The True Christian Religion, Containing the Entire Theology of the New Church, Foretold in Daniel Vii., and Revelation Xxi
By . Translated from the Latin by R. NORMAN FOSTER. 2 vols. Philadelphia : J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1869.
THE publishers of this edition of Swedenborg spare no pains, mechanical or literary, to put a good face upon his writings, by giving them to the world better edited and very much better printed than they have ever before been. So far as we have been able to judge, we should say that Mr. Foster has acquitted himself of his obligations in a very conscientious manner, having no sectarian bias nor covert ends of any sort to promote, by imposing his own personality in any appreciable degree upon his author, or making him speak the language of the conventicle rather than that of common sense. When the edition is completed, we think it must in great measure supersede the older ones.
It is not easy to give the reader a compendious idea of Swedenborg’s philosophic significance as a religious teacher. It is easy enough to say, no doubt, that all truth to his judgment is identical with the contents of the Christian revelation, spiritually understood: that is, with the Christian dogma of the incarnation, or, as he calls it, of the “ divine NATURAL humanity.’’ But there is the rub. Men’s “spiritual,” unlike their natural understanding, is essentially free, is eminently individual; and no authority exists in heaven or earth consequently to compel them into unanimity on questions of a spiritual order. Thus a profound philosophy, natural and moral, underlies the Christian truth as Swedenborg presents it; and there can be no spiritual or intellectual apprehension of that truth unless this philosophy be previously to some extent excogitated. Swedenborg himself never pretends to give his reader the least philosophic insight into the truth. He denies that spiritual or living power can be directly communicated even by God himself, much less by man or angel; and he confines himself to affirming the endless superiority of the internal scope of revelation over its external letter, without ever attempting to justify the affirmation by any application of the internal sense to the elucidation of our history as a race. It is quite useless therefore to resort to Swedenborg with a view to get any direct increment to your spiritual stature. He gives you any amount of phenomenal fact, derived from his own observation of the spiritual world; but not one of these facts is ever given as of the least interest or significance in itself, but only for the bearing it exerts upon the truth of God’s natural humanity. They are as good, no doubt, as any other facts wherewithal to fill your memory, or mental stomach, and are perhaps even more entertaining than most facts of observation. But they will do you no manner of permanent good, unless you intellectually digest them, or resolve them under the stimulus of your own spiritual necessities, out of their lifeless, literal application to Christ as a person, into a doctrine of God’s creative presence or spiritual intimacy in universal man, i. e. man in nature, or the race of man.
Swedenborg’s books are wholly impertinent then, save in the way of literary entertainment, to every one who is at ease in our intellectual Zion; that is, to every one who is not feeling a secret divine discontent with the existing ontological conception of deity, as a being outside of man, or unimplicated in human nature, human progress, and human destiny, Swedenborg is the sworn foe of every such deity, every deity who has any personal interests apart from those of the humblest man that breathes, or the lowliest plant that blooms. The whole mythologic conception of God, as an idle, luxurious, superfluous force in the world, essentially unrelated to all that exists, is practically ignored by him; and our ordinary Christian deism consequently, which is more or less fashioned upon this lifeless mythologic method, is regarded by him with little less aversion than atheism. For deism, under whatever name it goes, is the doctrine of a patent or exhausted divine force in the world, not of a latent or living one ; of a manifested, not of a revealed deity; a deity manifest to sense or observation in the fixity of nature, rather than revealed to life or consciousness in the progress of history. Deism regards God as primarily the author of nature, and as imprisoned therefore within its inflexible laws; while revealed religion regards him primarily as the father of man, and as endlessly active therefore and urgent towards every conceivable issue and possibility of human freedom. Deism says, nature first, and man in subordination to nature. Revelation says, man first, and mineral, vegetable, and animal only in subservience to him. Thus while deism explicitly avouches God as a maker, or regards him as sustaining the same formal and heartless relation to man that a clock-maker does to his clock, it to the same extent implicitly denies him as creator, or refuses to accredit him with the substantial and intimate or affectionate relation which a father bears to his child. And this is the reason why deism has never been, and never will be, a popular doctrine. An eccentric intellect here and there may espouse its fortunes, but to the mass of religious minds it bears the chill of death. The human heart invincibly insists upon a nearer approximation to God than nature enforces ; and it is incredible therefore that any of our tepid and bloodless deistical formularies, — positivist, radical, liberal, or what not, — should be able to supplant or even enfeeble the craziest scheme of faith that ever issued from a human noddle, so long as it intrenches itself to the imagination of its followers behind the bulwarks of a living divine revelation. It may tickle the speculative ambition of an enthusiastic naturalist now and then to cultivate a filial recognition of his late-found father, the gorilla; but the fashion will never be popular, especially whilst the relationship continues to be the lop-sided thing it is, and the gorilla himself remains utterly untouched by the return of his repentant prodigals. People, no doubt, admire the child that knows its own father; but they never will agree to acknowledge a father who is absolutely indifferent and even insensible to the caresses of his own child.
Yes, the world has had and still has gods many and lords many ; but they are one and all, according to Swedenborg, definitively doomed and disposed of by the Christian revelation of the divine name, which stamps itas essentially inimical to the moral hypothesis of creation, or to the existence of any outward and personal relations between man and God. It is true that the Christian Church, in Swedenborg’s estimation, has never begun to be true to the idea of its founder, having indeed from the start grossly misconceived the altogether spiritual doctrine and mission he confided to it. From the day of the Apostle John’s decease down to our own day, a midnight darkness has rested upon the mind in regard to spiritual things, — a darkness so palpable at last, so unrelieved by any feeblest star-shine of faith or knowledge, that a church has recently set itself up among its which claims to be nothing if not spiritual, and yet has so little apprehension of the meaning of that word as to exclude Christ from a primary place in its regard, because, forsooth, it can get no conclusive proof of his having been morally or personally superior to Socrates and other great men of whom history preserves a tradition! But let us for once admit the charge. Let us for once frankly allow that Christ was so inferior in point of moral or personal force, not only to these great names, but even to the meanest of his own followers, that he was incompetent to provide for his own living, and actually depended for his subsistence upon the precarious charity of a few poor women : what then ? May not this comparative deficiency on his part of personal or moral force, force of selfhood, argue of itself a greater force of spiritual manhood in him, a nearer approximation to the divine nature, than ever befell any merely accomplished person ? Such at all events is Swedenborg’s conception of the case. For he invariably represents the divine being as destitute of any moral or personal limitation. He denies that God has any absolute character, any passive existence, any such perfection as makes him self-centred, or leads him to contrast himself favorably with the meanest wretch that breathes. He has in truth no absolute or passive and personal worth, such as we covet under the name of virtue; for his worth is altogether active or creative, existing only in relation to his creatures. He has no absolute claim, according to Swedenborg, upon our regard, but only a working claim; a claim founded not upon what he is in himself, — for he has no self in our sense of the word,—but upon what he is relatively to others. We, of course, cannot help, in our native ignorance of his spiritual attributes, according him a blind and superstitious worship for what he presumably was before creation, or out of relation to all existence. But this, nevertheless, is pure stupidity. His sole real claim to the heart’s allegiance consists, according to Swedenborg, in the excellency of his creative and redemptive name. That is to say, it consists, first, in his so freely subjecting himself to us in all the compass of our creaturely destitution and impotence, as to endow us with the amplest physical and moral consciousness, or permit us to feel ourselves absolutely to be; and secondly, in his himself becoming, by virtue of such subjection, so apparently and exclusively objective to us,— so much the sole or controlling aim of our destiny, — as to be able to mould our finite consciousness at his pleasure, inflaming it finally to such a pitch of sensible alienation from, or felt otherness to, both him and our kind, as to make us inwardly loathe ourselves, and give ourselves no rest until we put on the lineaments of an infinite or perfect man, in attaining to the proportions of a regenerate society, fellowship, brotherhood of all mankind. But our space fails us, and we can only say, in closing, that no one interested in the controversy between “natural” and “revealed” religion, or deism and Christianity, should fail to give his days and nights to Swedenborg.