Secrets of Heaven #400

By Emanuel Swedenborg

Study this Passage

  
/ 10837  
  

400. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and delivered Enoch, means that this schism or heresy spontaneously produced another. This is the obvious conclusion from all that precedes. It also makes sense in light of verse 1, which says that the human and his wife, Eve, gave birth to Cain; later developments are similar conceptions and births, whether it is the church or heresies that reproduce themselves. For these offshoots the people [of the earliest church] established a genealogy, 1 because they resemble family trees: from a single heresy, once seized upon, many others are born.

Footnotes:

1. Swedenborg has more to say about this kind of genealogy at §339. [LHC]

  
/ 10837  
  

Many thanks to the Swedenborg Foundation and its New Century Edition team.