The Other Life/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
OUR SURROUNDINGS HEREAFTER.
WITH affections there must be something to love; with ideas and thoughts there must be objects to investigate. With a spiritual body, substantial and real, there must be ground to stand upon; air to breathe; a world to see and feel; other spirits to come in contact with; associations and organizations arising from such contact; and in fine, an external spiritual universe more or less resembling the natural universe we now live in.
Where is this spiritual world? How is it created? What are its laws and its phenomena? What stupendous interests revolve around the replies to these questions! What light their truthful answers would cast upon the great mysteries of life and death!
How singularly averse is the popular mind, under the tuition of the passing dispensation, to think of heaven as a real and substantial state of existence. Say that heaven is a state of perpetual prayers and praises and ineffable bliss, and you find a ready acquiescence; but endeavor to give it a "local habitation and a name," to describe it and make it credible to our rational faculty, and all ears are deaf to us, all eyes are blind.
The Bible itself is in a measure a dead letter in the eyes of a sensual and philosophizing generation. The very people who believe it and love it and preach it, cannot realize that the Bible shows us that angels and departed spirits are living already in the human form, seeing, feeling, loving and even eating as we do. They forget that the prophets and apostles who had glimpses of heaven, saw there mountains and rivers and seas and fields and temples and cities and animals, and all such visible objects as meet our senses here.
If they say that all these things are symbolical and not real, which is equivalent to saying that revelation is a kind of dream, what will they answer, when we press home to them their own professed beliefs, (in which, however, we do not concur,) that Enoch and Elijah and the Lord Jesus Christ ascended into heaven with their material bodies? How can physical bodies, such as they had upon earth, exist among the unsubstantial ethers and abstract states of the soul, which constitute the orthodox heaven?
The glorious things of the life to come which Paul was only permitted to see and hear. Swedenborg, in the fullness of the Lord's time, has been commanded to reveal. Why should Swedenborg do more than Paul? Why should Paul have seen things which the prophets desired in vain to see? Why should the prophets have discerned the mysteries of God more thoroughly than the patriarchs? Because revelation is a progressive work, advancing slowly from the pearl-white glimmer of its dawn to the golden blaze of its perfect day. All things are not done at once. The seed first; afterward the flower; then the fruit! Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, John, Paul, Swedenborg: each had his distinct mission, an essential part of the whole, and each came or was sent at the right time and in the right place.
Every statement of Swedenborg about the other life can be confirmed from the Bible or derived from scriptural statements by a process of logical induction. It is this which separates him entirely from all the spiritualists of modern times. He is pre-eminently the Christian Seer. His feet are immovably planted upon the Word of God. Therefore his name and his works will grow brighter and brighter in the eyes of successive generations, when all the false prophets and false Christs, both in the Church and out of it, have passed into oblivion.
The mind of man, unillumined by light from heaven, never could have invented the sublime philosophy by which the Swedish seer has penetrated so far into the mysterious abysses of the universe. The unaided imagination of the natural mind, struggling to frame for itself some idea or visible image of heaven, rushes to the two extremes, materialism and sheer immateriality. Heaven is, from one standpoint, a purely mental state of existence, a negation of everything real; God is a Being without body, parts, or passions; the soul is a formless and intangible ether; its life hereafter is one of perpetual psalm-singing and oral prayer.
The mind which entertains this idea of heaven is like the earth before the creation, "without form and void;" a chaos, a dark, bewildering abyss. It needs the voice of God to speak light into existence, so that it may think wisely and rationally.
On the other extreme the natural mind falls into utter materialism. Heaven is located in some distant star or sun, or it occupies
"The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
The sacred, everlasting calm."
If heaven be thus far off in space, they ask themselves, how can any living man mount up to it? how can any one return from it? how can we know anything about it? Very pertinent questions if the premise were true.
Swedenborg affirms that the spiritual world is neither material nor immaterial, but substantial; a mediatory form or state of existence between the abstract essence of spirit and the concrete forms of matter. This is the biblical doctrine, and the great Swede, standing faithfully by it, deduces from it a system of truth, which throws a new light upon science, psychology and theology; so powerful a light, indeed, as to make all things new under its magic power.
The spiritual world is substantial and living.
The light of the sun, the glory of the clouds, the majesty of mountain scenery, the witchery of woods and vales, the poetry of waters, and the beauties and wonders of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, exceed in the spiritual world anything we have ever seen or felt in this mundane sphere. And the first impression of the newly-risen spirit in the midst of such scenes, is, that they are as real as anything left behind him on the earth.
He beholds about him what appears to his senses an external and physical world, only etherealized and beautified beyond description:
"An ampler ether, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams."
He wonders into what serene depths of the abysses of space he has unconsciously penetrated. He does not believe he is dead, or he still waits for his winged angels to appear and conduct him to his imaginary heaven.
He has, however, entered a sphere not separated from ours by time or space; a sphere not to be reached by ascending or descending; a sphere into which the light of nature never penetrates, and whose laws and phenomena can never be understood by a mind in bondage to sensuous appearances.
And yet this spiritual world, which is so similar to ours in externals, originates in an entirely different manner and is governed by peculiar laws. What, then, is the fundamental difference between the spiritual world and the world of nature?
The natural world, or rather the physical universe, is fixed and permanent, being the last and lowest sphere of the divine emanations. It is utterly dead in itself, but is plastic to the inflowing and organizing forces of the spiritual sphere. It is, therefore, the basis, the footstool, the seed-field, the birth-place of all things. The spiritual grows and expands within the natural, like the chick within the egg, like the butterfly within the worm, until it bursts its bonds, and rises to its real and better life.
The physical cosmos has an externeity independent of the souls that live upon it, encased in their natural bodies. One sun shines upon all alike. The rain descends upon the evil and the good. Daylight and darkness come invariably to half the world at once. The wilderness does not blossom for our prayers; the flowers do not perish at our crimes. Times and spaces, cruel and inexorable as death, stand between us and our hopes, our longings and our loves.
In the spiritual world it is different. That sphere has no externeity independent of the souls inhabiting it. That world is momentarily created by the influx of the divine life through the spirits or angels who live there; and its spiritual forms and phenomena represent outwardly in ever-shifting panorama the qualities and motions of the soul itself.
Dissect this statement and view the constituent ideas separately, for they are the foundation-stones of the Swedenborgian philosophy.
The spiritual world has no externeity independent of the mind.
It has a transcendently beautiful externeity wholly dependent upon the mind.
That externeity represents the mind; is the mind symbolized or mirrored in objective spiritual forms.
Take away the angels and heaven would vanish.
Take away God and all would vanish; for everything lives, moves and has its being from a continuous influx of the divine life.
The spiritual world is created momentarily and changes momentarily by and through the changes of affections and thoughts in the inhabitants. It changes as the scenery of a dream changes in correspondence with the changes of state occurring in the brain of the dreamer.
Heaven and hell are, therefore, in the last analysis, states of the soul or spirit of man. "The kingdom of heaven is within you" is the great spiritual truth announced by the Word of God; and the kingdom of heaven without the spirit corresponds in its minutest particulars to the kingdom of heaven within him.
"Heaven", said an old English divine, "is a state first and a place afterward." Swedenborg shows that the place is created by the state, changes instantaneously with it, and is altogether dependent upon it.
It seems, at first view, a strange idea that the objects surrounding spirits and angels are created from moment to moment by the influx of the divine creative sphere through the affections and thoughts of the inhabitants. That external objects should, in some manner, represent or symbolize affections and thoughts is credible, and commends itself to our aesthetic sense as beautiful and even true. But that they are caused or created by affections and thoughts, that they appear, change and disappear with them, is extraordinary to the mind which still thinks from the sensuous appearance of the natural life.
Strange as it seems, however, is it not the simple statement of the law by which all creation is effected—the law by which the sublime panorama of the universe was projected from the Divine Mind? Has not that universe been aptly called "the created or unwritten Word," spoken into existence by his will, representing in ultimate and concrete forms, by a sacred symbolism, the spiritual life, the infinite love and wisdom of the Great Architect? Is not the universe the mirror in which He repeats his image?
The horizon of each spirit or angel embraces the little cosmos in which his own image is thus repeated. God creates all the heavens by flowing into and through the universal angelic mind as a whole. The small part or infinitesimal fraction visible to each spirit, is determined by the state of his own affections and thoughts, which receive and reflect more or less perfectly the divine love and the divine wisdom.
We may never understand it or explain it further; but the ultimate fact remains, that spiritual forces flowing from within outward, from above downward, from one sphere to another, project or make objective a vast, visible, tangible universe, corresponding to the invisible, intangible universe of affections and thoughts concealed within.
In what other way did God create the world? Is not the universe wrought into forms corresponding to the archetypal images, ideas or patterns existing in the Divine Mind? Is it not reasonable that the surroundings of spirits, who are images and likenesses of God, should be created in a finite manner by the same law which regulates the infinite operations of the Creator?
We can see the beautiful shadow of this same law even in the actions of our minds upon dead matter. What are the changes which civilized man has impressed on the face of nature but projections of his own will and understanding? What are statues and paintings and songs and the splendors of architecture, but the inner lives of the artists wrought out before us into visible shapes?
Heaven is so boundless because the varieties of good affections and thoughts are infinite. Heaven is so sublime and beautiful because the affections and thoughts of angels are so pure and holy. Heaven is continually growing in majesty, power and glory, because the affections and thoughts of its inhabitants are ever expanding, and becoming more and more receptive of the divine love and the divine wisdom.
Each soul, therefore, is responsible for its heaven or its hell. Its own organic structure, its own emotional and intellectual states determine where and with whom and how it shall live for ever. No arbitrary or judicial decree lifts it to heaven or dooms it to hell. We determine the final forms of our inner universe of affection and thought by our own life and conduct upon earth, and those forms of our spiritual nature determine our external surroundings to eternity.
We have already seen how the character of the spirit gives beauty or deformity to the spiritual body, perfection or imperfection, pleasure or pain to the spiritual senses. The intelligence of the spirit determines what clothing the spiritual body is to wear.
Clothing in heaven? Why not?
Is it not said of the angel who rolled away the stone from the sepulchre, "and his raiment was white as snow?"
Did not the women who entered the sepulchre see an angel who was "clothed in a long white garment?" And the seer of Patmos tells us that, when a door was opened to him in heaven, he saw on one occasion "seven angels" coming out of the temple, "clothed in pure white linen, and having their breasts girded with golden girdles." Rev. xv. 6.
Let infidels and rationalists sneer at the statement that we have bodies and clothing and houses in heaven. The Christian expects to live in a spiritual body in which he will no longer see darkly, but face to face; he hopes to be clad with the saints in fine linen and purple; he believes he will be given one of those mansions of which there are so many in his Father's house.
As the garments of the angels correspond to their spiritual states, they change or are changed according to these states. They are of different styles and colors according to the rank and office of the wearers. They are opaque or dull, or bright or flaming in splendor, each and all in turn according to the variations of their affections and thoughts.
These garments are not made with hands. They are given by the Lord, from day to day, from moment to moment. They come to the angels as the leaves come to the tree, as the colors come to the cloud. Our spiritual bodies are arrayed in beauty and glory, like the lilies of the field, without toil, without spinning, even without our thought.
The houses in the spiritual world are not built by manual labor, but rise
"Like golden exhalations of the dawn,"
in obedience and in correspondence to the outflowing spiritual life of those who dwell in them.
Hear what Swedenborg reports:
"I have been with the angels in their habitations. They are exactly like our houses upon earth, but more beautiful. They contain chambers, drawing-rooms and bed-rooms in great numbers. They have courts, and are encompassed by gardens, flower-beds and fields."
"Where the angels live in societies, the habitations are contiguous, and arranged in the form of a city, with courts, streets, and squares exactly like the cities on our earth. It has also been granted me to walk through them and to look about on all sides. This occurred to me when wide awake, my interior sight being open at the time."
"I have seen palaces in heaven so magnificent as to surpass all description. Some were more splendid than others. The inside was in keeping with the outside. The apartments were ornamented with such decorations, that no language is adequate to the description of them."
Heavenly affections, wise thoughts and good deeds are the materials which determine the construction of these eternal homes. We are every day by our life here contributing something to our surroundings hereafter. Not only are our ciothing and houses thus created, but the scenery about us; the sun in our sky, the clouds over our heads; the mountains or vales afar off; the forest with its green mantle; the river with its silver ripple. Our affections bring the vernal airs about us; our wisdom floods the atmosphere with light; our love of God kindles the sun; our love of the neighbor peoples our spheres with paradises and splendors; the spiritual truths in our own minds build our houses of precious stones, make the meadows green, and the stars visible, and the winds musical:
"And every thought, breaks forth a rose."
If each spirit creates or determines its own objective world around it, will there not be an endless confusion of forms and images, of sounds and colors? indeed, a perfect chaos?
Such, doubtless, would be the case, were it not for the laws of spiritual affinity by which the heavenly societies are organized. Spiritual affinities determine presence or absence in the other life. By the operation of this great force, the good and evil are separated after death. By its still further operation the good are distinguished into different orders and classes. Similar states of affection and thought attract each other, and they project or make visible similar representative objects. What results? Spirits who resemble each other interiorly find themselves in what we, in the natural sphere, would call the same world, the same country, the same place.
Individual differences between spirits in the same society (and no two spirits were ever created exactly alike) may determine that one spirit lives in one house and another in a different one; that oue resides by a river and another on a hill-top; that one is clad in silk and another in purple; that one is a prince and another a doorkeeper; and so on with infinite variety.
These diversities are individual and special; the points of agreement are general. All the spirits in a given society are held together by some ruling love; some similar relationship to the Lord and the neighbor; some subtile and powerful bond of common faith and thought; some consentaneous desire and capacity for specific uses. This fundamental unity or brotherhood of thought and affection causes them to have similar surroundings, similar scenery; the same sun shining before their faces, the same mountains towering afar, the same sea gleaming in the distance, the same city, the same temples, the same civil goverment and similar manners and customs. There is thus a certain fixity and permanence in general, within the bounds or limits of which there is a charming and ever-varying fluctuation of particulars.
We see at once that society in heaven has no geographic or national basis. A society of angels is only a larger man, consisting of similar units bound together like the organs of the human body by loving sympathies, each doing the work for which he is structurally fitted, and each finding his own life by expending it for all the rest. Many societies, great and small, are again held together by larger bonds and sympathies and grander uses, and constitute a still greater man. Finally, all the heavens are so organically connected, that they appear to the Lord as a single man. Heaven, says Swedenborg, is the maximus Homo—the Grand Man.
His doctrine of the Grand Man, with all its complexities and mysteries, is based upon the transcendent fact, that the universe was created by a Divine Man, in his own image and likeness; and all its discrete degrees, spiritual and natural, are woven and held together by influx and correspondence through the mediation of the Human Form. The subject is too vast and difficult for even a partial elucidation in this little volume.
The societies of each heaven are innumerable. All the members of one society have some general resemblance, like the facial and other resemblances which we here detect in families and races. They all know and love each other intimately with the tenderest sense of kinship. In the other life, indeed, all who are not in similar and corresponding states of thought and affection are, or become strangers to each other, live in distant societies, or even in other heavens.
For there are more heavens than one. The Greek of the Lord's Prayer should have been translated: "Our Father who art in the heavens." Paul says that he was carried up to the third heaven. Swedenborg affirms that there are three heavens, distinct from each other, one above or within the other, communicating not by spaces or sensible approaches, but only by influx, like that of the soul into the body.
As all external appearances in the spiritual world are due to differences of affection and thought, the division of the entire heaven or Grand Man into three distinct, discrete, spiritual universes, is founded upon a threefold manifestation of the divine love and wisdom through the natural, spiritual and celestial degrees of angelic life. The three heavens differ in their degrees of love and wisdom, in their modes of thought, in their organizations, their uses, their clothing, their houses, their external scenery and surroundings; each higher degree being more perfect, beautiful and glorious than those beneath it.
And we, poor denizens of earth, live far below them all! If we turn from the guiding light of revelation and question the cold and beautiful Nature before us about the life after death and the heaven for which we yearn, we are answered only by the blinding glare of the sun, the murmur of the sea, the wail of the wind, the birth and death of the flowers, the shifting colors of the cloud, the blue dome with its unrevealing face and the far-off smile of the silent stars!
Immersed in our sensual and corporeal states; limited in thought and perception by the barriers of time and space; scarcely developed in our most advanced condition to a rational grasp of spiritual things; unable to form more than a vague and pleasing idea of the heaven nearest to our earth; the spiritual and celestial states of thought and affection are almost incomprehensible to our souls; and our ideas of the worlds produced by them as transcendent mirrors of their being, are like music which can never be translated into words.
Yet even the loftiest celestial height is attainable by men who were born in the moral darkness and gloom of a world so wicked; that the Divine Man had to visit it in the flesh to redeem it from the power of hell.
Man is a microcosm, an epitome of the entire universe, a miniature heaven, because he was created in the image and likeness of God. We have rational, natural, spiritual and celestial degrees of life folded away in potency behind and within the flesh and blood of this corporeal life. These degrees are shut at birth, and are gradually opened by instruction, discipline, experience; by the development of the rational principle, by temptations, by a life according to the commandments; by the reception of love and wisdom from the Lord.
Man's moral state at death, his ruling love, the possibility of putting away for ever the evil, and of developing the good things of his nature; these determine what spiritual sphere he will go to, what society he will live in, what position he will hold, and what surroundings he will have.
All these things are foreseen by the Lord alone. His eternal providence watches over us, to lead us by ways we know not, from the cold and darkness of our sensual life to the light and warmth, the beauty and peace of the celestial country.
There is a great difference between spiritual thought and natural thought. Spiritual thought is not merely thinking about spiritual things, but thinking about all things in a spiritual manner.
If the angels thought about their external world as we do of ours; if there were fixed times and spaces there as here; if they studied the objects around them in our sensuous manner, and viewed them as something independent of their own spiritual states; then indeed the heaven of Swedenborg would be little better than a physical globe purified and etherealized; such a heaven as the current theology expects when the dead bodies are raised and made incorruptible, and the earth is prepared by fire for the final habitation of the saints!
But the angels do not survey their surrounding phenomena as we do ours. They do not think of the objects about them as something separate from them and independent of them; as something to be studied by observation and experiment and induction, the processes by which our natural sciences are constructed on the evidence of our senses. That would be to think naturally as we do, and not spiritually as the angel is obliged to think by the very laws of his being.
How then does he think spiritually?
That beautiful and glorious nature which seems to surround him, is a glowing mirror of his own affections and thoughts and those of the angels associated with him. It is an open book to him, whose every object is a word, every movement a sentence, conveying to his mind some spiritual or celestial idea. He does not think of the objects before him any more than we think of the paper, ink, letters and marks of punctuation, when we are reveling with delight over the pages of some favorite author.
Sweden borg says:
"Such is the architecture of heaven that you would say you there beheld the very art itself; and no wonder, for it is from heaven that that art is derived to men on earth. The angels said that such objects as have been mentioned, and innumerable others still more perfect, are presented before their eyes by the Lord; but that nevertheless they impart more pleasure to their minds than to their eyes, because in every particular they discern correspondences, and through those correspondences things divine."
Yes, the external world of the spirit is a vast series of symbolisms, which reveal to his perceptive faculties the infinite treasures of spiritual truth and the infinite miracles of spiritual love. Nothing comes to him from without, although it seems to do so, but all from within.
The God within him reveals himself outwardly to him as a Sun. He feels the divine wisdom in the light which surrounds him, and the divine love in the sweet warmth of his celestial air. The winds and the clouds denote to his eye the movements in the spheres above him. He draws from his evening stars a spiritual light that emanates from the innumerable societies of heaven. All things are alive to him and commune with him. All things breathe upon him wisdom and love. The forests, the gardens, the flowers, the waters, the mountains, the sea, are voices that speak, and faces that smile, and hands that beckon, and music that gladdens, and thoughts that illumine, and hearts that beat in unison with his own.