Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/371

XXVIII ] brief creed of five articles that sounded almost orthodox, if one did not read his explanations of what was meant by each article in it.

One was: "God is one in whom there is a divine Trinity, and the Lord God the Savior Jesus Christ is that one."

The gist of his explanations of this was that God, the invisible, unmanifest, spaceless and timeless,2 (the Godhead of Eckhart), seeing the state into which His creatures had fallen through their injudicious use of freewill, manifested Himself in time by descending into a human body so that the invisible could become visible, and act materially in a world of matter, for, said the practical Swede, "no one can scale a fish without a knife or pluck a crow without fingers or descend to the bottom of a lake without a diving bell." 3

The "Trinity" in the Man-God was his soul from the eternal and timeless Father, his body as the Son of Mary, and the Holy Spirit as the "operation," or action, caused by the union of that soul and body. "They make one," Swedenborg said, "as soul, body and operation make one in man." He devoted considerable skill to showing how all the polytheism had come about through the "trinity of persons" introduced by the Nicene creed.4

Two was: "That a saving faith is to believe in Him," something to which no heresy-hunter could object. But Swedenborg insisted that the only way by which "faith" could become "saving" was in accordance with "the laws of order." They required that unless a man regenerated himself "naturally," even God could not regenerate him "spiritually." 5 Man had to drag himself as far as he could by rational reflection and by genuine, self-examining repentance before the way would be leveled and the door open for God to come in and do His part, in accordance with His own laws of order, filling the truths acquired by man with divine light and warmth.

Salvation was coöperative. But Swedenborg had to include "redemption," or the orthodox would be after him. He said that redemption consisted in the subjugation by the Lord of the hells and the reëstablishment of order in the heavens. But he was not nearly so insistent on what redemption consisted in as on what it did not.

Mankind was not redeemed, he said, through the passion (or suffering) of Jesus on the cross. That passion was the completion