People of all religions and spiritual paths believe that we have souls. But where does our soul come from? Is it eternal, living on after death? Has it always existed, or does it come into existence at a specific time? And if it does have a starting point, when does it become eternal, and live forever? At conception? At birth? At some other time?
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who lived four centuries before Christ, was among those who believed that the soul has always existed. He also believed that souls pass from one body to another in a process known in Greek as metempsychosis, more popularly known today as reincarnation.
Plato’s famous student Aristotle (384–322 BC) disagreed. Our soul, Aristotle said, has not always existed. Instead, he said, it comes from our father. Aristotle left the door open to the possibility that that the soul lives on after death, but separate from the physical body. He rejected the idea that a soul could enter another body, for reasons we’ll get into in a moment.
Eastern religions generally hold that the soul has always existed, and that it passes from one body to another. This is not based on Greek philosophy, but on Eastern sacred texts such as the Bhagavad Gita—though I would add that it is based on a literal interpretation of those texts.
Early Christian theologians added a third theory: God newly creates each soul and infuses it into the body either at conception or later. This theory is known as creationism (not to be confused with the belief that the world was literally created in six days). This is the belief held to in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, and in some Protestant churches.
The idea that the soul comes from one or both parents, which is held to in other Protestant churches, is known in Christian circles as “traducianism.” Even among Christians, the debate about the origin of the soul goes back almost to the beginning of Christianity, mostly between the creationists and the traducianists. Almost all Christians reject the pre-existence of the soul, and reincarnation along with it.
Where does Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) stand on all this? Swedenborg largely adopted and expanded upon Aristotle’s views, which Christians would class as “traducian.” But Swedenborg also included an element of creationism in his theory in that ultimately, all things come from God and are created by God, including the human soul.
Where do I come down on these questions?
That’s what this article is all about!
This topic has long fascinated me. I have spent many hours over many years studying and contemplating it. My tentative conclusions follow the arc of Aristotle’s and Swedenborg’s thought, but make further modifications based on developments in science since Swedenborg’s day, viewed in the light of Swedenborg’s teaching about correspondences in the Bible and in nature.
Having dashed off parts of my thinking on this subject here and there in various forums and discussions, it’s time to write it all out in an organized way.
Fair warning: This article is going to get technical in places, and it will not be short. Nothing else would do the subject justice. Also, although it draws on Aristotle, Swedenborg, present day science, and other sources, the theory presented here is my own. This article does not speak for any organization or school of thought.
Here we go!
Aristotle on the origin of the soul
Aristotle would have been well aware of the views of his teacher and mentor Plato supporting reincarnation. But he ultimately disagreed with Plato on this—and so do I. For a full analysis of reincarnation and why I believe it is a mistaken idea, please see:
The Bible, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Reincarnation
As for Aristotle, he saw the soul as building and inhabiting a body that reflects its own character. It would therefore be impossible, he reasoned, for a soul to inhabit a body other than its own. Here is what he said about this in his treatise on the soul, written around 350 BC:
. . . as if it were possible, as in the Pythagorean myths, that any soul could be clothed upon with any body—an absurd view, for each body seems to have a form and shape of its own. It is as absurd as to say that the art of carpentry could embody itself in flutes; each art must use its tools, each soul its body. (Aristotle, On the Soul, Book 1, Part 3)
And more fully:
Since, then, the complex here is the living thing, the body cannot be the actuality of the soul; it is the soul that is the actuality of a certain kind of body. Hence the rightness of the view that the soul cannot be without a body, while it cannot be a body; it is not a body but something relative to a body. That is why it is in a body, and a body of a definite kind. It was a mistake, therefore, to do as former thinkers did, merely to fit it into a body without adding a definite specification of the kind or character of that body. Reflection confirms the observed fact; the actuality of any given thing can only be realized in what is already potentially that thing, i.e. in a matter of its own appropriate to it. (Aristotle, On the Soul, Book 2, Part 2, emphasis added)
This is a key reason for Aristotle’s rejection of reincarnation. Each soul is different in character. Each must inhabit a specific body that reflects the soul’s specific character. A soul therefore cannot pass into another body. Any other body besides its own would not match the character of the soul.
If Aristotle is right about this—as I think he is—and the soul does not pre-exist the body as in reincarnation theory, but inhabits only one body, where does the soul come from?
Aristotle on the role of man and woman in reproduction
Here is Aristotle’s most succinct answer to that question:
While the body is from the female, it is the soul that is from the male. (Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Book 2, Part 4)
The soul comes from the father, Aristotle said. It is contained in his semen, which delivers it to the womb of the mother. The mother contributes the materials that the soul uses to build a body for itself. This is in line with classical concepts of the male as the active element and the female as the passive element in interactions between man and woman.
Since Aristotle’s thought on this subject had a major influence on European and Christian beliefs about the soul right up to the time of Swedenborg, let’s lay it out in some detail, in his own words.
Here is the beginning of the sequence in which Aristotle explains how this process works:
That, then, the female does not contribute semen to generation, but does contribute something, and that this is the matter of the catamenia [menstrual blood], or that which is analogous to it in bloodless animals, is clear from what has been said, and also from a general and abstract survey of the question. For there must be that which generates and that from which it generates. Even if these be one, still they must be distinct in form, and their essence must be different. In those animals that have these powers separate in two sexes, the body and nature of the active and the passive sex must also differ. If, then, the male stands for the effective and active, and the female, considered as female, for the passive, it follows that what the female would contribute to the semen of the male would not be semen, but material for the semen to work upon. This is just what we find to be the case, for the catamenia have in their nature an affinity to the primitive matter. (Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Book 1, Part 20)
Clearly Aristotle did not have today’s knowledge of the reproductive organs and their functions. Neither sperm nor human eggs had yet been discovered. His theory was that the menstrual blood provides the material that the soul, carried in the male semen, uses to begin building a body for itself.
For now, I am simply presenting what Aristotle believed about the origin of the soul and the body. Naturally, his views were dependent upon the scientific knowledge available to him. They were also shaped by the ideas of his time and culture on the nature of man and woman in relation to one another.
Later, when we get to my own theory, I’ll make the required modifications to Aristotle’s views, as adopted and developed by Swedenborg two thousand years later in the eighteenth century, and in light of today’s much more specific and detailed twenty-first century knowledge about sexual reproduction.
Explaining himself further, Aristotle writes:
So much for the discussion of this question. At the same time, the answer to the next question we must investigate is clear from these considerations—I mean how it is that the male contributes to generation and how it is that the semen from the male is the cause of the offspring. Does it exist in the body of the embryo as a part of it from the first, mingling with the material that comes from the female? Or does the semen communicate nothing to the material body of the embryo, but only to the power and movement in it? For this power is that which acts and makes, while that which is made and receives the form is the residue of the secretion in the female.
Now the latter alternative appears to be the right one both a priori and in view of the facts. For if we consider the question on general grounds, we find that whenever one thing is made from two, of which one is active and the other passive, the active agent does not exist in that which is made. And still more generally, the same applies when one thing moves and another is moved; the moving thing does not exist in that which is moved. But the female, as female, is passive, and the male, as male, is active, and the principle of the movement comes from him. Therefore, if we take the highest genera under which they each fall, the one being active and motive and the other passive and moved, that one thing that is produced comes from them only in the sense in which a bed comes into being from the carpenter and the wood, or in which a ball comes into being from the wax and the form. It is plain, then, that it is not necessary that anything at all should come away from the male, and if anything does come away it does not follow that this gives rise to the embryo as being in the embryo, but only as that which imparts the motion and as the form; so the medical art cures the patient. (Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Book 1, Part 21)
In short, the man contributes the power of motion, while the woman contributes the materials it works on. To make this abstract idea more concrete, Aristotle compares the male’s contribution—the soul—to an artisan, and compares the female’s contribution—the body—to the material from which the artisan forms the object being made:
For the same reason the development of the embryo takes place in the female; neither the male himself nor the female emits semen into the male, but the female receives within herself the share contributed by both, because in the female is the material from which is made the resulting product. Not only must the mass of material exist there from which the embryo is formed in the first instance, but further material must constantly be added so that it may increase in size. Therefore the birth must take place in the female. For the carpenter must keep in close connection with his timber and the potter with his clay, and generally all workmanship and the ultimate movement of matter must be connected with the material concerned, as, for instance, architecture is in the buildings it makes. (Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Book 1, Part 22)
Summing it all up, he writes:
From these considerations we may also gather how it is that the male contributes to generation. The male does not emit semen at all in some animals, and where he does this is no part of the resulting embryo. Just so, no material part comes from the carpenter to the material, i.e., the wood in which he works, nor does any part of the carpenter’s art exist within what he makes, but the shape and the form are imparted from him to the material by means of the motion he sets up. It is his hands that move his tools, his tools that move the material; it is his knowledge of his art, and his soul, in which is the form, that moves his hands or any other part of him with a motion of some definite kind, a motion varying with the varying nature of the object made. In like manner, in the male of those animals that emit semen, Nature uses the semen as a tool and as possessing motion in actuality, just as tools are used in the products of any art, for in them lies in a certain sense the motion of the art. Such, then, is the way in which these males contribute to generation. (Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Book 1, Part 22)
Even the semen, then, is simply a tool that the soul, which Aristotle saw as derived from the male, uses to accomplish its purpose. That purpose is to form a body for it to inhabit—a body that reflects the soul’s own character.
There is no need to provide a full account of Aristotle’s thinking about the soul. If you are interested, his treatise On the Soul is freely available to read online at the linked website and elsewhere. In this section I have covered the parts of his theory that are relevant to the question of the origin of the soul.
Aristotle on the soul’s immortality
There is some debate about Aristotle’s views on the immortality of the soul. But he did seem to think the soul was immortal in at least some form. For example, he says:
When mind is set free from its present conditions it appears as just what it is and nothing more: this alone is immortal and eternal. (Aristotle, On the Soul, Book 3, Part 5)
However, Aristotle generally connected the soul with the body, believing that the soul could not engage in most of its functions without a body. Hence his diffidence on the existence and character of the soul after it has departed from the body.
All these things, however, were slated to be developed in much more detail in later Christian thought, in which there is a definite and embodied afterlife that the soul moves on to. Though we could survey the development of the arc of Aristotle’s thought through Christian theologians over the past two thousand years, my knowledge and expertise is primarily in Swedenborg’s teachings. That is where we will go next.
Swedenborg on the origin of the soul
In the Christian world of Swedenborg’s day, Aristotle had come to hold an outsized stature compared to any other secular thinker of the past. Arguments could be settled by saying “Ipse dixit,” Latin for “He himself said it.” This did not refer to Jesus. It referred to Aristotle. On non-theological subjects, if Aristotle made a statement about it, that settled the matter.
During Swedenborg’s lifetime Aristotle’s influence began to wane as scientific discoveries started to come in thick and fast, many of them contradicting what Aristotle had said. However, during Swedenborg’s earlier scientific and philosophical period Aristotle’s influence was still very strong. The idea that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother was still “settled science,” because ipse dixit.
Swedenborg did have considerably more knowledge of anatomy and physiology, and specifically of embryology, than Aristotle did. But he still had only rudimentary knowledge of the microscopic processes of reproduction. He did know about the human ovum (egg), but he did not give it the level of importance in reproduction that today’s science does. Sperm had only recently been discovered. There was still much debate about its function. Swedenborg came down on the side of sperm not having any significant function in reproduction. In his earlier scientific works he referred to them dismissively as “little eels.” (If you see the word “sperm” in one of Swedenborg’s theological works, it is an erroneous translation of the Latin word semen, which means “seed,” but which is also used for the male seminal fluid.)
In other words, in Swedenborg’s day there was still no compelling reason to doubt Aristotle’s teaching that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother. Mendel, the science of genetics, and the discovery of DNA were still in the future. Swedenborg wove the “settled science” from Aristotle on this subject into his theory of human reproduction. He also wove it into his teachings about the Incarnation (God coming to earth as Jesus), but that will be a subject for a future article.
Swedenborg made no claim to originality on the idea that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother—and he certainly never said that it was revealed to him by God. He presents it as common knowledge, and defends it on logical grounds. It is what educated people of his time commonly believed. Based on the available scientific knowledge, and on the views in that culture about the roles of men and women, it made perfect sense to them.
Swedenborg himself had no reason to doubt it. It was the best concept of the soul’s origin available to him, and he built upon it.
Swedenborg’s scientific background
In fact, he took it and ran with it!
For many years before his spiritual eyes were opened in his mid-fifties, Swedenborg was a scientist and a philosopher. As time went on, he increasingly focused his studies on a search for the human soul. During this period of his life, he wrote many books on anatomy and physiology. Since he saw the human body as the dwelling place of the soul, he reasoned that if he could delve deeply enough into the secrets of the human body, the secrets of the soul might be revealed to him there.
One of the books he wrote but never published during this period was his Draft on the Reproductive Organs, traditionally known as On Generation. This is where he laid out his theory of where new human souls come from in the greatest detail. His descriptions of the process in that book are very long, and go into considerable anatomical detail. What I will present below is a simplified summary.
I should add that most of Swedenborg’s schema of the origin of new souls was not original to him. Earlier thinkers had proposed many of the same ideas, which were common intellectual currency among the educated people of Swedenborg’s day. For the most part, Swedenborg created his theory by synthesizing and further developing ideas that were already in circulation, some of them originating in ancient Greece, and others in the writings of more recent thinkers.
This is not to say that Swedenborg just uncritically copied earlier thinkers. There was tremendous debate on these issues. Swedenborg’s theory involved taking specific positions in that debate.
For example, one long-held and very popular theory was preformationism: the idea that each new human being or animal starts out as a tiny, miniaturized version of a full-grown individual, which simply grows bigger until it reaches adulthood. Swedenborg rejected this theory (see Divine Love and Wisdom #432). He settled instead on today’s accepted alternative to preformationism, which is epigenesis: the idea that each new plant or animal starts with a relatively undifferentiated seed or egg, which then develops and grows the various parts of the mature organism in a step-by-step process.
With that as a preface, let’s get to Swedenborg’s particular theory of the beginnings of the individual soul.
Swedenborg’s theory of the generation of new souls
The soul, Swedenborg believed during his earlier scientific period, was a sort of spiritual fluid that flowed through the body, giving it life. In particular, it flowed through the tiniest fibers of the body, which were like tiny tubes that were gathered together in bundles to form the nerves that run from the brain to the entire body. These fibers were also continuous with the blood vessels, which provided other, less fine fluids and materials that the body requires for life. The finest of these fluids that flow through the blood vessels he referred to as “animal spirits.” These were the next step down from the soul, or spirit, itself.
More specifically, the soul flowed from the “cortical glands” described by anatomists of the time. We now know that these “cortical glands” do not exist. They were based on faulty early examination of brain tissue. However, in Swedenborg’s treatment of them they served as a crude early analog to what we know today as neurons. The electrochemical nature of brain activity was not yet known. But like neurons, the “cortical glands” were located in the cortex, or outer layer, of the brain, and in Swedenborg’s view they handled both sensation and motor control via the “fibers” running from them to all parts of the body. From these cortical glands the soul flowed through the tiniest of fibers (really, tiny tubes), and supplied the entire body with life-giving soul.
This process of the soul flowing from the cortex of the brain and being circulated throughout the body by the nervous system applies to both males and females. However, in Swedenborg’s elaboration of Aristotle’s theory about the origin of new souls, when the male testicles receive this flow of soul, they do something unique with it. Of course, the flow of soul gives life to the testicles themselves just as it does to every other part of the body. But the specific function of the testicles is to take some of this soul and “package it up,” so to speak, for delivery to the womb of the female.
This packaging (my word, not Swedenborg’s) is anything but simple. First, the highly volatile fluid of the soul is surrounded by a tiny little shell of the animal spirits mentioned earlier. This begins the process of containing the highly volatile soul so that it won’t escape out into the surrounding fluids and tissues, and be lost. Then, at each step of the way, as each of these tiny little spheres, which are the “seed” of a new human being, moves from the testicles through the passages of the epididymis, the vas deferens, and so on right out to the glans penis just before it is sent out of the father’s body, it is coated with more and more layers, each one coarser than the last, until it forms a little globule that securely contains the central offshoot of the father’s soul so that it can be delivered safely and securely into the womb of the mother.
In the mother’s womb, each of these coatings is peeled away one by one in reverse order, releasing its tiny, precious offshoot of the father’s soul to do its work of forming a new human being.
If you want to read for yourself Swedenborg’s descriptions of these processes involved in generating new souls, here are references to most of the relevant sections in his draft on the reproductive organs: #36–37, 40–53, 70–74, 80–90, 103–114, 149–151, 163–176. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you!)
Keep in mind that Swedenborg theorized and wrote all of this before his spiritual eyes were opened. After the opening of his spiritual eyes, he had quite a different understanding of the nature of the soul, though he retained from his earlier scientific period the idea of the soul being packaged up in the testicles for delivery to the womb of the mother.
Swedenborg’s theory of how the soul builds the body
In Swedenborg’s theory, it is in the mother’s womb that this tiny offshoot of the father’s soul, now delivered to the mother, begins its task of building a body suitable to it—a body that reflects its own specific character.
Since the function of the sperm and the egg in reproduction was still not well-established in Swedenborg’s day, and DNA was as yet unknown, Swedenborg largely fell back on Aristotle’s theory of how the soul forms a body for itself in the womb of the mother. The tiny offshoot of the father’s soul, now liberated from its coatings, sets about the task of building a body for itself, first using as its building materials the menstrual blood in the womb of the mother (remember, Swedenborg did not have the benefit of today’s much more detailed knowledge of human physiology), and later using material supplied by the mother from the placenta via the umbilical cord.
As in Aristotle’s theory, in Swedenborg’s theory the soul progressively builds a body for itself that corresponds to its own character. Swedenborg, though, developed this idea of correspondence much more fully than Aristotle did, building it into a major component of his cosmological theory. We will take that up in a moment.
For now, I will simply point out that Aristotle’s concept of the soul from the father as the active organizing principle, in contrast to the body or material substance from the mother as the passive principle that the soul worked on, is carried directly over into Swedenborg’s theory of human reproduction.
However, there are also some significant differences in the two theories. For example:
- Swedenborg posited the soul as a distinct spiritual entity, whereas for Aristotle the soul was simply the “form” or organizing principle of the new human being, and the body was its substance.
- Aristotle said that the development of the embryo began with the early formation of the heart, whereas Swedenborg said that it began with the early formation of the brain.
- Aristotle was diffident about the eternity of the soul, believing that it could not engage in most of its functions if disconnected from the body, whereas Swedenborg stated definitively that the soul is eternal; he said that the soul has its own spiritual body, made of spiritual substance, distinct from the physical body, and that after death the soul lives forever in its spiritual body, in the spiritual world.
There are many more elements to Aristotle’s and Swedenborg’s theories of the nature and origin of the soul and the body, such as their parallel views on plant, animal, and human souls, and Aristotle’s conjecture that perhaps there is an “intellect” infused into the new human being from some unknown outside source that is distinct from the soul derived from the father, and that may survive death. However, what I have presented here is sufficient background information on the Aristotelian origins of Swedenborg’s theory of the origin of the soul and the body of a new human being.
Correspondence
The concept of a nous, or higher mind that expresses itself in the human form and in the world of nature, was a common one in ancient Greek philosophy, best known in its Platonic and Aristotelian forms. However, Swedenborg went far beyond any of the ancient philosophers, or anyone else before or since, in developing this concept into a grand and highly detailed theory of the relationship between God and the created universe, between the spiritual realm and the material realm, and between the human mind and body.
Swedenborg rejected the traditional Christian concept of creatio ex nihilo (Latin for “creation out of nothing”), which, as its name suggests, holds that God created the universe and everything in it out of nothing. Instead, he said that God created everything out of “substances put out from himself,” on which God imposed limits so that they were no longer infinite and divine, but finite and created. On this, see True Christianity #33.
Since the substance and form of the spiritual and material universes derive from and reflect the divine love and wisdom that are the substance and form of God, everything in the created universe, Swedenborg said, corresponds to something in the nature of God. The entire universe, both spiritual and material, is therefore a reflection and expression of God.
Further, this relationship exists between the spiritual and material universes both on the broad level and on the individual level. Every part of the material universe reflects, or corresponds to, some specific thing in the spiritual universe. And in an individual human being, every part of the human body reflects or corresponds to some specific thing in that person’s spirit or soul, which we know as the human mind or psyche.
Further, the flow is always from God to spirit to nature, and never the reverse. God’s nature is reflected in the spiritual universe, and the spiritual universe’s nature is reflected in the material universe. Similarly, God flows into each individual human soul at its center, giving it being and life, and each person’s soul flows into his or her body, giving it being and life.
The bulk of Swedenborg’s voluminous theological works is devoted to explaining the specific correspondences between particular people, places, and things in the Bible, in nature, and in the human body to specific elements of spiritual reality, and of God. For just one simple example, the eyes, Swedenborg says, correspond to the understanding. This is why when we say, “I see,” it can mean either “I see that house over there” or “I understand what you are saying.” Every other part of the human body also corresponds to some specific part of the human spirit, such as the commonly understood connection between the heart and love.
This vastly more detailed working out of the correspondence, or relationship, between spiritual things and material things, and specifically between the human spirit and body, provides the basis for Swedenborg’s idea, parallel to that of Aristotle, that each human spirit builds a body specifically suited to and expressive of itself. Like Aristotle, Swedenborg rejected the idea that a soul could enter any other body than the one it built for itself in the womb, and continued building to adulthood.
However, as it turns out, Swedenborg’s concept of correspondence also puts the nail in the coffin of Aristotle’s idea that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother. And here is where we must depart from both Aristotle and Swedenborg, and use Swedenborg’s own principles to begin developing a better theory of the origin of the human soul.
Present-day science on reproduction
You see, today we do know the functions of the sperm and the egg in reproduction, and we do know about genetics and DNA.
Specifically, we know that in both the sperm and the egg there is a unique set of genetic material from the father and mother, respectively, which in turn combine in the womb to form a unique new full set of human DNA that forms the blueprint for a unique new human being.
If Swedenborg’s concept of correspondence is correct—as I believe it is—then this physical process of forming a new human body must correspond to and express the spiritual process of forming a new human soul.
Yes, there is a wee little difference between the male and female half set of DNA contained in the sperm and the egg. The DNA in the egg has one X chromosome, whereas the DNA in the sperm can have either an X chromosome or a Y chromosome. If it has an X chromosome, the baby will be female. If it has a Y chromosome, the baby will be male. The father’s contribution to the DNA therefore determines the baby’s sex, and certain sex-linked traits.
Some Swedenborgians have argued that this means that the father does provide the soul, since gender is an inherent and eternal part of a person’s soul. But this is grasping at straws. There is one sex-linked chromosome pair, compared to twenty-two non-sex-linked chromosome pairs. Singling out one of the twenty-three pairs of human chromosomes and linking that, and not the others, to the soul makes no sense.
The reality is that the father and the mother contribute equal parts to the formation of the specific and unique set of DNA that the offspring will have. And it is that DNA as a whole, not the one sex-linked chromosome pair, that will build the new human being in the womb.
As a case in point, Aristotle’s and Swedenborg’s theories that the heredity from the father is dominant and the heredity from the mother is recessive conflicts with well-established genetic science. Yes, there are dominant and recessive genes. But the dominant ones can come from the mother just as much as they can come from the father. If the mother contributes a dominant trait and the father contributes a corresponding recessive trait, it is the trait from the mother that will prevail.
So much for the idea that the male is always the active element and the female is always the passive element in the relationship between man and woman.
Further, Swedenborg said that in succeeding generations of children, the traits derived from the father would tend to reassert themselves over the traits derived from the mother (see Arcana Coelestia #6716:2; Marriage Love #206; True Christianity #103:2). But this has not been borne out in reality.
One example is the “Coloured” people of South Africa. (Note that in South Africa, “Coloured” is not a pejorative term.) The Coloureds, who are seen as a distinct racial group in the African context, originated in pairings of European fathers and African mothers starting in the Dutch Cape Colony in the seventeenth century. For many generations, Coloured people have mostly married one another. Yet contrary to Swedenborg’s theory, they have not gradually become more European in appearance due to having originally come from European fathers. They continue to maintain the same mixed-race traits and appearance generation after generation.
This example, and others like it, also refutes the Aristotelian idea that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother so that the father is the active element and the mother is the passive element in the generation of a new human being.
The origin of the soul
The bottom line is that in light of today’s far greater scientific knowledge, we cannot preserve both Swedenborg’s concept of correspondence and Aristotle’s theory that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother.
However, for the faithful, not all is lost! In fact, today’s genetic science provides strong support for the idea that each soul is a new creation, contrary to reincarnation theory. Further, it provides strong support for the idea that the soul is not some direct creation of God infused into the fertilized egg or into the fetus at a later stage of development, but comes from the parents, and is present from conception.
Think about it. Biologically, we now know that each new human being begins as a unique combination of unique offshoots of the DNA of the father and the mother. If, as Swedenborg teaches, everything in the material world is a corresponding expression of something in the spiritual world, then this means that each new soul is not some special creation direct from God, but is also a unique combination of unique offshoots of the souls of the father and the mother.
Of course, everything, including the human soul, ultimately comes from God. But God works in specific ways, through specific means. And modern biology informs us that the means God uses to create new human souls is to have the mother’s and the father’s sprits each produce many unique combinations of their “spiritual DNA,” meaning their specific spiritual character and personality, one of which from each parent combines together with one from the other parent to provide the blueprint for a unique new human being who has never existed before, and is a brand new creation.
This is how the vast creativity of God works when it comes to making new human beings. God doesn’t just continually recycle old souls into new bodies. God continually produces new souls through human fathers and mothers, adding new variety and complexity to humankind with each new conception and birth. As in the broader world of nature around us, each new birth is a unique new variation of the overall theme of humanity.
In short, it is now clear that Aristotle and Swedenborg were on the right track. It’s just that instead of new souls coming only from the father, new souls come from both the father and the mother.
The basis for this view
Obviously this fits far better with today’s move away from historical gender inequality and toward the view that men and women are different but equal, just as they were originally created by God in Genesis 1:26–27. However, the conclusion that the soul comes from both the father and the mother is not based on any currently popular social or political ideology. It is based on fundamental, well-established scientific knowledge about human reproduction.
The egg and the sperm each carry twenty-three chromosomes, which are derived from each parent’s DNA. This happens through the complex process of meiosis, which, unlike common cell division, or mitosis, does not merely copy over the same DNA, but produces unique new combinations of DNA. One sperm then fertilizes one egg in the mother’s womb, and their respective DNA combines to form the DNA of the fertilized egg. Unlike eggs and sperm by themselves, which will die out on their own, a fertilized egg has the capacity to grow into a new human being.
To sum up, my theory of the origin of the soul is based on Swedenborg’s principle of correspondence combined with today’s knowledge of reproduction and genetics. The theory is that not only the body, but also the soul of each new human being is a unique new product of the combination of unique offshoots from that individual’s father and mother. To put it plainly and simply:
Each new soul comes from both the father and the mother.
Given today’s vastly greater, more detailed, and more solidly established understanding of human reproduction compared to what existed in Aristotle’s day, or even in Swedenborg’s day, I don’t see how we can come to any other conclusion.
For those familiar with Swedenborg’s theology, I am aware that this adjustment to our understanding of the origin of the human soul requires significant changes to Swedenborg’s teachings about the Incarnation (God being born in the flesh as Jesus). However, as I will explore in a future article, making this adjustment actually saves Swedenborg’s teachings about the Incarnation from insuperable obstacles caused by Aristotle’s theory of the respective contributions of the father and the mother to a new human being.
Building a new human being
Now let’s turn to the even thornier issue of the building of a new human being, and when the soul becomes eternal.
If we look at the universe and at the world of nature around us, we see that nothing springs into being fully formed in an instant. Everything develops into its form over time.
- The universe as a whole began with a “singularity,” in which all matter and energy were compressed into a point-like space, and it expanded and developed stars and galaxies from there.
- The solar system began as a vast cloud of gas and dust, which compressed into a much denser disk, in the center of which the sun formed, and the planets formed from the disk around it.
- The earth began as bits of dust and rock that gradually clumped together, forming a molten ball that then gradually cooled into the planet that we live on today.
- Trees grow from a seed, which sends out tiny roots, stalks, and leaves, and only gradually grows into a sturdy full-grown tree having a solid trunk, a broad canopy of branches and leaves, and an extensive underground root system.
- Animals begin with a fertilized egg that is only a single cell, which divides over and over again, its cells differentiating and forming all its parts and organs.
The list goes on and on.
We humans are no exception. We do not start as mini-humans, as the old preformationist theory held. We start as a fertilized egg, which does have its own internal structure, but does not have any of the parts and organs of an adult human body. These must all be formed over time, rudimentary at first, and only gradually taking on their fully developed and functional forms.
In recognition of this, as already mentioned, Swedenborg rejected preformationism, instead describing a process in which a new human being is formed gradually over time, starting with the primitive beginnings of a brain. In the very last section of Divine Love and Wisdom, #432, you can read his description of our early form in utero, which he said was shown to him by an angel. It may not exactly match what today’s anatomical studies have discovered, but the overall idea of early rudimentary forms that later develop into full-fledged organs is very much in line with today’s knowledge of the process of gestation in the womb. He ends this description, and the book, by saying:
Further, since love and wisdom are the essential person, love and wisdom being the Lord in essence, and since this primal stage of ours is a vessel, it follows that there is in this primal stage a constant striving toward the human form, a form that it gradually takes on. (emphasis added)
When do we become human?
This leads to a thorny question: When do we become human beings?
Of course, at conception we each have a full set of human DNA. But does this make us a human being? If I accidentally slice off a piece of my finger, and that piece of me is in the palm of my hand, am I holding a human being in my hand? Of course not. Even though each of its cells has a full set of human DNA, it is only a piece of human skin.
A human being is not an abstract idea. A human being has specific characteristics, both mental and physical. Mentally, we have human capabilities of motivation and thought, and of expressing these in speech and action. Physically, we have a human body, which includes not only the vital organs, such as brain, heart, and lungs, but also the limbs—arms and legs, hands and feet—that make it possible for us to act on our thoughts and desires.
Of course, a person can have lost all his or her limbs and still be a human being. But if the brain or heart or lungs are missing, there is no human being. There is a vegetable at best, and a corpse at worst. If we boil it down to fundamentals, to be a human being physically, we must have the vital organs that make it possible for us to live, feel, think, and act. And to be a human being mentally and spiritually, we must have the human ability to be self-reflective, make rational and moral choices, and so on—or at least have that potential, even if it has been blocked by damage or malfunctions in the brain and body.
Focusing on the physical side of things, when do we have all these vital functioning parts that make it possible for us to live as a human being?
This question has a definite answer: at the time of fetal viability. This is the time when a fetus is capable of surviving outside the womb. Before that time, one or more organs have not developed sufficiently for the embryo or fetus to live semi-independently as a human being.
Practically speaking, since the lungs are not needed in the womb, and are one of the last major vital organs to develop full functional capacity, the development of the lungs is a key limiting factor on fetal viability. Underdeveloped lungs, and resulting lack of proper lung function, is a common problem in premature babies.
What happens in the womb is the development of a human being. And as with everything else in the universe, this is not an instantaneous event. It takes place over time.
When we see an automobile production line, and all that’s been produced so far is a chassis, without wheels, engine, controls, and passenger compartment, do we call it a car? No. But if the process continues, it will become a car.
When a contractor has laid the foundations of a new building, and is beginning to put up walls, do we call it a house? No. But if the process continues, it will become a house.
When a chicken lays an egg, and within the egg the cells start to divide and differentiate, do we call it a chicken? No. But if the process continues, it will become a chicken.
It is the same with human beings. We don’t start out as human beings. We develop into human beings.
I am aware that this is a controversial position. But objectively speaking, we become a human being physically when all our vital parts and organs have developed sufficiently for us to live as a human being.
In other words, once again, we become human beings at the time of fetal viability. Before that, if the process continues, we will become a human being, but we are not a human being yet.
The generation of a new human soul
However, our physical body is not the part of us that lives after death. The afterlife is in the spiritual world, not in the physical world. And physical things cannot enter the spiritual world. Instead, we live forever in our spiritual body, which is just as solid and real as our physical body, and has all the same parts, organs, and structures right down to the cellular level as our physical body does, only it is made of spiritual substance, not of physical matter.
This, too, cannot just suddenly pop into existence. Like everything else that has complex form and structure, our spiritual body must develop over time. Drawing on the principle of correspondence covered earlier, we can conclude that if the development of our physical body is an expression of spiritual things, then our spiritual body, too, must go through a similar process of development and growth.
This does not mean that there are angel mothers pregnant with our spiritual body while our earthly birth mother is carrying us in the womb. No. Rather, our developing spirit, including our spiritual body, is within our developing physical body, growing along with it.
More precisely, our “proto-soul”—which as discussed earlier, I believe is a combination of unique offshoots from our father’s and mother’s souls—is building both our spiritual and our physical body simultaneously. This idea of the primordial soul building a body for itself is a key concept that Swedenborg adopted from Aristotle and placed at the center of his own theory about the origin of the soul and the body, and their relationship with one another.
In this process, bringing in today’s science, the soul uses the blueprint of our DNA to build the body. However, based on the principle of correspondence explained above, even our physical DNA is a precise (albeit not always perfect) expression of a corresponding spiritual DNA that we receive from the spirits of our father and mother, just as we receive our physical DNA from the bodies of our father and mother. Presumably a process similar to the one in the mother’s physical womb is also happening in the building of our spiritual body.
And it only makes sense that these processes are happening in parallel with each other. Each new development of our spiritual body is reflected in a corresponding new development in our physical body. This continues throughout the entire process of gestation, from the point of fertilization through the embryonic and fetal stages right up to birth, and then onward to adulthood.
Forming a new eternal human soul, then, is a process, not an instantaneous event, just as forming a new human being physically is a process, not an instantaneous event.
When do we become eternal?
If you’re with me so far, then the question of when we become eternal should already be answering itself. To live to eternity, we must be a human being, having the psychological structures that give us our humanity. These are a human will, a human understanding, and the ability to act upon them.
A human will is one that can desire spiritual things, such as loving other human beings for their own sake, and wanting them to be well and happy regardless of any benefit or lack thereof for ourselves. A human understanding is one that can think about God and spirit, and can direct our life according to higher principles of love for God and the neighbor so that we live by moral and ethical standards.
Obviously, these capabilities are not present at the time of fetal viability. However, the structures capable of supporting these functions are present. Specifically, according to Swedenborg, our heart corresponds to our will, and our lungs correspond to our understanding.
Remember how I said earlier that the lungs are one of the last vital organs to develop sufficiently to function outside the womb? In our spiritual development, this corresponds to the time when we have developed the mental structures required to think rationally and morally—even if we’re not actually exercising that capacity yet.
This also answers the thorny problem of developmentally disabled people who never develop full adult rational and moral capabilities. These people are still human beings, and we still treat them as such, because they have the potential to develop these capabilities—and according to Swedenborg, they will develop these capabilities after death, where the genetic or physical damage that limited their mental development here on earth is left behind along with the physical body.
Back to the main point, I have come to believe that our soul becomes eternal, meaning that we will live forever if we die, when the structures of our spiritual body that are necessary for functioning as a human being have become sufficiently developed to support those capabilities. And since, I believe, this is happening in parallel with our physical development, this is the conclusion I have come to:
Our soul becomes eternal at the time of fetal viability.
In this I am not disagreeing with Swedenborg as I am when I say that the soul comes from both the father and the mother, because Swedenborg never made any clear statement on when the soul becomes eternal. But I am differing from the two main competing theories historically held by Swedenborgians: that the soul becomes eternal at conception and that the soul becomes eternal at first breath. I used to hold the “eternal at conception” position. However, in light of all the above science, reasoning, and spiritual principles, I can no longer sustain that view.
Conclusion?
As I said in the introduction, this theory and belief is my own. It is based on many years of study and thought drawing on the Bible, the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, ancient authors such as Plato and Aristotle, and my admittedly lay understanding of present-day physical and biological science. I make no claim that this is what Swedenborg teaches, nor is this the position of any group or organization that I know of or may be associated with.
Is it true?
I have laid out, step-by-step, the concepts, reasoning, and evidence on which I have based this conclusion. And I could have written much more, but even this lengthy article attempts to condense things down to the minimum necessary background, information, and thinking required to understand the logic and evidence behind my conclusion.
As for whether it’s true, that is up to you to decide for yourself. If nothing else, I hope this article provides you with some solid and tasty food for thought as we humans grapple with these complex and thorny issues.
For further reading:
- God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
- The Bible, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Reincarnation
- Do the Teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg take Precedence over the Bible?
- Can We Really Believe the Bible?
- Containers for God
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
something to consider is that Swedenborg’s entire doctrine of the Lord’s birth is based entirely on the Aristotle view.
A deviation from this view arising from modern science then places question marks on whether Swedenborg accurately understood the virgin birth
Hi R,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your thoughts. This gets into the area that I intend to cover in the promised future article on how our current scientific knowledge of reproduction affects Swedenborg’s doctrine of the Incarnation. Not that I’ve fully worked it out in my mind. But there are some basics that must be established so that we can even begin to develop a reasonable understanding of how this worked in light of today’s known science.
Short version: If a child received only its body from the mother, and nothing spiritual, this would be fatal to Swedenborg’s doctrine of the Incarnation. That doctrine requires a spiritual battlefield on which the Devil (i.e., hell) can attack the Lord via hereditary tendencies toward evil inherited from his human mother. If Jesus received only a body from Mary, and no spiritual component, this would be impossible. Hence my comment in the article that making this adjustment to the origin of the soul actually saves Swedenborg’s doctrine of the Incarnation.
As a spoiler for my future article, I believe that Jesus received both a human body and a human spirit from Mary, and a divine inner self from God, which was within, above, and beyond both the material and the spiritual part that he received from Mary. The Lord’s glorification was not only of the human body that came from Mary, but also of the human spirit that came from Mary. Otherwise the entire doctrine of the glorification doesn’t work. Swedenborg’s treatment of the glorification process throughout the first five (Latin) volumes of Arcana Coelestia assumes this. It speaks of the Lord’s lower and higher mental self in contrast to each other, not just of the Lord glorifying a physical body, which would be relatively trivial. But because of Aristotle’s doctrine, Swedenborg couldn’t really state this explicitly. I think Aristotle’s doctrine actually hobbled Swedenborg’s thinking on this subject. But the important part came through anyway.
It’s an overstatement to say that Swedenborg’s entire doctrine of the Lord’s birth was based on Aristotle’s view. Certainly he wove Aristotle’s idea that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother deeply into his doctrine of the Incarnation. It appears many times in his theological writings in that connection. However, in Swedenborg’s doctrine there is an entire superstructure of divine, spiritual, and material reality and their interrelationships that is almost entirely missing from Aristotle’s system. Aristotle focused on the material level of things. When he edged into spiritual territory, he became vague and diffident, because that wasn’t his arena. He was not even entirely convinced that the soul can exist apart from the physical body. I suspect his idea of an “intellect” that came from some other source, and that might survive death, was mostly a sop to those who believe in an eternal soul.
More importantly, the main point of Swedenborg’s doctrine of the Incarnation is God’s purpose in being born as a human being on earth. That purpose was to defeat the Devil, thus saving humanity, and simultaneously to glorify the human nature that God took on. These are entirely outside the arena of Aristotle’s thought. And these are the key, core issues that must be preserved for Swedenborg’s theology to survive, whereas the specific mechanism of exactly how God accomplished these things is secondary. Along these lines, please see:
The Logic of Love: Why God became Jesus
So no, I don’t think Swedenborg accurately understood the Virgin Birth because his thinking was clouded by Aristotle’s teaching that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother. However, as covered in the above article, the expanded Aristotelian idea that the soul comes from the parents remains an essential part of Swedenborg’s doctrine of the Incarnation. That is in contrast to both the Eastern view (pre-existence of the soul) and the dominant Nicene Christian view (creationism), under neither of which would Swedenborg’s view of the Virgin Birth and its purpose work properly.
I would say that Swedenborg had the right general idea, but getting it entirely right (as much as we finite humans are capable of that) requires making the adjustments I am attempting based on our far greater and more detailed present-day understanding of the process of reproduction. I believe that what will emerge from this effort is a more solid and sound understanding of how the Incarnation and the Glorification worked.
Of course, Swedenborg’s teachings about the Incarnation, Redemption, and Glorification are far more important than the mechanical details of exactly how God accomplished all these things. Still, we materially-minded humans from this materialistic planet do like to satisfy our thinking mind on these more external issues. That’s why I’ve taken it as one of my goals to rethink and modify various areas of Swedenborg’s teachings in light of today’s greater scientific and historical knowledge. Otherwise we risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Lee,
I would encourage you to look a bit deeper into the development of the form from the single fertilized cell. Modern embryology is having difficulty in moving from DNA to a creature’s form and increasingly referring to an epigenetic source. I happen to think that epigenetic source is hidden in Swedenborg’s communities, but here’s a brief from Grok on the current issues without any Swedenborg spin:
https://x.com/i/grok/share/vLAX4twcojOyBJ8mIOLHG5qxK
Ted
Hi Ted,
As my silly haploid vs. diploid mistake shows, I’m nothing like a trained scientist. My field is Bible and Swedenborgian theology. The last time I seriously studied reproduction was about half a century ago in public school biology classes. Of course I knew from those classes that there is only one x or y chromosome in the gamete, but these subjects aren’t active enough in my thinking to keep them fresh in my mind.
I have encountered the issue that DNA is not sufficient to direct the formation of a human being, and I don’t doubt that this is true. In the above article, “DNA” is more of a code word for the physical and biological determinants of our human form, whatever those may be. Certainly DNA is a key player, but as the linked Grok discussion points out, it is not the only player. The main idea is that something is carrying information from both parents that influences the particular human form that each new individual takes.
Swedenborg said that because God is human, everything in the universe tends toward a human form (see, for example, “Do Galaxies Have Heart and Lungs?”). How exactly that works itself out in physics and biology I don’t claim to know. But I do know that every time we think we have some phenomenon all nailed down, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than we thought (see: “On Pluto, Atoms, and Other Things (such as Heaven) that Just Keep Getting More Complex”). I presume that over time, we will discover more and more about how we human beings tend toward, and take, a human form in the womb and beyond.
In another hundred years, our current scientific knowledge will probably look just a little bit quaint. But I think of it more as a direction of development. We’re still in the early stages of knowledge. And we’ll never reach the last stage of knowledge, because that would be God, and God is infinite, whereas the human mind is finite. To me, this means that we will never run out of new surprises behind the latest discoveries that we initially think “settle the matter.”
I don’t think the limited scientific knowledge represented in the above article is anything like a final step. Really, it’s an attempt to take a first step toward a better understanding of issues that relate to our spiritual life given the current state of scientific knowledge. I hope that over time, more scientific minds than mine will take further steps on that path.
Lee,
I’ve been thinking about the “everything in heaven is human” issue and have a suggestion. A related issue is the “humans” on the 1st planet issue. I believe both are derived from Swedenborg’s conversations with angels, but you’d know that better than I. Explaining how Swedenborg was right is rather important since, if he’s not, much of his Spirit World reports can be questioned.
I think a possible answer lies in his descriptions of how Hell and its residents look to each other which is not how they appear to angels. I think this means that what residents in the spirit world look like to each other is something of a negotiated exchange rather than an exact recreation of what something looks like in the Universe. The result would be that Heavenly galaxies would look human to Swedenborg and Swedenborg would present as a galaxy to the real galaxy. BTW I’m not saying that galaxies have associated souls or not. Still, Genesis 1 suggests that there is some association of the Earth with a soul that was given an assignment to create plants. Similarly with water. So, if this speculation is right, then residents of the 1st planet might well exist and appear as human to Swedenborg. Is this proof? Of course not, but it is an explanation that enables more confidence in Swedenborg’s other more important descriptions.
What do you think?
Ted
Hi Ted,
I must admit, you lost me on a lot of that. By the “humans on the 1st planet issue” do you mean the issue covered in this article?
If Our Thoughts Come from the Spiritual World, Where Did the First Humans Get their Thoughts?
Or do you mean something else?
And I’m not sure what you’re referring to about galaxies as humans and the reverse. I don’t think Swedenborg is suggesting, nor am I suggesting, that galaxies are somehow human. Rather, that on their physical level they take on some characteristics of the human form. Being human requires having a conscious spiritual soul, which galaxies don’t have. Maybe I’m not understanding what you’re saying.
About Swedenborg’s spiritual-world experiences and their reliability:
First, Swedenborg never claimed that his spiritual-world experiences, conversations, and so on were “doctrine.” I know that some conservative Swedenbogians have taken this stance, but I think it is a serious mistake leading to many errors. Swedenborg said, “From the first day of my calling I have not received any instruction concerning the doctrines of that church from any angel, but only from the Lord, while I was reading the Word” (True Christian Religion #779). This explicitly excludes his conversations with angels, and it implicitly excludes all of his spiritual-world experiences, from being considered “doctrine of the church.”
Instead, he presents his spiritual-world experiences as background information without which he could not understand what the Lord was revealing to him in the Word (in his biblical exegesis, he often refers to his spiritual-world experiences as supporting information), and as something that people long to know about, which is therefore now revealed to them. So although the reliability of his spiritual-world experiences is certainly an issue, it is not, in my view, a critical issue. If he got some of it wrong, but the overall picture is accurate, that’s good enough.
I do believe that he experienced what he experienced and described. However, of course he was looking at it through a particular lens formed by his own mind and culture. And that, according to the spiritual principles he himself outlines, would color the specifics of what he saw and how he interpreted it.
This is why, for example, when Swedenborg describes a wedding in heaven, I don’t take that as prescriptive of how everyone here on earth should perform their weddings. It was an experience of a particular wedding between two particular people from a particular community and culture in heaven. If I attend an African wedding in Africa (as I have done), does this mean that everyone should do their weddings that way?
About Swedenborg’s experiences in hell, the major mismatch between the residents’ view of themselves and each other and Swedenborg’s and the angels’ view, that is due to the nature of hell specifically, as being a realm of evil and falsity. Falsity is . . . false. Meaning it is a false view of things. The way the angels see things in hell is how they really are. But the residents of hell are beings of evil and falsity. They therefore see things differently than they actually are. That’s the nature of falsity, which is what reigns in hell.
It is different in heaven. There, everything is seen in heaven’s light, as it really is. Yes, it is possible for people not to be able to see it properly because their own minds are dark. But if a person is lifted up to a heaven and his or her eyes are opened to see it, then what s/he sees is the reality of things there, not some false picture. That’s the nature of heaven, which is a realm of truth.
In general, I think that Swedenborg’s descriptions of the spiritual world are accurate. But I don’t get hung up on whether every detail is perfectly accurate. That’s not the point of his stories from the spiritual world.
I’ll stop here, and let you respond as to what you meant, and whether any of this is relevant to it.
Lee,
I sometimes (often?) get too terse.
My Galaxy comment was reacting to your point “Swedenborg said that because God is human, everything in the universe tends toward a human form (see, for example, “Do Galaxies Have Heart and Lungs?”). “
My reference to the 1st planet is about Swedenborg’s 1758 work beginning: The Earths in Our Solar System where he talks about the inhabitants of Mercury and other extra Earth inhabitants.
I believe you think Swedenborg was just mistaken as to life on Mercury or got the planet wrong. I suspect he did talk with inhabitants of Mercury, but they weren’t what we would call human. The just looked like humans to Swedenborg in the same way that inhabitants of hell see each other one way but angels see them a rather less attractive way.
Anyway, I was reacting to your comment about Galaxies mostly.
Ted
Hi Ted,
Thanks for clarifying. I already responded about galaxies, but if there’s anything I didn’t adequately respond to, or you have any further thoughts or questions, please let me know.
About Mercury: Nothing at all can live there. Not humans, not anything else. It has no atmosphere. Its days last 176 Earth days. Its surface temperature ranges from over 800° F (over 425° C) to -280° F (-175° C). No imaginable life could develop or even survive there. Plus, we’ve photographed over 99% of the surface of Mercury from orbit. There’s nothing there but barren crater-pocked rock.
I am aware that there is a theory that the inhabitants of the other planets in our solar system live in some other dimension, are non-physical, and so on. But this also conflicts with Swedenborg’s system, which has three “dimensions”: divine, spiritual, and material. It is very clear that Swedenborg saw the people from other planets as living ordinary human lives on the ordinary life-bearing surface of planets very much like Earth, only with variations based on their size, distance from their star, and so on.
Attempts to “rescue” Swedenborg by saying that the people he saw from the other planets in our solar system live in some other dimension, or are purely spiritual beings associated with those planets, merely jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. They say that Swedenborg was right about one thing (that those planets are inhabited) by saying he was wrong about another even bigger thing (that they live ordinary material human lives in an Earth-like surface environment on those planets).
Either way, Swedenborg is wrong about something. So what’s the point in making up some fanciful idea of life as we don’t know it living on those planets? It’s clearly not what Swedenborg described living there.
His description of the physical characteristics of the Mercurians is specifically human:
He even goes on in the same section to describe their livestock:
Saying that he was wrong, and that they only seemed to him to look like this, causes far more problems than saying that he saw them accurately, but was mistaken about what planet they came from. As you say, if Swedenborg’s view of things in the spiritual world can be that inaccurate, then we have to question everything he said about the spiritual world. This attempt to “rescue” Swedenborg ends out throwing into doubt everything he said about the afterlife. The cure is worse than the disease.
Swedenborg was aware of the problem of Mercury being very close to the sun, and therefore potentially too hot to live on. In the last section of his lengthy chapter on the Mercurians, he writes:
This is wrong on multiple counts:
Perhaps I’m pounding this into the ground, but Swedenborg was so wrong about the habitability of Mercury that there’s no way to rescue him on this point. If the planet these people came from was as they described it, it was definitely not Mercury.
Either we have to posit that Swedenborg was entirely wrong about conditions on Mercury and that that group of humans was entirely wrong about the conditions on their own planet, or that Swedenborg was wrong that they came from Mercury. The lesser error is to say that he was wrong about what planet they came from. That’s why I think it is the most likely explanation for Swedenborg’s interplanetary error.
And it’s not as though the people he was speaking to said, “We come from the planet you call Mercury.” Toward the beginning of the chapter on Mercury he says:
It wasn’t the Lord who told him what planet these spirits came from, and it wasn’t the spirits themselves either. Apparently it was angels. And as I’ve discussed elsewhere, angels, being in the spiritual world, have no more accurate an understanding of the material world than the current level of scientific knowledge on earth. Whoever the angels were who told Swedenborg this, they, too, would have had no idea that Mercury is a barren blasted planet completely incapable of supporting life.
My view is that Swedenborg accurately saw things in the spiritual world, but he didn’t always interpret them correctly. It is like seeing a shooting star and thinking it is an actual star falling from the sky, when in fact it is a small bit of rock burning up as it passes through Earth’s atmosphere. The observation is accurate, but the interpretation is not. If we can’t even trust Swedenborg’s descriptions of things in the spiritual world, it’s like saying, “You didn’t really see that shooting star.” Better, I think, to say, “Yes, you saw the shooting star, but it isn’t really a star.”
Lee,
Thanks. As is usual, you’re much better read on Swedenborg, and I’m sold on the “wrong planet” due to an interpretational error idea.
Ted
Hi Lee,
Depending on what you mean by “fetal viability” would make “humanness” a function of medical proficiency … something I don’t think God would agree with. While I agree with much of what you say, the historical measure of humanness was the point of “quickening” … when the baby’s movements could be detected by the mother and not “conception” (egg fertilization which was unknown in early times) as is commonly talked about today. I suspect it’s a bit before “quickening” since movement needs someone in control and that’d be the new soul. Still, it’s clearly a judgement call but if fetal viability includes external medical support, then why doesn’t fetal viability depending on the support of the mother in (and out) of the womb also qualify?
Ted
PS Although it doesn’t matter to your argument, the sperm and egg are haploid so the egg has one X chromosome and the sperm has 1 X or Y chromosome.
Hi Ted,
About this:
Oops, that was a mistake. I have fixed it. Thanks. I’ll respond separately to the substance of your comment.
Hi Ted,
Thanks for your thoughts and reactions.
Since I was aiming to paint the big picture in the article, I didn’t want to get into the weeds of the definition of “viability.” I agree that medical proficiency would not be the limiting or defining factor. Otherwise fetuses in poor parts of the world without good medical care would be at an eternal disadvantage to fetuses in wealthy parts of the world. And that certainly would not be the way God would operate.
My general thought on viability in this context is that it occurs when the spiritual and physical vital organs have developed sufficiently to be functional outside the womb of the mother. And I presume that the “medical proficiency” in heaven is better than what we have on earth, so that it would skew early rather than late in what we consider to be viability here on earth.
The reality is that life is messy. Many lines are fuzzy, not crisp and clear. This can be annoying to the modern mind, which wants precision. But I figure that God has a better understanding of these things than we do, and that if a fetus can continue to live outside the mother’s womb in the spiritual world, regardless of earthly medical technology and skill, it will. That’s just how God operates.
About quickening, this apparently overlaps with the time of viability, though it can also happen earlier than viability. I.e., the ability to move does not necessarily mean that the fetus has full human functionality. Also, quickening isn’t necessarily the first movement, but the first movement perceptible to the mother. So although quickening does have a long history in the lore of pregnancy and birth, I don’t think it would be the measure of when a fetus becomes a human being as discussed in the article above. It seems more to have served as a proxy for viability before the modern concept of viability developed.
And yes, of course even after birth a baby is not independent. Without feeding and care from the mother and/or other caregivers, it will die. Then again, that’s true of all of us. We have a sense of autonomy, but in reality we are dependent upon many other people for the food, clothing, housing, and so on that keep us alive.
Still, there’s a distinct difference between gestating in the womb and living outside the womb. Once we leave the womb, someone besides our mother can take care of us. We are no longer so dependent upon our mother that we will die without a constant connection to her. I.e., after birth we can live semi-independently, but before birth we are entirely dependent upon our mother.
Lee,
Thanks for the reply. As I said, it’s clearly a judgment call as are most religious questions. I lean to an earlier milestone of when all critical organs have begun development vs your: when the last critical organ has completed development. Put differently, I think human life begins when there is a full ensemble of all critical organ tissue types which is relatively early in gestation. But I think it is very much a judgement call.
Ted
Hi Ted,
Yes, it’s definitely a judgment call. In my current estimation, the old “eternal at conception” and “eternal at first breath” positions are not tenable. That leaves it somewhere in between. Exactly where, we don’t really know, because we can’t observe it from the other side. I think viability makes most sense, but it would not surprise me if it happens at some other milestone in the gestational process.
The main idea is that we do not instantly become human beings; we develop into human beings. Just when we cross that threshold is certainly a debatable point.
I like to think that any soul emerges with a consciousness emerging, and relates to a consciousness, rather than an entire body (otherwise how do organ transplants work?). And not just in Homo sapiens, but in animals, any consciousness created by plants networking, and maybe even in any future or alien machine life.
There is also, of course, the idea that there is no soul, and that consciousness is an emergent property of higher level brain functions. But that alone does not rule out the possibility of the Almighty re-creating a consciousness and point-of-awareness in a non-physical mode of existence after a mortal life (a sort of non-physical resurrection).
And there is also the traditional Christian belief in resurrection without a soul, which can deny the existence of any non-physical existence.
Hi K,
I presume that by “traditional Christian belief in resurrection without a soul,” you mean a future physical resurrection in the physical body.
Even these materialistic Christians wouldn’t say that there’s no soul. Rather, they would say perhaps that the soul is the life in the body, ironically somewhat similar to Aristotle’s views on the soul being the form and life of the body, and the body being its substance. There might be some higher “intellect” type soul, but it is disembodied, and has no real life apart from the body. Although they don’t realize it, these Christian materialists are resurrecting Aristotle along with the physical body. 😉
About the rest, yes, the soul emerges with consciousness, because our consciousness is in our soul. Our consciousness develops as our soul develops. (I am using “soul” here in the sense of “spirit,” not “inmost level of the spirit.”)
However (and I know this is where you wish to get off the bus), this does not happen in a formless, unstructured, or “point” entity, but in a highly complex spiritual organic form that is where and how the consciousness takes place. It is not so much an “emergent property of higher brain functions,” as if it’s something beyond what the structure and organization of the brain can do, but an actual function of the spiritual brain, which is reflected correspondentially in the physical brain, enabling us to think on the earthly level and interact with the physical world.
As an analogy, driving down the road is not an “emergent property” of an automobile. It is the function of an automobile. That’s what the automobile is designed to do, and it is able to do it due to its design being constructed out of the appropriate physical materials organized in a specific structure and form. It doesn’t somehow magically happen over and above what the structure and design of the automobile itself is capable of doing.
The same is true of human consciousness. It is called “emergent” perhaps for philosophical reasons, but also because it doesn’t really take place in the physical brain—and sensing this, physicalists grope for some fancy way to say that the brain does something beyond its ordinary physical and electrochemical capabilities. What they’re missing is that consciousness is a function of the spiritual brain, not of the physical brain. The physical brain only reflects consciousness in the material world.
We now know enough about the brain to have some reasonable understanding of how memory and other cognitive abilities function on a physical level, through synaptic connections and so on. This knowledge is too detailed to just divorce consciousness from the brain altogether. There are specific organic functions and changes happening in the brain that correlate with specific cognitive functions. This is not accidental (in the philosophical sense), but integral to consciousness functioning in the material world via the physical brain and body.
Since the physical brain corresponds to the spiritual brain, the same would be true of the spiritual brain. Consciousness doesn’t just happen, and then flow into the spiritual brain. It happens in the spiritual brain. It is a function of the spiritual brain just as pumping blood is a function of the spiritual (and physical) heart.
About heart transplants, a spirit will use the body it has, even if a part is replaced. However, if you tried to transplant the brain, it would be a different story. It would not be the same person, or the same spirit, inhabiting that body, afterwards. The spirit of the person from whom the brain was transplanted would then function within the body it was transplanted into, while the spirit that had previously inhabited that body would presumably die and move on to the spiritual world, unless that brain, too, was transplanted into some other body. This, of course, is in the extremely hypothetical scenario in which brain transplants become possible—something I doubt will ever happen.
More practically, it is especially the brain that is the locus of the conscious part of the soul in the physical body. A consciousness could theoretically exist in a brain hooked up to a machine that supplied its vital function and acted at its command. (Again, an extreme hypothetical that I doubt will ever happen.) But it could not exist in a body kept alive by a machine after its head and brain were severed from it.
Finally, for now, the Almighty does not just poof things into existence. The Christian creationists (in relation to the soul, as covered in the above article) are wrong about this. God does not just create a consciousness and infuse it into a body. Rather, God builds a consciousness by a definite process, which is the spiritual correspondent of the process of building a new human being in the womb of the mother, as covered in the above article.
Sure, God could theoretically poof a consciousness into existence. But as we look at everything in the universe around and within us, we see that this is just not how God operates. The idea of instantaneous creation is a pure hypothetical. It does not happen in reality. That suggests to me that this is something God cannot do because it would contradict the fundamental nature of God.
Omnipotence is not the ability to do arbitrary and contradictory things, but the ability to accomplish what the infinite will of God wants to accomplish. And God accomplishes these things, as Swedenborg says, “through means, and not immediately.” Swedenborg is using “immediately” in the philosophical sense of without any means, but it also applies temporally. In the temporal world, God does not do things instantly, but develops them over time. In the spiritual world, which is non-temporal, God also doesn’t do things instantaneously, but through a progression of definite and highly organized states of mind, which are the spiritual analog of time.
Another way of saying this is that God does not operate magically, but through definite processes that unfold sequentially in order to produce the desired result.
Dear Lee,
Many thanks for this article. I’ve taken time to read it carefully, as well as the discussion. I appreciate your deep, profound ideas, and I am much inclined to accept all of them. You are defending Swedenborg, or rather the Lord Himself(!), in many ways and quite successfully.
But still, allow me a doubt: If Swedenborg needs so much explanations and defence…, is there, on the other hand, anything that can be taken for granted (really certain!) in his message? Are they perhaps his expositions of the books of the Scripture? Or is it that which is written in pure correspondence between spiritual and material, which, in itself, is deprived of time and space? – This is what I incline to.
What do you think?
Please, have a look at the last but three paragraphs of your discussion at the end. You write there, probably correctly: “The idea of instantaneous creation is a pure hypothetical. It does not happen in reality.” And yet, Swedenborg assumes a kind of such instantaneous creation, see e.g. TCR 78! Aren’t there too many mistakes in Swedenborg? Almost everywhere the physical reality is touched, he falls into errors…
Best regards, Radko (from the Czech Republic)
Hi Radko,
Good to hear from you again, my friend. I hope all is going well with you and yours.
The operative words here are “almost everywhere the physical reality is touched.”
It is quite clear that no new science was revealed to Swedenborg from heaven. As in True Christianity #78:3, concepts such as evolution that were not yet discovered or developed on earth also did not exist in heaven. Hence the refrain found in some of Swedenborg’s stories from the spiritual world of the residents there asking, “What is the news from earth?” Remember, angels live in the spiritual world, not the physical world. They cannot study the physical world directly. They have no other source of information about it than what they gain from newcomers from the material world arriving and filling them in on the latest earthly happenings and discoveries.
The result is that the science in Swedenborg’s theological writings is only as advanced as the earthly science of his day. This is obvious from many statements he makes that were believed to be true in his day but that we now know are not true. Or, as covered in the above article, that are simply limited and imprecise because we did not yet have precise knowledge on a particular subject. Part of sifting the wheat from the chaff is recognizing which statements in Swedenborg’s writings have been poured into material-world vessels of knowledge that have since been superseded, and what the underlying truth of those statements is regardless of the limited human vessels they are contained in.
There is also another factor at work, which is that we are not meant to accept things as true based on authority, but based on understanding. The idea is not to have second-hand truth, which is not really our own, but to have first-hand truth, which is truth that we can see and understand for ourselves.
Reading Swedenborg as authority is as far as some people, and some groups of people, can get in their thinking. But this is a low-level way to approach any text. Even reading a scientific textbook is best done from a stance of attempting to come to a comprehensive understanding within one’s own mind of how the laws of nature work in that particular area, rather than just accepting this or that law of nature or physiological function because that’s what some eminent and very smart scientists say is how it works. Believing on the basis of authority is a weak type of belief. If some stronger-sounding authority comes along, one’s previous belief can easily be replaced with an entirely different set of beliefs, regardless of whether they are right or wrong, or make any sense at all. This is how cults are formed.
Believing on the basis of understanding is far superior. When reading texts from this perspective, the goal is not to pile up facts that are taken as true because the text says so, but to build a comprehensive understanding of the subject, be it scientific, sociological, or spiritual. As more and more pieces of knowledge and understanding are put in place, there is not just a general idea about how things work, but one that is filled in with many supporting pieces of evidence and specific understanding, like a house made of many different pieces of building material, all of which are put together in an orderly and tight fashion.
When reading Swedenborg from this perspective, the idea is not to determine whether every single thing he said was true, or on the other hand, whether he made mistakes, but to gain a more and more systematic and detailed understanding of how God, spirit, and our interactions with them and with one another work. Minor inconsistencies, and even significant mistakes, are not particularly important. These can simply be set aside in favor of a better understanding of the subject at hand—which, again, is the effort of the above article in one particular area where Swedenborg’s science is outdated by today’s standards.
The same is true of reading any text. Do we reject Darwin’s entire theory because some parts of it have now been superseded? Do we reject Newton’s laws because we now know that they don’t tell the whole story, and some of them have to be adjusted with relativistic effects to, for example, send an interplanetary rocket on the correct trajectory to reach its intended destination? Do we reject everything Freud said because he had, shall we say, a little too much preoccupation with sex?
The common practice is to keep what is good in any great author’s writings, while letting subsequent advances in knowledge inform us so that we can move farther forward on the trajectory that that author set us on, or propelled us forward in. Why should we treat Swedenborg’s writings any differently?
I know that some will say, “Because unlike Newton, Swedenborg’s writings are a revelation from God.”
That is true. But the Bible itself contains things that are scientifically and historically inaccurate. We don’t throw away the Bible for that reason, because the Bible was never intended to be a textbook of science and history. It’s message is a spiritual message.
The underlying principle is that revelation is a relationship between God and humans, meaning that it has a divine side and a human side. The divine side is eternal truth. The human side is finite and fallible human knowledge, ideas, culture, and so on. When we encounter things in any sacred text that are now seen as outdated, the proper procedure is not to throw away the sacred text, but to keep the spiritual principles expressed in it while recognizing that the human containers in which those spiritual principles were expressed are time-bound and faulty. We then make the adjustment by taking the same underlying spiritual principles and working out how they express themselves in today’s science, history, culture, and so on.
I am sure that in another century or two, many of the things I say on this blog, and many of the examples I use, will be considered outdated and faulty. I can see the same thing in New Church books written a century or more ago. But even if the material and cultural illustrations may fade with time, the spiritual truth contained in them is still just as valid today as it ever was.
I could say more, but I hope and trust that this much sufficiently answers your question—which is a perennial, classic one.
Dear Lee,
Many thanks for your prompt answer. Again, I agree with you on most of what you’re writing. Namely, Swedenborg did not have the science that we have (in 2025). We should look for the underlying truth in his statements and also believe on the basis of understanding rather than on the basis of mere authority.
As for Darwin, Newton and Freud, there is a difference! They all remain in the realm of nature and try to explain nature naturally. It is much different from Swedenborg, who answers metaphysical questions! He attempts to describe the realm which is over nature! This is why most mistakes he makes (those I’m referring to above) may potentially influence his theology.
It is because the scientific assumptions he makes form a basis on which, as we believe, the spirit can rest and observe itself. If something of these “scientifics” proves wrong, the spirit seeks help or rescue. And if he doesn ’t find it, he finally flies away, because he cannot exist in those principles, looking for better ones. Therefore, whenever the mistakes in Swedenborg become so numerous, my spirit starts feeling “anxious”. And maybe not only mine but also that of other Swedenborgians today.
This makes me repeat my question from above, which you unfortunately haven’t answered. What do you think is the unshakable ground of Swedenborg’s teachings? Please, can you speak positively?
Now, let me be more specific about how I see the particular problem with your article. I wouldn’t like to fully reject the idea “soul from the father – body from the mother”. It only needs to be shown where Swedenborg makes a mistake. I think it lies in his commingling the realm of spirit with the realm of body, which, by the way, sometimes happens to him. The instant creation would be another example. Yes, it happens, though in other places he explicitly claims this should be avoided!
As we know, Swedenborg claims that spiritual and material realms are two completely distinct and separate realms that communicate only via correspondences. Then, if someone says: “the soul comes from the father while the body comes from the mother”, it’s an obvious commingling of spiritual and natural lights or realms. The procedure that I suggest would be to take a look at the lovely picture of sperm and egg at the beginning of your article, and consider: What does this (natural) picture represent spiritually? Then, my answer would be:
/1./ It shows that every man, from his conception, consists of two principles: the active one (to which the sperm corresponds) and the passive one (to which the egg corresponds).
/2./ The beginnings of these two principles are conveyed to the new man in a certain way through his father and his mother. They are not strictly “from his father and his mother” but rather “through his father and his mother”, which enables God to operate through them. (DP 330a)
/3./ Therefore, also the new man’s body derives traits from both father and mother, since the body is the lowest level of existence and chiefly corresponds to the principial.
This would be solving the problem “in pure correspondences” which saves the initial idea in some way.
One should also consider that Swedenborg sometimes uses the terms “soul” and “body” just to distinguish between “more interior” and “less interior”. That means he doesn’t always use them in the philosophical-ontological sense. On the other hand, it doesn’t excuse him from the mistake, “the child of a black man by a white woman is black, and vice versa” in DP 277.3. It is a mistake!
At the end of my letter, allow me to add a fourth principle to round up to the previous three principles:
/4./ The fatherly principle in man calls for activity (based on truth from love). The motherly principle in man calls for stability and rest (based on love of truth). The Lord in man calls for heavenly regeneration of the whole man. Thus, the Lord enlightens, guides and imparts the true life to the whole man.
I also entered the topic: “inheritance from father and mother” into the internet browser. And interesting results and links popped up that could help you with a further detailed study. But one should also keep in mind the ideal picture that I have sketched. I have no more good thoughts today.
Warm greetings from Bohemia,
Radko
Hi Radko,
Thanks for your additional thoughts and questions. I’ll respond to your key question first, then to the rest separately. You ask:
On this, I will turn to Swedenborg himself, who in True Christianity #3 wraps up a presentation of “the faith of the new heaven and the new church” with this statement:
These five points are the essentials, or what you might call the “unshakable ground,” of Swedenborg’s teachings. If any of these are false, then his entire system is falsified, and cannot be believed or trusted.
In addition to Swedenborg’s classification of these into the two categories of faith and goodwill (in this translation, “charity” or “kindness” in others), the first two have to do with the Lord, the second two with us, and the fifth with our relationship with the Lord, so that these go full circle from the Lord to us and back to the Lord. They are also reminiscent of the Ten Commandments, which have one table for the Lord and one for us.
There are many other teachings in Swedenborg’s writings that I would also call basic teachings, such as the sacredness and nature of the Word of God as being divinely inspired and having an internal meaning that speaks of the Lord and of our regeneration. There are also his teachings about the nature of the afterlife, which are pretty important. But it would be possible to believe in and live according to only his five listed points above and not the rest, and this, I believe, would qualify someone as being part of the new church represented by the New Jerusalem.
In short, once again, these are the essentials of Swedenborg’s Christian teachings. He did also have ancillary teachings relating to non-Christians and their salvation, which largely just substitutes some belief in God for the specifically Christian belief in God stated here, but keeps intact the rest, about our need to shun evil and do good, but attribute it to God.
Everything else Swedenborg teaches could be classified as secondary teachings, not essential ones. If he’s wrong about one of these secondary teachings, it isn’t great, but it doesn’t take the foundation out from under his theology, as the untruth or rejection of any of these five would. If it were a big teaching, finding it false would still be like ripping a wall out of a house, not like demolishing the entire house from the foundation up, as negating any of those five would do.
Does this answer your question?
Dear Lee,
Yes, it answers my question! Many thanks; it is very helpful. As for the 5 Basic Principles, I remember reading them many times, but if someone is on a lonely way like me, he needs to be reminded and encouraged sometimes.
A certain unclearness remains with me. Principle 1 is clear, but Principle 2 sounds a bit empty to me. What does this principle add to Principle 1? Against what does it guard us? If I were to formulate the same 2. Principle, I would probably say: “This Lord can save you from spiritual death if you follow him.”…
As for principles 3 and 4, I understand them in a way that we shall not only say “no” to evil promptings in our spirit, but we shall actively look for good solutions and fulfil them. Do you read it like this, too?
Thanks for being there and writing such nice articles.
Radko
Hi Radko,
You are most welcome. And thank you for your kind words.
Principle 2 is indeed a bit cryptic, probably because the whole book is aimed at a Christian audience, and specifically a Protestant audience, for whom “faith” is the be-all and end-all of Christianity. But notice that neither Protestants nor any other Nicene Christians believe in Principle 1: “There is one God, the divine Trinity exists within him, and he is the Lord God the Savior Jesus Christ.” At best, they believe that Jesus is one third of God, and at worst that he is one half of one third of God. They don’t believe that Jesus simply is the one God, as Swedenborg teaches.
When Swedenborg says, in Principle 2, “Believing in him is a faith that saves,” it is not just a throw-away line. He is saying that believing in what he has just articulated in Principle 1 is a faith that saves. This is not the faith of Nicene Christianity, because Nicene Christians do not believe in the God that Swedenborg describes in Principle 1.
Further, when Swedenborg uses the word “faith,” it does not mean the same thing as it does in Nicene Christianity, especially in its Protestant branch. For Swedenborg “faith alone” is a nonentity. In Swedenborg’s theology, faith alone is not faith at all, because faith is faith only if it is united with or “married to” charity (kindness, caring). If it is not expressed in action from a heart of love, then it is not faith. It is mere intellectual knowledge, which is not faith.
So in Swedenborg’s theology, “believing in him” is not just an intellectual thing. It necessarily involves living according to that faith, which means following the Lord’s commandments. That is how this faith saves us.
“Believing in him,” then, does not mean intellectually believing that the God described in Principle 1 exists. It means belief that flows into action. This is the “faith that saves” mentioned in Principle 2. If we know intellectually that such a God exists, but do not live accordingly, then we do not have “a faith that saves.”
What Principle 2 guards us against, then, is mere intellectual belief, which does not save us, or really, have any significant effect upon our life at all. Principles 3 and 4 are a distillation of what that faith does in our life.
About Principles 3 and 4, though your recapitulation of them is not wrong, I think it is better to keep the two more distinct.
Stated biblically, they are encapsulated as, “Cease to do evil, learn to do good” (Isaiah 1:16–17). There is a temporal progression to it. We must cease to do evil first before we can learn to do good. One is a substitution for the other, not a development of it.
Perhaps this was what you meant. But it should be kept crystal clear in our mind that “good solutions” require ceasing to do the evil thing first. If there is no repentance from evil—which includes not doing it anymore—then there are no “good solutions.” In fact, mixing good in with evil is the definition of profanation, which is worse than not doing good at all.
Some people seem to think that if they do a lot of good things, they can still engage in their favorite evil actions because the good they do will counterbalance it. That’s not how it works. As long as we’re still engaging in our favorite evils, everything good we do is vitiated, and is not actually good.
Again, perhaps this was inherent in what you said. But it bears clarification that Principles 2 and 3 are in a temporal sequence. Principle 2 must come first, followed by Principle 3.
This doesn’t mean we have to stop doing all our evils before doing any good. But it does mean that in any specific area of our life and actions, the first step is to stop doing what is wrong, after which we are to start doing what is right. If we keep following this progression in one area of our life after another, we will be engaging in true repentance, reformation, and regeneration, and we will be on the path to heaven, which is what it means to be “saved.”
Hi Radko,
About this:
First, although Darwin and Freud certainly “remained within the realm of nature,” Darwin being an agnostic and Freud an atheist, Newton wrote extensively on religious and biblical subjects—although he never published any of his religious works during his lifetime, likely out of fear of persecution for heresy due especially to his rejection of the Trinity and the Deist leaning of his beliefs. Also, unlike Darwin and Freud, Newton did sprinkle his scientific works with occasional references to the role of God in the created universe.
I even have a pet theory that if Swedenborg had been an unpleasant person, and Newton a pleasant one, and not the reverse, I might have grown up in the Newtonian Church instead of in the Swedenborgian Church. 😀 But seriously, given his great interest in religion, Newton certainly could have been a candidate for the job that the Lord ultimately tapped Swedenborg’s shoulder to perform. Newton even rejected the Trinity of Persons, which was something Swedenborg had to do to accept his commission from the Lord.
Still, I take your point that the published scientific works of all three of these authors are focused on explaining nature. Swedenborg’s earlier works were also focused on explaining nature, but he later turned entirely to writing theological works.
What’s missing from this dichotomy is that in his theological works, Swedenborg was not attempting to explain nature at all. When he accepted the call to a spiritual career, over a period of a few years he transitioned entirely away from any further scientific work, and focused entirely on biblical exegesis, theology, and accounts of his experiences in the spiritual world. Yes, there is science in his theological works. But that science is in the nature of support, evidence, and analogy for the spiritual topics he is presenting there. It is not the primary focus or point of those works.
Another way of saying this is that Swedenborg was not intending to teach science in his theological works, as Darwin, Newton, and Freud were in their scientific works.
On the bigger question of the relationships among God, spirit, and nature, it is not how we think nature works that is the foundation for God and spirit in the material universe. It’s how nature actually works. God didn’t create our scientific theories. We did that. God created nature itself. So it is nature itself, not our theories and our knowledge of it, that forms the foundation for God and spirit in the material realm.
Even if Swedenborg was wrong in some of his science, that doesn’t invalidate what he taught about the correspondential relationship that flows from God through the spiritual world into the material world. It only means that Swedenborg’s understanding of the material world was limited and in some areas areas mistaken, and that he himself therefore drew some mistaken conclusions about that relationship in specific areas. If we gain a better understanding of the science involved, this should provide a better foundation for his teachings about God and spirit.
My intended follow-up article on the above one, about the Aristotelian theory of the soul being from the father and the body from the mother in relation to Swedenborg’s teachings about the Incarnation, intends to show exactly this: that our modern understanding of genetics and reproduction provides a much better foundation for Swedenborg’s teachings about the Incarnation than Aristotle’s theory ever did.
On the meta level, if we are confident that our beliefs about God and spirit are the truth, then we shouldn’t fear new discoveries in science. Perhaps new scientific discoveries will require us to rethink some things. But the result of this should be a better understanding of our faith, and a stronger faith.
This is why it’s important to ride loose in the saddle when it comes to Swedenborg’s scientific and historical statements. If we get all fundamentalist about it, and attempt to make everything in his theological writings revelatory and authoritative, then it will only be a matter of time before advances in scientific discovery either break our beliefs or force us to live in a bubble of scientific denialism similar to the one that the Christian fundamentalists live in.
In short, I believe it is very important not to attribute any sort of divine or revelatory authority to Swedenborg’s scientific and historical statements. This will require us to do some sorting of the wheat from the chaff. But that’s not a bad thing. The end result will be a better understanding of all three levels of reality: God, spirit, and nature.
Hi Radko,
Now I want to respond to the longer part of your previous comment, about the active and passive principles, and related ideas.
But first, you say:
I am not quite sure what you mean in saying that Swedenborg’s mistake lies in “commingling the realm of spirit with the realm of body.” Clearly, the spirit and the body have a relationship—as you say, via correspondences. There is nothing preventing them from having a relationship in the sperm, or in the egg, or in the meeting of the two, any more than there is something preventing them from having a relationship in the body as a whole.
Swedenborg’s earlier scientific idea of the soul being “packaged up” by various coatings, as if it were a physical thing that could be “contained” by a physical envelope, would certainly be a commingling. This, I think, is a general mistake in Swedenborg’s scientific works: thinking that the soul is some sort of highly refined physical substance. This mistake was behind his entire search for the soul in the body, present throughout his anatomical works—and it is the reason that this search ultimately proved fruitless. The whole idea of “spirituous fluid” or “animal spirits” is faulty precisely because, as he later articulated in his theological works, the physical and the spiritual are two entirely distinct realms that do not intermix with one another, but interact with one another via correspondences.
However, the idea that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother doesn’t necessarily run afoul of this intermixing. If, instead, we think of the structures in the sperm as organized vessels that correspond to the offshoot of the father’s soul, then the sperm could be a bearer of this offshoot of the soul just as a mature adult body is the bearer of the soul of that person.
In this case, we must jettison Swedenborg’s whole theory of the soul originating in the cortical glands of the physical brain and traveling from there throughout the body via the “fiber” (apparently the nervous system, but perhaps also the vascular system or even the lymphatic system), and in the testicles being “packaged up” for delivery to the womb of the mother. But if instead we think of the testicles as producing an organized structure (the sperm) capable of providing a physical vessel in which an offshoot of the father’s soul can dwell, just as a mature soul dwells in a mature body, then this part of the theory could be salvaged.
However, this points out the problem, covered in the above article, for Swedenborg’s elaboration of Aristotle’s theory that the soul comes from the father and the body comes from the mother. If the sperm is an organized structure for bearing an offshoot of the father’s soul to the womb of the mother, where it can initiate the development of a new human being, then clearly the egg serves the same function, because, as we now know, it has an internal structure (the DNA) similar to that of the sperm. And if, as we now know, the DNA is the primary carrier of genetic information, it would be hard to argue that the DNA is not the key element of the “organized vessel” made to correspond to and bear the soul in a physical vessel.
Of course, the egg and the sperm have different configurations. The sperm is a “little eel” that can swim, because it needs to travel. The egg being a much larger sphere, because it doesn’t need to travel, but it does need to attract the sperm, and it does need to have the initial material to nourish the organism before it has a regular, organized supply of nourishment from the body of the mother.
However, in the nucleus of both gametes, there is the organized structure that is the obvious candidate for being the complex physical container capable of corresponding to, and therefore bearing within itself via correspondence, an offshoot of the soul of the respective parent.
This is the physical fact that drives me to the conclusion that the new soul comes, not only from the father, but also from the mother. Specifically, that the new soul is a unique combination of unique offshoots of the souls of both the father and the mother. There are theological reasons for this too, which I’ll delve into my future article relating this whole issue to the Incarnation. But for now, this seems to me to be the sensible and inescapable conclusion based on scientific knowledge that is available to us, but that was not available to Swedenborg.
I will respond about the active and passive principles in a separate comment.
Hi Radko,
Now about the active and passive principles. You say:
The “active principle” and the “passive principle” are also, I think, borrowed from Aristotle and other earlier thinkers. It continues from Swedenborg’s scientific works into his theological works, but is much more muted there, being largely replaced by the relationship between love and wisdom, or good and truth, which is the key interactive dynamic in Swedenborg’s theology. In this formulation, love would be the “active principle” and wisdom the “passive principle.”
However, that is not an entirely accurate characterization of love and wisdom. Wisdom, in Swedenborg’s theory, is not a mere passive recipient, but actively carries out the will of the love that is within it. He even insists, in some fascinating passages, that love does not act through truth (a parallel to wisdom), but rather, that truth acts from love. This seems to be a critical distinction, and it negates the idea that love can be characterized as an active principle in relation to wisdom or truth, which would be characterized as a passive principle. It makes what would be the “passive principle” active, in that truth actively engages in various activities in order to carry out the will of the love behind it.
I would therefore suggest that the “active principle” and the “passive principle,” while they may still be useful in some contexts, are not the best way to characterize the sperm and the egg. It would provide more clarity of thought if we consider the sperm to be a correspondence of love, and the egg to be a correspondence of wisdom.
Looking at the bigger picture, it was been common in classical thought, which has had a heavy influence even on modern thought, to think of man as the “active principle,” and woman as the “passive principle.” This is illustrated in various ways, including, on the purely physical level, man having a penis, which penetrates, and woman having a vagina, which is penetrated. Obviously man is the active one, and woman is the passive one!
But this hardly provides a complete or accurate picture of what actually happens during sexual intercourse. The woman does not just like there like a log while the man penetrates her. Or if she does, it is a very unsatisfying union. She is an active participant in the union, in many ways that I don’t need to describe here, but that actively contribute to sexual intercourse. Again, it would be a better correspondence to think of the man as representing love, and the woman as representing wisdom.
Even this is counterintuitive, since the usual assignment is of man as intellect and woman as will. And yet these roles do reverse in man and woman at a deeper level. So we have a situation in which there is a complex interaction between love and wisdom in which, on some levels and in some areas the man represents love and the woman represents wisdom, whereas on other levels and in other areas the man represents wisdom and the woman represents love.
To use a more ordinary, everyday example, if my wife cooks a nice meal for me and serves it to me, and I receive it from her and eat it, who is representing the active principle in this interaction, and who is representing the passive principle?
It just doesn’t work to uniformly assign “active” to the male, whether it is a man or a sperm, and assign “passive” to the female, whether it is a woman or an egg. A more complex and nuanced way of thinking about it is necessary. And Swedenborg provides this with his “marriage” between love and wisdom, and with his presentation of man as inwardly love and outwardly wisdom, and of woman as inwardly wisdom and outwardly love. This formulation at least begins to reflect the complexity of the relationship between man and woman, which I would expect would also be reflected in the relationship between the sperm and the egg.
Further, it is very clear that the “active principle” and the “passive principle,” or better, love and wisdom, corresponding to male and female, exist in both men and women.
Consider that the Bible contains both male and female characters, and that these characters correspond to elements of the spiritual life and regeneration of every person, both male and female. The spiritual correspondent of both Abraham and Sarah exists in both men and women. This despite the fact that a man is male as a whole and in every one of his parts, and a woman is female as a whole and in every one of her parts. We now know that this latter statement is true even down to the cellular level, in that each cell of a man’s body has an X and a Y chromosome, whereas each cell of a woman’s body has two X chromosomes.
And yet, both man and woman also have within them everything that corresponds to every male and every female character in the Bible.
This should serve to illustrate that simply assigning “active” or “love” to man, and “passive” or “wisdom” to woman, is woefully inadequate to provide a full picture of their respective natures and their relationship with one another. The reality is far more complex and nuanced, and is resistant to the types of simplification involved in simply assigning man, or sperm, as the active principle, and woman, or egg, as the passive principle.
As a relatively simple example, the egg admits one sperm into itself, and then “closes the door,” not allowing any more in. If the egg were purely passive, it would not be able to prevent millions of sperm from penetrating it. But it engages in active process of “hardening its skin” once a sperm has penetrated it. Once again, simply making the egg passive and the sperm active doesn’t provide a full accounting of what actually happens in the process of the fertilization of an egg.
This is not to say that the concept of active and passive principles is useless. It certainly has its application. If a hammer strikes a nail, obviously the hammer is active, and the nail is passive in that interaction. There certainly are interactions in which the male is active and the female is passive. But realistically, there are also interactions in which the female is active, and the male is passive, as in the example above of my wife serving me dinner.
Perhaps by now I’ve hammered this particular nail right into the ground! 😉
So, moving on, you say:
The question is whether the “active principle” or better, love, is exclusively from the father, and the “passive principle,” or better, wisdom, is exclusively from the mother.
Based on the above discussion, I believe this would be a far too simplistic way of viewing the situation. It takes into account the gross appearance of the man penetrating the woman, and the sperm penetrating the egg. But it doesn’t take into account the far more complex reality of the woman actively participating in the act of making love, and the egg actively participating in the process of fertilization, in order to make these two actions both satisfying and fruitful.
I would accept, then, that there is an overall representation of “active” in the male and “passive” in the female. But in actual life, when looking beyond the overall appearance, the picture is nowhere near that simple.
Moving on, you say:
Even Swedenborg recognized that the body derives traits from both father and mother. Traits from the mother he believed were primarily outer, earthly level traits, which of course would include the body, since, he believed, the body came from the mother. Traits from the father were the higher, spiritual ones, but since the soul forms the body in its image, it also puts its own characteristic traits into the body as it builds it.
An analogy would be a carpenter building a house out of various building materials. The building materials themselves have a particular character, such as being boards cut from a particular species of tree, having grain, knots, a particular hardness, and so on, all of which affects the character of the eventual house. But the carpenter takes those materials, cuts and shapes them, and connects them all together in a particular configuration that reflects his idea of what a house should look like, and that contains particular expressions of the carpenter’s style, such as fine or sloppy worksmanship, nails vs. mortise and tenon joints, and so on.
In this analogy, the carpenter is the soul, supplied by the man, and the building materials are the body, supplied by the woman. And Aristotle does use the specific example of a carpenter and the materials he uses in illustrating the respective contributions of the father and the mother to a new human being.
Once again, looking at it from a gross, overall perspective, there is some reason to think that this analogy holds. The man contributes a tiny little thing that seems to initiate a whole process of development. The woman provides a great big (relatively speaking) egg, and then all the “materials,” or nourishment, from which the fetus and embryo are “built.”
But once again, once we look more closely, especially in light of today’s knowledge of genetics and reproduction, the analogy breaks down.
The problem with this theory, also covered in the above article, is that other than the differentiation of sex and sex-linked traits contributed by the father, via the sperm, supplying either an X or a Y chromosome, the “carpenter” that directs the building process comes equally from the father and the mother via the half-set of DNA that each one supplies via his or her respective gamete. There is no basis in the now-known physiology involved for thinking that the father’s contribution does the building (i.e., is the “carpenter”), and the mother’s contribution merely provides the building materials.
The picture is complicated, because in fact the mother’s body does exclusively provide the building materials, and the father’s body does not. But even here, what if the father goes out on the hunt, and brings home an animal that the woman then cooks and eats, together with the rest of the clan? Hasn’t the father now also provided raw materials, which the mother’s body then processes and draws from to supply the embryo/fetus with the “building materials” it needs?
Once again, reality is far more complex and nuanced than our attempts to boil things down to simple “actives” and “passives,” and black-and-white differentiation of roles between men and women. Once again, it’s not that the “active principle” and the “passive principle” are meaningless and useless. But their interaction in real life is far more complex than “man = active, woman = passive.”
On the cellular level as wel, the interaction is far more complex than “sperm = active = soul, egg = passive = body.” If the sperm contributes soul, then so does the egg, because the egg contributes the same kind and measure of determinitive, directing genetic material as the sperm.
My thesis is that the mother via the egg contributes the same kind and measure of spiritual genetic material as the father contributes via the sperm. So back to your original Point 3, if the new person’s body derives traits from both the father and the mother, it is my view that the new person’s soul also derives traits from both the father and the mother. Once again, I don’t see how we can avoid this conclusion knowing what we now know about the genetic contributions of the father and the mother.
To round things out, you conclude your points by saying:
Once again, in the big picture there is some truth to this. Men want risk and activity. Women want stability and security. On the biological level, this derives from their respective contributions to the propagation of the species. Men want to mate with women—in earlier times, with as many women as possible—to propagate their genes. This requires activity and risk in providing women with what they want—food, shelter, etc.—in order to accept this man instead of that man as the father of her children. Women, meanwhile, must spend nine months gestating the child, and years afterwards nursing (at first) and caring for the child. This requires stability and security for best results.
So yes, overall, there is an interplay of activity in relation to stability in the relationship between man and woman. But as the above discussion suggests, this is far from a simplistic picture. There is now evidence that prehistoric women sometimes participated in the hunt, perhaps in the form of scaring and containing animals for the men to spear and kill. Women also went out gathering fruits, berries, roots, and so on that contributed essential nutrition to the family and clan. And of course, men regularly rested and slept, and were also served food and other things by women, which are passive activities in relation to an active woman.
So again, even if the big picture supports the idea of “man = active, woman = passive,” it’s not that simple in the finer grained complexities of real life.
Applying this specifically to the process of reproduction, it is now clear scientifically that the woman and the man contribute nearly equally to the “carpenter” that builds the “house” of the new body, in the form of nearly equal contributions of the DNA that forms the blueprint, and directs the building, of the new human being.
And while all of the “building materials” are supplied by the woman’s body, such that it could be argued that she provides the “body,” even this is a little too simplistic, in that she does not provide all the “building materials” for her own body, some of which are in turn supplied to the new human being growing inside her.
All of which is support for my thesis that Aristotle, and Swedenborg, were right in thinking that the soul was supplied from a parental source, but wrong in thinking that it was provided exclusively by the father, whereas the mother’s contribution was exclusively the body.
Hallo Lee,
Thank you again for your reply and your valuable thoughts. You have supplied me with a lot of intellectual stuff that needs more thinking and time. So for the moment, I am only going to answer your first question. You are writing:
I am not quite sure what you mean in saying that Swedenborg’s mistake lies in “commingling the realm of spirit with the realm of body.” Clearly, the spirit and the body have a relationship—as you say, via correspondences. There is nothing preventing them from having a relationship in the sperm, or in the egg, or in the meeting of the two, any more than there is something preventing them from having a relationship in the body as a whole.
To my mind, such commingling really happens to Swedenborg, but rather exceptionally. It may happen to him because of a lack of attention or because he just wants to simplify things.
For example, instead of saying:
“The soul comes from the father,
The body comes from the mother”,
Swedenborg should have said:
“The higher principle comes from the father
the lower principle comes from the mother”
Then he would have remained in the realm of pure correspondence. Namely, in that second type of thought, he conjoins two principles, thus remaining in the realm of spirit and describing something there – to which something material below, that is fertilisation of an egg by a sperm, corresponds!:-) In such a case, he doesn’t commingle.
But saying only “the soul comes from the father, the body comes from the mother”, he takes up in his thought something spiritual and, at the same time something material. Then he does commingle.:-o
Similarly, in a case of a possible instant creation (say 6000 years ago), Swedenborg commingles the natural world which is always subject to time and space, with the act of creation which is timeless and spaceless. Time only exists in the created world, not sooner.
To understand this, one has to reflect upon one’s thinking itself.
Do you understand?
Thank you for hearing me,
Radko
Hi Radko,
Thanks for your reply. I’m glad I’ve given you some things to ponder!
About the “commingling” of the spiritual and the material, or of the soul and the body, perhaps I see your point on the idea of a possible instant creation. This sort of thing is characteristic of the spiritual world, in which things can instantly appear and disappear as they do or don’t correspond to the sometimes rapidly changing thoughts and feelings of the angels and spirits in the vicinity. However, the instant appearance of things in the material world, such as in the case of spontaneous generation, would be contrary to natural laws, in which things do not appear instantly, but develop over time, within space. Therefore instant creation in the form of what we today would call spontaneous generation, as Swedenborg presented it in one of his memorable relations coming from the mouth of an angel, would be in effect a “commingling” of the spiritual and the material realms by positing that the material realm would in this instance operate by spiritual law rather than by physical law.
Do I have this one right, according to your thinking?
On the other example, of the idea that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother, stated by Aristotle and adopted by Swedenborg, I can see, as I said previously, that having the soul be some sort of very fine material substance, such as a “spirituous fluid,” that is encased and enclosed by progressively coarser substances and coatings, would be a clear commingling of the spiritual with the material. It would make the spiritual into a highly rarefied physical substance, when Swedenborg in his theological period insisted that spirit, and spiritual substance, are entirely distinct from matter, and material substance, such that the two cannot be commingled, but can interact with each other only via correspondences.
However, although Swedenborg’s earlier formulation of how the father supplies the soul runs afoul of the “commingling” issue, it doesn’t seem to me that the idea itself that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother does. That’s not the basis for my rejection of the idea.
In Swedenborg’s system (and of course, in most other spiritual thought systems as well), both men and women have both souls and bodies. These two (the soul and the body), in Swedenborg’s system, relate to each other via correspondences, just as in every relationship between the spiritual and the material. And yet, since each sex has each part (soul and body) it is within the capabilities of each to contribute one or both to the new human being, via the reproductive method on those respective levels.
If the mother contributes the body, it’s a relatively simple matter of her producing an egg, and also supplying all the nutrients out of which the embryo and fetus are built. Yes, the egg would have to have some sort of soul in order to be a living organism. But it wouldn’t have to be a human soul. An animal soul, without the higher human spiritual and heavenly (celestial) levels of the spirit, would be sufficient to maintain the life of the egg until it was fertilized. Technically, she would be contributing a “soul,” but it wouldn’t be a human soul, which is, I think, the specific element that Swedenborg thinks of the father as supplying.
For the father to contribute the soul, it would also require only a fairly simple adjustment. We must ditch Swedenborg’s earlier scientific version of this process for the reasons mentioned above. But the semen (or today, the sperm) could still be a corresponding vessel for the proto-soul from the father, similar to the physical body as a whole being a corresponding container for the developed human soul. The proto-soul from the father could “ride along,” so to speak, in the sperm, infusing itself into the egg when the sperm fertilizes the egg, thereby contributing the soul that is the “carpenter” that will direct the construction of the body, and actually “build” it using his “tools,” while the mother supplies the physical “building materials” for the carpenter/soul to use in building the body.
None of this, it seems to me, violates the “no commingling of spirit and matter” principle. The two are kept distinct from each other, and in a correspondential, not a contiguous or commingled, relationship.
So I confess that I still don’t see your “commingling” issue when it comes to the idea that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother. Yes, it would have to operate a little differently than Swedenborg thought it did. But the adjustments are relatively minor, and easily made conceptually.
Am I missing something in your analysis of these things?
Dear Lee,
As for the instant creation, you understand me very well; as for the hereditary issue, I’m afraid, you don’t understand me yet. In other words, you are still commingling spirit and matter, though unaware. You have proposed quite a new solution to our topic. There is something on it(!), but, in my opinion, it isn’t correct and only complicates things further.
The method I suggest is a very platonic one: Observe the material reality as keenly as possible and then try to guess what’s spiritually behind it. This is an approach I have developed over time when reading and thinking about Swedenborg and comparing him with other philosophers. A result of this approach of mine could be (like I’ve already recommended) the following principles:
The body of the child comes from both parents (correspondingly).
I stick to this, and I can surely find something supportive of this idea in Swedenborg and add it later.
Now, as for your approach: you simply fancy soul and body in one imaginative thought, which is impossible, or it is a kind of commingling of spirit and matter, which goes against my proposed Platonic method.
Two paragraphs where I perceive such “commingling” (a kind of chaos)Â are the following ones:
And yet, since each sex has each part (soul and body) it is within the capabilities of each to contribute one or both to the new human being, via the reproductive method on those respective levels.
The proto-soul from the father could âride along,â so to speak, in the sperm, infusing itself into the egg when the sperm fertilizes the egg, thereby contributing the soul that is the âcarpenterâ that will direct the construction of the body, and actually âbuildâ it using his âtools,â while the mother supplies the physical âbuilding materialsâ for the carpenter/soul to use in building the body.
For example, you think of a proto-soul from the father as “infusing itself into the egg”… Well, you can let some liquid infuse in another liquid, a lemon juice in a glass of water, but not a soul in the body. It only shows what you have before your eyes at the moment of your thinking, namely, two natural substances! Two substances of the same genre! (otherwise infusing is impossible). If you had said a proto-human-soul from the father somehow joins a proto-animal-soul from the mother, which process becomes represented in the sperm infusing itself into the egg, everything would have been better.
You try not to commingle as much as you can(!), but you still are not free of it. But don’t get down on your mind, nobody is! Even Swedenborg commingles at times, as I have shown. I believe, only the glorified Lord doesn’t commingle spirit and matter at all, and he gives the angels of his kingdom the proportionate ability not to do likewise.
So, to my mind, the right method of how to think about spiritual things (the Lord presents us through Swedenborg) is to withdraw from our natural thoughts as much as we can. We can only grasp the spiritual by retreating from the natural! And we have a big help in Swedenborg’s thoughts, who, unlike us, was able to see the spiritual things face to face. His thoughts allow us this retreat.
But to give you and me some positive perspective: If you can’t see your “commingling”, don’t get down, and carry on in the path you have trodden. Each of us is different, and the Lord may bring you to unexpectedly good solutions to the topic, or to some unexpectedly good use!
Pondering on the topic of heredity, I came across several articles I had read in the past. For example, the Swedenborg Society once sent me an issue of their Magazine that dealt almost exclusively with this topic (No.5, 1990) . I guess large volumes of commentaries have been written on the same topic. In one such article, I found a quote by Swedenborg that could be taken as representative:
“A person receives from his father everything that is internal; the soul itself, that is, life, is from the father. But from the mother he receives everything that is external. In short, the interior man, that is, the spirit itself, is from the father, but the exterior man, that is, the body itself is from the mother. Anyone can grasp this simply from the fact that the soul is implanted by the father. This begins to clothe itself in the form of a tiny body in the ovulum; anything added, either in the ovulum or in the womb, is from the mother, for it has no other source of growth.”
(Arcana Caelestia #1815.1; translation by J. Chadwick)
Here we have Swedenborg a bit “half on the way”. With “the interior man being from the father, the exterior man being from the mother”, he speaks absolutely in favour of my proposal, but he overleaps to the problematic “soul from the father, body from the mother” idea. Interestingly, he uses here the words “body itself” and “spirit itself”(?).
If we consider that in many other passages (see below) Swedenborg clearly distinguishes between the exterior man and the physical body(!), the idea becomes complete.
“The internal and external, about which I have written, are the internal and external of a person’s spirit. His body is merely an extra external, within which the internal and external of the spirit come into existence. For the body does nothing of itself, but is directed by the spirit which resides in it.”
(The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine #46; translation by J. Chadwick)
I believe that in the combination of the above two principles of Swedenborg, the truth lies!
For the order of things, let me revise the principles which I deduce to be true:
The lower (earthly) principle comes from the mother.
The body comes from both (correspondingly).
One also has to consider that with an infant both the internal and the external man are still sleeping wherefore the only perceptible duality is the one of “soul and body”.
Reading through websites where parents discuss the topic of heredity, I noticed that they agreed on a certain principle, namely, that a child receives “intelligence” from the mother and “intuition” from the father. This would again nicely correspond with the principles above.
It doesn’t matter that in our previous discussion I called the internal man “the active principle” and the external man “the passive principle”. I referred basically to the same. It is generally heaven that acts (= is active) and earth that counteracts (= is passive). It would be just a slightly different approach.
If, on the other hand, someone would think of the contribution of the father and the mother as basically equal (being on the same level, that is, not “higher and lower”), it would hit the doctrine of the Lord’s incarnation and glorification and blur it.
Well, these are my thoughts today. I hope they are comprehensible and not insulting to you. Thanks for listening to me.
Yours,
Radko (from Czechia)
PS: I am enclosing a photo from a table tennis camp in Liberec, which I participated in two weeks ago. But, please, don’t get it posted anywhere. Thank you.:-)
Hi Radko,
Thanks for your response. I am glad I at least got one thing right! 😀
On the other, bigger issues, I have a different perspective.
From your reply:
This may be a suitable modification of Swedenborg’s system, but it is certainly a modification of it. As quoted later in your reply, Swedenborg is consistent in stating that the inner element comes from the father, and the outer from the mother. (Incidentally, that translation of Arcana Coelestia is by John Elliott, not John Chadwick.) So far your formulation is in sync with Swedenborg’s. But he also explicitly identifies the inner element from the father with the soul, and the outer element from the mother with the body. Here your formulation departs from Swedenborg’s, especially in its conclusion that the body comes from both parents. (Parenthetical question: Where does this idea come from, and what are its implications in your mind?)
I am, of course, aware of Swedenborg’s formulation of the inner and the outer as the inner and outer elements of the spirit, as stated in The New Jerusalem #46 and elsewhere. And ultimately, if Swedenborg is correct about the inner elements coming from the father and the outer from the mother (something I doubt), this would be the necessary resolution, since clearly the mother does contribute to the character and spirit of her children by heredity and not only by environment. However, this is at odds with Swedenborg’s formulation, which explicitly identifies the outer element contributed by the mother with the body. His formulation of this is distinct and different from his formulation of the inner and outer elements described in The New Jerusalem #46 in reference to his treatment of our inner and outer self. As in many areas, Swedenborg’s statements must be read contextually, and the contexts of these two passages are different.
You raise the issue of the Incarnation:
As mentioned in the above article, and briefly taken up in the initial comments and replies, the subject of the contributions of God and Mary to Jesus’ initial state and constitution will be the subject of a future article. However, this certainly is one area where Swedenborg’s idea that the inner part comes from the father and the outer from the mother is relevant, and is something explicitly brought to bear on the subject of the Incarnation in his formulation of it.
Where his formulation breaks down is in thinking that Mary contributed only a body to Jesus, and not a spirit. This would make the purposes of the Incarnation impossible. For the Lord to battle the Devil (hell) during his earthly lifetime, he needed, not just a human body but a human spirit with all its inherited tendencies toward evil. Otherwise there would be no plane or battlefield on which the battle could take place. These are spiritual battles, not physical battles. Without a full spiritual component from a human being (Mary) Jesus could not have been “in every respect tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).
What must survive any reasonable formulation is that in the case of the Incarnation, God contributed the inner part, and Mary contributed the outer part. What must change is that God did indeed “contribute” the divine element in Jesus (really, God was the inner divine element in Jesus), but that Mary contributed both a human body and a human spirit. Both of these will always be external to or lower than the divine, since that is the universal order of things. But they must both be present in Jesus’ heredity from his mother, or the entire purpose of the Incarnation breaks down.
Another way of saying this, which seems abundantly obvious from Swedenborg’s extended treatment of the process of glorification in Arcana Coelestia, is that Jesus did not glorify only a human body. He glorified a human body and spirit, making them both divine in the process. Glorifying only a body from Mary would be trivial. It would not look anything like the intensely psychological descriptions of the process provided in Arcana Coelestia.
In my view, Swedenborg’s treatment of the glorification in Arcana Coelestia requires and assumes that Jesus received a human spirit from Mary. However, his view, inherited from Aristotle, of the respective contributions of the father and mother to a child was too deeply ingrained in him to overcome, so he continued in that view even though it radically conflicts with his own treatment of the Incarnation and Glorification.
Now on to the conflicted area of commixture.
In all of my descriptions, it should be understood that in no case is the spirit commixing with the physical, because in all cases the relationship is one of correspondence, not one of contiguity. Such words as “infusing” may have given a different impression, but the “infusing” is of a spiritual element (the proto-soul) inhabiting the physical element (the semen, in Swedenborg’s view, the sperm, in ours) via corrspondence, not by being physically infused into the sperm, or physically contained within the semen as in Swedenborg’s earlier scientific formulation of the process.
This sort of habitation of the spirit in a specific physical form is a universal aspect of creation. Your soul does not just float around here in the material world. It specifically inhabits your body, and uses your body as its primary means of communication with the people and objects surrounding the body in this world, and its primary means of action in the material world. And yet, there is no commixture of your soul and your body. The relationship is not by physical contiguity, but by correspondence, your soul remaining entirely spiritual, and your body remaining entirely physical.
The very same principle would apply to the sperm (or the semen, as Swedenborg saw it) and its relationship to the proto-soul. The proto-soul doesn’t just float around in the physical realm. It specifically inhabits the sperm as its physical containing vessel, exactly as the soul inhabits its physical body as its physical containing vessel. There is no commixture between the proto-soul and the sperm. The relationship is one of correspondence, the sperm being the physical container that corresponds to and provides a physical “tool” or “vessel” for the proto-soul to use in accomplishing its purposes, which are to contribute to the initiation of a new human life.
When the sperm “carries” the offshoot of the father’s soul to the mother’s womb (in my formulation), it does not do this in the way Swedenborg described it in his scientific works—viz., by wrapping the soul up in a physical container. Rather, it does so by providing a physical vessel that corresponds to the proto-soul, so that the proto-soul can work on the physical level via the sperm just as the soul works on the physical level via the body.
The other, and bigger, modification I make to Swedenborg’s theory is that if the sperm carries (by correspondence) an offshoot of the father’s soul, then the egg also carries (by correspondence) an offshoot of the mother’s soul. When a particular sperm fertilizes an egg in the mother’s womb (technically, usually in the fallopian tubes) on the physical level, this corresponds to a spiritual fertilization of a spiritual egg by a spiritual sperm, happening entirely on the spiritual level. The two processes of fertilization, physical and spiritual, do not commix with one another. They correspond to one another.
This is my current theory of how the process works. And once again, at no point in the process is there any commixing of spirit and matter. The entire relationship is one of correspondence, not of commixture.
I suspect, however, that you have some other angle or element of the process in mind. So I’ll send this much along, and give you the opportunity to make any response that seems useful and necessary.
Hello Lee,
Thanks for your reply. Let me begin with things less important and progress to things more important in our discussion.
When transferring my e-mail replies to your website, there are some problems with the correct „printing“. You’ll see what I mean when you look at the first paragraphs of my last response. Please, can you fix it? Thank you!
The translation of AC 1815.1 was really by John Chadwick. He translated just this paragraph to be able to express his own ideas as precisely as possible. I found it in an article by him and quoted therefrom.
It is great you have clarified your position as for not commingling spirit and matter! It is exactly what I meant. Now we are in absolute agreement, and further discussion on this topic is needless. You’re improving, Lee.:-)
It’s only now, after reading your last response, that I begin to comprehend your overall concept of heredity according to Swedenborg. And it is not bad! I would agree in most points. On several points I would just like to make a comment. I feel you have had a lot of struggle with the issue.
To answer your parenthetical question, I have to brush up on my last 3 principles, especially the 3rd one of them. Here they are:
The body of the offspring comes from both (correspondingly).
As for principle 3, of course, I meant, as far as the bodily traits are concerned. In other words, what the offspring looks like outwardly depends on what his parents look like outwardly. Nothing else. This is a very common observation that every sound mind can make, and I am sure you won’t protest against it. Could Swedenborg be so blind as not to see it? I don’t think so…. And yet, he presents to us the principle „the soul comes from the father, the body comes from the mother“. What could he mean?…
…We can employ a different, second type of observation as well. One based chiefly on the bodily senses. Just focus on how tiny a sperm is. It is (I guess) about 10x smaller than the egg, definitely invisible to our eyes. And after infusing itself into the egg, it even disappears from the eyes of a microscope. Its small body, having lost its flagellum, does become a part of the zygote, but that’s the whole – bodily – contribution of the father to the new child! The rest of the body, on the other hand, is added in the following process in the woman, basically in her womb. Here the new child takes on its shape until, one day, it can appear in the world. What a great difference between a tiny, invisible sperm and a nicely visible child of 3,5 kilos! From such observations one could infer that the body of the child comes from the mother. While the soul, one might speculate on, is somehow in the sperm and comes from the father. This is how both Aristotle and Swedenborg may have come to their idea! It is not bad. It’s chiefly an observation of the outer eyes paired with some intuition. It’s not bad, though it’s not pure. It combines the observation of the outer senses (which in itself is valid!) with a purely metaphysical term, that is the „soul“. The result is the type of „commingling“ I have referred to before.
Aristotle, despite not being able to detect the sperm, could detect the semen or the ejaculate of a man. Again, this is a very small amount of matter, just a trifle in fact, when compared with a 3,5 kg newborn.
But Swedenborg takes up both these observations. The first one is really spiritual, because it is in pure correspondence; the second one is a mixture of natural and spiritual lights. He uses them both, without any problem, perplexing us.:-o Yes, he even gives the second principle the authority of a revelation, as one can read at the beginning of TCR, no. 103:
„To this I shall add a revelation, that the soul which comes from the father is the person himself, and the body which comes from the mother, is not in itself the person, but a product of the person. This is merely its covering, woven of substances from the natural world, while the soul is of substances from the spiritual world. After death every person lays aside the natural which he got from his mother, and keeps the spiritual which he had from his father, together with a sort of fringe (limbus) around it composed of the purest natural substances.“
It becomes plain to me that the second observation has become a metaphysical (spiritual) principle to him, though, in reality, it’s not.
I much agree with you that Swedenborg should be read contextually! You can do that better than I can…
You wrote:
„However, his view, inherited from Aristotle, of the respective contributions of the father and mother to a child was too deeply ingrained in him to overcome, so he continued in that view even though it radically conflicts with his own treatment of the Incarnation and Glorification.“
This sounds very probable!
There is one more approach to the problem, which I have found in Swedenborg. It is rather a marginal one, but one you could like. It can be read out from a passage in Divine Providence:
„This means that as regards our life, He alone is our Father, and that our father on earth is our father only as regards the clothing of our life, namely the body. Consequently in heaven only the Lord is called father.“ (DP 330.1)
I cannot tell you how much I regret those inconsistencies in Swedenborg. Maybe your future article can help a little…
Goodbye for the moment,
Radko
Hi Radko,
Thanks for your reply. In response to your request, I edited your previous comment to remove and replace the spurious characters, which were apparently mostly “smart quotes,” with ordinary English-style quotation marks. There were a few other spurious characters that I couldn’t determine the purpose of, so I just deleted them. I may have missed some.
I also checked that AC 1815 translation against the Elliott translation, and found that though it starts out the same, it does diverge, so apparently it is indeed a translation that Chadwick did himself rather than a use of the Elliott translation.
However, on the quote from True Christian Religion 103, Chadwick got a bit over-exuberant in his translation. I immediately suspected that “a revelation” was not correct. And indeed, the Latin word is not revelatio, “revelation,” but Arcanum, “secret.” I don’t know why Chadwick chose to translate it “revelation,” but that is not correct. Swedenborg does not here give the authority of revelation to his statements about the soul coming from the father and the body from the mother. To my knowledge, he never does. He states these things based on science and reason, not on the basis of revelation.
Back to the physical, the image of the sperm and the egg at the beginning of this article is AI-generated, and doesn’t necessarily show the true size ratio between the egg and the sperm. In terms of diameter, the egg is about 20x the diameter of a sperm. In terms of volume, however, the egg is at east 10,000x the volume of the sperm, and some estimates are much higher. The egg is one of the largest human cells, whereas the sperm is one of the smallest.
Based on this, purely external visuals would give support to the idea of the soul coming from the father and the body from the mother, since the egg is far more like a “body” than a sperm. Swedenborg’s theory, however, goes even farther in that direction, in that he did not consider the sperm to be the bearer of the soul from the father, but rather the semen itself, and specifically, tiny globules within the semen, which are even less like a body. Still, this way of thinking does run afoul of your “commixture” objection.
More than that, though, as stated numerous times above, we now know that despite their massive size difference, the egg and the sperm carry almost the same complement of genetic material, contributing nearly equally to the DNA of the resulting fertilized egg and eventual human being. In this case, the outward appearance does not give an accurate picture of the actual functions of the egg and the sperm. Yes, the egg needs to be big so that the sperm can find it, and to provide initial nutrients to its core elements so that they can grow and divide until the initial cluster of cells can attach itself to the wall of the uterus and begin receiving nutrition that way. And yes, the sperm must be small and streamlined to make the long journey from the vaginal canal through the cervix and uterus to the fallopian tubes, where fertilization usually takes place. But these determinants of size and form have nothing to do with the critical genetic material contained within each gamete.
In short, in this case the outward appearance does not provide an accurate picture of the core function of the egg and the sperm, which is to transmit genetic material to the young from the mother and the father, respectively.
About your third principle, that “the body of the offspring comes from both (correspondingly),” this does not accord with Swedenborg’s theory of generation, in which the body comes from the mother, but not from the father.
Yes, Swedenborg was well aware that the body of children had traits from both the father and the mother. However, this did not conflict with his theory that the mother contributes the body, and not the father, for a very specific reason. The role of the soul from father is analogous to that of a carpenter or builder. Like a carpenter, the soul from the father does not contribute any materials to the building being constructed. I.e., none of the carpenter’s flesh and blood is incorporated into the building—at least, not intentionally! 😉 Rather, the carpenter’s role is to form building materials supplied separately into the building that is being constructed. As such, even though none of the “body” of the building comes from the carpenter, the carpenter still stamps his character onto the building as he forms it according to his blueprint and his style of building.
Swedenborg would therefore insist that none of the body comes from the father. The paternal traits are passed on, not by physical substance, but by the soul directing the building of the body, and stamping its traits on the body in the process.
These paternal traits, he states, are more persistent through the generations, and into the spiritual world, than the traits from the mother, which are transmitted through physical substance, and therefore have less long-term generational staying power, and are also limited to the physical realm, being left behind along with the body when the spirit leaves the body and enters the spiritual world.
I am not saying that I agree with this. As the above article details, I think Swedenborg, and Aristotle before him, were mistaken about the soul coming from the father and the body from the mother. But if we’re talking about Swedenborg’s theory, the existence of paternal traits in the offspring does not mean or imply that the father contributes any part of the body. Only that the soul from the father shapes the body.
In an immediate sense, it is, however, true that the body comes from the mother, in that all the actual material for the body is supplied by the mother, and none directly by the father. However, even this is not true in a broader sense, in that the father commonly supplies much of the substance that the mother consumes to provide nutrients from which the body of the new human being is formed. Still, I could accept in a specific and limited sense that the mother supplies the body. What I can’t accept is that the father exclusively supplies the soul, none of the soul coming from the mother.
Finally, that statement in Divine Providence #330.1 about the earthly father supplying the body is indeed a fascinating one, conflicting, at face value, with Swedenborg’s Aristotelian principle that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother. It’s just one more reason that I think it’s best not to get too fundamentalist about that principle. This is not the only statement that attributes a bodily contribution to the father, nor, indeed, a spiritual contribution from the mother.
Certainly many Swedenborgians will “regret those inconsistencies in Swedenborg.” However, I think of it as a prompt to look deeper, past the surface appearances, and seek to build a better understanding of how these processes work. This reply is getting long, and my future article will take up some of these issues more specifically. However, one general principle that will survive is that what comes from God is internal to what comes from human beings. This is true whether we’re talking about the physical body or the human spirit. None of God is physical or spiritual. It is all divine. This means that everything from God is internal to both the human (physical) body and the human spirit.
As will be covered in the future article, with regard to the Incarnation, this means that regardless of whether the mother (Mary, in this instance) supplies only a body, or both a body and a spirit, the divine element from the Father is interior to what Mary supplies. This means that in the case of the Incarnation, something like Aristotle’s theory does survive, though not exactly in the way Swedenborg presented it.
As to human-level inheritance, I am skeptical that what comes from the father is deeper or more spiritual than what comes from the mother. I don’t see any correspondential basis for or expression of this in the physical process of reproduction. However, this is something I am still thinking about. I haven’t entirely rejected the idea that perhaps what comes from the father is more interior than what comes from the mother. However, I lean toward thinking that this is incorrect, and that what comes from the mother can be just as persistent and spiritual as what comes from the father.
But that is a topic for another day.
Dear Lee
Thanks for your response. Before I add my thoughts to it, allow me to change the subject. I often wonder where you are living right now. Was it Argentina last time? Or Paraguay? And do you have any chance there to serve as a priest in a parish?
God bless you, Radko
Hi Radko,
After we left South Africa in January of last year, we spent three months in southern Brazil, then moved on to Paraguay, where we are living now. I have no plans to return to any kind of parish ministry. Besides, Paraguay is a Spanish-speaking country, and we are just barely beginning to learn Spanish. There would be no possibility of preaching here.
Hello Lee,
Thank you for your reply and the detailed explanation of your position and doubts. Also, thank you for your patience in explaining Swedenborg’s approach! I have pondered it for long, and now it seems to me that, by the Lord’s mercy, I have found a solution to a part of the trouble!
Suppose we really want to understand the seemingly contradictory quotes on heredity (from the father and the mother, respectively) in Swedenborg. In that case, we have to pay attention to what happens with the inner structure of man in the course of time, that is, over the course of a man’s life. Even more, the process of regeneration of man must be taken into account, too. To demonstrate it, I have drawn a scheme which is attached to this letter. Please, see!
(Click here for a larger version of the chart.)
Firstly, let me cover the basic principles in this e-mail. When a child is born, his inner structure is a sheer duality of (1)soul and (2)body. The mind doesn’t exist yet, which implies that the soul works completely unconsciously on the body. In the same sense, the soul can be well seen as the carpenter of the body, as you stated it. But with the development of man’s consciousness over the course of time, the situation changes. The mind comes into play. So with an adult man, we have a picture of a triality consisting of: (1)internal mind (2)external or natural mind (3)body. The life’s centre has shifted from the body to the natural mind, which is actively working/searching now. And it should co-work in the process of regeneration, too. Again, as time goes on, man comes to the edge of his earthly life: his body will soon be put off completely, and not only this, but the natural mind as he knows it, too. At the time of his transition into the spiritual world, his natural mind is about to be internalised, that is, brought into full correspondence with the internal mind. The external mind won’t cease to be, but man’s life’s centre will be shifted to the internal mind.
Overall, there is a gradual shift of the man’s life’s centre from the body towards the external (natural) mind and then towards the internal mind. Or, rather, it should be like this. When it happens, then the regeneration of man happens.
Now, with all these changes, it becomes manifest that the sphere of the mother’s hereditary influence recedes, while the sphere of the father’s hereditary influence advances! It is clearly shown in the attached scheme (see the blue arrow).
If it is like that, then we can understand that both types of quotes in Swedenborg are valid and not contradictory to each other! When looking at a young child, Swedenborg can well say, “the soul comes from the father, the body comes from the mother”. When looking at an adult, Swedenborg can well say, “the interior mind comes from the father, the exterior (natural) mind comes from the mother”. Here are two examples of these approaches:
“Everyone’s soul comes from the father, and is only clothed with a body by the mother.” (DP 277.2)
“it is known that he who is born a man derives what is his from both the father and the mother, and that he has his inmost from the father, but his exteriors (that is, the things which clothe this inmost) from the mother. Both that which he derives from the father, and that which he derives from the mother, are defiled with hereditary evil.” (AC 4963.3)
It is clear that only spirit, not body, can be defiled with evil!
There is another example in Arcana Coelestia where both types of approach appear even in one paragraph.
“A person receives from his father everything that is internal; the soul itself, that is, life, is from the father. But from the mother he receives everything that is external. In short, the interior man, that is, the spirit itself, is from the father, but the exterior man, that is, the body itself is from the mother. Anyone can grasp this simply from the fact that the soul is implanted by the father. This begins to clothe itself in the form of a tiny body in the ovulum; anything added, either in the ovulum or in the womb, is from the mother, for it has no other source of growth.” (AC 1815.1)
The above considerations seem to go well with the following statement:
“After death every person lays aside the natural which he got from his mother, and keeps the spiritual which he had from his father, together with a sort of fringe (limbus) around it composed of the purest natural substances. In the case of those who come into heaven this fringe is below with the spiritual side uppermost; with those who come into hell, the fringe is uppermost and the spiritual side is below.” (TCR 103)
All types of these statements are just glimpses of a man’s interior structure at different times of his life!!
I believe this way the chief problem in your concept on heredity can be overcome. Not necessary to mention that the concept is fully compatible with the concept of the Lord’s Incarnation and saves other great correspondences as well.
I hope you can draw some use from my thoughts.
Yours,
Radko (from the Czech Republic)
Hi Radko,
Thanks for you further thoughts. If nothing else, the above article and this exchange have given you (and me) something to think about!
The issue I have with this whole approach, though, as covered in the above article, is that I think Swedenborg, and Aristotle before him, were mistaken in their idea that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother.
And since the idea that the internal comes from the father and the external from the mother is a consequence of that (mistaken) belief, I lean heavily toward thinking that this is an error also. Possibly the idea could still be salvaged, but I think it is probably wrong. As an example, it has been observed by various thinkers that children tend to follow their mother’s religion rather than their father’s if the two are different. This is exactly the opposite of what we would expect if the internal came from the father and the external from the mother.
I’m open to evidence that the internal comes from the father and the external from the mother, but so far I haven’t seen any convincing evidence. And the physical manifestation of the process in nearly equal contributions of DNA from the father and the mother also does not support the idea that the father contributes something more internal, and the mother something more external.
In short, I seriously question the whole idea that what comes from the father is more internal than what comes from the mother. I would require some serious evidence to convince me that it is not wrong.
As for the Incarnation, this is a unique case in which the father is divine, and the mother is human. In this instance, the mother could contribute only material and spiritual elements, because we humans are limited to the material and spiritual levels, whereas the father could contribute only divine elements, because God is wholly divine. And of course, divine things are always internal to spiritual things, which are always internal to material things.
This means that in the case of the Lord, what came from the father had to be internal in relation to what came from the mother. Further, in the case of the Lord, everything from the mother had to be put off, because nothing material or spiritual can be part of God, who is wholly divine.
I recognize that this breaks the parallelism between the process of glorification and the process of regeneration. However, the process of glorification is distinctly different from the process of regeneration, right from the start. In the case of a human being, in Swedenborg’s schema, the soul, though it derives from the father, separates from the father’s soul, and becomes a distinctly different individual. But in the case of the Incarnation, since the divine is indivisible, the soul does not separate from the father’s soul, but remains one and indivisible with it. So instead of becoming a distinct and new individual, as happens with a human birth, and regenerating as a new individual separate from the father, in the Lord’s case, the glorification process led to complete union with the father, so that Jesus is one and the same being as God.
In short, right from the start, the glorification process is distinctly different from the regeneration process.
Further, the idea that the human father of a new baby takes the place of God, supplying the internal part, whereas the human mother takes the place of the church, supplying the external part, runs afoul of the only passage I’ve found in Swedenborg’s published writings that clearly rejects something stated in Paul’s letters:
The implications of this are far-reaching, and have hardly been taken up or accounted for in New Church thought, which has historically tended toward the conservative, and has generally accepted “male headship” de facto if not theoretically.
But if the husband does not represent the Lord and his wife the church (except on the wedding day), but both together are the church, this places them on equal footing rather than having the husband above and internal and the wife below and external. The implications of this for their respective contribution to their offspring should be obvious.
Dear Lee,
Thanks for your reply. Before I answer, could you please fix the “misprints” in my last response and add the scheme I have attached to it? My response doesn’t make much sense without that picture, and it took me so much effort to draw it. Thank you very much. I am a bit sad about my responses not copying well onto your website?!:-( What could I do to fix this problem at last and for ever?
Thanks again, Radko
Hi Radko,
I have fixed the spurious characters in your previous comment. Czech must use different special characters for smart quotes, both single and double, than English does, and the blog software doesn’t know how to handle them. If you are able to compose your comments in a simple text editor that doesn’t use smart quotes, but uses standard ASCII quotes instead, that should fix most of the problems.
As I was just saying to another reader, at one point I tried to migrate the blog to another hosting setup, but it was a complete mess. I had to revert back to this hosting, which is fairly limited in its capabilities. I.e., this is not something I can fix on this end.
Another of those limitations is that the WordPress hosting version of the software doesn’t accept images in comments. If you send me the image by email, I’ll see if I can get it to display in your message. Another possibility is to post it somewhere on the web and link to it. It is possible to post links in the comments. What I don’t know is whether the image would show up directly in the comment, or whether readers would have to click on a link to see it. So it’s probably better to send it to me by email and let me see if I can add it manually.
Dear Lee,
I added it to my previous e-mail, the one with my response, as you can easily see. Please, let me know, whether you have found the diagram.
Thank you, R.
Hi Radko,
No, I have not received the diagram. You need to send it directly to me by email, not to the website.
Hallo Lee,
Thanks again for your last thoughts on the topic. I can understand your dilemma well, but I feel unable to solve it or add anything besides what I have previously written in this discussion. As for the passage in CL 125 referring to Ephesians 5:23, it seems to be written contra Paulus, so the husbands may not think they are the lords of their wives, which I agree with. That some correspondences are still valid, not of the persons of husband and wife, but rather of their inner (mutual) life, is shown immediately afterwards in CL 127. Here on earth, we can only observe things in their simultaneous order, not in their consecutive order, and I guess, this is the cause of the difficulty you are facing.
Best regards,
Radko
Hi Radko,
I’m not sure if this is the full message you meant to send. You sign off, but then begin a new sentence which ends abruptly in the middle.
At any rate, just to be clear, I don’t have a “dilemma.” Just some principles and ideas that I am working out in updating the human vessels into which the spiritual revelation embodied in Swedenborg’s writings flowed. These conversations are useful in working out some of the ramifications and details. But the overall picture is clear enough to me that it’s not a matter of concern. Just a matter of working things out to their conclusions.
And yes, I think Swedenborg contradicted Paul on that specific point to ensure that husbands would not think they can lord it over their wives. This would break his principle that any desire for dominance destroys a marriage. However, this is also an area in which we must do some updating of the cultural containers into which Swedenborg poured the spiritual principles about marriage that the Lord showed him.
Hi Radko,
Oops, I hit send on that reply prematurely. I wanted to ask what, specifically, in Marriage Love #127 you are referring to. There is something at the end of #126 that seems to apply, or perhaps you are referring to his brief summary in #127 of the correspondences marriage love, impregnating, reproducing, and love of children?
At any rate, I’m not “facing a difficulty.” Just working these things out in an organized, sensible matter given the advances in scientific knowledge and in human culture here on earth that have come about as a result of the Last Judgment and Second Coming that happened in Swedenborg’s time.
Hi Lee,
Oh no, my previous response was complete! The sentence in the end was litter. I referred to CL 127 throughout, specifically to these thoughts:
“I can only make these few remarks, which will seem obscure to the intellect. Conjugial love corresponds to the affection for real truth, and its chastity, purity and holiness. The planting of seed corresponds to the power of truth; the procreation of children to the propagation of truth; the love of children to the guarding of truth and good. Since then truth in a person seems as if it were his own, and good is added to it by the Lord, it is plain that these correspondences are between the outward or natural man and the spiritual or inward man. But these matters will have further light shed on them in the account of experiences which follow.”
Regards, Radko
Hi Radko,
Okay, thanks. I threw that “litter” from your earlier comment into the trash. 😉
Hello Lee,
If I remember correctly I’ve read from Swedenborg’s books that God organises heaven according to a certain structure, specifically the form of the human body. And the location of communities within the universal human determines their function. Also everyone is grouped together in heaven according to their ruling love. These communities have a specific role that they do and the people within the communities contribute to this overarching purpose by performing their unique job which contributes to the whole. And everyone and every community in heaven works harmoniously towards the large overarching purpose of God’s will. So if this is the case then the kinds of ruling love that people have matter and the amount of them matter also. To give an example lets take the community that looks after and raises children in heaven. You need a large enough number of these people who have the ruling love of raising children, if not there won’t be enough people to look after the children in heaven. And you can’t have too many of these people or some of them will have nothing to do. So God must be managing the types and amounts of people with certain ruling loves who go to heaven. If he didn’t, heaven would be chaotic and there would either be too many people to perform a specific task or too few.
In your article you say, “ If, as Swedenborg teaches, everything in the material world is a corresponding expression of something in the spiritual world, then this means that each new soul is not some special creation direct from God, but is also a unique combination of unique offshoots of the souls of the father and the mother.” You also say, “And modern biology informs us that the means God uses to create new human souls is to have the mother’s and the father’s spirits each produce many unique combinations of their “spiritual DNA,” meaning their specific spiritual character and personality, one of which from each parent combines together with one from the other parent to provide the blueprint for a unique new human being who has never existed before, and is a brand new creation.” If this is true and if it is also true that God manages the spiritual demographics of heaven then God must be very involved in who has kids with who.
This would be because the “spiritual DNA” we get from our parents would have a strong influence on the direction we choose to develop our ruling love. And our ruling love is what lives on forever and goes to live in heaven and form the spiritual demographics of heaven. My question is how does God manage these things if we all have the free will to choose who we want to have kids with? How does God ensure the right kids are born in the right numbers and at the right time without controlling people’s mating behaviour?
Also could you either link me to an article or explain more about what a ruling love is? I think I read that most of our interests are offshoots or outgrowths of our ruling love but aren’t our ruling love itself. I know our ruling love must be very deep and almost completely unconscious but do you think you could give me an example of a ruling love? Also I read that everyone has a unique ruling love but some people are more similar than others and some people are more different. Any light you could shed on this would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Hi Bob,
Good to hear from you again. About your final query, you’re in luck! Just a couple of months ago I posted this article:
The Four Kinds of Love that Drive Human Life
It gives a basic definition of “ruling love,” and goes over the four main categories of ruling love. As that article says, all the more specific and individualized ruling loves that we diverse human beings have fit into one of those four categories.
As for how God arranges things so that there are the right number of people for the right jobs in heaven, I’m sure that’s beyond the ken of ordinary finite brains like mine and yours. But God’s brain is infinite, so for God it’s not a problem! 😀
But seriously, we can get some idea of this by looking to see how the right number of people get into the right jobs in this world. Nobody really arranges it all. In fact, every culture and government that has tried to arrange it all has failed miserably and left people in poverty instead of abundance. In a healthy culture and economy, there is more of an organic system in which people see what jobs are out there and what things need to be done, and gravitate toward the ones that fit their own personality and skill set best. In this way, and through many other mechanisms and incentives, the required jobs are filled by wiling people.
Another consideration is that ruling loves are not jobs. Jobs are implementations of ruling loves. It’s not a case of one job per ruling love. Rather, ruling loves involve wanting to accomplish something that is very important to the person, and there are various ways that can be accomplished.
For example, if someone’s ruling love is to give people a fun and enjoyable time involving laughter and camaraderie, this could be achieved through stand-up comedy, but it could also be achieved through music with funny lyrics, through movies or video games, through comedic plays, and in many other ways. The ruling love is the same, but the way it is expressed can take many different forms.
Consider that if all the people in a community of heaven share a similar ruling love, there are still lots of different jobs that need doing in that community, just as there are in communities of people here on earth. Everyone with similar ruling loves isn’t doing the same job. But they’re all working toward a common purpose through all the different jobs they do.
A lot of what God does in organizing heaven, then, likely involves nudging people in one direction or another, each according to his or her own ruling love, to fill the jobs that need filling. And since angels love to follow God, and love to do things for other people, they’re always happy for some new thing they can do that expresses their ruling love in a new way. Heaven isn’t a static place. It’s a growing, evolving place just like earth.
As for the grainy question of how to get the right DNA combos produced, I would say that DNA is not as determinative as people think it is. Yes, it gives the general outline and direction of our life both physically and spiritually (the latter by our spiritual DNA). But we now know that DNA is only a generalized blueprint. How all the details and directions work themselves out is still a huge unsolved mystery. DNA by itself simply doesn’t have enough information to build and organize an entire human being right down to the cellular level.
The heredity vs. environment debate comes in here. For quite a while, and in some circles even today, there was a desire to attribute everything to heredity, even to the point of thinking of human beings as deterministic beings predestined by their genes to a certain path. But that’s wrong. Environment also plays a big role. Human life is an interaction between heredity and environment, each of which plays a major role in shaping a person’s life and character. This means, as I suggested above, that it’s not critical to get the exact right mix of DNA, because the human social, political, and economic environment will shape the DNA that it does get into people who will fill the needed roles in the “body” of humanity. (Your run-down of the human structure of heaven is impeccable, BTW.)
And of course, beyond heredity and environment there is the major factor of human free will. We humans are not predetermined, deterministic beings. We have free will, and we can make choices within the general direction and structure of our heredity and environment as to which way we want to turn ourselves, what we want our ruling love to be, and what we want to do with our life. And since it is God who gives us both our existence and all our capabilities of rationality and freedom, not just once at the beginning, but continually every second, God can also flow into people who are willing to accept God’s love, wisdom, and power, and move people in directions that will lead them toward fulfilling critical roles in the universal human form of heaven.
There’s plenty more that could be said about this, and I’m not sure I’ve answered all your questions, but I hope this much gives you something to think about. These are all fascinating and complex questions! I’m just glad it’s God figuring it all out, not us, or the entire universe would fail just as miserably as our ill-fated attempts at centrally planned societies and economies. 😉
Everything you just said sounds good to me, and I agree with it. Basically before I read this article I thought that our physical DNA obviously came from our parents and our “spiritual DNA” came directly from God. If this was the case then it would be a simple matter for God to manage the spiritual demographics of heaven because he would just directly give the person the spiritual traits they needed to develop into whatever possible range of ruling loves that they chose and that God needed in heaven. However if it is the case, as you say in your article, that everyone receives their spiritual traits as a random combination of spiritual DNA from their parents then God must be involved in who has kids with whom. I guess how God can manage this without controlling free will is going to be a mystery for me for the rest of my life. That’s ok, I guess. The next issue I’m hoping you can shed some light on is related to this and it’s the topic of free will itself. You’ll have to forgive me because If I remember correctly I think I’ve asked you this question before, but what actually is free will? I understand free will in a superficial sense as making choices between alternatives as it relates to morality. But what I’m wondering specifically is why we make the choices we do? Is it really free will if we don’t fully understand why we make the moral choices we do ? I’ll give an example. Let’s say there is a ten year old boy and he is hanging out with his friend who is also ten. The boy’s friend has a new toy that the boy himself wants but does not have because his parents are poor and can’t afford to buy it for him. The boy’s friend is playing with his new toy and describing in detail how great it is and how fun it is to play with. The boy grows jealous of his friend who has the toy that he himself longs for but can’t have. It’s not fair that his friend has the toy that he himself can’t have because his parents are poor. So the boy decides to steal the toy from his friend. The friend puts the toy away and the two boys move on to do something else. Later on in the day however the boy returns to secretly take the toy and hide it under his shirt. The boy’s mom comes to pick him up and take him home from playing with his friend. Feelings of guilt are swirling around inside of the boy for what he is about to do. On some deep unconscious level he knows that stealing is wrong even in these unfair circumstances and that’s where the feelings of guilt are coming from. But he beats back and pushes down the feelings of guilt with the rationalization that it is not fair that his parents can’t afford to buy him the toy. He should have the toy, not his friend. So the boy gets in his moms car with the toy still secretly under his shirt and his mom drives him home. Now I’ll give you a second example this time from my own life. When I was a little kid I was in the grocery store with my mom and I asked my mom to buy me a chocolate bar. She said no. I kept asking throughout the shopping trip because I really wanted it but she was firm about it and kept saying no. This made me angry at my mom and at the whole situation. What gave her the right to decide on my behalf that I couldn’t have the chocolate bar? If I was an adult with my own money I would have bought the chocolate bar for myself. But since I was a little kid with no money of my own I was at the mercy of my mom’s decisions, it wasn’t fair and it made me angry. So I took a chocolate bar and put it in my pocket, intending to take it out of the store with me when we left. As the shopping continued with the chocolate bar in my pocket the feelings of guilt slowly began to grow. Just like the boy in the previous example, on some deep, half-conscious level I knew that stealing the chocolate bar was wrong even given the current unfair circumstances. But I continued to rationalize, it wasn’t right for me to be denied what I wanted, even more it felt unjust for a higher power (my mom) to arbitrarily refuse me the chocolate bar. I had no control in this situation so I was going to take control and take what I wanted because it was not right for my mom to refuse me the chocolate bar. The feelings of guilt continued to grow however especially as my mom paid for the groceries and we were walking towards the doors of the store to leave. Even now as an adult I can still distinctly remember the overwhelming feeling of guilt as we were walking towards the doors to leave. When we got to the car I showed my mom the chocolate bar and confessed what I had done. My mom made me go back inside the store and put the chocolate bar back. So in these two examples the one kid chose to ignore and push down the feelings of guilt and justify what he was doing with rationalizations whereas with me for some unfathomable reason I choose to listen to my conscience. Why do people make those decisions that they do? Why does one person stand firm on the rationalizations and another person who has the same rationalizations listen to their conscience instead and do the right thing? I used to be a Christian universalist and so I used to believe that everyone would make the right choice in the span of eternity anyways so I never really thought about these things. But now if it is the case that we go to heaven or hell forever based on the sum total of these choices we make over the course of our lives then why we make those choices is suddenly very important indeed and have eternal consequences. I’m trying to make sense of this by trying to put myself in the shoes of the boy who chose to steal the toy and trying to think, see and feel things from his perspective. What would it be like to choose to persistently do evil over the course of your life? I’m trying to see and feel things from their perspective not because I want to do it myself but because I want to understand how such a thing could be possible when they have the ability to make the right choice. It’s very tragic and it grieves my soul. And of course I wonder what is God’s role and intention in all this since he created the system where it is possible for a person to choose eternal hell. Why didn’t I choose persistent evil? Why does anyone choose heaven or hell? Sorry this is kind of long but those are the questions I’m wrestling with right now. There is a lot more that could be said but that’s good for now. If you could help that would be great. Thanks.
Hi Bob,
First, a follow-up about this:
What I was driving at in my previous reply to you is that God doesn’t have to tinker with who has kids with whom.
First, because DNA isn’t as determinative as people think it is. DNA is one factor in our eventual personality, and perhaps in our ruling love. But it’s not the only factor. Environment is another major factor. And our own choices are the biggest factor of all.
Second, because there is enough variability both in people and in jobs to do quite a bit of mixing and matching. There’s not one and only one person who can fit into one and only one job. If someone quits or is fired from a job, someone else is hired for the job. They may do a better job of it or a worse job of it, but they can do the job.
The variability in people is that we’re multi-faceted and adaptable. We’re not limited to only one skill, nor are we limited to using a particular skill in only one way. A pianist can play classical, jazz, pop, and so on, each in a different venue. That pianist may also be able to do electrical work. Whichever is more needed at the time is what that person will do.
The variability in jobs is that jobs don’t always have to be done exactly the same way. Different people have different styles in doing different jobs. One house decorator may do art deco. Another may do futuristic. Another may do traditional. The common denominator is that the house gets decorated.
God is involved in every little detail of our lives. But this happens through attraction and bending, not through brute force and violation of free will. Perhaps God does nudge one particular person toward another particular person with the idea that a particular type of person will be the result of their union. But even if that happens, it’s not something God forces. It’s something God finesses. Perhaps the two just happen to meet in a subway car when one of them is visiting the city where the other one lives. The chances against those particular two people meeting are astronomical. But maybe God distracted one of them to miss a subway train and get onto the next one, where the future partner would be. I don’t know. But none of it is forcing anyone to do anything. It’s just guiding and bending things to accomplish God’s purposes, always respecting our free will in the process.
Third, God throws massive resources at things, and in the end, what’s most needed is produced. Everything in the world is the result of huge amounts of time, materials, processes, and so on, and we’re the ultimate result. Part of making sure that there are enough people to do the jobs in heaven is just producing billions and billions of people. That gives God plenty to work with in arranging things so that every job that needs to get done has someone to do it, and every person who needs a satisfying job gets one.
Hi Bob,
Now about the main question in your comment:
First, since both your examples involve children, it should be said that we do not have full moral and spiritual freedom until we are self-responsible adults. People who die before reaching adulthood always go to heaven, never to hell. That’s because children haven’t yet developed their full rational capabilities.
Also, as you allude to in your example from your own childhood, children are not ultimately responsible for themselves. Their parents are. This means that much of what children do is reactionary rather than being something freely chosen. As you say, if you had been an adult, you would have just bought the chocolate bar. It was in part because you were not free and self-responsible that you stole it instead.
There is some further discussion on moral freedom and responsibility in childhood vs. in adulthood in this article:
Can Gang Members Go to Heaven? (Is Life Fair?)
What is free will? Basically, it is the ability to make choices, and also to act on those choices, in a way that isn’t determined by anything outside our own will—which would generally be heredity and environment, not to mention spiritual influences from heaven and hell. Of course, we are influenced by all these things. But free will is the ability to choose, in at least some areas of our life, which of these influences we will adopt and make our own, and which we will not.
It’s not that there aren’t forces acting on us. There are. But part of God’s providence in the moral and spiritual sphere especially is to ensure that there is a balance of good and evil forces acting on us, so that we are not forced one way or another.
An analogy I like to use is that it is like a tug of war with ten strong men pulling on either side, equally balanced, and we are in the middle. If we were up against one team or the other by ourselves, we’d lose quickly and badly. But since they’re pulling against each other and are evenly matched, whichever way we pull, that’s the way the rope will go. The rope being our life.
As children, we make the choices we do primarily from heredity and environment, and our natural inclination to think mostly about ourselves and our own happiness and pleasure. The incident about the chocolate bar was all about what you wanted for yourself right there and then, regardless of your mother’s wishes. But since she was the responsible party, and you weren’t, she could tell you no. That created a rift between what you wanted to do and what you could do in the moment. You short-circuited it by defying your mother’s will and asserting your own. It was a tug-of-war between your will and hers. It wasn’t an internal choice on your part as to whether it was a good idea to eat a chocolate bar, and whether that was something you really wanted to do.
As adults having adult rationality and free will, we can evaluate different courses of action, make decisions about which one we think is better, and then act on those decisions if there aren’t external forces restraining us from doing so. But in most ordinary cases, once we’ve chosen to do something, we can just go ahead and do it, unlike you as a child in that store. That’s part of what being an adult means. We’re responsible for ourselves, and we act on our own rationality, choice, and initiative, not on or against someone else’s who is responsible for us.
Ultimately, we act based on what we love, what we enjoy, and what gives us pleasure. Even our big choice between good and evil is a choice between various types of love, enjoyment, and pleasure. If evil were not pleasurable, nobody would ever do evil things. But for example, the choice whether to build a life based on honest work for honest pay, or one based on stealing and cheating to get our money, is a choice between what we think we’ll enjoy most, and will give us the life we want the most.
Over time, as we travel the path of “regeneration” or spiritual rebirth, we make choices based not only on our own profit and pleasure, but also based on what will make others, and ultimately God, happy. But that’s not where we start out in life when we’re first entering the path of spiritual rebirth. We all start out thinking primarily about our own happiness and advancement in life, and only progress over time to thinking primarily about others’ happiness and long-term advancement in life—which at the top end means their pathway toward heaven. But thinking about other people’s benefit, short-term or long-term, even here on earth is moving from a focus on self, which is our pre-rebirth state, to a focus on others.
On the big up/down choice, we decide whether we want to get our pleasure from things that are good or from things that are evil. We can go either way. There are twenty strong men, ten from hell and ten from heaven, pulling with all their might to get us to go their way. We decide which way we’re going to pull, and that’s the way we’ll go. But the men on the other side will still keep pulling, not making it easy for us, and trying to get us to change our mind. That’s the tug-of-war of life, and we’re engaged in it our entire lifetime here on earth.
I should also highlight that there are two distinct types of freedom, which I mentioned above:
Here on earth we have a lot of freedom of choice, but not as much freedom to live as we choose. In the spiritual world, we have less freedom of choice because we’ve already made the big up/down choice, but we have a lot more freedom to live as we choose, especially if we chose heaven. So while we do have both kinds of free will in both places, there is a different balance of them in heaven than on earth.
In heaven we still do make choices, and they still do affect our life as it unfolds, but it’s not going to send us down an entirely different path than the one we chose on earth. It’s going to be within a “cone of probability” set by our big, ultimate choice of ruling love, good or evil, and what specific type of ruling within the realm either good or evil, that we made on earth. We can go straight down the middle of that cone, or we can head toward one side or the other. Even in heaven, our life is not deterministic. But our general direction has already been determined by the choice of ruling love we made here on earth.
Here on earth, we have a lot of choice about who we want to be, but we don’t always have the choice to act on it, fully or even at all. We may want to be an artist, but external circumstances mean that’s not in the cards for us. But it does mean that we can’t just lazily say “I want to be this” or “I want to be that.” We have to work hard at it against resistance. This tests how much we really want to be, and do, what we think we do. It is in the crucible of struggle and resistance that we make the hard choices involving what we’re going to actually put work into in order to achieve. This makes the choices real, and not just theoretical.
In heaven, all external restraints are lifted. We are completely free to live as we choose. This, of course, can happen only because we chose to love and do what is good, not what is evil. If we chose hell, our freedom to do what we want is much more limited. We can still do it to some extent, but there will be restraint and backlash due to the inherently destructive and self-limiting nature of evil.
I’ve written quite a bit, so even though there’s plenty more that could be said, I’ll stop here, and let you read this and respond or press further as you wish. This is a huge topic, and not one that can be disposed of quickly. I hope this much is helpful, at least.
Hi Lee,
I want to make sure I understand what you (and Swedenborg) are saying about free will and eternal destiny. So I’ll summarize what I think you’re saying, and then you can tell me what I’ve gotten wrong or misunderstood.
From what I understand:
No one ends up in hell by accident. Everyone in hell is there because of their own freely made choice — specifically, their choice to take pleasure in hurting others and to reject change. Even if these people were given a thousand different lives with a thousand different circumstances, they would still choose hell every time because that’s what they love and persist in. In other words, no matter how the conditions are varied, they always choose to develop a ruling love that leads to hell.
What this means is that life on earth is perfectly calibrated, designed and balanced to facilitate our ultimate choice up or down. If the fundamental situation on earth was different it would actually make it a worse and less genuine place to make spiritual and moral decisions. I used to think if God wanted us to make a choice for heaven or hell wouldn’t it be better for us to experience the highest heaven and then the lowest hell before we had formed our ruling love. Once this experience was over then we could start to form our ruling love and therefore make our choice. And that this would be better than a life on earth to make our choice. But the reason God doesn’t do this is because, in his mind, that would be the same thing as force since everyone would choose heaven under those circumstances. So a condition for free will to be real is we have to be unable to experience the full and eternal joys and consequences of our choices until after we make them. So God allows us to have enough knowledge — through conscience, religion, and spiritual insight — to make an informed and free choice, but not so much that it forces our hand. So people are generally aware of eternal outcomes of a good life vs a bad life but they can’t experience the ultimate eternal outcomes of their choices until after they die. After which point they can’t (don’t want to) change their hearts and minds. So we can’t be totally aware and we can’t have perfect experiential knowledge of the consequences of what we are choosing or else it would not be a free choice. If we had this perfect experiential knowledge it would sway our choice towards heaven when we might otherwise make a different choice without that perfect knowledge. In other words, perfect experiential knowledge would just be a form of coercion. But God believes that what we do know is enough to make a free and informed choice. We have just enough light from God to make a true and informed choice but not so much that it forces our decision.
Furthermore God is always encouraging (never forcing) people to make the right choices. God does everything in his power to get people to choose heaven except force them. If God was to do anything more than he is doing right now it would cross the threshold into force. God is also not able to get everyone into heaven without forcing them to do so. If there was a way for God to get everyone in heaven using his current methods of no force then he would do so. But since not everyone goes to heaven and people go to hell this is not the case. God very much wants to have everyone in heaven but he can’t do it without force and he will not take people’s free will to force them into heaven. There is no way around this. So, in the end, God judged that creating human beings with real freedom was worth the sorrow that comes from some people freely choosing hell forever. He doesn’t want that outcome, but given the nature of free will, it was always a near certainty that some would make that choice. This of course makes God very sad but this system he came up with was just the best he could do. If humans were going to have free will so they wouldn’t be robots then people in eternal hell is a very strong possibility. There is no other way to structure creation so that everyone chooses heaven because that would contradict the idea of free will. And God can’t have two contradictory things be true at the same time. Just like 1+1=2 and cannot equal anything else, humans + free will = strong likelihood of eternal hell. Humans + free will cannot equal everyone in heaven, the math just doesn’t work out.
So what did I get right and what did I get wrong in that explanation ?
Hi Bob,
On your final paragraph about free will, yes, that’s about the size of it.
I wouldn’t say, however, that the system God came up with was “just the best he could do,” as if God had to “settle” for something less than the ideal. The ideal is humans who are actually human, which means beings who have rationality and free will. And as you say, this requires allowing humans to choose things God wouldn’t choose. You can’t say, “You’re free to do everything except what I don’t want you to do.” That’s not free will. Free will means allowing people to make bad choices, just as free speech means allowing people to say bad things. Otherwise it just plain isn’t free.
This isn’t “the best of all possible worlds” (a la Voltaire’s Candide) in the sense that everything here is lovely. But it is the best of all possible worlds in the sense that, as you say, it is “perfectly calibrated, designed and balanced to facilitate our ultimate choice up or down.” If there were not both good and evil in the world, we would not have that choice.
Why do we have to be able to choose evil? Why can’t we just choose among various things that are good?
Because everything good is God. If we had only choices between different kinds of good, we would still ultimately be forced into a relationship with God. We would have no choice not to be in relationship with God. And a relationship that isn’t freely chosen is not a real relationship. Not on a human level, anyway.
God had to allow for something other than God for us to have real freedom of choice and real free will in relation to God. That’s why God had to allow evil.
About this:
Yes, except I would express it slightly differently: “God does everything in his power to make it possible for people to choose heaven except force them, and God invites and encourages people to choose heaven.” I wouldn’t use the “get people to” language because it has a sense of pushing or wheedling people, which isn’t how God operates. Rather, God continually keeps a pathway toward heaven open to people, and continually invites and encourages them to take it.
And God does do literally every single thing possible to give each one of us a pathway to heaven. God is working in every detail of our life, every second, seeking to turn us toward heaven and away from hell, if we are willing. This means that if we don’t, then there is no excuse, and it is our own fault. We can never say, “If God had just done this, then I would have chosen good over evil.” No. God literally has done and does do everything possible to keep the choice of good open to us.
This of course, is during our lifetime on earth. Once we die, the choice is made, and God accepts that, while still doing everything possible to mitigate our suffering and prevent us from falling down into any deeper evil or hell.
So yes, as you say, “No one ends up in hell by accident. Everyone in hell is there because of their own freely made choice — specifically, their choice to take pleasure in hurting others and to reject change.”
However, once again, I wouldn’t put it as “Even if these people were given a thousand different lives with a thousand different circumstances, they would still choose hell every time because that’s what they love and persist in.” This is a pure hypothetical. Each one of us has only one life, and it is the life we lived here on earth, in the specific circumstances in which we lived it. If we had another life, it wouldn’t be us anymore. It would be someone else.
Perhaps the idea behind this is that we could pass through multiple lifetimes via reincarnation. But from a Swedenborgian perspective reincarnation is impossible. Each soul is built within the specific body and specific circumstances that it is born into. It shapes and is shaped by that body and those circumstances. Attempting to put it into a different body, and different circumstances, would be the proverbial attempt to put a square peg in a round hole. It just wouldn’t work. The body and the circumstances would not match that soul. Reincarnation is completely impossible.
Instead, we are given every opportunity to choose good over evil in this life—in the one lifetime we have. Giving us all sorts of do-overs would just be insulting and disrespecting us. It would be God saying, “I don’t like what you did this time around, so you’re just going to have to try again until you get it right”—”getting it right” meaning doing it God’s way instead of our way. Once again, it would mean that we are not human because ultimately, we have no free will.
God arranged it instead so that we have a reasonable length of time in which to try out different possibilities and make a choice between the good and the evil. And once we’ve made that choice, God gives us the freedom to live the life we’ve chosen. Doing otherwise would be like making us go back to college over and over again, and get more and more degrees, until we finally get the degree God wants us to get. Once again, it would mean stripping us of our free will.
Plus, it would be a colossal waste of time!
Why make us go through all those lifetimes, when one lifetime is enough, and then we can move on to enjoy the life we have chosen? Why make us wait millions of years through thousands of lifetimes, when God has created us perfectly capable of doing it in one lifetime lasting decades, not centuries or millennia?
In other words, God has created a far more efficient system than the Eastern reincarnation model. God’s system doesn’t require do-overs, and it doesn’t waste time.
In sum, thinking of people having multiple do-overs is not realistic, and it’s not thoughtful or respectful. It’s not realistic because living a different life would make us a different person. It’s not respectful because it means God not being willing to accept our choices, and making us keep doing it over and over again until we get it “right.”
The real principle is that God gives us every opportunity and incentive to choose good in the lifetime that we do have. If we refuse to choose the good, and choose evil instead, that’s on us.
About this:
I generally agree with your conclusions about this. However, I would add one more thing:
We cannot experience the highest heaven or the lowest hell unless we have gone through all the prior stages required to get there. And the vast majority of people on earth go nowhere near that far in their mental, emotional, and spiritual growth, either up or down.
Swedenborg describes an instance in which some ordinary spirits are brought up to a high heaven and shown the tree of life there, but they can’t see anything at all. They just see some ordinary trees. That’s because their minds do not think in the way required to see such high-level things. They are ultimately allowed to see it, but only by changing their mental state to be something that it isn’t in itself. Presumably when they went back down to their own level, they would once again be unable to see the tree of life in that heavenly paradise.
For us to see the highest heaven or the lowest hell while we are living on earth would be even more impossible. At least those people were spirits living in the spiritual world, where things are much more fluid and adaptable than they are here. On earth, things—including the human mind—are much slower and less adaptable. The vast bulk of people on this earth would be utterly incapable of experiencing the highest heaven or the lowest hell. If they did, it would burn out their mind and heart because it would be far too intense for them to bear, for either good or evil. It would be like someone whose hands are not hardened to hot water trying to do dishes in hot water, only far worse. Instead of being useful or enlightening, it would be intensely painful. Or it would be like someone running a marathon who hasn’t even run a mile before. Most likely the result would be a heart attack and possibly death.
What we are shown is the good or evil that exists on our own mental, emotional, and spiritual level. No one chooses evil without seeing that there are some people who are good and happy people. No one isn’t aware that there is a possibility to live a different, more thoughtful and loving life. We are all given forks in the road where we can go one way or another. And we are perfectly capable of going either way. If we have some sort of mental illness that makes such a choice impossible, then we don’t actually have free will, and in the afterlife the mental illness is removed, and we continue on from wherever we were before the mental illness took hold—even from birth or childhood, if it is that early and severe. Therefore no one goes to hell without having seen both good and evil, and what they are like, and choosing evil over good.
Lots of people make excuses, and say they didn’t have any choice. But it’s not true. We do have a choice, and that is just an excuse.
This is not disagreeing with you. In fact, it is in agreement with this statement of yours:
God gives us exactly enough knowledge to make a choice for good if we are willing. Any more, and it would be overload. It would blow our circuits instead of giving us the amount of power we need to function.
It is a general principle that God gives us exactly as much love, wisdom, and power as we need and are able to accept. Any less, and God would be stingy. Any more, and it would harm us by frying our circuits. In every moment of every day of our life, God is giving us exactly as much as we need to make a choice for good. If we don’t make that choice, once again, that’s on us, and there are no excuses.
Back to the “perfect experiential knowledge,” then, it’s not that it would “coerce” us. It’s that it would overwhelm us. It would be more than we can bear. God gives us just as much as we can bear, and makes sure that we have examples of both good and evil in our own experience and in the people around us that we can see and understand, and make a choice between.
As an example, even hoodlums and criminals have at least some good people in their lives. A common theme in gangster movies, drawn from real life, is the father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, uncle or aunt, who loves the budding criminal and does everything to try to dissuade him from the course of action he is taking, but the criminal goes ahead with it anyway—often destroying or severely damaging the life of the one who loved him so much and tried to dissuade him from going that way.
No one goes through life without some experience of human love and goodness to draw on, making it possible for that person to make a good choice. This is what Swedenborg calls “remains” or “the remnant,” based on the biblical theme of the few remaining good people in the land after some devastating event. If we don’t have these “remnants” of love and goodness within us from childhood, we literally can’t survive. We will die and go to heaven, because our life here is so bleak that it kills us soul and body, and God will not allow that to happen. Not that God kills us. The people around us and our environment do. But God allows it because it is better than the alternative, which would be an adult incapable of choosing good and heaven. And of course, all children who die go to heaven, not to hell.
As an example, experience in hospital nurseries has shown that babies must be held for at least a little while each day, and have human contact, or they will literally weaken and die. We cannot survive infancy and childhood without receiving and experiencing goodness and love. This is the goodness and love stored away inside of us that God can draw upon in our adult years to lead us away from evil and toward good. Even hardened criminals had someone who loved them. And if they do decide to change their ways, it is often the thought and memory of someone who truly cared about them and loved them that turns them around.
Perhaps there are a few more things I could respond to, but this is getting long, so I’ll stop here, and let you continue the conversation or ask further questions if you wish. Most of what you say I agree with, and think is good and right. There were just a few things I would say differently to line things up with our actual experience as human beings, and God’s actual character and actions toward us.
I hope this much is helpful to you in sorting out these complex issues in your own mind.
Hello Lee, I have two questions for you. They are not about the article above but I figured since my most recent comment that I can remember is on this article I figured I would just stick with it. I like Swedenborg’s theology in a lot of ways but there seems to be some important things he never mentioned. Granted I have only read two of his books so not even close to everything he wrote but I am hoping you can tell me if Swedenborg covered any of these topics and what he said about them. If Swedenborg is silent on the issue then maybe you can tell me what you think about these questions instead. These are my two questions:
These two questions also play off of one another. Lets say a person was living in a country where Islam was the dominant religion and Christianity was illegal. This person had the choice to be Muslim or Christian. It would be much easier to just be a Muslim and avoid problems. Would there be any benefit either in this life or the next to be a Christian in this context and suffer for it? If you have already made articles about this I’d be happy to read them. Thanks.
Hi Bob,
These are very good questions. However, to keep the comments section on this article from getting too far off-topic, I’ll link you to a couple of related articles, and ask you to re-post your comment and questions on one of these:
The first article relates to your first question, and the second to your second question. Neither one is a full answer to your questions, so please do re-post your comment, and I’ll fill in some of the blanks in response. Thanks.
Gnosticism (or at least some sect of such) tells quite the tale on the origin of the soul. AFAIK and IIRC, such beliefs say that the demiurge – a lesser evil god – somehow managed to abduct shards or portions of the one true God, and imprison them as souls in reincarnation in the physical, so the demiurge or his agents can feed off of the suffering of those trapped in the physical.
I think the goal of such Gnostic beliefs is to not fall for the tunnel with light at the end trick* after passing away: with the aid of the true God, escape the physical universe and rejoin the true God.
Personally I think that worldview is a rather depressing – and far-fetched – view, and I hope such is not true.
*(The belief goes that if one does fall for the light at the end of the tunnel trick, agents of the demiurge force the soul to reincarnate.)
Hi K,
There’s a reason the title of the very first chapter of Swedenborg’s systematic presentation of Christian doctrine titled True Christianity is “The Oneness of God.” To monotheists, the idea that there is one God may seem almost trivial. In fact, it is the critical, most important first principle from which everything else flows. Once any individual, movement, or religion starts thinking and talking in terms of more than one god, the jig is up. Everything goes downhill from there.
That’s why Swedenborg traces the downfall of Christianity to Nicaea. It was there that Christians first began to believe in three gods in their minds, while still saying “one God” with their lips. And it was there that Christian doctrine, and with it the Christian Church itself, began its path to complete falsification and corruption of the entirety of the Christian religion, which is the state it’s in today, and the reason for its current ongoing downfall.
It’s no different for Gnostic belief systems. Once a group starts thinking in terms of more than one God, the entirety of their thinking and worldview deteriorates rapidly, until you get the depressing and farfetched views that you refer to here.
Everything depends not only on the existence of God, but on the oneness of God.
Gnosticism is polytheistic? I guess it is, since Christ seems to be separate, and there is also Sophia the goddess of wisdom (IIRC).
Hi K,
Gnosticism is not a single viewpoint. There are a lot of types and variations. But that particular kind of Gnosticism, which has a greater and lesser god, is clearly polytheistic.
I read some more on Gnostic beliefs. There seems to be only one true God (the Monad), while the demiurge is a lesser being and false god. And if I read right, Gnostic belief says that the demiurge is ignorant of reality beyond the illusion that is the physical (which the demiurge created).
PS: I also think that depending on the Gnostic belief, the demiurge ranges from evil to merely foolish and incompetent.
PS: This guy explains Gnosticism much better.
Every Major Concept in GNOSTICISM Explained in 9 Minutes
(by Toon Explainer)
Hi K,
Good video. Clear and concise.
There are obvious parallels with New Church thought. There are different levels of being, the higher ones being greater and more perfect and the lower ones being lesser and more imperfect. There’s the idea that this world is not our ultimate home; that our stay here is temporary. There’s the idea of a higher existence that we will go to. And there’s the idea that there is higher knowledge that will lead us there. Plus other parallels.
However, there are also major, distinct differences, starting with the fundamental New Church belief that there is one and only one God, who is the Creator and Sustainer of everything. There are no lesser gods, and no personified emanations from God. Everything except God is created and finite, and therefore by definition is not God.
Specifically, there is no “demiurge” who created a flawed, illusory world either out of malice or out of incompetence. The material world, like the spiritual world, is created by God, and though it is resistive and tends toward evil, it is not intrinsically evil or illusory. It is real, and it is a reflection of the perfection of the spiritual world, albeit at a lower, cruder level of reality.
This points to another major difference. The material universe, in New Church thought, is not a realm of illusion that we get trapped in. It is not a prison, nor is it a cave, to use the Platonist idea. Yes, it is darker and cruder than the spiritual realm, but it is a seedbed, not a prison. It is where new created beings are conceived, born, and grow to adulthood so that they can take their eternal place in the spiritual world. It is not a prison, but a womb in which we are conceived and from which we are born into the spiritual world. So in itself, it is not evil or illusory, but good and real. It becomes illusory only when we think it is the only and greatest reality. As long as we recognize that it is a lower, and for us temporary, reality, then it is good, just as the garden bed and the womb are good.
Further, in New Church thought, we do not individually pre-exist this life. Each newly conceived and born human being is a brand new creation that never existed before. The only sense in which it is an “incarnation” is that it is an expression of some particular aspect of God. But it is an expression that is newly created, not one that came here from another realm. Every new human/spiritual being, according to Swedenborg, gets its start in the material world, where its initial development takes place, and then moves on to the spiritual world, which is its true home. This is another way in which the material world is good and real, not evil or illusory as Gnostics believe. Oh, and we are not “sparks of God.” No part of us is divine. We are entirely created, non-divine beings. However, God does dwell in us.
Related to this, salvation is not a matter of attaining secret knowledge, as it is in Gnosticism. Rather, it is a matter of using that deeper knowledge to build oneself into a good, loving, and useful human being. Salvation is not just a matter of the head. It is a matter of the head, heart, and hands together. It is forming our whole self into a good and heavenly person. It doesn’t require only intellectual effort and enlightenment. It requires a change of heart and life/actions guided by the enlightenment, or truth, we are given.
These are some of the key differences that came to mind as I watched the video. There are others, of course, and other commonalities. But these are some of the basics.
I’ve already given this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRHUXyUOk48 (“What happens when you die” by Hope Through Prophecy”).
You didn’t mention people or groups that reject the idea of an immortal soul. Just refer to the Bible verse Dustin Pestlin quotes in the video, such as “The dead know nothing” (Ecclesiastes 9:5) and “The body will return to the dust, and the spirit to the god who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7).
If there is an immortal soul and the dead are consciousness, doesn’t that negate some of the foundations of the law against contacting the dead (Deuteronomy 18:11)? Isn’t the concept that the dead are literally sleeping and are not conscious, one of the foundations for that law?
Perhaps ruach doesn’t mean a ghostly soul. Nepesh is the only Hebrew word for “soul,” right? Perhaps ruach doesn’t mean the soul that you talk about in this article.
Hi World Questioner,
The ancient Hebrews had a very shadowy idea of the afterlife, if they had any idea of it at all. There was only so much God had available to work with in that culture to inculcate any sense of the afterlife at all. For the most part, they believed that God blessed or cursed people in this life, not in some afterlife, and that this blessing or cursing went down through the generations, so that one’s good or evil actions would have repercussions for one’s children, grandchildren, and further descendants.
As an example of the ancient Israelites’ shadowy sense of the afterlife, see the story of Saul consulting a medium to speak with the deceased Samuel in 1 Samuel 28:3–25. There is not a lot to be gleaned from the story about the aftetrlife, but one thing that’s clear is that it suggests that the ancient Hebrews did believe that the soul survives death in some way, even if they thought of it as merely sleeping. If the soul had ceased to exist, there would be no way the medium could contact Samuel, and no way Saul could have had a conversation with him.
As for the video, I didn’t watch it again. But the verses you mention from it are cherry-picked to support a certain viewpoint. This is very common in fundamentalist and materialistic sects. They pile up passages that seem to support their particular beliefs, while ignoring or explaining away passages that don’t.
Over against those passages in Ecclesiastes there is Jesus saying that those who do good will go to eternal life, whereas those who do not will go to eternal punishment. Sects that don’t believe in hell, or that believe in annihilationism, will try to explain that away, but Jesus himself was not fuzzy or uncertain about the afterlife, and he made it very clear that the good will go to eternal life, AKA heaven, and the evil will go to eternal punishment, AKA hell.
People can prove anything they want from the Bible, because the Bible says many different things. Only a clear understanding of God, spirit, and the meaning of our life in the material world makes it possible to read the Bible correctly.
Why didn’t the Law or the Prophets teach the ancient Hebrews about the afterlife and resurrection? If the Israelites believed death is not the end but there is an afterlife and resurrection, would they still follow God? You said that if they didn’t believe in a literal restoration of the Kingdom of Israel, they wouldn’t follow God.
Hi World Questioner,
If you started talking to me about women’s nails and nail salons, and about all the different styles and methods, I’d probably start fidgeting, then yawning, then looking for a way out of the conversation, because I’m just not interested in that. The ancient Hebrews would have had the same reaction if God started talking to them about the afterlife and resurrection. They just weren’t interested in that sort of thing. They were interested in their lives here and now on this earth. That’s why God didn’t talk to them about the afterlife and resurrection.
It’s not that they wouldn’t still follow God if they believed in an afterlife. It’s just that for them, an afterlife was irrelevant, and not even on their horizon. It just wasn’t anything they thought about. On the other hand, if they thought that God didn’t have the power to bless or curse them in tangible ways on this earth, such as making them rich or poor, or making their crops and wives fertile or infertile, they would indeed stop following God because they would consider God to be irrelevant to their concerns.
As far as the Kingdom of Israel, yes, they believed in a literal restoration of the Kingdom of Israel, and that’s what kept at least some of the Jews from the southern kingdom (Judah) faithful to their God. Otherwise there would not even have been a Judaism for Jesus to be born into, nor would there have been a Temple for him to preach at, and cleanse. If they did not believe that God would rescue them and restore them to their literal, earthly kingdom, they would have lost their faith altogether, and would have just assimilated into the surrounding people in the land that they’d been deported to, like the people of the northern kingdom (Israel), who had already lost their faith and started worshiping other gods.
Even many Jews today still sustain their faith with the idea that they will once again have a kingdom in the Holy Land ruled over by a literal, human Messiah who will make them the pre-eminent people on earth, according to a literal reading of various prophecies in the Hebrew Bible. If they didn’t believe this, many of them would lose their faith even today.
But you didn’t answer this: If the soul is immortal and the dead are conscious, doesn’t that negate one of the foundations of the law against contacting the dead (Deuteronomy 18:11)? The concept that souls are not immortal and the dead are not conscious – isn’t that one of the foundations for that law?
Hi World Questioner,
I don’t get your logic. If something were considered to be impossible, why would there be a law against it?
Deuteronomy 18:11 assumes that contacting the dead is something people can do, and forbids it. In fact, the existence of a law against something is excellent evidence that the forbidden thing is something that people did at that time. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a law against it.
What are the real foundations for the laws given in Deuteronomy 18:9-13?
Hi World Questioner,
For those reading in, here is Deuteronomy 18:9–13:
“Making a son or daughter pass through fire” is a prohibition on child sacrifice, and on human sacrifice in general. The rest prohibits various kinds of magic, divination, and contacting spirits of the dead. Obviously, human sacrifice is wrong. It is murder, which is explicitly prohibited in the Ten Commandments.
About the rest, for an earthly, materialistic culture and its people, such as ancient Israel was, doing such things inevitably leads to superstition and destructive beliefs and practices, because there is no real understanding of spiritual reality and the spiritual realm. Without such an understanding, it all becomes “magical,” and becomes a fascination that draws people away from following God and God’s commandments into all sorts of useless and even destructive practices. Hence the final injunction: “You must remain completely loyal to the Lord your God.”
There is the New Age-y sounding idea of biocentrism, that consciousness is somehow fundamental and creates reality, and can assume form as particular beings (one person compared it to trying on different VR headsets). Aside from that sounding like reincarnation crap, does that sound somewhat like what New Church beliefs claim?
(That claim also sounds like that unsatisfactory radio receiver analogy yet again.)
Hi K,
It’s a fuzzy and not very accurate view of the reality, by New Church standards.
First, once again, we do not “create our own reality,” either here or in the spiritual world. God creates all reality.
However especially in the spiritual world, God creates that reality through the prism of our consciousness, so that it reflects our thoughts and desires. Even the material world is created to reflect humanity, albeit in a less responsive and more stubborn and fixed way. For one ramification of this, see the item, “2. Violence, pain, and suffering exist in the universe because the universe was created for us” in this article:
How can we have Faith when So Many Bad Things happen to So Many Good People? Part 2
If for “consciousness” in the New Agey formulation we substitute “God,” then there is some semblance of truth in that formulation. Unfortunately, New Age formulations tend to avoid God as much as possible. This, as I said previously, is a primary reason they suffer from a fundamental misapprehension about the nature of reality.
What actually happens is that God, who is not mere “consciousness,” but is an actual, real, solid, albeit divine, beyond-space-and-time entity, creates reality, and expresses God’s self in particular beings. God does not “assume form as” those beings. They are not mere extensions of God, but are creations of God, having an existence of their own distinct from, albeit entirely dependent upon, God.
There is only one human being who is an actual assumed form of God, and that is Jesus Christ, who, in Swedenborg’s more abstract terminology, is the “Divine Humanity.” I.e. Jesus is the sole, unique human form of God. All the rest of us are imperfect and limited copies, representing the whole of God in our overall form, but only some specific aspect of God in our relationships with one another, and with humanity as a whole. We’re holographic in that way.
Further, created entities cannot arbitrarily assume different forms. The specific form they take, especially on the spiritual level, is a specific and highly detailed expression of the specific element of God’s being that they represent. They can’t just put on a different “avatar” and exist as something else. That would not reflect their actual core being and essence. This is also why reincarnation is impossible.
Of course, we humans can, in imagination, and now in computer simulations, take on different “avatars.” But these are not full representations of our self. They are an expression of some element of us that we are playing with and exploring. They are at best partial expressions of our total being. Only our spiritual body is a total expression of our core and total being. Our spiritual body reflects every aspect of who we are, whereas if we take on an avatar, that reflects only some particular element or collection of elements of who we are, not the totality.
This is why, as I’ve said in other responses, I do believe we can take on various avatars in the spiritual world if we want to, and the experience of them will be much more realistic and lifelike than what we’ve been able to achieve with our computer and animation technology here on earth so far. Even with a VR headset and/or VR gloves, etc., the experience just isn’t as full as being in our own body in the real world. If you go virtual skiing with our most realistic simulators today, it’s just not going to match actual skiing on a real mountain.
In the spiritual world, I tend to think that you can create virtual realities that do feel as real, or perhaps almost as real, as living in the ordinary day-to-day spiritual world. If you want to live as a crystalline entity for a while, I see no reason why you couldn’t do that. However, it would be only a partial expression of who you are. Eventually, you would return to your actual form as a human being with a spiritual body, just as here on earth, eventually we take off the VR headset and gloves, and go get something to eat, or take a walk over to a friend’s house.
I think the idea that consciousness is somehow fundamental and creates physical reality is New Age woo because the unexpected can happen. If consciousness created physical reality, there should be no surprises. And of course that tired radio receiver analogy would actually work if consciousness created physical reality.
About the avatar thing, hopefully there is a way to alter the way the abstract (and yes it is abstract relative to the physical) appears via correspondence in the New Church afterlife (NCA) to avoid being stuck in human forever, should I wind up in the NCA (or some other way to take a break from being stuck in human form). I do not like being stuck in human life for more than one life, which is why reincarnation (which is hopefully false) is so hellish to me.
This may sound pessimistic, but to me it seems that what it “means to be human” is to suffer: the endless rules of society, the endless pitfalls to avoid to be a moral person, all the ugliness of human nature, the struggles of relationships, the gross limitations of flesh (or any spirit analog)… you get the idea. Of course the amount of suffering varies by person to person, and a number can cope and live happy and fulfilling human lives anyway. Others, not so much. And of course, life is not _all_ suffering, it is not a pure hell. But being stuck in a human (or any flesh or spirit analog) body for eternity is inherently suffering to me. Even if it is somehow different in any NCA, I do not like being stuck in a human body anyway.
The oblivion of metaphysical naturalism does not sound so bad: one finite life stuck _as_ a human body, but then it is like as Epicurus said.
“Where I am, death is not. Where death is, I am not.”
Hi K,
I’m on the fly, but none of those things are true in heaven. This is pretty basic. There, all the struggles and suffering are over.
Hi K,
Yes, I think you’re way too pessimistic. You seem to think that the spiritual word is just Earth 2.0. It’s not. It’s an entirely distinct universe that has entirely distinct substance and entirely distinct laws. Things there do not work the way they do here. If you’re afraid that you’re going to be “stuck” in an eternity of things being just as sucky as they are here on earth, that’s just not how it works. It’s not the reality.
To get specific:
Also, even if all the BS of humanity is somehow magically gone in the NC Heaven (despite ruling loves never changing), for the man who winds up in hell, he could be stuck there forever with no hope of ever getting out, even if he likes it there, if God designed it so that those in hell can never repent unlike those in the physical.
Hi K,
It’s not that it would undermine free will. It’s that if there is never any point at which our basic character becomes set and permanent, then there is never any security for anyone. Everyone in heaven would have to fear that they will one day switch over and become hellish. And for people in hell, even if they made the choice to go to heaven, it wouldn’t be permanent, and they would have the same fear.
Basically, it wouldn’t be good for anyone.
Besides, the people in hell do want to be there. As annoying as that may be for you or me, it’s not up to us to tell people they can’t choose evil as their permanent choice.
That would undermine free will, if the idea is that once people in hell choose heaven, they’ll stay there forever. The only way it wouldn’t undermine free will is if everyone is free to choose between good and evil forever, which, once again, means that no one can dwell secure in his or her life.
That truly would be hell, for everyone.
PS: I disagree being able to recover from hell after death undermines free will.