Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/337

XXIV ] subject in the spirit world, incredible to any but the denizens of the higher heavens.

In language much more rainbow-colored and with much more detail than is usual with him, Swedenborg in this book described visions of his, such as that of a married pair from heaven who descended to him that he might see two angels that yet were spoken of as one angel, because they utterly complemented each other.11 It must be confessed that many of the discussions Swedenborg said he had in the spirit world, especially with women about the nature of love, have a flavor not of the eighteenth century but of the salons of the seventeenth. A little less emphasis on the other world, and one might be in the salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet, discussing the points of the Carte du Tendre.

But he had a reason for it. In a garden called, in other-world language, "Adramandoni," among laurel and palm, olive trees and flowers, he said he saw near a fountain husbands and wives, youths and maidens, seated on the grass and listening to two angels, clad in purple and scarlet, telling them about marriage and its delights. "This being the subject of their discourse, the attention was eager and the reception full," Swedenborg says, and one suspects he knew what he was doing when he chose these wrappings for his messages about ethics, religion, and the other world. The angels told the eager listeners that conjugial love was divine because it consisted of divine love, divine wisdom, and divine use. Without wisdom love was a mere infatuation; without use even love and wisdom were but a transitory emotion. "Love cannot rest unless it is at work, for love is the essential active power of life," the angels declared, "and to work is use." 12

The specific "use" of earthly marriage, as Swedenborg saw it, was of course the procreation of children, for otherwise the communities of heaven might lack new citizens, but his "doctrine of use" became one of the foundation pillars of his teachings. Swedenborg was nothing if not practical; he had had too many of his good memorials dustily filed not to want theory carried out into practice.

Having established the high ancestry of sexual psychophysical pleasure, Swedenborg also discussed with the spirits many of its problems, with amazing knowledge and shrewdness for a