The Secret of Swedenborg

Being an Elucidation of his Doctrine of the Divine Natural Humanity. By HENRY JAMES. Boston : Fields, Osgood, & Co.

To begin with, Mr. James rejects the idea of a Supreme Being, who, having created the heavens and the earth, and set life in operation according to certain universal laws, has ever since been resting and enjoying himself. Our author aims to show, from what he believes the inspired philosophy of Swedenborg, that God is now and ever was the striving, self-devoted Christ, loving his creatures supremely, and living for them ; and he teaches that the creature exists only and continually from the Lord, and that whatever conception of human freedom involves the notion of a completed and independent existence is false. Nature is the implication of man, and spirit is the fact; matter is illusory and insubstantial; a reflex, a shadow cast from the essence of another and real world. Nature is divine because God includes it ; but, though full of God, it docs not include him, − a point at which the Swedenborgian philosophy diverges finally and forever from Pantheism. The relation of humanity to God is that of an identity of life and interests, a perfectly filial relation, an utterly non-political relation. Before the divine love, all its creatures are equal, like the children of a father : to be good is a condition of happiness in this world and the next, but there is no system of favoritism by which a moral man can commend himself above a sinner to God’s love. Christ, or God incarnate, continually strove by violation of usage to teach the inferiority of mere law, or morality, and the superiority of love. The regeneration which is to take place will be a social, not a personal effect ; not so far as a man obeys God, but as far as he loves his fellow, is he saved ; and hell is not so much a state of punishments, or inevitable consequences, as of ignorance, of blindness to the divine natural humanity ; it exists in the necessity of things as the negative of heaven.

Mr. fames discards the church from his idea of religion, or rather lets it be for the present as the most harmless escape for the spiritual vanities and ambitions of men ; only devoting to singular reprobation an ecclesiastical embodiment of Swedenborg’s philosophy. At the same time he is the ardent opponent of deism ; a thorough and devout believer in revealed religion, and that only.

He has here written a book of which the very title will repel most readers, and of which the tone and manner will dreadfully shock many. He secularizes his theme as much as he can ; taking religion out of the hands of the church, he treats the chief concern of the world in the world’s own fashion. Only here and there, we suppose, a reader will perceive and acknowledge the essential reverence and earnestness with which he always writes ; but few can fail to see the excellence of his performance in that particular in which he probably values it least. He has so fresh and unconventional a sense of language, that his style is a continual surprise and pleasure, and is full of unpremeditated eloquence. He also treats his abstruse topic with great clearness ; and he has done all that is possible to put his reader in possession of new and Startling ideas, which the reader must reject with open eyes if he rejects them at all. Doubtless nearly all will reject them. We have been avowing for a good many centuries that we are God’s creatures ; but when a philosopher approaches us to say, “ You are God’s creatures ; you originate nothing without him, you effectuate nothing without him; of yourself you only seem to be ; if he restrained for an instant his creative impulse towards you, you would fall into absolute non-existence,” we find this philosopher so far from a flatterer, that we shall be very apt to snub him, and cut his acquaintance at once. His doctrine is peculiarly distasteful to the intellectualized spirit of this age, in which men seem to exist only in their self-consciousness. We must be humbled to the dust before we can consent to accept divine honors ; we must be beggared before we can know that

Mr. James elaborates his ideas of the Swedenborgian philosophy in many chapters, with great fulness of example and illustration, a singular luxury of epithet, and an occasional concession to the impulses of a humor which is the thing we think likely to terrify some readers. He takes a new and peculiar view of Swedenborg’s character, − beholds him as a man entirely uninteresting in himself, and of small value to mankind save in his quality of seer. He dismisses the scientific claims of Swedenborg as matters of comparative indifference, and is not afflicted by Mr. White’s late assertions concerning his personal character; this also appearing an affair of small moment, in the consideration of his spiritual adaptability to the great end of his existence. We do not know that Mr. James concedes the truth of the charges against Swedenborg, but he concerns himself with the imputed errors as little as he would with the homicides of Moses, Samuel, and David, were their prophetic character in question; and he discourages with much sarcastic felicity the attempt to canonize Swedenborg.

We are sensible of having touched Mr. James’s remarkable essay in vague and most inadequate terms, which can be satisfactory neither to those who accept nor to those who reject his philosophy or his interpretation of Swedenborg’s secret. Those who cannot classify themselves with either party decidedly, must in their doubt content themselves as we do with admiring the metaphysical acuteness, the logical power, and the singular literary force of the book, which is also remarkable as carrying into theological writing something besides the hard words of secular dispute, and as presenting to the world the great questions of theology in something beside a Sabbath-day dress.