# Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 12

CHAPTER TWELVE
The Great Vision
IT is hard to lock up a house entirely. Lock and bar and shutter as one may, there will nearly always be a window not securely fastened—to the great joy of the burglar, or even to the house-holder who forgot his key.
Swedenborg, so watchfully impersonal, did leave an opening leading directly into his inner life at its most difficult period. It was a diary,$^1$ mainly of his dreams, which he kept in 1743 and 1744, while he was in Holland and in England. The hand, probably a family hand, which tore out the notes he had made of his dreams in 1736—39, did not apparently have a chance to meddle with the record he made in this diary. At any rate, someone discovered and published the diary in the middle of the nineteenth century, causing a full Victorian uproar.
There were people who objected that he never meant such intimate notes to be published, referring to his frank descriptions of sexual dreams. By their attitude they unwittingly lent color to the theory which now would seem all too obvious, the theory that Swedenborg was in a state of melancholy because of "guilt feelings" due to suppressed sex. But that easy explanation has to be examined. Fortunately Swedenborg has left no doubt about his attitude in this matter.
It was not Victorian. He lived in an age when his environment did not compel him to veil or to suppress interest in sex—quite the contrary. One of the commonplaces of history is to refer to the eighteenth century, especially the first three quarters of it, as "one of the most licentious, etc.," of the world's record for licence in sexual matters. Casanova need hardly be mentioned. Now Swedenborg was no Casanova, although he himself said that women had been his chief passion all his life.$^2$ That admission, made to himself only in a supersensitive state of his conscience, need not be taken too literally—there was hardly time in his life for this sort of thing​—but he had been perfectly ready to publish his views on sex in a book written only a year or two before the dream diary.
It was the draft of a book on "Reproduction" (De Generatione), and in it he not only described the objective anatomy of the sex organs, but the subjective feelings associated with "this most pleasant and delicious violence and necessity." He described the psycho-physical pleasures of love with a kind of pure and glowing factual frankness, which was equally far from the ineffable or the lascivious—and from the theoretical; though the still eager mathematician in him quaintly enough wondered whether the number of "tacit titillations" of which certain nerves were capable could not "be reduced to calculation," because they "must equal the sum of the papillae." $^3$
So when he set down undisguisedly those dreams in which he had had sexual experience, it was not as examples of something which he held in horror, it was because he had come to look on his dreams as symbolic, quite in the modern way, but from another angle. Instead of seeing his dreams as symbols of striving sex desires, he interpreted his sexual dreams as symbolic of striving spiritual desires, either intellectual or religious, or both. One of his dreams, for instance, was of two women, one young and the other older; he kissed the hands of both, but was in doubt as to which of them he would make love. Having decided that women in dreams represented sciences, he interpreted this dream as referring to his doubt whether he would keep on with his older, intellectual work, or take up a newer and more spiritual work also in his thoughts.$^4$
After one dream involving successful physical intercourse, he interpreted it as "love for what is holy," since, he said, all love has its origin in what is holy, "it is a series, in the body it really is in projectione seminis . . ." $^5$
The key-word here is "series." As early as in The Economy of the Animal Kingdom he had placed different kinds of love at the different levels of man's personality. At the level of the body was the physical act, this had its "correspondence" in the unthinking desire of the lower mind, and to this again corresponded, in the higher mind, "a purer love, lacking a name of its own, with the representation of another in oneself and of oneself in another, that ​is, of an inmost connection." This was as high as man could go, consciously, but on a still higher level the origin of these loves and desires lay in the soul's wish to preserve its own kind for "more universal ends," and, of course, he saw this as an expression of the will of God.
Hence, for him, a dream of physical love, the lowest level of the series, could signify its origin in the highest level, that is, God, or "love for what is holy." No step in this ladder was "impure" to Swedenborg (though he noted that the world thought so), provided it really was part of the whole series, and not the last two bits broken off, unspiritualized by that love "lacking a name of its own." In his draft of the book on the Soul (De Anima, 1741) he gave it a name, calling it "conjugial love," as opposed to "conjugial hate," which he also described—a state worse than hell, he said, where lovers, who had been merely physically linked and then lost the illusion of passion, now loathed each other and fought like furies.$^6$
What he saw as essential in the true union of minds and bodies was the feeling that each wanted to give all to the other. Self-abandonment. For this reason he, and many other mystics of East and West, have tried to describe the sense of union with the Infinite in the only earthly terms they knew which approached it—in Swedenborg's case "conjugial love." One of his dreams shows this.
But it was not really a dream, he said. He woke one morning "and lay awake, but as if in a vision; I could open my eyes and be awake when I wanted to, but yet I was in the spirit—there was an inward and sensible joy through my whole body; it seemed as if in some transcendent way all rose and hid in the infinite as if in a centre which was love itself, and which flowed out from there again and down through incomprehensible circles from that centre of love, around and back again. This love in a mortal body with which I was filled was then like the joy which a chaste man has when he is really in love and in the very act with his spouse, with such extreme delight was my whole body suffused . . ."
He noted, he says, that this real and inner joy lasted for half an hour or an hour, but that as soon as any self—love appeared it ceased, and he felt a chill shiver and a sorrow, and in this way he said he ​realized "from what the great sorrow comes." $^7$ That, he felt, was the source of melancholy.
Self-love made him far more anxious than sex—love; indeed he had begun his diary by noting that he was no longer "so prone to the sex as I have been all my days," and that he "so quickly lost my inclination for women, which has been my chief passion." He noted too, at the same period, that his ambitiousness had declined. "I wondered that I no longer wanted to work for my own glory," and "I wondered that since I came to the Hague I had lost the push and self-centered love for my work."
He was in The Hague to see his new physiological work—the first and second parts of the Animal Kingdom (The "Soul's Kingdom") through the press; he was doing research; he was dining with his friends during the day; only his diary knew of his strange experiences during the night. As he says, "during all this I went to the same parties as before and no one could tell anything . . ."
About what? His diary mentions "wakeful ecstasies" and reveals that since about October, 1743, he had had preternaturally long sleep, often ten or eleven hours at a stretch. The "Kingdom of God" was first shown to him, he said later, "in the repose of sleep," and he described the joy-dissolved sensation with which he had had a vision of a ladder of angels and saints leading up to the Only Begotten Son of God.$^8$
It is clear that in his increasing spiritual bewilderment, troubled by strange psychic phenomena, he had had a dream, so vivid that he felt it was "real." In this dream he had had a vision of Jesus Christ, carrying with it a sense of conviction almost equal to his need. That was in Amsterdam, 1743. He was then fifty-five.
For a man of Swedenborg's strong emotions and concrete mind the Indefinable Creator, the "Nameless Nothing" of the Neoplatonists, was not enough for his heart to cling to, satisfactory as the Supreme Infinite had been to his intellect. Once again as in 1733 or '34 when he wrote Of the Infinite he felt Christ mystically, but now it was as far more than the "Nexus" between Infinite and finite. It was as the infinitely compassionate figure of the God who had Himself been tempted, had suffered, had been crucified. The direct experience of this Christ had been greatly emphasized in ​Protestant mystical literature with which Swedenborg was certainly acquainted. It was not strange to have that form of the Godhead appear to Swedenborg's distraught soul as his one salvation. All the patterns of his boyhood, all the strong traditions of his early environment rushed to reinforce the "vision," and he yielded himself unreservedly not only to it but, in his present great bewilderment, to the orthodox Lutheran theology of grace and faith and atonement that was associated with it.
More correctly expressed, he tried to yield himself unreservedly. Intellectual habits of forty-odd years are not easily given up. And it was mainly this struggle that the diary portrayed. It was Swedenborg's outcropping scientific self that "tempted" him, especially to doubt the literal truth of the Bible. It was chiefly this which caused the melancholy that made him smile inwardly at mere money worries, and even made him tremble briefly at thoughts of hell, thoughts hitherto foreign to him.
It must be remembered that Swedenborg belonged to a people which had fought fiercely in the Thirty Years' War for the right to appeal to the Bible as the ultimate authority instead of the Church of Rome. In a sense they had fought for freedom, and they had bought the right to the Bible with their blood. To Protestants of that time everywhere and very much so to Lutherans the authority of the Bible was the same as belief in the Revolution to orthodox Bolshevists now. They had secured the Bible for themselves through a revolution, and while the Book was to become a yoke it was still the last court of appeal and source of justification for almost any proposition.
(It is well to remember also that as late as in the 1880's even a man like Henry Sidgwick had to read a great deal of modern Bible history before he could free himself from this kind of orthodoxy.)
Swedenborg was not troubled because he was still writing on scientific subjects; indeed, he noted that he sometimes was impatient and blamed God when his work did not move easily as he thought it should, "since I was not doing it for my own sake." He knew that in his painstaking effort to explain the relationship of mind and body he was really pursuing a spiritual goal, and one of which he still thought as his life work.
But the "new man in Christ" that he wanted to become turned ​a chill, analytic gaze on the various shortcomings of his old recalcitrant self. There were certain signs that, after all, his inclination toward the other sex had not entirely disappeared; one finds him hinting that he had been "in certain places" $^9$ with a Swedish boon companion, but he also suggests that he did not think God objected to this so much since he had not been warned about it as he had about some other things.$^{10}$ Swedenborg seemed to be more shocked at another kind of overindulgence, namely that he had eaten and drunk too much at a banquet; this, he said, was leading "a pig's life." (He was in Holland, of course, and a sociable man.)
But still worse, he considered, with microscopic scrutiny of himself, was his personal vanity. Once while listening to a medical lecture he caught himself wondering if he would be mentioned as one who knew more about such things. And then there was the time when he went past a book store and felt that his books would do more good than others; something for which he reproached himself severely, adding that probably every book did some good in its own way.
Worse yet, he thought, was the tendency he found in himself to boast of the grace of God. When somebody did not seem to value him as he felt he ought to be valued he caught himself thinking, " 'Oh, if you only knew what grace I have, then you would act differently' "—and "that was impure and due to self-love, which I at last discovered and asked God's pardon for, wishing that others might have the same grace, as they perhaps already had it." $^{11}$
But the most persecuting sorrow of all was the fact that he could not become "as a child," could not simply believe without reasoning. He says he prayed and sometimes fasted and sometimes wept and beat himself, but it is evident that the rational thoughts, his lifetime habits, would assert themselves. One night, that between April 6 and 7 in 1744 when he happened to be in Delft, he was reading about the miracles God did through Moses. But critically. "I both believed and I did not believe. I thought that was why the angels and God appeared to the shepherds and not to the philosopher who brings his own reason into it, which always leads him to ask why God used the wind to bring up the locusts with, and why did He harden the heart of Pharaoh and not act directly," and other such things.
​The day before he had taken communion and still he had been depressed about hell, his only consolation Paul's Letter to the Romans, chapter 5, in which Christ's death as an atonement for our sins is stressed. Yet the depression had passed into such a state of indescribably mystic joy that "if it had increased my body would have dissolved from mere joy."
And still, there he was, sitting before a fire in Delft the next evening full of the "temptation" of doubt again. But he "looked at the fire" and said to himself that he might better doubt the evidence of his fallible senses and say there is no fire than to doubt God who is Truth Itself, "and so I passed the hour or hour and a half, and laughed in my heart at the tempter."
The entry for this night of April 6, I744, Swedenborg has marked with three capital NB's. He might well, for from the experience he records here undoubtedly stemmed both his conception of his mission and his feeling of divine authority for it.
He went to bed early, after laughing at the tempter, and about half an hour later he heard a noise under his head (he was evidently by now used to strange noises) which he interpreted as the departure of the tempter. He says he shivered several times (throughout this diary of 1744 he often notes that shivering precedes the "psychic" phenomena), but then he fell asleep and "about twelve or one or two o'clock I trembled violently from head to foot and there was a great sound as of many storms colliding, which shook me and threw me on my face. In the moment I was thrown down I was fully awake and saw how I was thrown down." (This sounds as though he means that he was "in the spirit" or with his consciousness external to his body.) "I wondered at what it meant, and I spoke as though awake when yet it seemed as if the words were put into my mouth. I said, 'O thou almighty Christ, how canst thou condescend to come to such a great sinner, make me worthy of such grace.' I held up my folded hands and prayed, and then a hand came which clasped mine hard. At once I continued my prayer and said, 'Thou hast promised to pardon all sinners, thou canst do no more than keep thy word.'
"In the same moment I lay in his bosom and saw him face to face. It was a face of such holy mien and everything indescribable ​and smiling so that I believe this was how he looked when he was alive. He spoke to me and asked if I had a certificate of health, I answered, 'Lord thou knowest that better than I.' He said 'Well, then act,' which seemed to me to mean: Love me really, or do what you promised. God give me grace to do so, I thought, it was not within my own power. I woke, trembling, and came again into the state where I was neither asleep nor awake but in thought as to what this might mean, was it Christ, the son of God, whom I saw?"
First he thought it was a sin to doubt it, then he remembered the Biblical injunction to try the spirits, and he recalled the "series mystica" of blissful gyres in which he had been the previous night, deciding that he had been thus prepared by the Holy Ghost for this night's experience. Then he considered his impression that although he had spoken the words of his prayer himself, yet they had somehow not been his, they had been put into his mouth—that is, he now thought, Jesus himself had told him he was Jesus. And he prayed to be forgiven for having doubted it.$^{12}$
In 1710 Swedenborg was very near death for having broken the London quarantine. No doubt it sank deep into him then how important it was to have one's health certificate in order. As for the injunction to act, it may not be out of the way to remember that Descartes, who had meant much to the young Emanuel, had had "Fac" (Act) in his brief device.$^{13}$
This need not hurt those who believe in the possibility of divine theophanies to loving and anxious souls. If any such Impulse can come from a Beyond it must clothe itself in material comprehensible to the recipient, and perhaps use material in the recipient.
But why should Swedenborg, who certainly was not a great and hardly even a little sinner, have gone through this concatenation of what would now have been dismissed as "guilt feelings"?
In the dossiers of mystics (those who feel they experience God directly) one often finds that it is some glimpse of mystic joy which has set them on their path. The experience may have come unexpectedly, and, they often feel, undeservedly, but from then onward they only live to taste it again. Withdrawn from them, by that species of coquetry which Divinity seems to practice, they begin to torment themselves to find the reason for the withdrawal, and they ​usually find it in whatever orthodox idea of "sin" belongs to their cultural background, at least in the case of Christian mystics.
That Swedenborg had tasted this "honey of the soul" before his feelings of sinfulness began to attack him is quite clear. Perhaps it was as early as 1733, but certainly there are more than hints at mystical experience in the Economy. And in the prologue to the Animal Kingdom (the "Soul's Kingdom") written about 1742, he cites the well-known description (by Plotinus) of how the soul having united itself with a higher world and "feeling his own immortality with the greatest assurance and light" has to descend again into the body, becoming "sorrowful as the light decreased." Very significantly Swedenborg adds, "but this may perhaps appear like a mere fable to those who have not experienced it." $^{14}$
According to his diary of 1744, he continued to experience "the usual state of inward joy" quite frequently, but he had no more visions, not at least recorded, which he placed as outside of himself. He did have "a strong inward" vision of Jesus, he said, when he was bothered in a dream by dogs (he identified them with animal instincts). In another dream (definitely distinguished from a vision) he says he again saw Jesus. Here there was a charming touch. From time to time Swedenborg worried a little as to whether he wasn't avaricious, a vice he particularly detested, and in some of his dreams he noted that he wanted to hold on to his money. But in this one, he said, "It seemed as if I were with Christ himself as informally as with anybody. He borrowed a five-pound note from someone; I was sorry he had not borrowed it from me, and I took out two notes, letting one drop and then the other. He asked what was that, I said I had found them and that he had dropped one of them. I gave them to him and he took them—we seemed to live together in such a state of innocence."
Still, doubts kept returning. Even the night after the great Vision at Delft, he could not make his thoughts "contemplate Christ whom I saw such a little while ago . . ." There was a constant fight between faith and reason in spite of the fact that he thought he had submitted himself in all humility to faith. The fight went with him to England, where he went in May, 1744, having seen the first two parts of his new physiological work (the "Soul's Kingdom") through the press in The Hague. Sticking close to faith, he had ​taken lodging with a "pious shoemaker" whom he had met on a Dutch canalboat. The shoemaker's piety was of the crudely literal Moravian brand, and from his house Swedenborg moved to that of another Moravian, a watchmaker, following his old practice of taking lodgings with artisans.
At first he seemed to feel that he had been "led" to these "Moravian Brothers" who "only reckon with the grace of God and the blood and merits of Christ," and this belief was doubtless strengthened by the fact that three months previously he had had a dream in which he had seen their church, "just as I saw it later, and they were all dressed like parsons." $^{15}$
Gradually his enthusiasm for them seems to have cooled (nor were they, apparently, at all keen to have such an intellectual aspirant) and he did not join their community of faith. Emanuel Swedenborg was beginning to find his own way out of his dilemma.
While he was recording his strange dreams and spiritual struggles in his diary, he was very busy by day with entirely different matters in this London summer of 1744. By July 3 he had finished a first draft of his work on the senses, two hundred folio pages in less than six weeks.$^{16}$ The work seeped through into the dreams. He wrote that a dream of kissing a girl tenderly good—by was his farewell to The Five Senses, while another girl "seen farther off" was the further elaboration of his treatise on the brain.$^{17}$ But the dreams also seeped into the work. Here and there in the draft of The Five Senses, written in the summer of 1744, he refers to admonitions and instructions that he feels he has received in sleep, regarding what is to be written and in what order. (They are personal asides, not meant for publication.)
It is not strange that he thought he was receiving other-worldly aid, for, together with the epilogue to Part II of the Animal Kingdom which he had written in the spring of the same year, this brilliant and remarkable sketch of The Five Senses was concerned not only with the very essence of the problem he had been trying to master—the body-mind relationship—but reached out and up still further, to "a principle in which life is involved, and the force and life of which all other things carry out and live, and which causes the sense itself to be and to live: this principle is what we term the Soul." $^{18}$
​But for his arguments he used his cherished "analytic way," building up from physiology (he referred to his studies of the embryo and the soul as formative force) $^{19}$ through the psycho-physiology of sensation to the "spirituality," one might say, of what it really is that sensates, and by what means, and—for him now most important of all—to what end.
No series of conquests were ever planned with such zest as the intellectual campaigns that Swedenborg promised in this draft of The Five Senses. Among the volumes planned to complete the Animal Kingdom were the ones on reproduction, on the nerves, on psychology specifically; he had drafts ready of these. Of course he meant to finish the drafts he had on the brain; in fact he was adding to his studies of the brain while he was in London in 1744, one of the additions being the localization of the motor centers of the cortex.$^{20}$
He prepared and published part of the work on the senses as Part III of the Animal Kingdom, but the rest of that "noble procession" (as he had thought it symbolized in a dream) remained either in manuscript or never even reached paper, not at least in scientific form. He never tried to publish even the important brain discoveries.
Had Swedenborg given up the attempt to try to find "the mechanism of the intercourse of the soul and the body" by means of "experience, geometry and reason"?
He had not. Everything he had written went to show that he felt he had essentially solved the problem, but in the draft of The Five Senses he did say to himself, as it were, that as he had written it he felt his theories could not be comprehended by others, and he himself noted that certain points were still obscure to him. But he meant to go on, for the general picture was clear to him. The soul, the life force, had created for itself an instrument in the material body. The rational mind was a kind of sixth sense or chief instrument of the soul, the latter alone having the power to see "the beauty, order and truth of the rose," $^{21}$ while for the botanical details the rational mind ofliciated, instructed by the senses.
Physically the soul was "the principle of active life in the body." Psychologically it organized the ideas the mind had acquired from ​sense reports. This took place in the cortex. Writing with the awe that nearly made him a poet at times, Swedenborg said: "There [in the cerebrum] the soul resides, clad in the noblest garment of organization, and sits to meet the ideas emerging thither and receives them as guests. This high and noble place is the innermost sensorium, and it is the boundary at which the ascent of the life of the body ceases, and the boundary from which that of the soul, considered as a spiritual essence, begins." $^{22}$
Swedenborg did not think he had shirked "the laws of physics," however. About the body and mind relation he specifically said that "there is a continual influx to be explained by the laws of physics," adding, "This also falls under demonstration, yea, God willing, it shall fall." $^{23}$
And he sketched out discussions of the "changes of state" by which an external stimulus reached the soul as a conscious sensation, first as a "modification" or vibration in the external sense organs, then carried by "the spiritual essence" or energy-stuff in the nerves to the "cortical glands" and/or that inner sensorium where mind and soul interacted and the "field" of the memory could be consulted, that "field" not being anything "material" nor yet separate from "an eminent organism." $^{24}$
But all that, he said, could not be really understood until the brain had been fully studied, also "changes of state." He thought he was on the right track. What dragged him away from continuing to follow it, at least in more or less orthodox scientific fashion, was that he had become occupied with another question: To what and have we this mind, this intellect, that may or may not accept instruction from the soul?
All through the draft of The Five Senses runs a refrain that seems to have little to do with science—the love of God, reached as a result of the conquest of that which is "inferior and external" in man.$^{25}$ Swedenborg here shows himself to be as God-intoxicated as ever Spinoza was, and, like Spinoza, he thought he could demonstrate the things of the spirit "geometrically." Not only true and false, but also good and evil, though he saw the two pairs of opposites as linked. For those assessments, however, sciences were not enough, he now stressed, they involved truths, "wisdom is what also involves goodnesses." $^{26}$
​Swedenborg had stopped walking around life and viewing it mainly from the outside, yet he had not renounced reason, he felt he had given its exercise a divine object. Through his mystical experience he had been dragged like an iron filing into a celestial field, and from then on he was still concerned about truth, but even more about "wisdom"—the use of truth in the service of goodness. Our rational mind should enable us to choose the best, to know good from evil. "This is the work of science and wisdom. To the extent that we are affected by the love of the truly good and especially of the supreme best, to that extent are we united to it . ." $^{27}$
Carefully noting that the love of God should not be for the sake of experiencing "felicity," Swedenborg nevertheless seems to have been so overwhelmed by his experiences that, about three weeks after he had ceased his work on physiology, he began to write another book. The title he felt had been given him when he was in a state "neither sleep nor wakefulness." This state, the forerunner of his later "trances" (or "dissociated" conditions), he mentions often enough in the dream diary to show that he was becoming accustomed to it, at least for the reception of mystical joy. But there were other signs in the same diary that he was increasingly puzzled by certain things he thought he saw, felt, heard, and even smelled, half in dream, half out of it, mostly trivial, but which he did not know how to interpret.
This did not bother him very much. The great experience into which he now wholeheartedly flung himself was the new book.
This book was 0f the Worship and Love of God. Like a stream long dammed up it poured out of him. This poetic-pedantic allegory of the creation of the world and the creation of Adam and Eve was a kind of summary of everything Swedenborg had been trying to tell in his other books. It was in Neoplatonic terms, with the odd addition of God's Only Begotten Son, while the story of Adam and Eve was far from literally Biblical. Significantly their mental faculties, their "intelligences," were personified as beautiful women who told them how the Supreme communicated via the soul through intelligence.
No more blackening of reason as against "faith." This book was ​a bright symptom of the fact that Swedenborg had emerged from orthodoxy and melancholy at the same time.
He had used his own tragic emotions as material for the book, always an excellent sign of returning emotional health in a writer. When Adam was puzzled by the same questions as Swedenborg, then "Wisdom," a daughter of his soul, answered them just as if she had read his books. And she used some pretty similes. When he wondered if it were really true that man is governed by his "loves" or desires, and in that sense has little or no free will, his "Wisdom" asked him if he had not noticed the ringdove violently beating the air with his wings. It seemed to the dove that he chose the shortest and quickest way home, but in reality "his loves—his fledged young and his mistress—excited his mind and his mind moved his wings."
"Wisdom" did not miss the chance to note that "it is the life of our love which we live, and that life is of such quality as the love is." $^{28}$
And Swedenborg in a footnote asked, "What are truths without an ultimate regard for goodness! Or . . . the intelligence unless to know how to choose the Good . . ."
Disguising it slightly, Swedenborg wrote even of the vision when he had felt himself to be in the bosom of Christ, who in this book was called "Love Himself." When Adam emerged from a similar experience in which he had, like Swedenborg, heard the divine words "spoken within himself," he too began to wonder what it had really meant. "Where now," Adam asked, "is that Love in whose bosom I was held? . . . Am I fallen down or am I deluded? Tell me, my wisdoms! I entreat you by God—where have I been; rescue me from this darkness." $^{29}$
An honest cry, one not uttered by a man who was longing to be self-deceived for the sake of ecstasy.
Adam was told by one of his "wisdoms" that he was still in "His bosom," that only a thin veil kept him from seeing this. If that veil were but a little withdrawn "He will again appear, for He is in our inmost principles and also in the highest; Himself and His Heaven being in the former and in the latter." $^{30}$
Swedenborg had found his religion again—the spiritual religion or "Perennial Philosophy" that sees the "inmost and highest" ​principles of the soul as capable of being influenced by the divine and only Reality, even of being identified with it, and that sees the essence of this divinity as love working through wisdom.
But the brimming—and lasting—wave of light, warmth, and confidence which now so evidently bore up Swedenborg was not due to his intellectual agreement with this. He had agreed intellectually long ago, and it had not prevented him from passing through such doubt and sadness that he was on the brink of thinking he had to sacrifice his reason in order to "believe."
Then he had, through his vision, felt the "love of God." And, during the months that followed, he had scrutinized the experience and come through to certainty, with reason intact.
Clumsily made as his new book was, with pedantic interpolations and gigantic footnotes like chunks of science heaved into mystic joy, it was the work of a sane mind, a mind that often flashed into brilliance as when he expressed in a paragraph things he had taken chapters for in other books, while at times there was poetic grandeur in it such as in Adam's and Eve's vision of creation. (Eve was as intelligent as she was beautiful.)
There were also many indications of what it was that had saved the day for reason.
Swedenborg no longer felt he had to believe in only the literal significance of the seven plagues of Egypt and whatever else offended his head or heart in the Bible.
He had freed himself from his compulsion, as many had done before him, by the device of interpreting the Bible symbolically. He had long been interested in symbolism; as early as 1734 he was curious about hieroglyphics as symbols. And by deciding what the symbols in the Bible meant he could make everything fit. In 1741 he had been working out a Hieroglyphic Key to the Bible, and in 1744, probably after his vision, he had resumed this work. It consisted mainly of lists of the metaphors, parables and allegories used in the Bible, and of his own interpretations.
Swedenborg had read Philo Judaeus, Origen, and others who had tried to make the Bible more divine by humanizing it, through symbolic interpretation, but the Latin translation which he was using at this time happened to be that of Sebastian Castellio. Castellio, one of the noblest of the Christian Neoplatonists, had also ​written books, and he had translated the Theologia Germanica, that gem of mysticism with which Swedenborg's beliefs have much in common. It cannot be proved that Swedenborg had read these books, and he could have read the same opinions in a dozen other books to which he had access, but it is interesting that Castellio had written that "Divine revelations can be seen in a literal, pictorial, temporal way, or they can be read deeper . . . as eternal and spiritual realities." $^{31}$
It is not likely, however, that Swedenborg had not read the preface to the translation of the Bible with which he was working, and in this preface Castellio expressed an idea that may have been the spark to Swedenborg's tinder. Castellio said: "Only the person who has in himself the illumination of the same Spirit that gave the original revelation can see through the garment of the letter to the eternal message, the ever-living Word hidden within." $^{32}$
Might not Swedenborg feel that he had had that illumination in his Delft vision? There is a hint in his diary in October, 1744. He wrote of a vision of bread "which was a sign that the Lord himself would instruct me . . ."
He hints too that there is something he ought to do which is still obscure, but he will find the right way.
Was it that which he felt he had "promised" the Lord to do at the time of the Delft vision? It could not be the book on The Worship and Love of God. He abandoned it about April, 1745, after he had written two parts and begun a third part.
He had wondered and wavered as to what his mission was to be—science or philosophy, but what he did after April, 1745, was to devote his leisure to the reinterpretation of the Bible.
The traditional story of what happened to cause Swedenborg to turn to this work is the one told by Carl Robsahm, a friend of his later years. This, set down by Robsahm in his old age,$^{33}$ is to the effect that Swedenborg had related he was having a good dinner in a London inn when a mysteriously appearing man told him not to eat so much, and Swedenborg saw vapor come out of his own body and flash off as worms. That night the same man revealed himself as the Lord and commissioned Swedenborg to explain the spiritual contents of Scripture. He himself would tell Swedenborg ​what ought to be written on this topic. To convince Swedenborg, the story went on, the world of spirits was opened up to him that night and he recognized many acquaintances there of every class. From that day, he said, he gave up all worldly intellectual work and devoted himself to spiritual matters, according to what the Lord commanded him to write.
This picturesque story has probably done more to cause Swedenborg to be deemed plain mad than anything else. Does he himself tell it as Robsahm said he did in any records left by him from the time the incident is reported to have happened, or even within a few years of it? No such records have been traced, but there are contemporary references by Swedenborg to some of the ingredients of the Robsahm story, references that are complete in themselves yet leave out the main features of the "Lord" and the "commission."
In his "spiritual diary" for 1747 there is a note dated "April, 1745," that is, the date of the Robsahm story. Swedenborg, as was his custom, gave the entry a title: A vision by day concerning those who are devoted to the table and who thus indulge the flesh.$^{34}$
Then follows, "In the middle of the day an angel who was with me conversed, saying that I should not indulge the belly so much at table. While he was with me there clearly appeared to me, as it were [note visionary quality] a vapor, exuding from the pores of the body, like a watery vapor, extremely visible, which fell towards the earth where the carpet was, upon which the vapor being collected, was changed into various little worms," which, he says, seemed to burn up in a noisy Hash. From this Swedenborg deduced very calmly that it was a kind of purification of immoderate appetite, going to show "what luxuries and similar things carry in their bosom." (Amateurs of modern "ectoplasm" theories would say it was a case of "ectoplasm" being molded by his mind into the shapes that for him symbolized his self-indulgence.) $^{35}$
About a year later, probably less, he again referred to this vision as being symbolic of those unclean spirits which "correspond" to overeating, mentioning the "smoke" that came out of his pores in "April, 1745," but he speaks of this merely as an aside to explain that the "worms" were the same as the "frogs" spoken of as one of the Egyptian plagues.$^{36}$
​In neither contemporary reference is there anything about the Lord, although the first is from his private diary where it certainly seems as if he would have mentioned a new vision in which he was given a specific "commission."
The episode at the inn he evidently regarded as a separate incident, and so he did another ingredient of the Robsahm story—his "admission" into the freedom of both worlds. After the middle of April, 1745, he had, he said, "conversed with those who are in heaven the same as with my familiars here on earth, and this almost continuously," for, he reckoned, about eight months, at the time he was writing this.$^{37}$ During the succeeding four years, Swedenborg made about twenty references $^{38}$ or more to his admission into the spiritual world as having taken place in the middle of April, 1745, but in none of these does he mention either the inn episode or the Lord giving him a commission.
Since 1743, whenever he was in a state of mystic ecstasy, he had now and then been conscious of "angelic voices," and in the summer of 1744, when he was writing about the sense organs, he noted from time to time that he had been "ordered" to write this or that. (An "angel" for him was a highly evolved spirit.) At the beginning of these experiences he was still rather vague about terms, mixing up "kingdom of God," "heaven," and "the spiritual world," giving rise to inconsistencies.
"The kingdom of God," however, was usually written of in the tradition of mysticism. About the end of 1745 he writes of "the heavenly sweetnesses and felicities" of the kingdom of God having been experienced so frequently by him "during the past two years that I forbear to count the occasions," also that it has several times been shown to him "first in the quiet of sleep and afterwards in midday or time of wakefulness," $^{39}$ which makes it clear that he dates his first experience of "the kingdom of God" from 1743. That also tallies with his dream diary from this time.
Also about the end of 1745, he writes of having been admitted into the kingdom of God "by the Messiah himself," and that there he has spoken with various heavenly personages, and "with the dead who have risen again," and "this now for a period of eight months."
​Here is no mention of any commission either, but he is aware of certain inconsistencies, for he adds to this the following humble note:
"As to those things that have been written concerning myself, I cannot so confirm them as to be able to testify to them before God; for I cannot know whether the several words of the description [descriptions?] are such, and this in least detail, as to coincide entirely. Therefore, if God grants, they must be amended at some other time, and this in such a way that I can then seem to myself to speak things absolutely true." $^{40}$
Eight months or so after he was supposed to have received a divine commission to reinterpret the Bible, could he write such a confession of uncertainty as the above?
That he came to believe firmly in the commission we know, since in his old age he told Robsahm and Beyer and others about it, more or less in the same way. It is perhaps unlikely that Robsahm—the careful bank oflicial—telescoped several different stories by Swedenborg into one story. No, Swedenborg undoubtedly did it himself, unconsciously of course. But the human memory is a great dramatist, and it loves the unities of time and place, especially when, instructed by overwhelming need, it selects the incidents to be combined.
Swedenborg needed to believe in the symbolic exegesis of the Bible and in divine authority for it, since that was the only way in which he could keep both the Bible and his reason. But what really shocked him into devoting himself to the "mission" of this interpretation was undoubtedly something that happened to him in April, 1745. It was his feeling that he had seen and spoken with "dead" acquaintances of his, "of all classes," in other words, with people he knew. This is what "convinced" him, as he told Robsahm, and it is too much to expect that, considering his need for belief, he should have seen the illogicality of thinking that everything he was experiencing was "real" just because he was suddenly put in the presence of people of whose identity he was able to feel sure.
He had been in and out of dreams and semidreams and visions which might have been traced by him to his own knowledge and wishes—he was subtle enough for that to have occurred to him, ​indeed he seems at times to have doubted everything, even the Delft vision.$^{41}$ But the experience of being with his "dead" friends and acquaintances was nothing he had apparently been either wishing for or preparing for. There was not one word in his diary preceding this experience to show that he was at all interested in proving "survival" so as to be reunited with the loved and lost. He wanted to prove by his science, and he felt he had done so, that man's body was governed by a "soul," because he thought this a necessary step in proving that there was a receptacle in man into which God could flow or with which He could unite Himself. Of course a consequence of believing in a soul was that he believed in its survival, but neither in 1742 nor in the summer of 1744 did Swedenborg touch on a description of the other world as a state with a great resemblance to this one—at least for a while. It was either heavenly felicity or else hellish damnation.
But, if Swedenborg thought that what seemed to him the stark reality of the spirit world would help to convince other people, he had a lot to learn. And he was wise enough to say nothing about his experiences when, in August, 1745, he was back at his old job in the Board of Mines. During the next two years his health was even better than usual; he was listed as absent on account of illness for a total of only eleven days.$^{42}$ To his colleagues life must have seemed to go on as before for Swedenborg—metals were tested, charcoal allotted, claims judged, mining districts inspected.
Little they knew!