
bird and beast, but emanation and effluvia of the minds and wills of
men there present. Every one makes his own house and state. The ghosts
are tormented with the fear of death, and cannot remember that they
have died. They who are in evil and falsehood are afraid of all others.
Such as have deprived themselves of charity, wander and flee; the
societies which they approach discover their quality, and drive them
away. The covetous seem to themselves to be abiding in cells where
their money is deposited, and these to be infested with mice. They who
place merit in good works seem to themselves to cut wood. "I asked
such, if they were not wearied? They replied, that they have not yet
done work enough to merit heaven."
He delivers golden sayings, which express with singular beauty the
ethical laws; as when he uttered that famed sentence, that, "in heaven
the angels are advancing continually to the springtime of their youth,
so that the oldest angel appears the youngest:" "The more angels, the
more room:" "The perfection of man is the love of use:" "Man, in his
perfect form, is heaven:" "What is from Him, is Him:" "Ends always
ascend as nature descends:" And the truly poetic account of the writing
in the inmost heaven, which, as it consists of inflexions according
to the form of heaven, can be read without instruction He almost
justifies his claim to preternatural vision, by strange insights of
the structure of the human body and mind. "It is never permitted to
any one, in heaven, to stand behind another and look at the back of
his head; for then the influx which is from the Lord is disturbed."
The angels, from the sound of the voice, know a man's love; from the
articulation of the sound, his wisdom; and from the sense of the words,
his science.
In the "Conjugal Love," he has unfolded the science of marriage. Of
this book, one would say, that, with the highest elements, it has
failed of success. It came near to be the Hymn of Love, which Plato
attempted in the "Banquet;" the love, which, Dante says, Casella sang
among the angels in Paradise; and which, as rightly celebrated, in its
genesis, fruition, and effect, might well entrance the souls, as it
would lay open the genesis of all institutions, customs, and manners.
The book had been grand, if the Hebraism had been omitted, and the law
stated without Gothicism, as ethics, and with that scope for ascension
of state which the nature of things requires. It is a fine Platonic
development of the science of marriage; teaching that sex is universal,
and not local; virility in the male qualifying every organ, act, and
thought; and the feminine in woman. Therefore, in the real or spiritual
world, the nuptial union is not momentary, but incessant and total;
and chastity not a local, but a universal virtue; unchastity being
discovered as much in the trading, or planting, or speaking, or
philosophizing, as in generation; and that, though the virgins he saw
in heaven were beautiful, the wives were incomparably more beautiful,
and went on increasing in beauty evermore.
Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned his theory to a temporary form.
He exaggerates the circumstance of marriage; and, though he finds false
marriages on the earth, fancies a wiser choice in heaven. But of
progressive souls, all loves and friendships are momentary. Do you
love me? means, Do you see the same truth? If you do, we are happy
with the same happiness; but presently one of us passes into the
perception of new truth;--we are divorced, and no tension in nature
can hold us to each other. I know how delicious is this cup of love,--I
existing for you, you existing for me; but it is a child's clinging
to his toy; an attempt to eternize the fireside and nuptial chamber;
to keep the picture-alphabet through which our first lessons are
prettily conveyed. The Eden of God is bare and grand: like the outdoor
landscape, remembered from the evening fireside, it seems cold and
desolate, whilst you cower over the coals; but, once abroad again, we
pity those who can forego the magnificence of nature, for candle-light
and cards. Perhaps the true subject of the "Conjugal Love" is
conversation, whose laws are profoundly eliminated. It is false, if
literally applied to marriage. For God is the bride or bridegroom of
the soul. Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the communion of all
souls. We meet, and dwell an instant under the temple of one thought,
and part as though we parted not, to join another thought in other
fellowships of joy. So far from there being anything divine in the low
and proprietary sense of, Do you love me? it is only when you leave
and lose me, by casting yourself on a sentiment which is higher than
both of us, that I draw near, and find myself at your side; and I am
repelled, if you fix your eye on me, and demand love. In fact, in the
spiritual world, we change sexes every moment. You love the worth in
me; then I am your husband: but it is not me, but the worth, that fixes
the love; and that worth is a drop of the ocean of worth that is beyond
me. Meantime, I adore the greater worth in another, and so become his
wife. He aspires to a higher worth in another spirit, and is wife of
receiver of that influence.
Whether a self-inquisitorial habit, that he grew into, from jealousy
of the sins to which men of thought are liable, he has acquired, in
disentangling and demonstrating that particular form of moral disease,
an acumen which no conscience can resist. I refer to his feeling of
the profanation of thinking to what is good "from scientifics." "To
reason about faith, is to doubt and deny." He was painfully alive to
the difference between knowing and doing, and this sensibility is
incessantly expressed. Philosophers are, therefore, vipers, cockatrices,
asps, hemorrhoids, presters, and flying serpents; literary men are
conjurers and charlatans.
But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that here we find the seat
of his own pain. 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: and this man, profusely endowed in
heart and mind, early fell into dangerous discord with himself. In his
Animal Kingdom, he surprises us, by declaring that he loved analysis,
and not synthesis; and now, after his fiftieth year, he falls into
jealousy of his intellect; and, though aware that truth is not solitary,
nor is goodness solitary, but both must ever mix and marry, he makes
war on his mind, takes the part of the conscience against it, and, on
all occasions, traduces and blasphemes it. The violence is instantly
avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love is unlovely, when truth, the half
part of heaven, is denied, as much as when a bitterness in men of
talent leads to satire, and destroys the judgment. He is wise, but
wise in his own despite. There is an air of infinite grief, and the
sound of wailing, all over and through this lurid universe. A vampyre
sits in the seat of the prophet, and turns with gloomy appetite to the
images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not more readily weave its nest,
or a mole bore into the ground, than this seer of souls substructs a
new hell and pit, each more abominable than the last, round every new
crew of offenders. He was let down through a column that seemed of
brass, but it was formed of angelic spirits, that he might descend
safely amongst the unhappy, and witness the vastation of souls; and
heard there, for a long continuance, their lamentations; he saw their
tormentors, who increase and strain pangs to infinity; he saw the hell
of the jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the hell of the lascivious;
the hell of robbers, who kill and boil men; the infernal tun of the
deceitful; the excrementitious hells; the hell of the revengeful, whose
faces resembled a round, broad-cake, and their arms rotate like a
wheel. Except Rabelais and Dean Swift, nobody ever had such science
of filth and corruption.
These books should be used with caution. It is dangerous to sculpture
these evanescing images of thought. True in transition, they become
false if fixed. It requires, for his just apprehension, almost a genius
equal to his own. But when his visions become the stereotyped language
of multitudes of persons, of all degrees of age and capacity, they are
perverted. The wise people of the Greek race were accustomed to lead
the most intelligent and virtuous young men, as part of their education,
through the Eleusinian mysteries, wherein, with much pomp and
graduation, the highest truths known to ancient wisdom were taught.
An ardent and contemplative young man, at eighteen or twenty years,
might read once these books of Swedenborg, these mysteries of love and
conscience, and then throw them aside forever. Genius is ever haunted
by similar dreams, when the hells and the heavens are opened to it.
But these pictures are to be held as mystical, that is, as a quite
arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth--not as the truth. Any
other symbol would be as good: then this is safely seen.
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 those 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 center 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. Every thought comes into each
mind by influence from a society of spirits that surround it, and into
these from a higher society, and so on. All his types mean the same
few things. All his figures speak one speech. All his interlocutors
Swedenborgize. Be they who they may, to this complexion must they come
at last. This Charon ferries them all over in his boat; kings,
counselors, cavaliers, doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane,
King George II., Mahomet, or whosoever, and all gather one grimness
of hue and style. Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle seer sticks
a little at saying he talked with Cicero, and, with a touch of human
relenting, remarks, "one whom it was given me to believe was Cicero;"
and when the _soi disant_ Roman opens his mouth, Rome and eloquence
have ebbed away,--it is plain theologic Swedenborg, like the rest. His
heavens and hells are dull; fault of want of individualism. The