231. A single evil afflicted not only the earliest church, before the Flood, but also the ancient church, after the Flood, and the Jewish church, and then the new church or the church among non-Jews that came after the Lord's arrival into the world, 1 just as it afflicts the modern church. It is the evil of not believing the Lord or the Word but trusting oneself and one's senses. The result is an absence of faith, and when faith is absent, so is love for others — a situation that leads to all falsity and evil.
Footnotes:
1. By "the church among non-Jews" (ecclesia gentium, in the Latin) Swedenborg seems to mean the early Christian church as expanded by Paul to include non-Jews (see, for example, Acts 9:15; 13:47). Specifically, the Latin word here translated as "non-Jews" is gentium, literally, "nations;" the traditional translation is "Gentiles." Swedenborg uses this term differently in different contexts. In §367 below, the term clearly means "non-Jews" as opposed to Jews; in Heaven and Hell 516, it means certain unspecified non-Christians who are also not Muslims. In Heaven and Hell 308, he uses the term to refer to "people who are outside the church, where the Word is not found," and this seems to be the core meaning of the term as he employs it (see §410 below). In sum it would be safe to say that, although in the current passage the term refers to those within the church, in most instances when Swedenborg speaks of "Gentiles" he refers to those who are outside the church of a given dispensation. [LHC, GFD, RS]
