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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

 

True Christian Religion #35

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35. I shall here add the following account of an experience. 1

Once I was amazed at the huge number of people who regard nature as the source of creation, and therefore of everything beneath or above the sun. When they see anything they say, and they give it heartfelt acknowledgment, 'Surely this is due to nature'; and when they are asked why, they say that this is due to nature rather than to God, when they still sometimes follow the usual view that God created nature, so that they could just as well say that what they see is due to God rather than to nature, they reply muttering almost inaudibly to themselves, 'What is God but nature?' This false belief that nature created the universe, a piece of madness they take for wisdom, makes them so puffed up that they look on all who acknowledge that God created the universe as ants, creeping along the ground, treading a worn path; and some as butterflies flying around in the air. They call their dogmas dreams, because they see things the others cannot, and they say: 'Who has ever seen God? We can all see nature.'

[2] While I was wondering at the immense number of such people, an angel came and stood beside me, saying 'What are you thinking about?'

I replied, 'How many people there are who believe that nature produces itself and is therefore the creator of the universe.'

'The whole of hell,' the angel told me, 'is composed of such people; there they are called satans and devils. Those who have formed a firm belief in nature and consequently denied the existence of God are satans; those who have spent their lives in crimes and thus banished from their hearts any acknowledgment of God are devils. But I will take you to the schools in the south-western quarter where such people who are not yet in hell live.'

So he took me by the hand and guided me. I saw some cottages containing schools and one building in their midst which seemed to be their headquarters. It was built of pitch-black stones coated with glassy plates giving the appearance of glittering gold and silver, rather like the stones called selenites or mica. Here and there were interspersed shining shells.

[3] We went up to this building and knocked. Someone quickly opened the door and made us welcome. He hurried to a table and brought us four books, saying: 'These books contain the wisdom which the majority of kingdoms approve to-day. This book contains the wisdom favoured by many in France, this by many in Germany, this by some in Holland, and this by some in Britain.' He went on: 'If you like to watch, I will make these four books shine before your eyes.' Then he poured forth and enveloped the books in the glory of his own reputation, so that at once the books shone as it were with light. But this light immediately vanished from our sight.

We asked him then what he was now writing. He replied that at present he was bringing out of his stores and displaying the very kernel of wisdom. This could by summarised as: (1) Whether nature is due to life, or life to nature; (2) whether a centre is due to an expanse, or an expanse to a centre; (3) about the centre and expanse of nature and life.

[4] So saying he sat down again at the table, while we strolled around his spacious school. He had a candle on the table, because there was no sunlight there, but only moonlight. What surprised me was that the candle seemed to roam about and cast its light; but because the wick was not trimmed it gave little light. While he was writing, we saw images of different shapes flying up from the table on to the walls. In that night-time moonlight they looked like beautiful birds from India. But as soon as we opened the door, in the sunlight of daytime they looked like nocturnal birds with net-like wings. They were apparent truths turned into fallacies by adducing proofs which he had ingeniously linked into coherent series.

[5] After seeing this we approached the table and asked him what he was now writing.

'My first proposition:' he said, 'whether nature is due to life or life to nature.' He remarked that on this point he could prove either proposition and make it appear true. But because of some lurking fear which was not explicit, he dare only prove that nature is due to life, that is to say, comes from life, and not the reverse, that life is due to, that is, comes from nature.

We asked politely what was the lurking fear he could not make explicit.

He replied that it was the fear of being called by the clergy a nature-worshipper and so an atheist, and by the laity a person of unsound mind, because both parties are either believers from blind faith or people who see that it is so by studying supporting arguments.

[6] Then our zealous indignation for the truth got the better of us and we addressed him thus: 'My friend, you are quite wrong. Your wisdom, which is no more than an ingenuity of style, has led you astray, and your desire for reputation has induced you to prove what you do not believe. Do you not know that the human mind is capable of being raised above the objects of the senses, that is to say, the thoughts engendered by the bodily senses; and when it is so raised it can see the products of life at a higher level and the products of nature below? What is life but love and wisdom? And what is nature but a receiver of love and wisdom, a means to bring about their effects or purposes? Can these be one, except as principal and instrumental? Light surely cannot be one with the eye, nor sound with the ear. What is the cause of these senses if not life, and what is the cause of their shapes if not nature? What is the human body but an organ for receiving life? Are not all its parts organically constructed to produce what love wills and the understanding thinks? Surely the body's organs spring from nature, but love and thought spring from life. Are these not quite distinct from each other? Raise the view of your mind a little higher, and you will see that emotion and thought are due to life; that emotion is due to love and thought to wisdom, and both of them are due to life, for, as has been said before, love and wisdom constitute life. If you raise your intellectual faculty a little higher still, you will see that love and wisdom could not exist unless somewhere they had a source, and that this source is Love Itself and Wisdom Itself, therefore Life Itself. These are God, who is the source of nature.'

[7] Afterwards we talked with him about his second proposition, whether the centre is due to the expanse, or the expanse to the centre. We asked his reasons for discussing this subject. He replied that it was in order to enable him to reach a conclusion about the centre and expanse of nature and life, which one was the source of the other. When we asked his opinion, he made the same reply as before, that he could prove either proposition, but for fear of losing his reputation he proved that the expanse was due to, that is to say, was the source of the centre. 'All the same,' he said, 'I know that something existed before there was a sun, and this was distributed throughout the expanse, and this of itself reduced itself to order, so creating a centre.'

[8] The zeal of our indignation made us address him again, saying: 'My friend, you are mad.' On hearing this he drew his chair back from the table and looked fearfully at us, but then listened with a smile on his face. 'What could be more crazy, 'we went on, 'than to say the centre is due to the expanse? We take your centre to mean the sun, and your expanse to be the universe; so you hold that the universe came into existence without the sun, do you? Surely the sun produces nature and all its properties, which are solely dependent upon the light and heat radiated by the sun and propagated through atmospheres? Where could these have been before there was a sun? We will explain their origin later on in the discussion. Are not the atmospheres, and everything on earth, like surfaces, the centre of which is the sun? What would become of them all without the sun? Could they last a single instant? And what of them all before there was a sun? Could they have come into existence? Is not subsistence continuous coming into existence? Since therefore the subsistence of everything in nature depends upon the sun, so must their coming into existence. Everyone can see this and acknowledge it from personal experience.

[9] Does not what is later in order subsist, just as it comes into existence, from what is earlier? If the surface were earlier and the centre later, should we not have what is earlier subsisting from what is later - something which is contrary to the laws of order? How can the later produce the earlier, or the more outward the more inward, or the grosser the purer? How then could the surfaces making up an expanse produce a centre? Anyone can see that this is contrary to the laws of nature. We have drawn these proofs from rational analysis to show that the expanse is produced by the centre, and not the reverse, although everyone who thinks correctly can see this for himself without these proofs. You said that the expanse of its own accord came together to form a centre. Did this happen by chance, that everything fell into such a wonderful and amazing order, so that one thing should be on account of the next, and every single thing on account of human beings and their everlasting life? Can nature inspired by some love and working through some wisdom have ends in view, foresee causes and so provide effects to bring such things about in due order? Can nature turn human beings into angels, build a heaven of them, and make its inhabitants live for ever? Accept these propositions and think them over; your idea of nature begetting nature will collapse.'

[10] After this we asked him what he had thought, and still did, about his third proposition, about the centre and expanse of nature and life. Did he believe that the centre and expanse of life were the same as the centre and expanse of nature?

He said that here he hesitated. He had previously believed that the inward activity of nature was life and that love and wisdom, which are the essential components of human life, come from this source. It is produced by the heat and light coming from the fire of the sun and transmitted through atmospheres. But now as the result of what he had heard about people living after death he was in doubt, a doubt which alternately lifted up and depressed his mind. When it was lifted up, he acknowledged a centre which had previously been quite unknown to him; when it was depressed he saw a centre which he thought to be the only one. Life was from the centre previously unknown to him, and nature from the centre he thought to be the only one, each centre being surrounded by an expanse.

[11] We said we approved of that, so long as he was willing to view the centre and expanse of nature from the centre and expanse of life, and not the reverse. We taught him that above the heaven of the angels there is a Sun which is pure love; it appears fiery, like the sun in the world, and the heat radiated from it is the source of will and love among angels and human beings; the light radiating from it produces their understanding and wisdom. Everything from this source is called spiritual; but the radiation from the sun of the natural world is a container or receiver of life; this is what we call natural. The expanse proper to the centre of life is called the spiritual world, and the expanse proper to the centre of nature is called the natural world, which owes its subsistence to its own sun. Now because space and time cannot be predicated of love and wisdom, but there are states instead, it follows that the expanse surrounding the sun of the heaven of angels is not a spatial extension, though it is present in the extension to which the natural sun belongs, and with the living things there, depending upon their ability to receive them, and this is determined by their forms and states.

[12] But then he asked, 'What is the origin of fire in the sun of the world, the natural sun?'

We replied that it was from the sun of the heaven of angels, which is not fire, but the Divine Love most nearly radiating from God, who is in its midst. Since he found this surprising, we gave this explanation: 'Love in its essence is spiritual fire; that is why "fire" in the spiritual sense of the Word stands for love. That is why priests in church pray that heavenly fire may fill their hearts, meaning love. The fire on the altar and the fire of the lampstand in the Tabernacle of the Israelites was nothing but a representation of Divine Love. The heat of the blood, or the vital heat of human beings, and of animals in general, comes from no other source than the love which makes up their life. That is why people become warm, grow hot and burst into flame, when their love is raised to zeal, or is aroused to anger and rage. Therefore the fact that spiritual heat, being love, produces natural heat in human beings, to such an extent as to fire and inflame their faces and bodies, can serve as a proof that the fire of the natural sun arose from no other source than the fire of the spiritual sun, which is Divine love.

[13] Now because the expanse arises from the centre, and not the reverse, as we said before, and the centre of life, which is the sun of the heaven of angels, is the Divine Love most nearly radiating from God, who is in the midst of that sun; and because this is the origin of the expanse deriving from that centre, which is called the spiritual world; and because that sun brought into being the sun of the world, and also the expanse which is called the natural world, it is plain that the universe was created by God.'

After this we went away, and he accompanied us out of the courtyard of his school, speaking with us about heaven and hell, and about Divine guidance, showing new powers of sagacity.

Footnotes:

1. This is repeated from Conjugial Love 380.

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

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Apocalypse Revealed #655

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655. To this I will append the following account:

I spoke with some of the spirits meant by the dragon. And one of them said to me, "Come with me and I will show you what pleases our eyes and hearts."

Then he took me through a dark forest and over a hill, from which I could view the pleasures of the dragon spirits. And I saw an amphitheater built in the form of a circle, with sloping tiers of benches extending up all around on which spectators were sitting. Those who sat on the lowest benches looked to me at a distance like satyrs and priapi, some of them with a cloth covering their private parts, and some of them naked without one. On the benches above them sat whoremongers and harlots. So they appeared to me from their behavior.

The dragon spirit then said to me, "Now you will see our sport." And I saw what looked like calves, rams, ewes, kids and lambs brought into the arena of the circus, and after they were all there, a gate opened and I saw what looked like young lions, panthers, leopards and wolves rushing upon the flock and savagely attacking them. They tore them to pieces and slaughtered them. And after that bloody carnage the satyrs spread sand over the site where the slaughter took place.

[2] The dragon spirit said to me then, "These are our sports, which please our hearts."

But I replied, "Get away from me, you demon! In a little while you will see this amphitheater turned into a lake of fire and brimstone."

He laughed and left me. And wondering to myself afterward why the Lord permits such things, I received in my heart the answer, that they are permitted as long as spirits are in the world of spirits; but that when their time in that world is over, such theatrical scenes are turned into dreadful ones in hell.

[3] Everything that I saw was a sight induced by the dragon spirits through beguilements. There were no calves, rams, ewes, kids or lambs, therefore, but those spirits made genuine goods and truths of the church to so appear, goods and truths that they hate. The young lions, panthers, leopards and wolves were manifestations of the lusts in those spirits who looked like satyrs and priapi. Those without a cloth over their private parts were people who believed that evils are not seen in the eyes of God, while those with a cloth are people who believed that evils are seen, but do not condemn, provided they have faith. The whoremongers and harlots were people who falsified the Word's truth, for licentiousness symbolizes the falsification of truth.

Everything in the spiritual world appears at a distance in accordance with its correspondence, and when these correspondences take manifest form, in objects like those of natural ones, we call them representations of spiritual entities.

[4] I later saw those spirits leaving the forest, with the dragon spirit surrounded by the satyrs and priapi, followed by their lieutenants and camp followers, who were the whoremongers and harlots. The troop grew as it went, and I was given then to hear what they were saying among themselves. They were saying that they saw a flock of sheep and goats in a meadow, and that it was a sign that they were approaching one of the Jerusalem cities where charity is primary. And they said, "Let us go and seize that city, throw out its inhabitants, and plunder their goods!"

They went to it, but it had a wall around it, with angels as guards upon the wall. So then they said, "Let us take it by trickery. Let us send in an artful person skilled in casuistry, who can make black white and white black, and color the reality of any subject."

So the spirits found a certain expert in the metaphysical art, who could turn concepts of things into considerations of terms and hide actual realities under strings of words, and so fly away like a hawk with its prey under its wings. They told him what to say to the inhabitants of the city, that they were people who shared the inhabitants' religion and should be admitted.

Going to the city gate he knocked, and when it was opened, he said that he wished to speak with the wisest person in the city. So he was allowed in and taken to a certain man, and he addressed the man then, saying, "My brethren are outside the city and ask to be let in. They share your religion. You and we both make faith and charity to be the two essential ingredients of religion. The only difference is that you say charity is primary and faith its effect, while we say faith is primary and charity its effect. What does it matter which one is called primary, when we believe in both?"

[5] The city's wise man replied, "Let us not speak about this matter by ourselves, but do so in the presence of a number of others, to serve as arbiters and judges. Otherwise no decision will result."

And at that he summoned some others, and the dragon spirit's emissary repeated to them what he had said before.

Then the city's wise man responded, "You said that it is the same whether one takes charity to be the primary concern of the church, or faith, provided one agrees that the two together form the church and its religion. And yet the difference is as the difference between something prior and something subsequent, between a cause and its effect, between a principal cause and an instrumental cause, between an essential component and a manner of expression.

"I speak so to you, because I have observed that you are an expert in the metaphysical art, an art that we call casuistry, and that some people call mumbo jumbo. But let us put these terms aside. The difference is as the difference between something above and something below. Indeed, if you would believe it, it is as the difference between heaven and hell. For that which is primary forms the head and breast, while that which is its effect forms the feet and the soles of the feet.

"But let us first agree on what charity is and what faith is - that charity is the love's affection for doing good to the neighbor for God's sake, and for the sake of salvation and eternal life, and that faith is confident thought regarding God, salvation and eternal life."

[6] However, the emissary said, "I grant that that is what faith is, and I also grant that charity is, as you say, an affection for God's sake, because it conforms with His commandment, but not that is an affection for the sake of salvation and eternal life."

Whereupon the city's wise man said, "Let it be as you say, provided it is for God's sake."

Following this agreement the city's wise man said, "Is not affection the primary thing and thought its effect?"

To which the dragon spirit's emissary answered, "No, it is not."

But he was told in reply, "You cannot deny it. A person is moved to think by his affection, is he not? Take away the affection. Can you form any thought? The case is entirely the same as if you were to take the sound out of speech. If you were to take away any sound, could you speak a word? The tone is also a matter of affection, while the words are a matter of thought, for affection produces the tone and thought the words. The case is also like that of a flame and its light. If you take away the flame, does not the light die?

"So it is with charity and faith, charity being an affection, and faith a matter of thought. Can you not comprehend, then, that the primary element is everything in the secondary one, even as sound is in speech? And from this you can see that if you do not make primary that which is primary, you do not possess the second element. Consequently, if you take faith, which is in second place, and put it in first place, you will appear no otherwise in heaven than as a person upside down, with his feet planted upward and his head pointed down. Or you will look like a clown turned upside down and walking on his hands. Since people like you will appear so in heaven, what then are your good works constituting charity but the kind that a clown might do with his feet, seeing that he cannot do them with his hands? As a consequence your charity is natural and not spiritual, as you yourself see, because it is turned upside down."

[7] The emissary understood this, for every devil can understand truth when he hears it, even though he cannot retain it, because when his affection for evil returns, it casts out thought of truth.

After that, then, the city's wise man described with many illustrations what faith is like when it is accepted as primary, saying that it is merely natural, that it is simply knowledge devoid of any spiritual life, and that it is consequently not faith. "For your charity," he said, "is nothing but a natural affection, and the only kind of thought that springs from a natural affection is natural thought, which is what constitutes your faith.

"I might almost say, too," he continued, "that in your merely natural faith there is scarcely any other spiritual life than in your knowledge of the Mongol empire, of the diamond mine there, or of its emperor's wealth and court."

When the dragon's emissary heard this, he angrily departed and reported to his companions outside the city. And when they heard that he had been told that charity is an affection for doing good to the neighbor for God's sake and for the sake of salvation and eternal life, they all cried out, "That's a lie!"

And the dragon spirit himself said, "What an outrage! All good works that constitute charity - if done for the sake of salvation, are they not merit-seeking?"

[8] The spirits then said to one another, "Let us summon here more of our colleagues, and let us lay siege to this city. Let us make ladders, scale the wall and attack them at night, and throw out those proponents of charity."

But when they attempted this, there suddenly appeared what looked like fire from heaven which consumed them. In fact, however, the fire from heaven was a manifestation of their anger, owing to their hatred of the city's inhabitants, because those inhabitants cast faith out of first place into second place. It appeared to them as though they were consumed by fire because hell opened beneath their feet and swallowed them.

Events similar to this occurred in many places at the time of the Last Judgment, and this is the meaning of the following depiction in the book of Revelation:

(The dragon) will go out to lead astray the nations which are in the four corners of the earth..., to gather them together for war... And they went up over the breadth of the land and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city. But fire came down from God out of heaven and consumed them. (Revelation 20:8-9)

  
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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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