Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/226

210 It is as if one had been hurled back into the early centuries and were surrounded by zealous disputants belonging to the various Gentile Christian or Judaeo-Christian churches, all feeling it vitally important to shout down the Jewish religion. "God-Messiah," used almost exclusively in these scripts by Swedenborg, is a Judaeo-Christian term; so is God-Jehovah, also used by him. So is the emphasis on the atonement. It is as though Marcionites and Ebionites were going at it, hammer and tongs; glimpses of a Gnostic can be had, or a Manichean flits by. The seething unsettled theologies of the second century seem to swirl around us.25

The style is different from Swedenborg's. The tone is extremely argumentative, at times addressing itself as if to a present Judaic adversary. "Give now some other interpretation!" In a part of which Swedenborg says specifically that it was written by his hand, not by his mind, the "speaker" rants against "the descendants of Jacob," calling them "backsliders from their benefactor, nay, their Savior . . . and now let each one of you say whatever he can." 26

Swedenborg did not like to write some of it. At times he even expressed his objection. When Jacob was declared to be the very serpent who was going to bruise the heel of "God Messiah," he dissented from "so sinister a meaning," and he added that "for myself it is abhorrent to say this, to write these words. Therefore they must be said by those who are permitted thus to bring them in." 27

There is nothing traceable in his previous writings or in what he is known to have read which would seem to account for this. At times one is tempted to use the license offered by Mr. Carington and imagine that Swedenborg's psychon-system, so long preoccupied with Biblical exegesis, had, by the power of association of ideas, attracted out of the world of discarnate psychon-systems little whirls, still stuck in the second century, but very lively, and carrying with them whole landscapes of ideas and large casts of persons. For at times Swedenborg seems to himself surrounded by Jews, but Jews seen inimically.

Before these scripts he had a high opinion of David and Solomon, for instance. In 1744 he wrote that the psalms of David and Solomon "contain veriest wisdom in simple form" and that he doubted whether all of Seneca contained as much wisdom as a single one of those psalms.28