Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/170

154 Here is no mention of any commission either, but he is aware of certain inconsistencies, for he adds to this the following humble note:

"As to those things that have been written concerning myself, I cannot so confirm them as to be able to testify to them before God; for I cannot know whether the several words of the description [descriptions?] are such, and this in least detail, as to coincide entirely. Therefore, if God grants, they must be amended at some other time, and this in such a way that I can then seem to myself to speak things absolutely true." 40

Eight months or so after he was supposed to have received a divine commission to reinterpret the Bible, could he write such a confession of uncertainty as the above?

That he came to believe firmly in the commission we know, since in his old age he told Robsahm and Beyer and others about it, more or less in the same way. It is perhaps unlikely that Robsahm—the careful bank oflicial—telescoped several different stories by Swedenborg into one story. No, Swedenborg undoubtedly did it himself, unconsciously of course. But the human memory is a great dramatist, and it loves the unities of time and place, especially when, instructed by overwhelming need, it selects the incidents to be combined.

Swedenborg needed to believe in the symbolic exegesis of the Bible and in divine authority for it, since that was the only way in which he could keep both the Bible and his reason. But what really shocked him into devoting himself to the "mission" of this interpretation was undoubtedly something that happened to him in April, 1745. It was his feeling that he had seen and spoken with "dead" acquaintances of his, "of all classes," in other words, with people he knew. This is what "convinced" him, as he told Robsahm, and it is too much to expect that, considering his need for belief, he should have seen the illogicality of thinking that everything he was experiencing was "real" just because he was suddenly put in the presence of people of whose identity he was able to feel sure.

He had been in and out of dreams and semidreams and visions which might have been traced by him to his own knowledge and wishes—he was subtle enough for that to have occurred to him,