SPIRITUALITY IN A NEW LIGHT


David J. Fekete, Ph.D.

Emanuel Swedenborg offers a new approach to spirituality for free thinking individuals. Swedenborg was a highly respected Swedish scientist-nobleman of the eighteenth century. His years are 1688-1772. His father was a Lutheran bishop. After extensive schooling in Sweden and England, Swedenborg was appointed Extraordinary Assessor of the Swedish mines to the Swedish House of Nobles. This was an important position because iron was Sweden’s primary economic product.

Swedenborg published prolifically. His first major work was a book of physics called The Principia. He then turned his intellect to a search for the human soul. Influenced by Aristotle, who held that the human soul was the organizing power of the human body, Swedenborg, accordingly, began an extensive study of human anatomy. His first publication on anatomy was a two volume work entitled The Workings of the Soul’s Kingdom. This wasn’t enough for him, and he next turned out another thorough study of anatomy called The Soul’s Kingdom.

In 1745 he had a mystical experience of God’s presence that dramatically influenced his later life and writings. To illustrate how profound this experience was we can consider a work of theology he wrote but never published. The work I am referring to is three volumes of scripture interpretation. He entitled it The Word Explained. In this work, he followed traditional Lutheran theology, including the doctrine of the Trinity. But he abandoned this three volume work and never sought to publish it. The manuscript still survives and it shows how radically his theological views changed after his visionary encounter with God.

Swedenborg spent the rest of his life writing theology. He completed thirty volumes, which I will try to condense in this brief essay. Although Swedenborg often uses terms from traditional Christianity, his use of them almost always requires redefinition. His ideas differed so much from Swedish Lutheranism that the Swedish Church summoned a council to examine Swedenborg’s ideas. He was declared heretical and forbidden to publish in Sweden. Swedenborg continued to publish theology primarily in England.

Some of the key doctrines that caused such an outcry from the Swedish Lutheran Church were Swedenborg’s position on Justification and his idea of the Godhead. The doctrine of Justification by faith alone was Luther’s key contribution to Christian thought and Swedenborg rejects this entirely. The doctrine states that God the Father was angry with the human race for all their sins, caused by Adam’s original disobedience and passed down to all humanity from him. So God sent his Son to be an atoning sacrifice on the cross. By Christ’s innocent death on the cross, all human sin was justified to God for those who have faith that Christ died for them.

Swedenborg rejects this doctrine. God’s infinite love for the whole human race is perpetual. God never was, never is angry with humanity. God always looks upon the human race with love. According to Swedenborg, God came down to earth as Jesus when the world was in need of healing. Jesus taught the ways of love and restored order to creation. God is now immediately present to the whole human race through the human body taken on at birth in Bethlehem which was made fully divine. As the Divine-Human, God brings healing love to us in our own form.

Swedenborg also rejects the doctrine of the Trinity. He considers the idea that there are three persons of God who are one in essence polytheism. No one can understand three persons who are one. And those who hold to the trinity inevitably claim it has to be taken on faith, since the mind can’t understand it. When I was in graduate school, I had a friend who held the traditional Christian doctrine of the trinity. I confess to feeling a little perverse one day and I decided to press my friend’s theology to its logical extreme. I said, “It’s time for you to come clean. How many feet does God have?” He thought for a few minutes and then said with complete conviction, “six”. In other words, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—three persons, six feet.

But Swedenborg rejects blind faith or mystery as religious methodologies. If a person doesn’t understand a given belief, it never becomes a part of their soul. And a large part of spiritual growth for Swedenborg is growing in one’s understanding of theology and how to live lovingly. One phrase from his theology that captures this perspective is, “now it is permitted to enter the mysteries of faith with the intellect.” Swedenborg is at pains to reason out all of his theological assertions. A God that can’t be understood is as if God isn’t there.

For Swedenborg, there is one God who is the perfect union of infinite love acting through infinite wisdom. We are created in the image and likeness of God and accordingly have a love and wisdom component to our lives. Swedenborg also uses the terms good and truth almost analogously to love and wisdom. When he talks about the human soul, Swedenborg uses the terms will and understanding. These latter two terms refer to our emotional component and our judging ability. As we grow spiritually, our will, or emotions become God and neighbor centered. Our understanding teaches our emotions how to love intelligently.

Human life for Swedenborg is to be lived in freedom in accordance with reason. God zealously guards human freedom. But with our freedom comes the injunction to live rationally. Our rational mind is formed by study of the Bible, theology and by our life’s experience. This wisdom works on our emotions and modifies them into spiritual loves. Swedenborg claims that from childhood, we have certain experiences of nearness with God through the innocence of childhood. These early experiences of godliness can become eclipsed in adult life as our ego develops. We can become driven by love of self and a love of worldly honor, reputation, and profit. While psychology today teaches that we should love ourselves, for Swedenborg this can become spiritually harmful. In the Gospels, we are taught to love the neighbor as ourselves. This balanced self-love is in order with spirituality. But when we put our personal interests above others this can impede our love for our fellows. The height of self love is to have contempt for others compared with ourselves and we may desire to compel others to bend to our will. It takes continual spiritual nourishment to keep our loves on good will for others and a love of service.

For Swedenborg, we are created to be useful to the world and to our neighbors. Spiritually healthy people love to perform useful acts for society and for people individually. Swedenborg adopts the traditional Protestant doctrine that through our occupations we serve society and the neighbor. A love of useful work is the same as love for the neighbor. I think in our society today, this is an idealistic doctrine. Few of us actually have the good fortune to work at an occupation that we love to do. Mostly we work to pay bills. Those who find Robert Frost’s position of uniting their vocation with their avocation are lucky indeed. But Swedenborg still claims that if we work in order to be useful to society we are loving the neighbor. But he is not against wealth. In fact, he claims that many wealthy people have a spiritual disposition and they do not dwell on their riches. The only problem he has with wealth is when one sets one’s heart on the perpetual accumulation of wealth as an end in itself. Then profit becomes the heart and soul of the individual, with the consequence of neglecting the neighbor and the joy of useful work.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was intrigued by Swedenborg’s doctrine of “correspondences”. Swedenborg sees the whole natural world as a symbol for spirituality and the human soul. The sun represents God. The east represents spiritual rebirth as it is the dawn of a new day. But here I need to define rebirth. It has nothing in common with “born again” Christianity. Rebirth is rather growth over a lifetime as we care less about self-interest and become more and more centered on God and the neighbor. Light corresponds to truth. Stars represent faith, which for Swedenborg is the internal assent to theological ideas that our intellect has reasoned out. Heat corresponds to love. Harmless animals represent all the many good affections one possesses as a part of their emotional makeup. Savage animals represent destructive and harmful passions. Trees represent truths with all the many ancillary branches of knowledge that go into making a whole system of truth.

With nature identified with parts of the human soul, Swedenborg interprets the Bible symbolically, using the imagery in it to represent spiritual growth. One interesting application of this symbolic interpretation of the Bible is how Swedenborg handles the creation story. For him, it represents the process of spiritual development each individual goes through. First there is light, which is the dawning in our consciousness that there is a God. Separating the waters above from the waters below is a re-ordering of our priorities from self-interest to God-interest, which is the sky. The tender herb that first grows on the earth is the beginning of our good works. The stars are faith, which is the intellectual assent to truth, wherever it is found. The animals are affections in accord with godliness. The creation of man and woman is the perfection of religious life, when a person acts spontaneously according to love through truth that has become a part of one’s makeup.

With this metaphorical interpretation of the Bible, Swedenborg retains the whole Bible. A lot of Christians hold that Christ undid all of the Old Law and instituted a New Law. For them, the Old Testament is more or less null and void. But for Swedenborg, the Old Testament is still theologically valid. The battles that are recorded in it are symbolic of the internal conflict a growing individual faces as one wrestles with the seductions of worldliness versus the call of the spirit. And Swedenborg details with a tediousness the various temptations a spiritually growing person faces--seductions of sensuality, pride, selfishness and the many experiences that come between love for the neighbor and love of God.

Swedenborg’s theology takes two forms. One form is carefully reasoned theology and psychological insight. This rigorous Eighteenth-Century influence, although controversial to traditional Christianity, can at least be defended intellectually. But the other form his theology takes is a series of visionary accounts of the spiritual world, life after death. This brilliant scientist made the striking claim that he saw into the spiritual world and narrated its nature. His descriptions of the world after life can be considered empirical if one can accept the notion that they are based on his experience. This is an exceptional claim that leaves many people behind. Whether or not Swedenborg saw into the spiritual world or not is a leap of faith. But what he came up with I find appealing and utterly different than what traditional Christians believe.

We can begin by considering human nature here. For Swedenborg, we are spiritual beings with a material body. Our material body is activated by our spiritual souls. When we die, our matter is separated from our soul. But we don’t end up clouds or energy or ghosts. Since it activated our whole material body, our souls are in complete bodily form. We have hands and feet, heart and lungs, organs of generation—in short, a complete human form. We meet with our loved ones and live in a community of like minded individuals. We continue to grow along the lines we have cultivated in this world, growing eternally into deeper love and brighter illumination.

He does describe a heaven and hell. But one chooses where one wants to go. Here, one of Swedenborg’s most radical redefinitions of traditional theology can be found. There are none of the mythic symbols of the afterlife: no fire, pitchforks, Satan, harps, or clouds. The next life is a continuation of the life one has acquired here. If one loves God and the neighbor one congregates with others who feel the same way. If one loves self first, and desires to dominate over others, one congregates with others who feel the same way. So heaven is a place where everyone loves each other and hell is a place where everyone wants to dominate over each other. But let me re-emphasize, these locales are chosen. God does not damn anyone. Furthermore, heaven and hell are not geographical places, they are states of mind.

Swedenborg’s correspondences enter into his description of the spiritual world. Even as he uses light and heat to symbolize truth and love, he claims that the climate of heaven and hell is physically felt according to emotional and cognitive aspects of the soul. And in an inversion of traditional Christianity, hell isn’t burning. It is heaven’s atmosphere that is warm with love and brilliant with truth. If one has incorporated love and truth into one’s life on earth, one feels comfortable in the light and heat of heaven. People who have freely rejected love feel uncomfortable in heaven’s heat and prefer the cold of hell.

Here, Swedenborg’s doctrine of free will is most prominent. God wants everyone to be in God’s heavenly world of love. But some, of their own free will reject love. God can’t force anyone to love. To compel love is a contradiction in terms. Still, God is continually influencing people to love. But in Swedenborg’s theology, some just won’t have it. Allow me a bit of polemic here. A look at the world as it is can bring the most charitably disposed to question whether evil is, in fact, real. And it seems some dig in their heels and are simply mean and selfish. Swedenborg’s unfortunate conclusion is if someone has spent an entire life in rampant self-interest, what kind of miracle would make them different after they die? What kind of miracle can make a mean-spirited individual change a life they have spent their entire existence cultivating? Can God force anyone to love?

But Swedenborg’s claim is that it is not hard to live the life that leads to heaven. All we need to do is live kindly, take into account our neighbor’s welfare, and recognize the source of our life and love in God. Even here on earth, we can taste the nature of heaven as we experience joy in our loving relationships and when we do good things. Heaven is just that for Swedenborg: a loving community where persons perform useful activities that they love to do and that serve the greater good. Thus heaven is much like an ideal form of earthly life. “On earth as it is in heaven.” For Swedenborg, it is not hard to live the life that leads to heaven. And isn’t a life of love and wisdom a good way to live anyway?
 

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