Skip to main content

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Even as he deeply respected them, the poet, Oscar Milosz, suggested that Swedenborg's spiritual writings, with their detailed, concrete depictions of envisioned heavens, hells and intermediate worlds, often felt as if they were theologies in search of emboldening vision rather than vision speaking into theology.

This may have been, in part, the temperament of a poet meeting that, in Swedenborg, of a scientist. William Blake, an errant disciple of Swedenborg's, also criticized the preachy, prim tendencies of certain of Swedenborg's heavenly inhabitants and their messages. They seemed too tidily lined up behind Swedenborg's exacting theological framework. For Blake, the divine imagination was more fluid, free and liberating from either narrow moralities or fix it all metaphysics than Swedenborg would allow!

But as Gary Lachman shows in his accomplished essay on Swedenborg (Into the Interior: Discovering Swedenborg), this was a man on a dedicated interior journey, whose discoveries in the structure and life of consciousness were important, and reflect the patterning and process of similar journeys.

Long ago I read Swedenborg's 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' - those extraordinarily detailed, concrete, and dry, if moving, descriptions of 'after life' states. Lachman brings them alive by illuminating their status as 'states of consciousness' that seek to show the enfolding unity of things and where each particular thing embodies a divine showing forth. Unity is not a subsuming 'cosmic jello' but a multiplicity of things each carrying the divine imaging, according to its nature, its capability. Swedenborg is an accomplished mystic under the guise of a sometimes pedantic visionary!

Lachman quotes the philosopher Robert Avens defining an 'angel' as 'a human in whom the inner and the outer, the material and the spiritual, perfectly correspond to each other, that is a person in a state of complete self-expression' and that is exactly Swedenborg's vision of the human beings destiny to become angelic - where inner and outer are in perfect harmony.

We all, says Swedenborg, find our place in heaven or hell by following the path of our deepest interest. These can no longer (in our 'after life' state) be hidden. They emerge and we discover either our harmony or our hypocrisy. How revealing might it be to ponder our deepest interest and how difficult it might be to do that in full honesty?

However, I am with Blake in believing that even if led to hell by our interest that interest is never fixed. Unlike Swedenborg, Blake saw that the states of heaven and hell are eternal but we pass through them as our interest is purified, transformed. Swedenborg, though charged with heresy, remained sufficiently aligned with his Lutheran origins to imagine that eternal damnation (though in his understanding self-inflicted by your own deepest interest that creates a mirroring hell) could be a soul's final destiny.

This is the second of Lachman's (prolific) output that I have read and I have to say his ability to write lucidly about complex realities with illumination and a grounding good sense are deeply admirable. He makes 'popular' in the best of senses.


                                          The Angel of the Flowing Light by Cecil Collins

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more