Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/331

XXIV ] Except for certain forms of Hinduism or Tantric Buddhism, it is doubtful if in any advanced form of religion so much stress has been laid on the symbolic significance of sex. In Swedenborg's philosophy "good and truth" (or love and wisdom) are united, or married, so as to form "one" in the Lord, or, as he sometimes says, good and truth are the Lord. Therefore, he says, "a universal conjugial sphere proceeds from the Lord and pervades the universe from its first things to its last, thus from angels even to worms." 2 It is the same, he says, as the "sphere of propagation." But as it is the sphere of propagation, "it follows that from this comes the love of the sex." It flows differently into all the different forms of the universe. In man "as he increases in wisdom his form is perfected; and this form receives, not the love of the sex, but the love of one of the sex," and that enables him to be united with heaven. If "the form of his mind" doesn't progress toward intelligence and from intelligence to wisdom, he can receive the influx of the universal sphere of sex "no otherwise than as the lower subjects of the animal kingdom." 3

Swedenborg's marriage mysticism, which he elaborates in great detail and works into his theology, may have stemmed partly from his own longing for an ideal marriage or it may have been another one of the topics that he received via automatic writing—there are conversations on the subject with angels recorded in the diary—or it may have been both. (The great modern Hebrew scholar Gershom G. Scholem has pointed out that certain Kabbalists used sexual imagery to describe the union of God and His "Shekhinah"—the feminine element in God—and saw this union as "the central fact in the whole chain of divine manifestations in the hidden world.") 39

At any rate the long new book with the alluring title contained a great deal of shrewd wisdom about the relations of men and women, whether in or out of this world. Swedenborg was not afraid of "the flesh." When asked in the other world as to whether marriages were not "doings of the flesh," he said, "Are they not also deeds of the spirit? And what the flesh does from the spirit is it not spiritual?" 4

That, in brief, was his philosophy of sex.