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Testimony to the Invisible : Essays on Swedenborg / by Jorge Luis Borges

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Testimony to the Invisible : Essays on Swedenborg / by Jorge Luis Borges '5 Testimony to the Invisible ESSAYS ON SWEDENBORG r i 0 / / f- ■*'#i 3' 3 .W f-r, ^ ■^:- EMANUEL-5WEDENBQRG TeJtinwny to the Invldible ESSAYS ON SWEDENBORG by Jorge Luis Borges Czeslaw Milosz Kathleen Raine D. T. Suzuki Eugene Taylor Wilson Van Dusen Colin Wilson EDITED BY JAMES F. LAWRENCE CHRYSALIS BOOKS IMPRINT OF THE SWEDE 1BORG FOUNDATION WEST CHESTER, PEN SYLVA IA ©1995 by the Swedenborg Foundation All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this pub­ lication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, elec­ tronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher. Chrysalis Books is an imprint of the Swedenborg Foundation, Inc. For more in­ formation, contact: Chrysalis Books Swedenborg Foundation 320 N. Church Street West Chester, PA 19380 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Testimony to the invisible : essays on Swedenborg / by Jorge Luis Borges . .. [et al.] : edited byjames F. Lawrence P- cm. ISBN 0-87785-149-2 1. Swedenborg, Emanuel, 1688-1772. I. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-1986. II. Lawrence, James F, 1955-. BX871LT47 1995 95-20167 289.4'092—dc20 CIP Illustrations from The Bettman Archive, New York, NY: Jorge Luis Borges, p. 2; Czeslaw Milosz, p. 18; Fyodor Dostoevsky, p. 27; William Blake, p. 50; Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 156. Picture of D.T. Suzuki, p. 172, by Francis Haar, Courtesy of Tom Haar Photogra­ phy, Flonolulu, HI. Edited by Mary Lou Bertucci Designed by Joanna V. Hill Typeset in Cochin and Baskerville by Ruttle, Shaw & Wetherill, Inc. Conten/:J Introduction / vii by James F. Lawrence Testimony to the Invisible / 3 by Jorge Luis Borges Translated by Catherine Rodriguez-Nieto Dostoevsky and Swedenborg / 19 by Czeslaw Milosz Translated by Louis Iribarne The Hu.man Face of God / !il by Kathleen Raine The Reality of the Visionary World / 89 by Colin Wilsoi:i A Mystic Looks at Swedenborg / 105 by Wilson Van Dusen Emerson: The Swedenborgian ,and Transcendentalist Connection / 141 by Eugene Taylor Suzuki on Swedenborg / 173 by O. T. Suzuki Translation and Introduction by Kei Tori ta About the Contributors / 187 Introduction BY JAMES F. LAWRENCE erious students of Emanuel Swedenborg frequently marvel at the sweeping impact the Swedish vision­ sary’s provocative ideas have had on creative and sig­ nificant contributors to modern cultural thought across numerous artistic and philosophic disciplines throughout most of modern civilization. Beyond such standard refer­ ences as William Blake and Ralph Waldo Emerson, a vast international coterie of characters continues popping up, once Swedenborg has been lodged in one’s conscious awareness: D. T. Suzuki; Sadhu Sundar Singh; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Honore de Balzac; Eyodor Dosto­ evsky; W. B. Yeats; Edgar Allen Poe; August Strindberg; Johann Eriedrich Oberlin; Immanuel Kant; Charles Bauderlaire; George Washington; Abraham Lincoln; Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Czeslaw Milosz; Helen Keller; Carl Jung; Ping Chong; and, of course, the lead essayist for the present volume, Jorge Luis Borges. The creative cross-pollinating perspectives on Swedenborg’s presence within the very fabric of modern thought is circuit-blowing. Vlll Introduction How is it that the writings of a celebrated scientist-cum- Christian prophet can engage the imagination and cre­ atively commingle within the work of such grandly diverse personalities as the leading exponent of Zen in America, the philosophic titan of Transcendentalism, the trailblaz- ing lion of modern Latin and South American literature, and the brooding Nobel Prize-winning poet from Eastern Europe? This collection of essays plumbs some of the depths and shoots some of the necessary heights needed to gain the proper perspective upon the system of spiri­ tual philosophy within Swedenborg’s life work that en­ ables him to appeal to physicists and poets, statesmen and artists. The lead essay is by a literary figure many believe to be the foremost spiritual voice emanadng this century from South America—short-story master, poet, essayist, and metaphysician Jorge Luis Borges. Though he shared the International Editor’s Prize with Samuel Beckett in 1961 and was awarded the Annual Literary Award by the In­ gram Merrill Eoundation in 1966, many critics feel his fail­ ure to receive the Nobel Prize for literature to be an outrageous oversight. Nevertheless, for the past thirty years, Borges’s fiction has established him as the modern master short-story writer in the Spanish language. So striking is his imagery and stylistic devices, he is generally credited with creating a new genre of fiction. As a literary icon to millions, his final place in world literature is yet to be reckoned. Born in 1899 in Buenos Aires of Spanish, English, Por­ tuguese, and Jewish blood, Borges’s eventual cosmopoli­ tanism perhaps could have been predicted. His first language was English; but, for the last several decades of Introduction IX his life, he wrote only in Spanish. Borges was raised in a sheltered environment and was encouraged to pursue his intellectual interests, which largely veered into philoso­ phy and literature. After World War I, Borges and his fam­ ily spent two years in Spain, where he launched his literary career. There he found a new philosophical move­ ment among a young rebellious group of intellectuals. Called the Ultraist Movement, they rebelled against classi­ cism in both form and content and drew upon radically free verse, heavy use of metaphor, and injection of much absurd humor to make their points. Borges returned to Buenos Aires in 1921 and quickly became the leading exponent in South America of Ultra­ ist literature. But it wasn’t until the 1940s and 1950s that he stumbled onto the genre that would establish his fame. On Christmas Eve, 1938, Borges struck his head against a recently painted open window. Lead poisoning developed from the wound, and Borges suddenly hovered near death for several weeks. Upon recovering, he found him­ self obsessed by a fear of lost creative powers. He decided to write a short story, reasoning that failure in a genre for which he was less known would be less humiliating. The result was Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quijote, one of his most praised works. His “tragedy” had led him to the medium in which he would make his farthest-reaching contributions. For the next twenty years, Borges forged an art form for fiction in Latin and South America that set a new stan­ dard and a new landscape. Displaying provocative stylistic innovations and drawing extensively upon metaphysical imagery, his stories are more in the vein of Franz Kafka, Poe, and LB. Singer—^yet with a distinctively explicit use Introduction of spiritually esoteric ideas and images. Borges, who be­ came fully blind in 1955, often invokes Chinese mysticism, the cabala, and other standard mystical references into his stories, as well as building entire story structures within surreal planes. Borges’s interest in Swedenborg deepened as part of his growing fascination with mystical states of knowing. In a lecture delivered at the University of Belgrano (Buenos Aires), he stated, “Voltaire said that Charles XII was the most extraordinary man recorded by history. I would say—if we admit such superlatives—the most extraordi­ nary man was the most mysterious of the subjects of Charles XII, Emanuel Swedenborg.” The title essay for this volume was originally written as the introduction to a Spanish edition of The Essential Swedenborghy Sig Synnest- edt. Borges attempts to trace the outlines of Sweden­ borg’s intellectual and spiritual development and displays his specialized interest in Swedenborg’s ability to experi­ ence lucid inner states and worlds of heaven and hell. Borges professes his profound admiration of Sweden­ borg’s mode of knowing in this essay, and one quickly dis­ cerns that he also feels a kindred spirit to the Swedish mystic. Borges declares that he himself is not a mystic, but that mysticism is an important and fascinating subject for him. 'When the epistemology of the knower is of solid pedigree, he believed, then the ensuing perceptions are the most sublime humanity has known. Borges felt that he shared with Swedenborg the same fundamental objec­ tives; they simply traversed the same terrain in somewhat different ways. Borges believed in Swedenborg’s spiritual journeys more profoundly than many artists and poets who have Introduction XI expressed perhaps some admiration or inspiration but who have not been so deeply inclined to explore the same realities with as much conviction and daring as Borges. It is in this sense that Borges was most deeply Swedenbor- gian. A figure looming both directly and indirectly through­ out these essays is William Blake. Borges himself con­ fessed to a deep and abiding interest in Blake’s mysticism; three other contributors to this volume—Czeslaw Milosz, Kathleen Raine, and Colin Wilson—also cite Blake as a seminal force in their work. When, as a young man, he came upon Blake’s searing imaginative works, Wilson im­ mersed himself into everything Blake wrote; and Raine, whose essay centers on Blake’s debt to Swedenborg, says flatly in an interview with Gno5M magazine in 1992; “Blake is my master.” Milosz counts Blake as one ofjust five foun­ dational influences on his work. Two others, Swedenborg and Dostoevsky, are the subjects of his essay in this collec­ tion. Czeslaw Milosz, accorded the highest honor in litera­ ture in 1980, the Nobel Prize, has lived in Berkeley, Cali­ fornia, since 1961, when he joined the faculty of the University of California, where today he is professor emer­ itus of Slavic languages and literature. Lithuanian by birth and Polish by upbringing, Milosz, like Borges, is a man of many languages, who, nonetheless, does not write in Eng­ lish.
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