Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/99

VIII ] seventeenth centuries for Jesus Christ.6 Jacob Boehme, for instance, said that Christ united eternity and time, God and man.

Swedenborg did an enormous amount of reading in Leipzig and Dresden, and he may have come across the works of Boehmists or those of the disciples of similar mystics, such as the Schwenkfeldians. No one can read Rufus Jones's work on the Protestant mystics7 without seeing the startling likeness between many of Swedenborg's ideas and theirs. And as their ideas stemmed from the Plotinian Christianity of the Areopagite and others, and as Swedenborg had come across the same thoughts when he was in England, in the works of the Cambridge Platonists, familiar echoes must have awakened in his soul had he come across the books of the Protestant mystics in the great book markets of Germany.

But there is greater pressure behind Of the Infinite than that of intellectual discoveries. Those would not have sufficed to throw a Swedenborg out of his orbit. A stronger passion than that for knowledge would be needed here, and there are signs of it.

He says that in man who is entirely finite, entirely of this world, even as to his soul, there is still a capacity for receiving what is divine, and it lies in this, "that man can acknowledge and does acknowledge God . . ." But—note well—he says that through this faith man has the further privilege of being aware "in love, or delight resulting from love, of a peculiar connection with the Infinite." 8

It sounds as though Swedenborg had at some time found in passionate human love that inkling of the divine which other lovers and mystics have found. Indeed he was later to elevate "marriage love," including physical love, to be both an outcome and a symbol of the divine.

He concludes in Of the Infinite that the true divinity in man is an acknowledgment of the existence of God "and a sense of delight in the love of God." 9

That sense of delight, which has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with religion, is the dynamism that makes mystics. From the time when Swedenborg had experienced it, though it may have been only a glimpse, his course was changed.

But not his conscience as a scientist. He had not given up science, his one sure grip on a slippery universe. The second half of the book