25. As for the fact that after life in the physical world everyone goes on living to eternity, this follows from the fact that we are then spiritual and no longer earthly, and that the spiritual self separated from the earthly retains its essential nature to eternity because our state cannot be changed after death. 1
Further, everyone’s spiritual self is joined to the Divine, since it can think about the Divine, and can also love the Divine and be drawn to everything that comes from the Divine, such as the teachings of the church. This means it can be united to the Divine in its thinking and willing, and these two abilities are the spiritual self and constitute its life. Anything that can be joined to the Divine in this way cannot ever die, because the Divine is present with it and joins it to itself.
[2] For another thing, on the level of our mind we have been created in the form of heaven, and the form of heaven is from the Divine itself, as you can tell from material in Heaven and Hell. See “It is the Lord’s Divine Nature that Makes and Forms 2 Heaven” (§§7-12, see also §§78-86); material in §57 on the fact that each of us has been created to be a heaven in least form; “The Whole Heaven, Grasped as a Single Entity, Reflects a Single Individual” (§§59-67); and “Therefore [Every] Angel Is in Perfect Human Form” (§§73-77). In fact, our spiritual self is an angel.
[3] I have often talked with angels about this, and they have been amazed that if you look at the people in the Christian world who are called intelligent and whom others believe actually are intelligent, you find many who have completely discarded from their faith any idea of immortality in regard to their own life. They believe that the human soul dissipates at death just like the soul of an animal. 3 They do not see any difference between the life in humans and the life in animals, namely, that we are able to think of things beyond ourselves such as God, heaven, love, faith, what is spiritually and morally good, what is true, and the like, and in so doing be raised up toward the Divine itself and be joined to it by all these means. Animals, on the other hand, cannot be raised above their own earthly nature to think about things like this, so their spiritual nature cannot be separated from their earthly nature after death 4 and live on its own the way our spiritual self can. This is why an animal’s life is dissipated when its earthly life is over. 5
[4] Angels told me that the reason many of the so-called intelligent in the Christian world do not believe that their own life will be immortal is that at heart they deny the Divine and credit everything to nature instead; and people who base their thinking on this premise cannot conceive of any eternity through being joined to the Divine. As a result, they cannot conceive of any difference between our state and the state of animals, since once the Divine has been eliminated from their thinking, eternity has been eliminated as well.
[5] Angels have also said that there is within every human an innermost or highest level of life-or an innermost and highest something-where the divine nature of the Lord flows in first and most intimately. From this highest point the Lord arranges the other things within us that make up our spiritual and earthly selves, descending level by level in accord with the way we are designed. The angels called this innermost or highest something the Lord’s gateway to us and his quintessential dwelling within us. They also said that this innermost or highest something is what makes us human and distinguishes us from mere animals, which do not have it, and that this is why we, unlike animals, can have our inner levels-our higher and lower mind-raised by the Lord to himself. This allows us to believe in him, be moved with love for him, and be granted intelligence and wisdom and the ability to speak on the basis of reason.
[6] Asked whether people live forever if they deny the Divine and reject divine truths, which are the means by which our lives are united to the Divine, the angels said that such people, just like those who acknowledge the Divine, retain the ability to think and intend and therefore to believe and love the kinds of things that come from the Divine; and that this is the ability that makes it possible for them to live to eternity like everyone else. The angels added that this ability comes to people from that aforementioned innermost or highest something that everyone has. They gave extensive evidence that even the people in hell have this ability, and that it is the source of their ability to argue and speak against divine truths. That is why everyone, regardless of what they are like, lives to eternity.
[7] Since everyone lives forever after death, no angel-no spirit, even-has any thought whatever about death. They do not even know what dying is. So when “death” is mentioned in the Word, angels take it to mean either damnation, which is spiritual death, or else ongoing life and resurrection. 6
All this has been said to make the point that all humans without exception who have been born and have died since the beginning of creation are alive-some in heaven and some in hell.
Footnotes:
1. The assertion that our state cannot be changed after death refers to the particular character we have developed on earth, which determines, among other things, whether we end up in heaven or in hell. Specifically, Swedenborg states that after death our “dominant love” (see New Jerusalem 54-58) remains fixed and unchanging to eternity. For more on what remains permanent in us after death, see Heaven and Hell 470-484; Divine Providence 317-319; Marriage Love 46-48 a. By contrast to this permanency in our characters, variations in our mental and emotional life do take place in the afterlife; in fact, an entire chapter of Heaven and Hell (§§154-161) is devoted to how the states of angels in heaven change in intensity, “like variations of light and shade” (§155). [GFD, LSW]
2. The actual chapter title in question omits the words “and Forms” (et formet). [GFD]
3. Which particular thinkers Swedenborg has in mind here cannot be determined; it can only be shown that the idea that the soul ceases to exist after death was in his time readily met with in both ancient and contemporary literature. Enlightenment skeptics delighted in maintaining that Jewish belief-at least before the rise of the sect of the Pharisees in the first century B.C.E.-seemed to deny the survival of the soul. (See, for example, Voltaire’s article “Resurrection” in his Philosophical Dictionary, section 1 [= Voltaire [1764] 1962, 449].) This analysis of Jewish belief was based on such Old Testament passages as Ecclesiastes 3:19, 21: “The fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same: as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals. . . . Who knows whether the human spirit goes upward and the spirit of animals goes downward to the earth?” (New Revised Standard Version). In Greek and Roman culture, the idea that the soul dies can be traced at least as far back as the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 B.C.E.); see Rist 1972, 119. The most eloquent and sustained argument for this view in ancient literature can be found in book 3 of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) by Titus Lucretius Carus (see note 1 in Last Judgment 16). In the Christian era, there were a number of significant but disparate thinkers and religious movements that subscribed to the belief that the human soul dies with the body as does the life of an animal; but that unlike the animal soul, the human soul is brought back into existence again at the Day of Judgment. Their versions of this theory are now lumped together under the label of Christian mortalism. This view can be traced in thinkers as divergent as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Milton (1608-1674), and Richard Overton (flourished 1642-1663). For a discussion of this widespread belief as it is evidenced in England, see Burns 1972; see also Jolley 1998, 382-385, and Thomson 2008, 42-44. [RS, SS, FLS]
4. [Swedenborg's footnote] There is an inflow from the spiritual world into the lives of animals as well, but it is a general one and not an individualized one like that of humans: 1633, 3646. The difference between us and animals is that we can be raised above ourselves toward the Lord, and can think about the Divine, love it, and thereby be joined to the Lord, which gives us eternal life; it is different for animals, which cannot be raised up to such levels: 4525, 6323, 9231.
5. The philosophers of the Enlightenment period were especially intrigued with the question of the difference between animals and humans; ultimately the assertion that there was any difference at all became a shibboleth that distinguished believers from atheists. Descartes had argued in the 1600s that animals were essentially automata (Descartes [1637] 1952, 59), and other philosophers took the next step in this line of thinking, asserting that humans were only a special form of machine; see, for example, the notorious L’Homme machine (The Human Being as Machine [= La Mettrie [1747] 1994]) by the atheist writer Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751). A parallel line of thinking concluded that since animals did not have souls, humans could not possess souls either. Here and in other passages (for example, Secrets of Heaven 4760:2, 5114:5) Swedenborg condemns these trends of thought. He adheres more closely to the classical view, advanced in such writers as Aristotle-for example, in Politics 1332b (= Aristotle 1984, 2114), where he asserts that human beings alone have reason. (For examples of this claim in Swedenborg’s works, see Secrets of Heaven 1944:1, 2219:2; Divine Love and Wisdom 351; Divine Providence 74:1, 210:1; Marriage Love 416:3, 438, 455; Revelation Explained [= Swedenborg 1994-1997a] §§152:2, 280:1.) Ultimately, Swedenborg insists, animals in this world are, though physically real, still only symbols corresponding to human qualities that exist in the spiritual world (Secrets of Heaven 10042:2). For further discussion of the general topic of animals during the Enlightenment, see Senior 2007 and True Christianity vol. 1 (= Swedenborg [1771] 2006), page 688 note 67. For more on Swedenborg’s assessment of animals, see Secrets of Heaven vol. 2 (= Swedenborg [1749-1756] 2013), page 520 note 43. For extended passages in Swedenborg’s works on the difference between animals and humans, see Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain (= Swedenborg [1740-1741] 1955) part 2, §§337-347; The Old Testament Explained (= Swedenborg 1927-1951) §§916-921; 1196:2-1202 (where the discussion is continued serially in the later subsections of each section); Marriage Love 151 b: 3-5; Soul-Body Interaction 15; True Christianity 48:8-13. [SS, JSR, FLS]
6. [Swedenborg's footnote] When death is mentioned in the Word in connection with evil people, angels in heaven take it to mean damnation — which is spiritual death — and also hell: 5407, 6119, 9008. In the Word, “the living” mean people who have devoted themselves to goodness and truth; “the dead” mean people who have devoted themselves to evil and falsity: 81, 290, 7494. When the subject is good people who die, angels understand death to mean resurrection and ongoing life, because then we rise again, continue the life we had, and begin our eternal life: 3498, 3505, 4618, 4621, 6036, 6221.
