Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/247

XVIII ] however with the knowledge that it took years for Locke's Human Understanding and Milton's Paradise Lost to make their way.

Lewis's insistence that this was a book-bargain beyond all book-bargains was not incorrect. But not till our day, really, with its nonsectarian interest in religion and ethics, new light on the subconscious workings of the mind, and great development of psychical research, can this rather chaotic mass of "heavenly secrets" be seen for the treasure trove it indubitably is, from several points of view.

The Bible interpretation had been freed from the cruder aspects of The Word Explained, which comprised Swedenborg's first, almost unchanged, automatic writings. A comparison: in the latter the "Philistines" (Genesis 26:15) are said to mean "the gentiles who do not profess the true faith and also the Jews who are not yet converted, and who thus are separated from the members who have entered into Christ's church," and in the "inmost" sense as being "the crew of the devil," or the devil's intermediaries.3 But in the Arcana the "Philistines" are interpreted as meaning the kind of people who "applied themselves little to life but much to doctrine," the kind who "being without good cannot understand truth and are not even willing to know it." 4

The first interpretation savors of those bellicose opinions, cited previously, belonging to the second century's strife between converted and unconverted Jews, but the second is purely ethical and universal. In general, although the Arcana continued, most tediously, to explain the Old Testament as referring symbolically to the New, the stress throughout was laid on the spiritual regeneration of man, with marvelous twistings of the text to suit the interpretation.

Swedenborg claimed for the Arcana, as indeed he did for all his theological works, that they were not his own, in the sense that they had been celestially "dictated" to him. That raises the question of the "authority" of these writings. It was one that preoccupied him considerably at the beginning. In the latter part of his life he always stated as an absolute fact that the Lord, or the Lord "in the Word," was his sole source of information, but at the beginning of his intercourse with the other world, when he so often quotes this or that entity, he felt he had some explanation to make. In a diary