How Trustworthy is Swedenborg?

This post is rooted in the mundane—my waking up this morning, unusually refreshed. Then came the thought: I wonder if we sleep in the next world? I certainly hope so. We so need those periods of non-existence. In turn came the thought: Do angels sleep? Swedenborg said that they do, sort of. They have cycles. Indeed they also have houses. The venerable Swede says, in Chapter XXI of Heaven and Hell, “Their dwellings are just like dwellings on earth which we call homes, except that they are more beautiful. They have rooms, suites, and bedrooms, all in abundance. They have courtyards, and are surrounded by gardens, flowerbeds, and lawns.” [§ 184]. Then came to mind the title to this post: Yes. But how trustworthy is Swedenborg?

Even to talk about that—except dismissively—one has to credit the possibility that another world exists and one that is, furthermore, in some ways analogous to ours. The mundane testimony for that comes from near-death experience reports. In these we are occasionally told of beautiful places, buildings, landscapes, gardens, walls, and the like. Beings appear—including people whom the experiencer recognizes: relatives who have passed on. Most of these reports are emotionally charged, brief, and the testimony is neither long nor detailed. Beautiful flowers, waterfalls, meadows, etc.

The core of my question, therefore, has everything to do with the testimony itself—and the qualifications of the witness. Swedenborg’s experiences began in his maturity, at 53. At that time he was already a well-known and accomplished scientific writer and public administrator. His access to other realms was more or less continuous, thus more extensive than brief NDEs. That that realm was as difficult for him to understand as it is for the near-death experiencers, who often remark about the oddity of their experience, is clear from Swedenborg’s diaries, never intended for the public. That world is different, yet in some meaningful sense similar to this one. Not only in Heaven and Hell but in his other writings, Swedenborg is constantly emphasizing the differences. He formulated the concept of “correspondences.” That notion is that what is below has corresponding realities above; but what is above is not literally what is below. Therefore angels have recurring cycles of consciousness; they experience heaven intensely at the apex of the cycle, as almost an absence at its nadir. In Swedenborg’s attempt to convey this, he speaks of feelings of heat and light and of cold and darkness. And angels cycle because they are still developing, and these changes are of help in that process. When he speaks of bedrooms, he means that they have places of rest that correspond best to what we mean when we retire to our bedrooms, but both “places” and “rest” must be understood as inner soul-states (§ 155).

One more note. Swedenborg’s angels do not correspond to the beings described in Scholastic philosophy. They are advanced spirits. No angel is a species unto itself; all spirits are of the same kind but differ in degree of perfection. Furthermore people can and do eventually advance and themselves become angels. But this note merely to mark out the ground, not to commit theology. This post is about a kind of modified empiricism: knowledge gained by experience, and not necessarily merely of the sensory variety.

If the beyond is different but yet in some ways corresponds to this realm, that would explain why different people report different but very similar things. To link the two the experiencer must interpret those more ethereal phenomena. And in such a context, the skill, intelligence, and experience of the witness are important. Swedenborg, therefore, skilled in observation and in relationships by a life of scientific study, and long exposure to the phenomenon, is probably a very trustworthy witness. And I can go to sleep tonight reassured to think that angels are also in their bedrooms and getting some necessary down-time.

Winged Migration

Today, by happenstance, I took my walk far from our house and thus saw an area on foot too far away to reach. It was a splendid walk, blue sky, bright, a few puffs of cloud—and this after an unremitting ten, eleven days of overcast, drizzle, snow, sleet, overcast, drizzle, and so on. Along the way I passed St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, immediately adjacent to a huge golf course. The church had been built in 1947 and featured at one of its entrances a shield depicting St. Michael astride a winged horse, a shining lance held in his right, about to pierce a wicked-looking red devil on the ground below. The shield featured the wings in such strikingly white ceramic, they left an impression as I moved on, flanking the green of the golf-course to one side and an empty and almost unearthly silent up-scale neighborhood on the other, the only sounds coming from, well, winged birds.

Those wings and that horse together launched a kind of musing. I could not remember ever having seen St. Michael mounted—and on Pegasus at that. That didn’t fit; to take just one observation, a winged creature surely needs no mount to get about. Then it dawned that the horse meant to indicate high status, and what with the rider himself splendidly winged, the horse had to be winged too. And his own execution of these wings had evidently pleased the artist so that he lifted them by color—or the lack of it. Later, on the Internet, I confirmed my own take on the matter. No, St. Michael, although very often shown as air-borne, does not need to and therefore doesn’t ride. I am here reproducing a Dürer drawing of 1498 that resides today in the Kunsthalle of Karlsruhe in Germany. The drawing, curiously, reflects the very thoughts I had as I marched on.

One was that wings visually picture and thus symbolize a quality we have but cannot actually see—a spiritual nature. Indeed we share this nature with the angels and with devils too who, in depictions of St. Michael, always appear at least singly as Satan or as Satan and his followers—and as the antagonists of a great battle. And Dürer had it right: the devils also have their wings, but not such as you’d brag about. Dürer’s drawing is quite wondrous in that the country-side beneath this aerial scene is ordinary and quite peaceful. The battle rages in the air—in a hidden dimension, you might say, one that a peaceful peasant, too small to see in this etching, would not actually see if he looked up. But it is happening nonetheless—right inside him.

Yes, I thought, eventually—after my walk, proceeding in a huge three-mile ellipse, once more brought heavy traffic into view and therefore I would now be distracted—yes, I thought, we are engaged, aren’t we, in a winged migration of our own. And let’s not blame it on peaceful nature that Dürer also had sense enough to show quite realistically as something pleasing, unless, of course, that battle up above happens to descend and disfigures the countryside.

Just before I reached Vernier, the heavy artery, I passed North High School. It is located precisely at one antipode of my ellipse, St. Michael at the other. There, at North, outside the fence of this huge complex, I saw the following chalked in simple but legible letters across the sidewalk: DOES GOD KNOW ME? And beneath it, by way of signature: MORMON.ORG. Angel Moroni meet Angel St. Michael?

Angels, Angels Everywhere

Last night, passing my bookcase on the way to bed, I sort of swept along a book I hadn’t looked at ever, it seemed, and it promised me a few thoughts to take into my dreaming. Angels, by Paola Giovetti, an Italian lady described on the Internet as a “giornalista e scrittirice, nata a Firenze risiede a Modena.” Just love the sound of that language. The book was published in 1993, a trade paperback with colored pictures and a text, priced then at $22.95. My library here evidently bought it immediately, but had already discarded it by December of that year—and I must have picked it up then. It’s been on my shelf since. I’ve discovered that my library resolutely tosses anything that hasn’t been checked out in five years—but some things, evidently, are shown the door much faster.

It turned out to be a sincere sort of work. Beautiful pictures, a text thoroughly footnoted, four pages of bibliography, nicely and carefully written to settle gently, as it descended, on all believers be they inspired by traditional religious faiths or the breath of the New Age…without either camp feeling the least possible unease. Hence, of course, everything is an angel. Serendipities hide them much as near death experiences unveil them. This produced a number of reactions in me—after I woke up this morning, not as I read. One was that the unseen reality is a perfect receiver of any kind of projection, much like brush-shadows are at twilight. The other was triggered by the discussion of guardian angles, regarding the curious nature of that concept. What an extremely boring assignment it would be to shadow and guide some fellow as he stumbles through his life trying to influence his actions while unable to compel him to do anything at all—because, as my author assures me, free will is God’s most precious gift to us. Words flow from the pen without at times stirring up even a single thought. Is it really logical to be given free will and also a guardian angel? Who cannot guard us or even mildly influence us if we’re inclined to make havoc? Does conscience need an administrative assistant?

Mind you, the book’s overall effect is positive. Indeed the book is well worth having.

The question in my mind is how really to account for the feeling that underlies this book and also renders its message acceptable to the average reader—not least to me.

What is the nature of that feeling? It is that a certain benevolence does really seem to be present in reality and actually does manifest, if only sometimes—in developments, events, and our experiences of them. There is a feeling, certainly present in me, suggesting something, some invisible field, something that does appear to communicate, yet without interfering. Serendipitous events are such communications. They have the character of confirmation: Yes. I am there!

This is the “ground” that calls for some kind of integration into the dismal daily. And some people search for the meaning and use the concept of the angel to build a picture. The reality, however, is not fleshed out by labeling certain experiential clusters with this name or that.

Angels: Heavenly Schematics

I am still circling the subject of angels but now would like to enlarged upon the concepts I first outlined in the last post on this subject (“Angels: A Short Overview”). There I proposed two sharply distinct views of angels. We could call these Western and Eastern. The Western view represents a highly-developed cluster of philosophical conceptions; the Eastern provides a very sophisticated image but much less developed in philosophical terminology—perhaps of necessity; the Eastern is much more dynamically complex.

The western view is dominated by the concept of Creation. In that conception God creates a universe. It has a hierarchical structure. Seen from above God is the summit, the angels are a lower order; they are creatures of pure spirit. Beneath that level are humans, composed of spirit and of matter—indeed these two components are considered permanently fused by God’s choice so that the strictly human must always be both. Hence, after the Judgment at the End of Time, we shall have resurrection bodies. Beneath that level come animals, plants, and non-living matter. We can also see this hierarchy from below. To do so we can turn to the poetic formulations of Genesis. There matter is made first; heaven and earth are created, the darkness illuminated. God next makes lower forms, finally man. Angels are missing in this view, but the presumption might be that the creation of “heaven” also includes the creation of angels. The angels then later appear as messengers of God. Here, of course, I’m tracing the Aristotelian, Thomistic formulations in which the two fundamental realities are unformed prime matter and immaterial form.

While the hierarchy is pleasing, the cosmology altogether lacks any kind of justification for matter, as such, except as the wax in which lower orders (not the higher) may be made visible by the impress of form. Matter-form duality admirably fits Aristotle’s concept of substance, but Aquinas has problems maintaining a rationally pleasing hierarchy as he moves on up to the angelic level. If substance is matter-form (hylomorphic), are angels then insubstantial? To get around this problem, Aquinas introduces the notion that angels are also marked by a dual composition; their essence is “substantiated,” as it were, by existence. Aquinas separates essence from existence. God, finally, in Aquinas’ view, is a Being whose essence and existence are one and the same. All I can do here is confess to the opacity of my own intellect. My intuition will not follow me into this thicket. Nothing resonates.

An emanationist schematic of reality pleases me much more—although it has its own challenges. To express that model in static terms—just to make it visible—we might say that reality manifests in degrees of subtlety, from the most gross to the most subtle. But at every level a duality exits—call it matter-form, passive-active, receptive-creative, body-soul, what have you. We might picture each being, substance, or entity as a temporary fusion of two distinct aspects of reality that, in the Ultimate, are one. These two core realities cohere less and less as we descend (or move away) from the Source (God) and appear more and more complexly fused as we ascend to (move toward) the Ultimate. Within the Ultimate the duality disappears into Pure Act. At the other extreme the duality also fuses, but in the sense of “locking up,” thus losing actuality and becoming, at the extreme, the closest imaginable something to non-existence. Here images of Satan, as depicted by Dante in the deepest pit of hell, produce an interesting picture to contemplate.

Still holding the static view, in this schematic angels may be seen as higher entities, thus more complex and unified beings. Humans as simpler and more fragmented entities—but on a much higher level than animals or inorganic matter. But everywhere, at every level, the dualism holds. At every point, from tiniest to greatest, there are analogues to body and to soul. Thus even the minutest subatomic particles of matter have a “pilot wave,” to cite Louis de Broglie and the elaboration of his notion by David Bohm. As above, so below.

The emanationist schematic, which is more akin to the Eastern philosophical traditions, is, however, a dynamic system. That is where, viewed from a Western perspective, problems appear. What we call creation is, in this view, a continuous outflow of divine substance. It “descends” in a way. It becomes ever more coarse as its “distance” from God increases. The problem? The problem is that spatial concepts are required to understand this model. But so does, of course, the Western notion of creation, but we are just more used to that one and rarely bother wondering if God first had to create a “space” for his creation. The Kabbalists (Isaac Luria, for instance) did actually wonder—and proposed that God’s first act was to create a vacuum. The scheme also appears to be a species of pantheism—but that need not be so. We need only make two assumptions to redeem it. One is that this outflow is a circulation. The other is that, on it ascent back to the One, the creation has achieved a higher degree of perfection. A third assumption might be that the creation itself, in the persons of the souls God has created at the outset of the downward flow, participate in the creation by using their free will—or don’t. This freedom, of course, only resides in one of the two core “elements” that make up creation, not in the other. That one is what we call soul, the entity. The other, by contrast, always follows strict laws—which even the free soul cannot suspend. Thus what we call a miracle consists of the lifting of matter from a lower to a higher level, not the violation or suspension of God’s law at all.

In this dynamic model, beings are perpetually descending and ascending, some outward bound to learn or to experience limitation, some inward bound to realize a higher form. Both the down and upward trajectories are spiraling structures—away from unity and back toward it. In this view separate creation of angelic orders, of humans, of animals, of plants becomes unnecessary—which would please Occam. The creation begins to take on a vastly more elegant form. And, pleasingly, what we see through the narrow lens of science appears in harmonious concordance with what our intuitions of the great whole whisper to us in the silence.

The Angel Beckons

The title is my own and chosen for its context here, today. See the last post to understand it. The following is, again, from Rumi’s Divani Shamsi Tabriz XII.

Every form you see has its archetype in the placeless world;
If the form perished, no matter, since its original is everlasting.
Every fair shape you have seen, every deep saying you have heard,
Be not cast down that it perished; for that is not so.
Whereas the spring-head is undying, its branch gives water continually.
Since neither can cease, why are you lamenting?
Conceive the Soul as a fountain, and these created things as rivers:
While the fountain flows, the rivers run from it.
Put grief out of your head and keep quaffing this river water;
Do not think of the water failing; for this water is without end.
From the moment you came into the world of being,
A ladder was placed before you that you might escape.
First you were mineral, later you turned to plant,
Then you became animal: how should this be a secret to you?
Afterwards you were made man, with knowledge, reason, faith;
Behold the body, which is a portion of the dust-pit, how perfect it has grown!
When you have travelled on from man, you will doubtless become an angel;
After that you are done with this earth: your station is in heaven.
Pass again even from angelhood: enter that ocean,
That your drop may become a sea which is a hundred seas of ‘Oman.
Leave this ‘Son,’ say ever ‘One’ with all your soul;
If your body has aged, what matter, when the soul is young?

Jalal’ud-Din Rumi (1207-1273) was a Sufi mystic who lived most of his life in a region which is now Turkey. This poem was written in Farsi and the translation is by R.A. Nicholson.

Angels: A Short Overview

Too many articles on angels rapidly bog down. The become historical. They try to explain the twelve angelic orders and their arrangement into four angelic choirs. They delve into biblical references. They deal with the celebrities among the angels. And so on. They almost never touch the core issue that interests a traveler of the frontier. Are angels real? How do they fit the scheme of things.

Every culture believes in angels, but to make the differences clear, let me suggest the following. Only the Judeo-Christian-Muslim cultures—they are genuinely monotheistic and adhere to a belief in a single, all-powerful God—view angels as a distinct category of beings. They project three kinds of conscious beings: humans, angels, and God.

In most other cultures angels are classified as gods and goddesses; they are celestial beings. The higher gods are higher by degree, not in kind. The angelic form, therefore, is not specifically differentiated. Two examples. The equivalent of an angel in Hinduism is a deva, a god or goddess. The word itself is rooted in the concept of the celestial, shining, or luminous. In Mazdaism all beings are conceived to have a fravarti, thus a celestial counterpart; we are twinned with our guardian angel, as it were. And angels of collectives exist as well. Mazdaism might be considered an angelology. In all systems, not least in the Christian, these spirits may be good or bad, and the bad ones are demons.

Staying with the Asian approach for just a moment longer, we see there that the distinction between humans and higher spirits is continuous. Humans are fallen sparks of the divine. The devas are the same sparks at a higher level. The difference is one of condition, not of essence. Only in the western conception are angels a specially created order. And in the Muslim conception (but notably not in Muslim mysticism, e.g., in the writings of Rumi) angels are functions; they’re strictly messengers of God without a will of their own.

The Asian view, which happens to be the view of the majority of humans, has only two rather limited parallels in the West. Swedenborg—and the churches that follow his teaching—hold that angels are simply highly advanced humans, that all angels began as humans—as did all demonic souls. Here is a quote from Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell which makes this point succinctly:

People in the Christian world are totally unaware that heaven and hell come from the human race. They actually believe that angels were created in the beginning and constitute heaven, and that the devil or Satan was an angel of light who became rebellious and was cast out together with his faction, and that this gave rise to hell.

Angels are utterly amazed that there can be this kind of belief in the Christian world, and even more so that people know absolutely nothing about heaven, even though this is a primary doctrine of the church. Knowing that this kind of ignorance is prevalent, they are profoundly delighted that it has now pleased the Lord to reveal to us so much about heaven — and about hell as well—and so as much as possible to dispel the darkness that is rising daily because this church [Swedenborg means this era] is drawing to a close. [Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, §311]

One faith that arose from the Muslim, and strictly-speaking the Shi’ite branch of Islam, has views almost identical to Swedenborg’s. They are the Baha’is.

Interesting, isn’t it? We have a rather ancient grouping of Asian traditions—and tiny minorities in the west—both of which suggest an interestingly parsimonious explanation of the angelic phenomenon. Together these views suggest that a single created conscious agency suffices to explain higher created beings existing beneath the Ultimate creator’s throne. And we belong into that category right alongside angels. The division of this community—which I like to call the soul community—into three parts is based on the operation of our free will. Some are demonic because they’re headed downward, some are embodied, and some are celestial because they are moving upward through the infinite reaches of reality. The explanation of that status in the middle, thus of the souls encased in bodies differs. The Asians view it as part of a descent; we were drawn by the desire for limited experience; in Swedenborg’s view we are experiencing the first state of life as newly created souls.

This will serve as a very general introduction to this subject. To see a much more sophisticated view of the place of the angelic in the order of creation, as described by the immortal poet, Jalal’ud-Din Rumi, a Sufi, I suggest that you read the next post.

Angels

[Jacob] dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. [Genesis 28:12]

He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. [Psalms 91:11]

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell. [Shakespeare, Macbeth IV, iii, 22]

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
[Richard Purdy Wilbur, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, 1956]

I looked over Jordan and what did I see? …
A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.
[Swing Low, Sweet Chariot]

“Pass in, pass in,” the angels say,
“In to the upper doors,
Nor count compartments of the floors,
But mount to paradise
By the stairway of surprise.”
[Ralph Waldo Emerson. Merlin I]




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Angels are a fascinating and deep subject worth pondering. A post on the subject is in the making, but I thought I’d introduce it in this manner, touching on some views of angels over time in quotes. If you want to read a poem of mine about angels, with some appended paragraphs from Swedenborg, see this post on Ghulf Genes. I collect my poems on that site, although that poem, and an earlier companion to it, reachable here, belong in the context of the borderzone.

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The painting is by Hieronymus Bosch, Ascent of the Blessed. Bosch (1450-1516), a Dutch painter, long predates any modern discussions of near-death experiences in many of which tunnels with a light at the end—and sometimes pairs of guides or helpers, and a luminous being present at arrival—became common enough to be abbreviated as NDEs.