1. The Latin phrase here translated "interlinking passages of a labyrinth," labyrintheis nexibus, may be an allusion to the phrase labyrintheis ... flexibus, "the labyrinthine windings," which occurs in an ancient Latin poem about the original labyrinth in Greco-Roman mythology (Catullus 64:114). Here Swedenborg seems also to be obliquely referring to a criticism raised by Deism, a philosophical outlook that during his lifetime could be defined roughly as a belief in God based on inborn knowledge, reason, and experience, without acceptance of revelation or traditional religion. The Deists mocked as impossible and absurd the idea that at the Last Judgment the physical bodies of the dead were to be reconstituted by God, no matter where their component parts had ended up over the millennia (see a sample of such a critique in Voltaire [1764] 1962, 452 [under "Resurrection," second section]). This common Christian doctrine, based on various passages of the Bible, including Revelation 20:13, was also rejected by Swedenborg (see, for example, Secrets of Heaven 5078:3); but in the present passage, he reserves to divine power the ability to reconstitute the nonphysical "living substances" of the dead, no matter what the circumstances of their final disposition at death. For more on the Last Judgment in Swedenborg's theology, see notes 1 in §32:1, 4 in §931:2. [JSR, SS]

1. The creation story is one area in which Secrets of Heaven differs radically from most earlier allegorical interpretations of Scripture (see note 1 in §606). The latter assume that the opening of Genesis does indeed attempt to explain the creation of the world and humankind (see, for example, Philo 1993, 3-5; Matt 2004, 107 and following). Swedenborg, by contrast, asserts that this passage is not dealing with actual cosmogenesis, but with the spiritual life of an individual human being. [RS]

2. Swedenborg uses the term ecclesia, or "church," in a number of ways. Here, as often, it does not denote a group of Christians but instead refers to one of five major phases Swedenborg assigns to the world's religious history. In general Swedenborg calls the first phase the earliest church, the second the ancient church, the third the Jewish church (up to the time of Christ), the fourth the Christian church, and the fifth a new church. In the early volumes of the present work, though, he often adds another, called the Hebrew church, between the ancient and Jewish churches. [LHC]

3. "Represent" (Latin repraesentare) and "symbolize" (significare) are heavily used terms in Swedenborg's theology. The two have related but distinguishable meanings. Both indicate the presence of an inner meaning in an object, person, name, or action, but symbolism directs our attention to the meaning itself (especially as communicated by words), whereas representation generally directs our attention to the living enactment of that meaning (especially by persons). One result, as described in §§665 and 1361, is that a person who represents something good does not actually have to be good; an evil monarch, to use Swedenborg's own example, can represent the Lord's power. In §920, in the first volume of the first edition, Swedenborg makes clear that these distinctions parallel certain of the divisions in the world's religious history he calls churches (see note 2 in §4). Members of the earliest church, he says, had the ability to perceive the inner meaning without effort; their perceptiveness was replaced in the ancient church by the codified knowledge of symbolism. In §1361:3, also in the first volume, he adds that when the church with an intuitive gift for symbolism came to an end, representation took the place of symbolism. However, by the third volume (that is, starting at §2760), Swedenborg becomes fairly consistent in assigning representative meaning to the individuals who appear in a story and symbolic meaning to everything else. A typical example occurs in §3131, which expounds a phrase in Genesis 24:29, "And Laban ran to the man outside at the spring." Swedenborg describes this as symbolizing the predisposition that goodness has toward truth; running symbolizes predisposition, and a man symbolizes truth, as does a spring, but Laban represents a desire for what is good. These distinctions apply only where Swedenborg is using the word symbolize in a technical sense. Often he uses it much more broadly. For more on these distinctions in inner meaning in relation to various modes of biblical discursion, see §66. For a very brief overview of the history of biblical interpretation as it relates to Swedenborg's views, see Smoley 2005, 27, and the references given there. [LHC, GHO]