4. Further, I have talked with spirits about the fact that if people consider how incredibly vast the starry heaven 1 is and how incalculably huge the number of stars in it is-and each star is a sun in its own realm, has its own solar system, and is much like our sun, though it may vary from it in magnitude-they can come to believe there is more than one inhabited world in the universe. Anyone who ponders this in the right way will conclude that all this immensity must be a means of achieving the ultimate purpose of creation, which is a heavenly kingdom in which the Divine can dwell with angels and with people [still in the physical world]. The whole visible universe, the sky studded with stars beyond number, each and every one of which is a sun, is just a means of producing planets with people on them, people who are the source of that heavenly kingdom.
The only conclusion rational individuals can draw from this is that a means so vast for a purpose so great was not brought into being so that a single planet could then produce the human race and the heaven it populates. How would that satisfy the Divine, which is infinite, for which thousands or even millions of planets full of people would amount to so little a thing as to be almost nothing?
Footnotes:
1. The Latin here translated “starry heaven” is caelum astriferum, literally, “star-bearing heaven.” The original reference is to the penultimate (eighth) sphere of the heavens in the Aristotelian-Scholastic cosmos, beyond the separate spheres that carry the planets (see, for example, Pseudo-Aristotle On the Universe 392a19-30 [= Aristotle 1984, 627]). Swedenborg seems to be using this adjective partly in this medieval sense-that is, to distinguish the stars from the solar system-and partly in order to distinguish “sky” from “heaven,” which are both indicated by the same word (caelum) in Latin. Thus when the Latin refers to telluribus in coelo astrifero (literally, “earths in the star-bearing heaven”), the current translation employs the more idiomatic rendering “extrasolar planets,” because the obvious function of the Latin phrase is merely to distinguish these farther planets from the planets of our solar system. In the main title of the work, “deep space” has been used on the same principle instead of “star-bearing heaven.” [SS]
