Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/166

150 of the soul as capable of being influenced by the divine and only Reality, even of being identified with it, and that sees the essence of this divinity as love working through wisdom.

But the brimming—and lasting—wave of light, warmth, and confidence which now so evidently bore up Swedenborg was not due to his intellectual agreement with this. He had agreed intellectually long ago, and it had not prevented him from passing through such doubt and sadness that he was on the brink of thinking he had to sacrifice his reason in order to "believe."

Then he had, through his vision, felt the "love of God." And, during the months that followed, he had scrutinized the experience and come through to certainty, with reason intact.

Clumsily made as his new book was, with pedantic interpolations and gigantic footnotes like chunks of science heaved into mystic joy, it was the work of a sane mind, a mind that often flashed into brilliance as when he expressed in a paragraph things he had taken chapters for in other books, while at times there was poetic grandeur in it such as in Adam's and Eve's vision of creation. (Eve was as intelligent as she was beautiful.)

There were also many indications of what it was that had saved the day for reason.

Swedenborg no longer felt he had to believe in only the literal significance of the seven plagues of Egypt and whatever else offended his head or heart in the Bible.

He had freed himself from his compulsion, as many had done before him, by the device of interpreting the Bible symbolically. He had long been interested in symbolism; as early as 1734 he was curious about hieroglyphics as symbols. And by deciding what the symbols in the Bible meant he could make everything fit. In 1741 he had been working out a Hieroglyphic Key to the Bible, and in 1744, probably after his vision, he had resumed this work. It consisted mainly of lists of the metaphors, parables and allegories used in the Bible, and of his own interpretations.

Swedenborg had read Philo Judaeus, Origen, and others who had tried to make the Bible more divine by humanizing it, through symbolic interpretation, but the Latin translation which he was using at this time happened to be that of Sebastian Castellio. Castellio, one of the noblest of the Christian Neoplatonists, had also