Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/373

XXVIII ] other world these constituted "hell" or the bells, but by choice, not because they had been "sent" there by God.

Swedenborg had thought a great deal about evil, and his reflections were much subtler than article three seemed to show. He had long maintained that evil was "sin." Not the other way around, that "sin" was evil. He was aware that "sin" is a terribly elastic word. It can be stretched to include the breaking of all sorts of rules, not in themselves ethical, such as food rules or attendance at ceremonies. But the Decalogue in its widest significance should, he said, leave no one unaware of what were real evils.

But why shouldn't you commit evil?

"Why shouldn't I kill my neighbor and eat him, if I'm strong enough to do it and clever enough to get away with it?" Moralists of all ages find it far too easy to answer this question, but not so that their answers convince the questioner, whose neighbor remains theoretically safe only so long as steaks from a cow are preferred to human chops.

Swedenborg had not only a negative but a positive answer to the question; not his own answers, naturally, but those he had made his own. He said first that the Ten Commandments were not only "civic and moral but also spiritual laws." "Unless evils are shunned as sins," he said, man is not leading a good life according to spiritual laws. Sin is the breaking of a spiritual law, and therefore "evil is hurtful to the soul." Swedenborg had done his best to prove to men "from experience" that he was not talking about theological niceties, but about consequences that, as inevitable as a chemical reaction, followed the "soul" into the other world.

But in the other world, he admitted, he had met with "devils" that frankly preferred the stenches of hell to the fragrances of heaven. Did he leave the question then as a matter of taste, or of taste in smell?

No. All through his works he said in effect that the best reason for not being evil was that being good opened the way to infinitely greater pleasures. He knew both. Early in his Spiritual Diary he had confessed that he used to feel revengeful.8 (It might be said that some of the diary notes in which his former enemies were represented as in a sad state in the other world were projections from a not wholly sublimated layer of his subconscious.) He