第23章

"The second transformation of man is to Wisdom.Wisdom is the understanding of celestial things to which the spirit is brought by Love.The Spirit of Love has acquired strength, the result of all vanquished terrestrial passions; it loves God blindly.But the Spirit of Wisdom has risen to understanding and knows why it loves.The wings of the one are spread and bear the spirit to God; the wings of the other are held down by the awe that comes of understanding: the spirit knows God.The one longs incessantly to see God and to fly to Him; the other attains to Him and trembles.The union effected between the Spirit of Love and the Spirit of Wisdom carries the human being into a Divine state during which time his soul is WOMAN and his body MAN, the last human manifestation in which the Spirit conquers Form, or Form still struggles against the Spirit,--for Form, that is, the flesh, is ignorant, rebels, and desires to continue gross.This supreme trial creates untold sufferings seen by Heaven alone,--the agony of Christ in the Garden of Olives.

"After death the first heaven opens to this dual and purified human nature.Therefore it is that man dies in despair while the Spirit dies in ecstasy.Thus, the NATURAL, the state of beings not yet regenerated; the SPIRITUAL, the state of those who have become Angelic Spirits, and the DIVINE, the state in which the Angel exists before he breaks from his covering of flesh, are the three degrees of existence through which man enters heaven.One of Swedenborg's thoughts expressed in his own words will explain to you with wonderful clearness the difference between the NATURAL and the SPIRITUAL.'To the minds of men,' he says, 'the Natural passes into the Spiritual;they regard the world under its visible aspects, they perceive it only as it can be realized by their senses.But to the apprehension of Angelic Spirits, the Spiritual passes into the Natural; they regard the world in its inward essence and not in its form.' Thus human sciences are but analyses of form.The man of science as the world goes is purely external like his knowledge; his inner being is only used to preserve his aptitude for the perception of external truths.

The Angelic Spirit goes far beyond that; his knowledge is the thought of which human science is but the utterance; he derives that knowledge from the Logos, and learns the law of CORRESPONDENCES by which the world is placed in unison with heaven.The WORD OF GOD was wholly written by pure Correspondences, and covers an esoteric or spiritual meaning, which according to the science of Correspondences, cannot be understood.'There exist,' says Swedenborg ('Celestial Doctrine' 26), 'innumerable Arcana within the hidden meaning of the Correspondences.

Thus the men who scoff at the books of the Prophets where the Word is enshrined are as densely ignorant as those other men who know nothing of a science and yet ridicule its truths.To know the Correspondences which exist between the things visible and ponderable in the terrestrial world and the things invisible and imponderable in the spiritual world, is to hold heaven within our comprehension.All the objects of the manifold creations having emanated from God necessarily enfold a hidden meaning; according, indeed, to the grand thought of Isaiah, 'The earth is a garment.'

"This mysterious link between Heaven and the smallest atoms of created matter constitutes what Swedenborg calls a Celestial Arcanum, and his treatise on the 'Celestial Arcana' in which he explains the correspondences or significances of the Natural with, and to, the Spiritual, giving, to use the words of Jacob Boehm, the sign and seal of all things, occupies not less than sixteen volumes containing thirty thousand propositions.'This marvellous knowledge of Correspondences which the goodness of God granted to Swedenborg,' says one of his disciples, 'is the secret of the interest which draws men to his works.According to him, all things are derived from heaven, all things lead back to heaven.His writings are sublime and clear; he speaks in heaven, and earth hears him.Take one of his sentences by itself and a volume could be made of it'; and the disciple quotes the following passages taken from a thousand others that would answer the same purpose.

"'The kingdom of heaven,' says Swedenborg ('Celestial Arcana'), 'is the kingdom of motives.ACTION is born in heaven, thence into the world, and, by degrees, to the infinitely remote parts of earth.

Terrestrial effects being thus linked to celestial causes, all things are CORRESPONDENT and SIGNIFICANT.Man is the means of union between the Natural and the Spiritual.'

"The Angelic Spirits therefore know the very nature of the Correspondences which link to heaven all earthly things; they know, too, the inner meaning of the prophetic words which foretell their evolutions.Thus to these Spirits everything here below has its significance; the tiniest flower is a thought,--a life which corresponds to certain lineaments of the Great Whole, of which they have a constant intuition.To them Adultery and the excesses spoken of in Scripture and by the Prophets, often garbled by self-styled scholars, mean the state of those souls which in this world persist in tainting themselves with earthly affections, thus compelling their divorce from Heaven.Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.

Torches, shew-bread, horses and horsemen, harlots, precious stones, in short, everything named in Scripture, has to them a clear-cut meaning, and reveals the future of terrestrial facts in their relation to Heaven.They penetrate the truths contained in the Revelation of Saint John the divine, which human science has subsequently demonstrated and proved materially; such, for instance, as the following ('big,' said Swedenborg, 'with many human sciences'): 'I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away'