Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/374

356 that he had been too ambitious. He knew that those states of self-occupation had been misery compared to those "ineffable felicities" he had enjoyed when he had labored with himself enough to feel he was able to be with angelic beings who were more nearly in a selfless state.

This black knot of the ego Swedenborg often referred to as man's "proprium," and he saw its annihilation as true religion. He wrote once in his diary that spirits "supposed that by losing those things which were most peculiarly their own, they would be left so entirely destitute that neither man nor spirit would be intelligently master of himself, but be like a machine, devoid of all sense and reflection . . ." but he explained that only by becoming "nothing" could one become "something." Nothing in this case meant, he said, that a man should lose all that was "his own," namely his "cupidities and so his iniquities," and then he would "come to exist as another person . . ." Other delights "in boundless variety" would then be his. As he wrote of the skeptical spirits "the sensation and perception which they thought would be extinguished are infinitely heightened when self-love ceases to be the ruling principle of their delights." 8a

Still he knew very well that it was no use to tell someone who preferred the smell of a rotten fish to that of a rose that the rose ought to be preferred, so, on the whole, he contented himself by telling the stench-lover that his main punishment would consist in gravitating irresistibly to his like in the other world. They dealt with each other.

But—why did God "permit" evil, as Swedenborg so often said? "Evil happens by permission," as it happened often enough to him, by his own accounts of his "infestation" by evil spirits.

On this crucial question he referred his readers back to his book on Divine Providence, in which he had made a very fair list of the miseries of mankind, including wars.

The answer he made, on behalf of Providence, was consistent with his belief in God as Order rather than God as Omnipotence. He said: "When God is said to permit, it is not meant that He wills, but that on account of the end, which is salvation, He cannot avert." 9