Emanuel Swedenborg: the Development of His Thought / Martin Lamm ; Translated by Tomas Spiers and Anders Hallengren
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Emanuel Swedenborg Swedenborg StudiesINo. 9 Monographs of the Swedenborg Foundation Emanuel Swedenborg THE DEVELOPMENT OF HIS THOUGHT MARTIN LAMM TRANSLATED BY TOMAS SPIERS AND ANDERS HALLENGREN elF Swedenborg Foundation Publishers West Chester, Pennsylvania ©2000 by the Swedenborg Foundation First published in Swedish as Swedenborg: En Studie Over Hans Utveck1ing Till Mystiker Och Andeskddare (Stockholm: Hugo Gebers Forlag, 1915) ©1915 Martin Lamm Second Swedish edition, 1987, by Hammarstrom & Aberg Bokforlag, with a foreword by Olle Hjern and afterword by Inge Jonsson The foreword by Paul Valery appeared in the first translation of Swedenborg (Paris: Li braire Stock, Delamain & Boutelleau, 1936) and is reproduced by permission of the estate of Paul Valery and Editions Stock. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher. Swedenborg Studies is a scholarly series published by the Swedenborg Foundation. The primary purpose of the series is to make materials available for understanding the life and thought of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) and the impact his thought has had on oth ers. The Foundation undertakes to publish original studies and English translations of such studies and to republish primary sources that are otherwise difficult to access. Proposals should be sent to: Senior Editor, Swedenborg Studies, Swedenborg Foundation, 320 North Church Street, West Chester, Pennsylvania 19380. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lamm, Martin, 1880-1950 [Swedenborg. English] Emanuel Swedenborg: the development of his thought / Martin Lamm ; translated by Tomas Spiers and Anders Hallengren. p. cm. - (Swedenborg studies; no. 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87785-193-X (hc) - ISBN 0-87775-194-8 (pbk) I. Swedenborg, Emanuel, 1688-1772. I. Title. II. Series. BX8748 .L3613 2000 289' .4'092-dc21 00-059537 Edited by Richard Smoley Designed by Sans Serif, Inc., Saline, Michigan Set in Granjon by Sans Serif, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. CONTENTS Foreword to French Translation (1936) by Paul Valby V11 Introduction to First Swedish Edition (1915) by Martin Lamm XXlll Introduction to the Present Edition by James F. Lawrence XXV 11 Early Years 3 2 The Mechanistic View of the World 24 3 A Mystical Philosophy of Nature 50 4 The Philosophy of Economy ofthe Animal Kingdom 69 5 The Doctrine of Correspondences 95 6 The Religious Crisis 123 7 The Worship and Love of God 160 8 The Spirit Seer 195 9 The Exegete 224 10 God and the World 238 11 The Spiritual World 290 12 The Last Judgment and the New Jerusalem 320 Notes 329 Index 347 FOREWORD TO FRENCH TRANSLATION (1936) THOUGHTS AFTER READING MARTIN LAMM'S SWEDENBORG by Paul Valery The noble name of Swedenborg sounds strange to us. It awakens all the depths of confused thoughts surrounding the fantastic image of a singular personage, less defined by history than created by literature. I confess that until recently all I knew of him was the remains of readings of many years ago. Seraphitus-Seraphita, by Balzac and a chapter of Gerard de Ner val had previously been my only sources, and into these I had not dipped for some thirty years. This fading recollection, nevertheless, retained a charm for me. The simple syllabic resonance of the magic name, when I chanced to hear it, evoked memories of incredible associations, of the fascina tions of a chimerical science, of the marvel of the considerable influ ence emanating from reveries; in a word, I loved to picture the uncertain figure of the seer in the frame of the century in which I would choose to have lived. I think to myself that his epoch was one of the most brilliant and whole that humanity can know. Therein we find the scintillating fi nale of one world and the strenuous birth pangs of another, the most refined art, all the forces and graces of the spirit. There was magic and differential calculus, the most cynical of the cynics, and the most Vtt FOREWORD BY PAUL VALERY bizarre among the dreamers. A surplus of intelligence was not lack ing, balanced-at times within the same minds-by an astounding credulity. All the themes of limitless intellectual curiosity that the Re naissance had recaptured from the ancients or drawn from its own euphoria reappear in the eighteenth century more alive, sharper, and more preCIse. Europe, then, accepts the coexistence of mutually contradictory systems. That is the characteristic of a "modern" type of civilization. Rome and Alexandria had already known such an accumulation of contradictory theses, publicly manifested and debated. In these an cient capitals, the diversity of cults and philosophies were in ferment: no one could ignore, in those environments of fiery intellectualism, the fact that every speculative question had more than one answer. The end product of such relationships and exchanges, often visible in a specific individual, incarnates the disorder and richness of an era. In the eighteenth century, while the d' Alemberts, the Clairauts, the Eulers were building a rigorously antiseptic, mechanical world on the foundation of entirely novel resources of mathematical analysis; while others researched biology, visualizing diverse philosophies of living nature and striving to trace the origins of what they believed about matter; while the great Linnaeus undertook the immense task of classifying all living organisms, others elaborated diverse meta physics-still in the footsteps of the ancients--or extrapolated from Gassendi, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, or Malebranche. In the theo logical camp, Jansenists, Quietists, and many of other hues disputed among themselves the possession of truth and the empire of souls. Thus, there was no dearth of vigorous spirits. But if freedom of inquiry-having become almost legitimate everywhere-if the progress of the exact sciences, their stunning suc cess, and the discovery of the entire shape of the world had created a kind of encyclopedic appetite-an attitude that rejected nothing this same thirst for knowledge and power did not disdain the explo ration of the intellectual penumbra even into those suspect shadows in which, from the most remote antiquity, the imagination of a larger number of individuals locates the wellspring of power and knowl edge and the source of secrets of supernatural importance. So curiosity and hope coexist in more than one spirit in an vm FOREWORD BY PAUL VALERY astonishing combination. Men like Leibniz or Boyle may appear to us to be too rich in concerns that are too disparate; and the association, in Newton, of the interpretation of the Apocalypse (by way of hy potheses on the astronomy of the Argonauts) with the formulation of the mathematics of fluxion and the theory of universal attraction dis concerts us. But their century abounds in research in all disciplines; and the necessary passion, the cultivation of observation and experi ment, does not deliver them from the temptations offered by doc trines and practices mysteriously transmitted. (I observe in passing that the most prudent and the most positive science of those who dedicate themselves to it with the ardor that leads to discovery demands a certain thirst for marvels. The prodi gious, the unexpected, deriving from rigorous deduction or a faultless experimental procedure, endows the mind with one of the deepest joys anyone can know.) We find, therefore, in the eighteenth century, the generaliza tion, almost the vulgarization, of both normal and degenerate vari eties, which kindle the desire to know more than one can know. Adepts multiply, initiates abound, charlatans swarm. The social and political role of the occult becomes immense. Credulity and skepticism have never been as closely associated and as impartially distributed among the human race as they then were. The symbolism that decodes the universe like a hieroglyphic text; the hermeneutics that attributes to the Scriptures an interpreta tion more profound than the sense of the letter; the theosophy that awaits and receives communication from an immediate light; and still more daring, more disturbing, and ambitious in their operating procedures-magic, alchemy, divination by stars, by dreams, by evo cation-all coexist in more than one spirit along with the most limpid culture and the discipline of the exact sciences. Such is the·mental environment, the intellectual theater, that the name Swedenborg recalls to me. These three syllables were for me only a kind of musical resonance, an incantatory formula, evoking a fantastic image of the secret spiritual life of the epoch of Louis Xv. 1 never thought that 1 would go further and consider with an entirely new and personal interest a personage who for a long time only IX FOREWORD BY PAUL VALERY appeared to me as among the shadows of a society voluptuously curi ous about the arcane. But the book I have just read turns my thoughts to an entirely different Sweden borg. The vague and Hoffmanesque idea that my ignorance formed of this man is transformed into that of a figure no less enigmatic, but precise-powerfully interesting, whose intellec tual history enlivens a quantity of problems of first importance in the domain of the psychology of consciousness. I have read the work of Martin Lamm with an increasing eager ness. There I saw take form, in chapter after chapter, the extraordi nary