New Christian Bible Study

Commentary

 

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

 

True Christian Religion #159

Study this Passage

  
/ 853  
  

159. At this point I shall describe some more experiences, of which this is the first.

Once when I was in company with angels in heaven, I saw far below a huge cloud of smoke with fire bursting out of it from time to time. I remarked to the angels who were talking with me, that few people here know that the sight of smoke in the hells arises from arguments in favour of falsities, and that fire is an outburst of anger against those who contradict them. I added that this is as little known in that world, as it is in the world where I live in the body, that flame is nothing but ignited smoke. I have often observed this, when, seeing smoke rising from wood on a hearth on earth, I have applied a lighted taper to it and seen the smoke turn into flame; and the flames copied the shape of the smoke, for each particle of smoke becomes a spark, and they join to make a blaze, just as also happens with gunpowder. 'It is the same with the smoke we can see down here below. It is composed of so many falsities, and the fire bursting out as flames is the outburst of zeal in their favour.'

[2] Then the angels said to me: 'Let us beg the Lord to allow us to go down and come near, so as to find out what falsities they have that produce so much smoke and fire.'

Permission was granted, and at once a beam of light surrounded us and brought us down without a break to that place. There we saw four groups of spirits who were arguing vigorously that God the Father, because He is invisible, should be approached and worshipped, and not His Son who was born in this world, because He was a man and visible. On looking to either side I saw on the left the learned clergy, and behind them the unlearned clergy; and on the right the educated laymen, and behind them the uneducated. But between us and them yawned an unbridgeable gap.

[3] We turned our eyes and ears towards the left, where the clergy were with the learned ones in front and the unlearned behind, and heard them arguing about God in these terms. 'We know from the teaching of our church, which on the subject of God is one and the same throughout Europe, that one should approach God the Father, being invisible, and at the same time God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, who are also invisible, being co-eternal with the Father. Since God the Father is the creator of the universe, and consequently in the universe, He is present wherever we turn our gaze. When we pray to Him, He is graciously pleased to accept our prayers, and when the Son has mediated for us, He sends the Holy Spirit to put in our hearts the glory of His Son's righteousness and to make us blessed. We, who have been made doctors of the church, felt, when we preached, the holy working of the Spirit's mission in our breasts, and we breathed the devotion aroused by His presence in our minds. We feel these emotions because we direct all our senses towards the invisible God who works not in a single way on the sight of our understanding, but universally throughout our mental and bodily systems by means of His emissary, the Spirit. Such effects could not be produced by the worship of a visible God, or one apprehensible mentally as a man.'

[4] This speech was greeted with applause from the unlearned clergy, who stood behind them. 'What is the source,' they added, 'of holiness, if it is not from an invisible and imperceptible Divine? As soon as this idea crosses the threshold of our hearing, our faces break into smiles and we are cheered as by the soothing breath of an incense-laden breeze, and we also beat our breasts. It is quite different if we think of a visible and perceptible Divine; if this idea penetrates our ears, it is reduced to something purely natural and no longer Divine. It is for a similar reason that the Roman Catholics conduct their masses in the Latin language, and take the Host, the alleged subject of Divine mysteries, from repositories on the altar and display it. At this moment the people fall on their knees as if before the profoundest mystery and reverently hold their breath.'

[5] After this we turned to the right, where the educated, and behind them the uneducated, laymen stood. I heard the educated speak as follows: 'We know that the wisest of the ancients worshipped an invisible God whom they called Jehovah, but in the period which followed this they made themselves gods out of dead rulers, including Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, Apollo as well as Minerva, Diana, Venus, and Themis, building temples to them and giving them Divine worship. This worship in the course of time led to idolatry, a madness which finally pervaded the whole world. We are therefore unanimous in assenting to the opinion of our priests and elders, that there were and are three Divine Persons from eternity, each of whom is God. It is enough for us that they are invisible.'

The uneducated behind them added: 'We agree. Surely God is God and man is man? But we know that if anyone proposed God-man, the common people, whose idea of God is only derived from the senses, will accept it.'

[6] At the end of this speech their eyes were opened and they saw us standing near them. Then they became angry that we had heard them and refused to say another word. But the angels used the power they had been given to shut off the exterior or lower levels of their thought, and open the interior or higher levels; so they compelled them to speak about God in this state. Then they said: 'What is God? We have not seen His appearance, nor have we heard His voice. God then must be merely nature in its first and last manifestations. Nature we have seen, because it is clear before our eyes, and nature we have heard, for its sounds are ever in our ears.'

On hearing this we said to them: 'Have you ever seen Socinus, who would acknowledge only God the Father? Or Arius, who denied the divinity of our Lord and Saviour? Or any of their followers?' 'No,' they replied. 'They are,' we said, 'in the depths below you.' Then some people were sent for from that place and questioned about God. They spoke in much the same way as the others had done, adding: 'What is God? We can make as many gods as we wish.'

[7] 'It is useless,' we said then, 'to talk to you about the Son of God born in the world, but this at least we shall say. To prevent faith about God, in Him and from Him, from becoming, merely because no one has seen Him, like a water-bubble floating in the air, full of beautiful colours in the first and second moments of its existence, but in the third and thereafter collapsing into nothing, it has pleased Jehovah God to come down and take upon Himself human form, thus putting Himself on view, and proving that God is no entity conceived by the faculty of reason, but That which was, is and shall be, from eternity to eternity. God is no three-letter 1 word, but the whole of reality from alpha to omega. Consequently He is life and salvation to all who believe in Him as a visible God, not to those who say that they believe in an invisible God. For believing, seeing and recognising make up a single act, which is why the Lord said to Philip:

He who sees and knows me sees and knows the Father.

and elsewhere that it is the Father's will that they should believe in the Son, and he who believes in the Son has everlasting life, but he who does not believe in the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God will rest upon him. (Both this and the previous passage are in John 3:15-16, 36; 14:6-15.)' On hearing this many of the four groups became so furious that smoke and fire came out of their nostrils. So we went away, and after escorting me home the angels went up to their own heaven.

Footnotes:

1. This is a puzzling expression, since God in Latin is Deus; but as the conversation took place in the spiritual world, it may refer to a word in the spiritual language.

  
/ 853  
  

Thanks to the Swedenborg Society for the permission to use this translation.

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Conjugial Love #293

Study this Passage

  
/ 535  
  

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.

  
/ 535  
  

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

©2024 New Christian Bible Study Corporation. All rights reserved. Printed from newchristianbiblestudy.org