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Memorable Occurrences in Swedenborg's Writings

This list of Memorable Occurrences in Swedenborg's Writings was originally compiled by W. C. Henderson in 1960 but has since been updated.

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Conjugial Love #444

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444. To this I will append the following narrative account:

After I finished my considerations of conjugial love and began reflecting on licentious love, suddenly two angels stood beside me and said, "We perceived and understood what you were thinking about before, but the things you are now pondering escape us, and we do not comprehend them. Omit them, because they are of no consequence."

But I replied, "This love that I am considering now is not of no consequence, because it exists."

To that they responded, "How can there be any love that does not exist from creation? Is it not conjugial love that exists from creation? Is this not a love between two people who have the capability of becoming one? How can there be a love which divides and separates them? What young man can love any other woman than the one who loves him in return? Must not the love in one recognize and acknowledge the love in the other - loves which, when they meet, of their own accord unite? Who can love someone in whom that love is missing? Is it not conjugial love alone that is mutual and reciprocal? If love is not reciprocal, does it not pull back and die?"

[2] On hearing this I asked the two angels what society of heaven they were from, and they said, "We are from the heaven of innocence. 1 We came into this world of heaven as little children and were raised under the Lord's guidance. Moreover, after I became an adolescent youth, and my wife here with me a marriageable girl, we were betrothed and pledged, and at the earliest opportunity married. So, because we have known nothing regarding any other love than a truly wedded and conjugial love, therefore when your ideas were communicated to us concerning an alien love altogether opposed to our love, we did not comprehend any of them. Consequently we have come down to ask you why you are pondering notions so inconceivable. Tell us, then, how a love is possible which not only does not exist from creation, but is even contrary to creation. We regard things contrary to creation as matters having no reality."

[3] When he said this, my heart rejoiced that I was given an opportunity to speak with angels of such innocence, who did not know at all what licentiousness was. I opened my mouth therefore and explained, saying, "Do you not know that there is such a thing as good and evil, and that good exists from creation, but not evil? And yet evil regarded in itself is not nothing, even though it is nothing good?

"Good exists from creation, and good moreover in the highest degree and in the least degree; and when this least good reduces to nothing, evil arises on the other side. Therefore there is no proportional relationship or progression of good to evil, but a proportional relationship and progression of good to a greater or lesser good, and of evil to a greater or lesser evil; for good and evil are opposites in every single respect.

"Now because good and evil are opposites, there is a middle ground, and in it an area of equilibrium, in which evil acts against good. But because evil does not prevail, it remains in the endeavor. Every person grows up in this equilibrium; and being an equilibrium between good and evil, or to say the same thing, between heaven and hell, it is a spiritual equilibrium, which produces a state of freedom in those who live in it. The Lord draws all people out of this equilibrium to Him, and the person who follows in freedom is led by Him out of evil into good, and thus into heaven.

"It is the same with love, especially in the case of conjugial love and licentious love. Conjugial love is good, while licentious love is evil. Every person who hears the voice of the Lord and follows Him in freedom is introduced by the Lord into conjugial love with all its delights and joys. But the person who does not hear and does not follow introduces himself into licentious love, entering at first into its delights, but afterwards into its distresses, and finally into its miseries."

[4] My having said that, the two angels asked, "How could evil come into existence when nothing but good existed from creation? For anything to exist it must have an origin. Good could not be the origin of evil, because evil is nothing good, being rather the negation and destruction of good. But still, because evil exists and is experienced, it is not nothing, but something. Tell us, therefore, from what this something, after having no existence, came into existence."

To that I replied, "This secret cannot be explained unless it is known that no one is good but God alone, 2 and that nothing is good that is good in itself unless it is from God. Consequently it is the person who looks to God and wills to be led by God who is motivated by good. But the person who turns away from God and wills to be led by himself is not motivated by good; for the good that he does is either for the sake of himself or for the sake of the world; thus it is either merit-seeking, or feigned, or hypocritical. From this it is apparent that man himself is the origin of evil - not that that origin was infused into man from creation, but that by turning from God to self he infused it into himself.

"This origin of evil did not exist in Adam and his wife until the serpent said, '...in the day you eat of (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil)...you will be like God' (Genesis 3:5). And then, because they turned away from God, and turned to themselves as though to a god, they created in themselves the origin of evil. Eating of that tree symbolized their believing that a person knows good and evil and is wise on his own, and not from God."

[5] But then the two angels asked, "How could man turn away from God and turn to himself, when a person can will nothing, think nothing, and so do nothing except from God. Why did God permit it?"

However, I replied, "Man was so created that everything he wills, thinks and does appears to him as being in him and thus from him. Without this appearance a person would not be a human being, for he would be unable to receive anything of good and truth or of love and wisdom, retain it, and seemingly adopt it as his own. Consequently it follows that without this, as it were, living appearance, man would not have any conjunction with God, and so neither any eternal life. But if as a result of this appearance he persuades himself to the belief that he wills, thinks, and thus does good of himself, and not from the Lord (even though to all appearance as though of himself), he turns good into evil in him, and so creates in him the origin of evil. This was Adam's sin.

[6] "But let me explain this matter a little more clearly. The Lord views every person by looking at his forehead, and this sight passes to the back of his head. Behind the forehead is the cerebrum, and in the back of the head the cerebellum. The cerebrum is devoted to wisdom and its truths, while the cerebellum is devoted to love and its goods. Therefore a person who looks with his face to the Lord receives wisdom from him, and through that wisdom, love. But a person who looks away from the Lord receives love and not wisdom; and love without wisdom is love that originates with man and not from the Lord. Moreover, because this love allies itself with falsities, it does not acknowledge God, but embraces itself as a god; and this it tacitly defends by the person's faculty of understanding and of becoming wise as though of himself, implanted in him from creation. Thus this love is the origin of evil.

"The fact of this can be visibly demonstrated. I will call here some evil spirit who has turned away from God, and I will speak to him from behind or at the back of his head. And you will see that the things I say are turned into their opposites."

[7] So I summoned such a spirit. He came, and I spoke to him from behind, saying, "Do you know anything about hell, damnation, and the torment there?" Then, when he turned around to face me, I asked, "What did you hear?"

He replied: "I heard the following. 'Do you know anything about heaven, salvation, and the happiness there?'"

Afterwards then, when I repeated his answer to him from behind, he said that he heard what I had said at first.

After that I said to him from behind, "Do you know that people in hell are insane because of their falsities?" And on my asking him about this, as to what he had heard, he said, "I heard, 'Do you know that people in heaven are wise because of their truths?'

Again, when I repeated this answer to him from behind, he said that he heard, "Do you know that people in hell are insane because of their falsities?"

And so it went. From which it became plainly apparent that when the mind is turned away from the Lord, it turns to itself, so that it then perceives things in a contrary way.

"That is the reason," I said, "that, as you know, in this spiritual world, no one is permitted to stand behind another and speak to him; for he thus infuses into the other his love, which the other's intelligence then yields to and obeys because of the delight attached to it, but which, being from man and not from God, is a love of evil or a love of falsity.

[8] "In addition to this, I will relate to you another, similar occurrence, namely, that I have several times heard goods and truths descend from heaven into hell, and they were gradually turned there into their opposites - good into evil, and truth into falsity. The reason for this phenomenon is the same, namely, that all who are in hell turn away from the Lord."

After listening to this, the two angels thanked me and said, "Because you are now thinking and writing about a love that is contrary to our conjugial love, and because anything contrary to that love saddens our minds, we will leave you."

And as they bade me farewell, I asked them not to report anything concerning this love to their brothers and sisters in heaven, because it would injure their innocence.

I can declare for a certainty that people who die as little children grow up in heaven, and when they attain a stature like that of youths eighteen years old and of girls fifteen years old in the world, they stop there, and marriages are then provided for them by the Lord. Moreover, that both before marriage and after it, they do not know at all what licentiousness is, or that it is possible.

Footnotes:

1. I.e., the third heaven. See no. 410.

2. Matthew 19:17.

  
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Many thanks to the General Church of the New Jerusalem, and to Rev. N.B. Rogers, translator, for the permission to use this translation.

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Conjugial Love #293

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293. To this I will append two narrative accounts. Here is the first:

I once looked out my window toward the east and saw seven women sitting next to a rose garden by a spring drinking water. I strained my eyes intently to see what they were doing, and the intensity of my gaze caught their attention. With a motion of the head one of them therefore invited me over. Accordingly I left the house and hurried in their direction. And when I arrived, I politely asked them where they were from.

They then said, "We are wives. We are talking here about the delights of conjugial love, and we have concluded from a good deal of evidence that these delights are also delights of wisdom."

This response so delighted my heart that I seemed to be more interiorly in the spirit and to have on that account a more enlightened perception than ever before. So I said to them, "Permit me an opportunity to ask you some questions about those pleasant delights." And they nodded their assent.

So I asked, "How do you wives know that the delights of conjugial love are at the same time delights of wisdom?"

[2] They then replied, "We know it from the correspondence that exists between wisdom in our husbands and the delights of conjugial love in us. For the delights of this love in us heighten or diminish and take on altogether different qualities according to the wisdom in our husbands."

On hearing this I inquired further, saying, "I know you are affected by gentle words from your husbands and cheerful states of mind on their part, and that you take delight on account of these with all your heart. But I wonder at your saying that it is in response to their wisdom. However, tell me what wisdom is and what sort of wisdom you mean."

[3] To this the wives replied with annoyance, "You think we do not know what wisdom is and what sort of wisdom we mean, even though we continually reflect on it in our husbands and daily learn it from their mouths. Indeed, we wives think about the state of our husbands from morning to evening, with scarcely any time intervening in a day when this is interrupted or in which our instinctive thought is entirely withdrawn or gone from them. Our husbands in contrast spend very little time in the course of a day thinking about our state. As a result we know what sort of wisdom in them finds delight in us. Our husbands call this wisdom a spiritual-rational wisdom and a spiritual-moral one. Spiritual-rational wisdom, they say, is a matter of the intellect and its intellectual concepts, while spiritual-moral wisdom is a matter of the will and its mode of life. Yet they join the two together and regard them as one; and they maintain that the pleasant delights of this wisdom are transposed from their minds into delights in our hearts, and from our hearts back to their hearts, so that these return to the wisdom from which they originated."

[4] I then asked whether they knew anything more about this wisdom in their husbands - "wisdom," I said, "which finds delight in you."

"We do," they said. "It is a spiritual wisdom, and from that a rational and moral one. Spiritual wisdom is to acknowledge the Lord our Savior as God of heaven and earth, and through the Word and discourses from it to acquire from Him truths connected with the Church, from which comes a spiritual rationality; and in addition to live from Him according to those truths, from which comes a spiritual morality. Our husbands call these two the wisdom which in general works to produce truly conjugial love. We have also heard from them the reason, namely, that this wisdom opens the inner faculties of their mind and thus of their body, providing free passage from the firsts to the last of these for the stream of love, on whose flow, sufficiency and strength conjugial love depends for its existence and life.

"As regards marriage in particular, the spiritual-rational and spiritual-moral wisdom of our husbands has as its end and goal to love only their wives and to rid themselves of all desire for other women. Moreover, to the extent they achieve this, to that extent that love is heightened in degree and perfected in quality, and the more clearly and keenly do we then feel matching delights in us corresponding to the contented pleasures of our husbands' affections and the pleasant exaltations of their thoughts."

[5] I asked them next whether they knew how the communication took place.

They said, "All conjunction by love requires action, reception, and reaction. The state of our love and its delights is the agent or that which acts. The state of our husbands' wisdom is the recipient or that which receives. And this same wisdom is also the reagent or that which reacts in accordance with their reception. This reaction is then perceived by us with feelings of delight in our hearts according to our state and the measure in which it is continually open and ready to receive those elements which in some way are connected with and so emanate from virtue in our husbands, thus which in some way are connected with and so emanate from the final state of love in us."

At that point they also inserted, "Take care you do not interpret the delights we have mentioned to mean the end delights of conjugial love. We never talk about these, but only about the delights of our hearts which constantly correspond to the state of wisdom in our husbands."

[6] After that there appeared in the distance what looked like a dove in flight with a leaf from a tree in its mouth; but as it drew near, instead of a dove we saw a little boy with a piece of paper in his hand. Coming over to us then, he held it out to me and said, "Read it in the presence of these maidens of the spring."

So I read the following:

Tell the inhabitants of the earth among whom you live that there is such a thing as truly conjugial love, offering a million delights scarcely any of which are yet known to the world. But they will be discovered when the church betroths itself to her Lord and becomes His bride and wife.

Then I asked the wives, "Why did the boy call you 'maidens of the spring'?"

"We are called maidens when we sit by this spring," they replied, "because we are forms of affection for the truths of our husbands' wisdom; and an affection for truth in form is termed a maiden. The spring likewise symbolizes the truth of wisdom, and the rose garden we are sitting next to its delights."

[7] One of the seven wives then wove a garland of roses; and sprinkling it with water from the spring, she placed it over the cap the boy had on, fitting it around his little head and saying, "Receive the delights of intelligence. Your cap, you see, symbolizes intelligence, and the garland from this rose garden its delights."

Thus adorned the boy then departed, and in the distance he looked once more like a dove in flight, but this time with a little crown on its head.

  
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Many thanks to the General Church of the New Jerusalem, and to Rev. N.B. Rogers, translator, for the permission to use this translation.

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