Index (1) Verborum, Nominum, et Rerum in Arcanis Coelestibus #0

1. No one, it seems, has ever transcribed the index to Regnum Animale.

2. For details regarding the original manuscript and the publication of Index Rerum in Apocalypsi Revelata, see items 2273-2277 in Hyde's Bibliography, spoken of below in note 6.

3. For details regarding the original manuscript and the publication of the index to Diarium Spirituale, also referred to as Experientiae Spirituales, see items 926-931 in Hyde's Bibliography, spoken of below in note 6.

4. For details regarding the original manuscript and the publication of Indices Rerum in Opere de Conjugio, see items 2370, 2371, 3071 of Hyde's Bibliography, spoken of below in note 6.

[%4] Contents and Interrelationship of the Two Indexes

In both Index 1 and Index 2 the entries pertaining to Volume One of Arcana Coelestia are set apart from those belonging to Volume Two; and, in Index 1, Volume Two's are in turn separated from the subsequent entries which have to do with matters contained in the remaining six volumes. But no further division exists to mark off one volume's entries from another's; all those belonging to Volumes Three to Eight stand as a single, sometimes extremely long, section. This particular feature of the two indexes has been reproduced in the transcriptions below, as may be seen from a casual glance at them. But in addition to all this, there are in Index 1 many places where, clearly after his initial compilation of it, Swedenborg re-worked certain of its subjects, in a somewhat similar way to his treatment of them in Index 2, though for some other purpose. Examples of these re-workings may be seen below on pages 82-83 (Cor) and 281-283 (Ordo).

The transcription of Index 1 - of the subjects as set down initially in Swedenborg's 'rough' handwriting, not of the re-workings of them in his neater script - is made additionally difficult by the fact that most entries have horizontal lines drawn through them. The natural explanation for the presence of these lines must be that Swedenborg crossed out each entry after writing it out in a fair copy of an index covering the whole of Arcana Coelestia. But no such complete index is extant today, nor is there any evidence, other than that of Index 1 itself, to suggest that it ever existed. As for the contents of Index 1 which passed over into Index 2, these generally have four backward-slanting oblique strokes drawn through the whole block of entries belonging to Volume One, and four more through those which have to do with Volume Two. It is clear from the manuscripts that these oblique strokes were made later than the horizontal lines through the entries which have to do with those two volumes.

Why all these crossings through, the horizontal lines and the backward-oblique strokes, occur in Index 1, we can but speculate. The best explanation seems to be that Swedenborg was at some stage making a fair copy of this index of the whole of Arcana Coelestia, drawing a horizontal line through each entry after adding it to that fair copy. Then, presumably, he became dissatisfied with this, and so abandoned it, perhaps destroyed it. After that, we must again suppose, he made another attempt at the task, this time using backward-oblique strokes to indicate a section that he had copied onto the pages of what is now being called Index 2. As to why Swedenborg did not go on to copy out entries belonging to Volumes Three to Eight of Arcana Coelestia, there can again be no definite answer, only speculation. Was it that he found the task too difficult to accomplish? If so, what was that difficulty?

[%5] Why was Index 2 not Completed?

Generally Emanuel Swedenborg did not write an index on loose sheets of paper but in a codex or manuscript-book. (Among the Swedenborg manuscripts, housed in the library of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, the codex containing Index 1 is numbered 112, and the two containing Index 2 are numbered 113 and 114.) Before making any entries in a manuscript-book he wrote something at the top of each page, like a heading above the text of a page in a book, to indicate which subjects were to be dealt with at that point. Page 33 of Index 2 for instance was headed Atm. Auctor., on which page Swedenborg subsequently placed the three subjects Atmosphaera, Avaritia, and Auctoritas. These three, carefully spaced out, take up less than half a page, so that additions to them, if not too many, could easily have been made or else other subjects inserted above, between, or below them. But in other places in Index 2 he was running out of space. Three and a half of the four or five pages allotted to the subject Dominus were already filled, and as may be seen from the contents of Index 1, there was a vast amount more to be added. Or to give another example, under the subject-heading Verbum the entries belonging to the first two volumes of Arcana Coelestia consumed more than half the space provided for that subject. Less than two pages would have been far from sufficient to accommodate what was to be added.

It would appear therefore that the presence in his index of certain subjects comprising extremely large numbers of entries was making it difficult for him to produce a clean and tidy fair copy; and it seems reasonable to assume that if, as speculated above, Swedenborg had made an earlier attempt at the production of a fair copy of Index 1, he would have encountered the same problem. Yet, other explanations of this whole matter are possible, one slightly different, and again purely speculative, being that having abandoned for whatever reasons his first efforts to index Arcana Coelestia, he decided at his second attempt to produce the index in installments. That is to say, his intentions may have been that the two manuscripts-books containing what is now termed Index 2 were to hold no more than what they already do, namely subjects as they are dealt with in Volumes One and Two of the whole work, and that other manuscript-books were to be used for the same and for further subjects taken up in Volumes Three to Eight. But all this, it must be emphasised, is no more than guesswork.

The tops of pages in Index 1, as in Index 2, have headings indicating where subjects were to be placed; but in countless instances there is insufficient space to accommodate those subjects. Time and again a particular subject had to be continued on an adjacent page or to overflow onto pages elsewhere, usually onto those towards the end of the manuscript-book. The lengthy subject Dominus for example begins on page 116, overflows onto pages 471-473, then onto pages 493-494, and ends on pages 398-399. Yet, although the entries constituting a long subject may extend into different parts of the manuscript, exactly where those extensions may be found is always indicated clearly.

It must be explained at this point that quite a number of manuscript-pages composing Index 1 and some belonging to Index 2 are missing, and that therefore both indexes are somewhat incomplete, as a result of which whole subjects or parts of them are now lost. Under the letter B in Index 1, to give but one example, the pages covering the beginning of Bonum, and everything after, are missing; but since its entries overflow onto pages that are not missing, much of the subject Bonum has been preserved. There and in other places it will be seen that lost sections are indicated in the transcription by the use of dots (… …), and that in these places an editorial note is supplied to remind the reader of what has happened to the original text.

[%6] Previous Transcriptions

No title to either index was provided by Swedenborg himself, but in 1815 a volume entitled Index Verborum, Nominum et Rerum in Arcanis Coelestibus was published, and another bearing the same title appeared in 1890. The first of these, prepared for publication by John Augustus Tulk and at his own expense, was not a direct transcription of Swedenborg's manuscripts but was based on a copy of these which, according to R L Tafel in his Documents ⁵ , was made 'under the superintendence of A Nordenskold and … conveyed to England in 1783 by his brother C F Nordenskold'. Indeed Tafel declares that Tulk obtained this copy 'by purchase'. James Hyde however in his Bibliography ⁶ says that 'a copy of this manuscript was in the possession of the Theosophical Society, in charge of B Chastanier, in 1784'. From this it seems as though Tulk bought the document for the society and then at a later time used it to prepare the volume published by him in 1815. But be all this as it may, it is clear that in Tulk's volume the readings in Swedenborg's two manuscripts have been conflated to produce a single index. In addition, wherever subjects are non-existent or incomplete, owing to the absence of certain pages from the manuscripts themselves, an effort has been made to remedy the deficiency by the introduction of entries to be found in Gabriel A Beyer's Index Initialis ⁷ of Swedenborg's religious works.

As regards the volume published in 1890, by the Swedenborg Society, this was meant to be a revision of that which had appeared 75 years earlier. In it the reviser, R L Tafel, endeavoured to remove all the readings belonging to Swedenborg's fair copy, that is, those constituting Index 2, and so in effect to present what had been set down in the rough draft or Index 1. Yet entries found in Beyer's index were retained. Thus Tafel as well as Tulk set out to provide a single index, the title of which may have been derived from Beyer, who described the first part of his work as Index Initialis … Verborum, Nominum, Rerum.

5. Documents concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg, Volume 2, page 875. 'Tafel's Documents', as the three books comprising two volumes are commonly referred to, was published by the Swedenborg Society in 1875-77.

6. A Bibliography of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg, item 939. This invaluable volume, generally spoken of as 'Hyde's Bibliography', was published by the Swedenborg Society in 1906; and a 'List of ADDITIONS to the Bibliography since its Publication', compiled by A S Wainscot and preserving Hyde's enumeration of items, appeared in 1967.

7. Index Initialis, in Opera Swedenborgii Theologica, Tripartitus was printed in Amsterdam in 1779.

[%7] The Present Transcription

At this point it should be mentioned that easy access to the two indexes of Arcana Coelestia, along with many more of Swedenborg's manuscripts, was made possible in 1916 by the production, in Stockholm and under the direction of Alfred H Stroh, of the volumes containing phototyped copies of them. Thus, although R L Tafel visited Stockholm for a limited period of time in order to consult the originals, these were not available to him, and certainly not to Tulk before him, in the way that they are to us. In the present volume therefore no attempt has been made to follow Tulk or Tafel; rather, the text has been transcribed and edited as though for the first time. The reason why 87 years have elapsed before such a transcription has been published by the Swedenborg Society is that the society was occupied for much of the twentieth century with the publication of the third Latin edition of Arcana Coelestia (1949-1973), followed by a new English translation (1983-1999). Both of these enterprises, it was decided, should be completed before dealing with the indexes compiled by Swedenborg himself.

As stated earlier in this Introduction, the transcription of Index 1 is made difficult by the presence of horizontal lines drawn through most entries as well as by the fact that the text is a rough draft, not a fair copy. In those places where it has not been possible to make out what Swedenborg wrote, †…† has been used to indicate an indecipherable word. Textual corrections may be seen by reference to the critical apparatus at the foot of a page, while editorial notes are gathered together at the end of the volume. Those corrections include very many cases of a wrong numbering of a paragraph, and wherever no accurate alteration of such a numbering could be made, ???? has been placed in the text and the incorrect number in the notes below.

The editorial treatment of the text has involved several other adjustments or changes. Though the author's (Neo-Latin) spellings have been retained, his eighteenth-century punctuation or capitalisation has not been preserved. A few small things in the text have been changed without comment, such as the replacement of the oft-occurring ibid with the actual paragraph-number to which it refers, or the addition of the letter n. wherever Swedenborg surely intended but failed to include it before the number of a paragraph. To achieve a degree of consistency throughout the two indexes, certain abbreviations have been lengthened, others shortened. The recurring cit and citat for example are lengthened, wherever they occur, to citata or occasionally citationes, while fin, to give another example, is shortened to f. Occasionally subjects have been moved around so that they appear in strict alphabetical order. There are also in Index 1 a number of instances of entries being placed under wrong subject-headings; these too have been transferred, sometimes without comment, to where they properly belong.

One problem that presents itself to an editor of Index 1 consists in what has been referred to above as Swedenborg's re-workings or later revisions of subjects. No difficulty arises in the case of those subjects which the author re-worked and set out anew in his neater handwriting. (In the present volume, as may be seen for example on page 185 (Ignorantia), the later revision of a subject is printed immediately after the earlier version of it.) But what is the editor to do in the many places where Swedenborg at a later time adds to what he wrote initially or supplies an alternative wording? Indeed, can the editor always be sure that something written above the line, in the margin, or wherever else, is in fact a later addition and not just part of the initial compilation of the index? In a few instances it has been possible to preserve Swedenborg's initial wording and at the same time give his later revision in editorial notes. But in the vast majority of cases what appear to be later additions have been incorporated without comment into the transcription of the text, such additions often coming at the start of a subject.

[%8] Value of the Transcription

All that has been written so far in this Introduction has to do with the origins and nature of Swedenborg's two indexes and with the practical matter of transcribing them. Now some thought must be given to the value of the transcription at the present day. First it may be said that anyone with a moderate understanding of Latin may benefit from reading it, especially Index 2 and those parts of Index 1 in which subjects were re-worked by Swedenborg himself. The short statements in each index will give the person who has not read Arcana Coelestia a more than general idea of what the eight Latin volumes contain, while those familiar with that magnum opus may be reminded of much they once knew and have perhaps forgotten.

The transcribed indexes may also contribute in some way to our understanding of Swedenborg's way of working. As noted at the beginning of this Introduction, he compiled many indexes. During the three or four years before 1748, the year in which he began to write Arcana Coelestia, he compiled his own index of the Old and New Testaments. This compilation or Index Biblicus *8 was to serve him in his extensive Scriptural confirmation of points of doctrine not only throughout Arcana Coelestia but also in later expository and doctrinal works. And the index he was compiling while writing the major work's eight volumes was the vital source of his ever-increasing references to earlier paragraphs. An example of Swedenborg's reliance on his own indexing may be seen by comparing the final part of n.2913, where the reader's attention is drawn to about forty earlier paragraphs dealing with fifteen points of doctrine concerning the Church. Here it is perfectly clear that he drew directly on what he had already set down in his index under the subject-heading Ecclesia.

Swedenborg's indexes serve not only to aid our understanding of his modus operandi but also to assist us in the task of editing the Latin text of Arcana Coelestia. In those places where editorial judgement must be exercised to arrive at what the author really intended, the evidence of the indexes should sometimes be taken into account. For example, in n.3819 the editor of the third Latin edition preferred discitur, which appears in Swedenborg's rough draft of that paragraph, to dicitur, the reading in the first and second editions. The editor would have found support for his preference in Index 1, where - under Major and again under Minor - Swedenborg certainly wrote discitur. In this instance dicitur appears to be a printing error, for although in context it makes sense, discitur makes far better sense; and it seems much more likely that the printer misread the manuscript he was working from than that the author deliberately changed discitur to dicitur.

Another example of determining Swedenborg's final intention occurs at n.9816 and n.9828. Here the editor of the Latin text must choose between the masculine noun baltheus, which appears in the first edition, and the less common neuter form baltheum, which Swedenborg wrote in his rough draft of those paragraphs. The editor of the third Latin edition judged the latter to be what was intended; but the evidence of Index 1, as seen in the transcriptions below of the subjects Baltheus and Cingulum, leads him now to prefer the reading of the first edition.

One further instance of the value of the Indexes to an editor of the Latin text of Arcana Coelestia may be seen at n.9984, which in the first edition reads:

Ipsa jucunditas, quae inest amori faciendi bonum absque fine remunerationis, est merces quae manet in aeternum, nam omnis affectio amoris inscripta vitae permanet; in illum insinuatur coelum et felicitas aeterna a Domino.

Is "in illum" here correct, and if so what is its antecedent? At this point the page in the rough draft of Arcana Coelestia is missing and therefore no help can be gained from that source. But under the subject-heading Meritum in Index 1 the wording Quod coelum et felicitas aeterna implantetur in affectionem illius amoris suggests that affectio amoris is the antecedent and that in illum ought to be amended to in illam. In a parallel passage in De Nova Hierosolyma et ejus Doctrina Coelesti (n.156) however, where the first half of the paragraph is identical to the wording in n.9984 of Arcana Coelestia, the second half is shortened to read, nam in id bonum insinuatur coelum et felicitas aeterna a Domino. If this is the meaning that Swedenborg originally intended in n.9984, then in illum should be changed to in illud [bonum]. Thus two emendations to the text are possible, one of which may be made on the basis of an entry in Index 1.

From the three examples which have just been presented it may be recognised that Swedenborg's two indexes of Arcana Coelestia have a part to play in the editing of that long work. They have no less a part to play in establishing the best text of other works, in particular the five which were published in 1758, namely De Telluribus; De Coelo et ejus Mirabilibus et de Inferno; De Ultimo Judicio; De Nova Hierosolyma et ejus Doctrina Coelesti; and De Equo Albo. Each of these five contains countless references to paragraphs in Arcana Coelestia where particular matters are dealt with more fully; but, as has long been recognised, so many of the paragraph-numbers cited by the five are incorrect. Since the entries in Swedenborg's indexes, the wording of them as well as the numbering, lie behind all those references, it is to be hoped that the edited transcription of the two indexes presented in the present volume will help future editors of the five works to establish correct readings wherever the Latin text is faulty.

The above discussion of the value of the two indexes began with the assertion that anyone with a moderate understanding of Latin could read them profitably; for in his religious works as a whole Swedenborg endeavours to employ straightforward language. There are however three frequently-used terms which need a little explanation. Whenever ostensum, followed by a paragraph-number or paragraph-numbers, occurs - usually at the end of an entry - it means that the paragraph(s) referred to contain(s) verses from the Sacred Scriptures, verses which 'show' or demonstrate the truth of whatever the entry is stating. If however illustratum is used instead or in addition, the meaning is that 'further light', that is, a fuller explanation, may be found in the paragraph(s) referred to. As for the term citata or citationes, mentioned previously in this Introduction, this denotes that, in the paragraph(s) which an entry refers to, a considerable number of other relevant paragraphs are 'cited'.

[%9] Acknowledgements

The task of transcribing and editing Emanuel Swedenborg's two indexes, and of seeing them through the press, has taken about four years to accomplish. At every stage I have had the unfailing help and advice of the Revd Norman Ryder, for which I offer him my sincerest thanks. And thanks be to our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ who has given us His joy in our efforts to transcribe and present the indexes in a form which will make them useful to present and future generations!

London 2003 John Elliott

ABBREVIATIONS

In the Text

f latter part of the paragraph

med middle of the paragraph

pr early part of the paragraph

seq paragraph(s) following that which has just been cited

In the Footnotes

1a Autograph or manuscript of Index 1

2a Autograph or manuscript of Index 2

d deleted

i inserted