Representative Men: Seven Lectures
thousand-fold relation of men is not there. The interest that attaches
in nature to each man, because he is right by his wrong, and wrong by
his right, because he defies all dogmatizing and classification, so
many allowances, and contingencies, and futurities, are to be taken
into account, strong by his vices, often paralyzed by his
virtues,--sinks into entire sympathy with his society. This want reacts
to the center of the system. Though the agency of "the Lord" is in
every line referred to by name, it never becomes alive. There is no
lustre in that eye which gazes from the center, and which should vivify
the immense dependency of beings.
The vice of Swedenborg's mind is its theologic determination. Nothing
with him has the liberality of universal wisdom, but we are always in
a church. That Hebrew muse, which taught the lore of right and wrong
to man, had the same excess of influence for him, it has had for the
nations. The mode, as well as the essence, was sacred. Palestine is
ever the more valuable as a chapter in universal history, and ever the
less an available element in education. The genius of Swedenborg,
largest of all modern souls in this department of thought, wasted
itself in the endeavor to reanimate and conserve what had already
arrived at its natural term, and, in the great secular Providence, was
retiring from its prominence, before western modes of thought and
expression. Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching themselves
to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which
carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities, in its
bosom.
The excess of influence shows itself in the incongruous importation
of a foreign rhetoric. "What have I to do," asks the impatient reader,
"with jasper and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony; what with arks and
passovers, ephahs and ephods; what with lepers and emerods; what with
heave-offerings and unleavened bread; chariots of fire, dragons crowned
and horned, behemoth and unicorn? Good for orientals, these are nothing
to me. The more learning you bring to explain them, the more glaring
the impertinence. The more coherent and elaborate the system, the less
I like it. I say, with the Spartan, 'Why do you speak so much to the
purpose, of that which is nothing to the purpose?' My learning is such
as God gave me in my birth and habit, in the delight and study of my
eyes, and not of another man's. Of all absurdities, this of some
foreigner, purposing to take away my rhetoric, and substitute his own,
and amuse me with pelican and stork, instead of thrush and robin;
palm-trees and shittim-wood, instead of sassafras and hickory,--seems
the most needless." Locke said, "God, when he makes the prophet, does
not unmake the man." Swedenborg's history points the remark. The parish
disputes, in the Swedish church, between the friends and foes of Luther
and Melancthon, concerning "faith alone," and "works alone," intrude
themselves into his speculations upon the economy of the universe, and
of the celestial societies. The Lutheran bishop's son, for whom the
heavens are opened, so that he sees with eyes, and in the richest
symbolic forms, the awful truth of things, and utters again, in his
books, as under a heavenly mandate, the indisputable secrets of moral
nature,--with all these grandeurs resting upon him, remains the Lutheran
bishop's son; his judgments are those of a Swedish polemic, and his
vast enlargements purchased by adamantine limitations. He carries his
controversial memory with him, in his visits to the souls. He is like
Michel Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the cardinal who had offended
him to roast under a mountain of devils; or, like Dante, who avenged,
in vindictive melodies, all his private wrongs; or, perhaps still more
like Montaigne's parish priest, who, if a hailstorm passes over the
village, thinks the day of doom has come, and the cannibals already
have got the pip. Swedenborg confounds us not less with the pains of
Melancthon, and Luther, and Wolfius, and his own books, which he
advertises among the angels.
Under the same theologic cramp, many of his dogmas are bound. His
cardinal position in morals is, that evils should be shunned as sins.
But he does not know what evil is, or what good is, who thinks any
ground remains to be occupied, after saying that evil is to be shunned
as evil. I doubt not he was led by the desire to insert the element
of personality of Deity. But nothing is added. One man, you say, dreads
crysipelas,--show him that this dread is evil: or, one dreads
hell,--show him that dread is evil. He who loves goodness, harbors
angels, reveres reverence, and lives with God. The less we have to do
with our sins, the better. No man can afford to waste his moments in
compunctions. "That is active duty," say the Hindoos, "which is not
for our bondage; that is knowledge, which is for our liberation; all
other duty is good only unto weariness."
Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious theologic limitation,
is this Inferno. Swedenborg has devils. Evil, according to old
philosophers, is good in the making. That pure malignity can exist,
is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained
by a rational agent; it is atheism; it is the last profanation.
Euripides rightly said,--
"Goodness and being in the gods are one; He who imputes ill to them
makes them none."
To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology arrived, that
Swedenborg admitted no conversion for evil spirits! But the divine
effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself
to grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on
gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true. Burns, with the
wild humor of his apostrophe to "poor old Nickie Ben,"
"O wad ye tak a thought, and mend!"
has the advantage of the vindictive theologian. Everything is
superficial, and perishes, but love and truth only. The largest is
always the truest sentiment, and we feel the more generous spirit of
the Indian Vishnu,-"I am the same to all mankind. There is not one who
is worthy of my love or hatred. They who serve me with adoration,--I
am in them, and they in me. If one whose ways are altogether evil,
serve me alone, he is as respectable as the just man; he is altogether
well employed; he soon becometh of a virtuous spirit, and obtaineth
eternal happiness."
For the anomalous pretension of Revelations of the other world,--only
his probity and genius can entitle it to any serious regard. His
revelations destroy their credit by running into detail. If a man say,
that the Holy Ghost hath informed him that the Last Judgment (or the
last of the judgments) took place in 1757; or, that the Dutch, in the
other world, live in a heaven by themselves, and the English in a
heaven by themselves; I reply, that the Spirit which is holy, is
reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws. The rumors of ghosts and
hobgoblins gossip and tell fortunes. The teachings of the high Spirit
are abstemious, and, in regard to particulars, negative. Socrates'
Genius did not advise him to act or to find, but if he proposed to do
somewhat not advantageous, it dissuaded him. "What God is," he said,
"I know not; what he is not I know." The Hindoos have denominated the
Supreme Being, the "Internal Check." The illuminated Quakers explained
their Light, not as somewhat which leads to any action, but it appears
as an obstruction to anything unfit. But the right examples are private
experiences, which are absolutely at one on this point. Strictly
speaking, Swedenborg's revelation is a confounding of planes,--a capital
offence in so learned a categorist. This is to carry the law of surface
into the plane of substance, to carry individualism and its fopperies
into the realm of essences and generals, which is dislocation and
chaos.
The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable
angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints,
the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any
favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into
parallelism with the celestial currents, and could hint to human ears
the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul. But it is certain
that it must tally with what is best in nature. It must not be inferior
in tone to the already known works of the artist who sculptures the
globes of the firmament, and writes the moral law. It must be fresher
than rainbows, stabler than mountains, agreeing with flowers, with
tides, and the rising and setting of autumnal stars. Melodious poets
shall be hoarse as street ballads, when once the penetrating key-note
of nature and spirit is sounded,--the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat
which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood,
and the sap of trees.
In this mood, we hear the rumor that the seer has arrived, and his
tale is told. But there is no beauty, no heaven: for angels, goblins.
The sad muse loves night and death, and the pit. His Inferno is
mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the same relation to the
generosities and joys of truth, of which human souls have already made
us cognizant, as a man's bad dreams bear to his ideal life. It is
indeed very like, in its endless power of lurid pictures, to the
phenomena of dreaming, which nightly turns many an honest gentleman,
benevolent but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulking like a dog about the
outer yards and kennels of creation. When he mounts into the heavens,
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_, and evangelical
picnic, or French distribution of prizes to virtuous peasants. Strange,
scholastic, didactic, passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes of
souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and visits doleful hells as a
stratum of chalk or hornblende! He has no sympathy. He goes up and down
the world of men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold-headed cane and peruke,
and with nonchalance, and the air of a referee, distributing souls. The
warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled world is to him a grammar of
hieroglyphs, or an emblematic freemason's procession. How different is
Jacob Behmen! he is tremulous with emotion, and listens awe-struck, with
the gentlest humanity, to the Teacher whose lessons he conveys; and when
he asserts that, "in some sort, love is greater than God," his heart
beats so high that the thumping against his leathern coat is audible
across the centuries. 'Tis a great difference. Behmen is healthily and
beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrowness and
incommunicableness. Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and, with all his
accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels.
It is the best sign of a great nature, that it opens a foreground,
and, like the breath of morning landscapes, invites us onward.
Swedenborg is retrospective, nor can we divest him of his mattock and
shroud. Some minds are forever restrained from descending into nature;
others are forever 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. He knew the grammar and