Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/219

XVI ] by a large garden. Having to work at odd hours and in odd states, it was of importance to him to be free from interruption and from street noises—heavy carriages on cobble stones—the cries of vendors.

In his new work, which he provisionally called a "spiritual exposition" of the Bible, there was a strand of the same Christian Neoplatonism as had preoccupied him for so long, bar the crisis period; and there was a beginning thread of "psychic" experiences; but the dominant strand was the Bible exegesis. It was that which he particularly felt was inspired.

A good many authors feel so about what they write, while they are in the fervor of composition, when thoughts rise up from the stores of the subconscious, almost seeming to come from an outside source. That is a common-sense interpretation of Swedenborg's large claim, and probably partly justified. On this view one could well say that, confronted by the vast gap between much of the Old Testament and what he knew to be true in science and ethics, he explained the gap by saying, in effect: These things that offend your reason and your heart are true (they had to be true, even literally, being the Bible) in so far that they do give us a history of the Jews, but this history was so contrived by the Almighty that their innermost truth is symbolic of spiritual matters and prophetic of the Messiah that is to come. They are moral and spiritual allegories, in every detail, as well as history.

Castellio, whose work he knew, believed this, but it must be remembered that Swedenborg had read a great many other books, enough to have forgotten some of them. (It was not till he was fifty-six that he thought he was "forbidden" to read theological books.3) As already stated, he knew Philo Judæus, who interpreted the Old Testament allegorically in the same way, minus the Messiah, Philo being a Jew. Swedenborg had read most of the Church fathers, among them Origen. In Origen's Alexandria of the third century enough of the skeptical spirit of Greece was still alive to make an educated Christian work hard at reinterpreting the Bible. Origen concluded—and he was not the first or the only one of that time to do so—that Scripture had three kinds of sense, one moral, one historical, and one spiritual,4 corresponding fairly well to Swedenborg's divisions.