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Swedenborg
by
This comparison of Swedenborg with Mary Baker Eddy is not straining a point. No one can read “Science and Health” intelligently unless his mind is first prepared for it by some one whose mind has been prepared for it by some one else. It requires a deal of explanation; and like the Plan of Salvation, no one would ever know anything about it if it wasn’t elucidated by an educated person.
Books strong in abstraction are a convenient rag-bag for your mental odds and ends. Swedenborg’s philosophy is “Science and Health” multiplied by forty. He lays down propositions and proves them in a thousand pages.
Yet this must be confessed: The Swedenborgians and the Christian Scientists as sects rank above most other denominations in point of intellectual worth. In speaking of the artist Thompson, Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote: “This artist is a man of thought, and with no mean idea of art, a Swedenborgian, or, as he prefers to call it, a member of the New Church. I have generally found something marked in men who adopt that faith. He seems to me to possess truth in himself, and to aim at it is his artistic endeavor.”
Swedenborg’s essay on “Conjugal Love” contains four hundred thousand words and divides the theme into forty parts, each of these being subdivided into forty more. The delights of paradise are pictured in the perfect mating of the right man with the right woman. In order to explain what perfect marriage is, Swedenborg works by the process of elimination and reveals every possible condition of mismating. Every error, mistake, crime, wrong and fallacy is shown in order to get at the truth. Swedenborg tells us that he got his facts from four husbands and four wives in the Spirit Land, and so his statements are authentic. Emerson disposes of Swedenborg’s ideal marriage as it exists in heaven, as “merely an indefinite bridal-chamber,” and intimates that it is the dream of one who had never been disillusioned by experience.
In Maudsley’s fine book, “Body and Mind,” the statement is made that during Swedenborg’s stay in London his life was decidedly promiscuous. Fortunately the innocence and ignorance of Swedenborg’s speculations are proof in themselves that his entire life was absolutely above reproach. Swedenborg’s bridal-chamber is the dream of a school-girl, presented by a scientific analyst, a man well past his grand climacteric, who imagined that the perpetuation of sexual “bliss” was a desirable thing.
Emerson hints that there is the taint of impurity in Swedenborg’s matrimonial excursions, for “life and nature are right, but closet speculations are bound to be vicious when persisted in.” Max Mueller’s little book, “A Story of German Love,” showing the intellectual and spiritual uplift that comes from the natural and spontaneous friendship of a good man and woman, is worth all the weighty speculations of all the virtuous bachelors who ever lived and raked the stagnant ponds of their imagination for an ideal.
The love of a recluse is not God’s kind–only running water is pure; the living love of a live man and woman absolves itself, refines, benefits, and blesses, though it be the love of Aucassin and Nicolete, Plutarch and Laura, Paola and Francesca, Abelard and Heloise, and they go to hell for it.
From his thirty-fourth year to his forty-sixth Swedenborg wrote nothing for publication. He lectured, traveled, and advised the government on questions of engineering and finance, and in various practical ways made himself useful. Then it was that he decided to break the silence and give the world the benefit of his studies, which he does in his great work, “Principia.” Well does Emerson say that this work, purporting to explain the birth of worlds, places the man side by side with Aristotle, Leonardo, Bacon, Selden, Copernicus and Humboldt.
It is a book for giants, written by one. Although the man was a nominal Christian, yet to him, plainly, the Bible was only a book of fables and fairy-tales. The Mosaic account of Creation is simply waived, as we waive Jack the Giant-Killer when dealing with the question of capital punishment.