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Secrets of Heaven #290

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290. The fact that the church was called the mother of every living thing by reason of its faith in the Lord, who is life itself, can also be seen from earlier evidence: In no way is it possible for more than a single life force to exist from which all other beings receive life [§2]. Any life that is truly to be life must come by way of faith in the Lord, who is life [§30:2]. And any faith that is to have life within it must come from him and therefore must have him within it [§41].

For this reason, the Word describes the Lord as the only living being. It uses the names Jehovah who lives (Jeremiah 5:2; 12:16; 16:14-15; 23:7; Ezekiel 5:11); the one who lives forever (Daniel 4:34; Revelation 4:10; 5:14; 10:6); the wellspring of life in David (Psalms 36:9); and the fountain of living water in Jeremiah (17:13). It calls heaven, which lives from him, the land of the living (Isaiah 38:11; 53:8; Ezekiel 26:20; 32:23, 24, 25-26, 27, 32; Psalms 27:13; 52:5; 142:5). People who believe in the Lord are called the living, as in David: .".. who places our soul among the living" (Psalms 66:9). Of those who believe, it also says that they are in the book of life (Psalms 69:28; Revelation 13:8; 17:8; 20:15). By the same token, those who accept a faith in the Lord are said to be brought back to life (Hosea 6:2; Psalms 85:6). Those who do not believe, on the other hand, are by extension called dead, as in Isaiah:

The dead will not live; the Rephaim 1 will not rise again, because you inflicted punishment on them and obliterated them. (Isaiah 26:14)

The dead here stand for people inflated with self-love, and rising again symbolizes entering into life. They are also referred to as victims of stabbing (Ezekiel 32:23, 24, 25-26, 28, 29, 30, 31). Hell is called "death" (Isaiah 25:8; 28:15). The Lord as well refers to them as dead (Matthew 4:16; John 5:24; 8:21, 24, 51-52).

Footnotes:

1. The Hebrew word translated Rephaim (רְפָאִים [rǝṕā'îm]) is usually taken to represent either of two separate words, of which one refers to giants and the other means "the enervated," or in other words, "ghosts." The latter is the sense that most translators assign in this passage, but Swedenborg seems to understand the word in the former sense, since he says that they stand for people who are "inflated" (see the text immediately after the quotation). In §581:2 and elsewhere he connects the Rephaim of this verse with the Nephilim (see §§581-583), who are taken to be giants; see note 1 in §554. [LHC]

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

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Secrets of Heaven #30

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30. Genesis 1:14, 15, 16, 17. And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to make a distinction between day and night; and they will act as signals and will be used for seasons for both the days and the years. And they will be lights in the expanse of the heavens, to shed light on the earth," and so it was done. And God made two great lights: the greater light to rule by day and the smaller light to rule by night; and the stars. And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens, to shed light on the earth.

We cannot understand the identity of these great lights very well unless we first know what the essence of faith is and how it develops in those who are being created anew.

The actual essence and life of faith is the Lord alone. No one who lacks faith in the Lord can have life, as he himself said in John:

Those who believe in the Son have eternal life, but those who do not believe in the Son will not see life; instead, God's anger will rest on them. (John 3:36)

[2] The progress of faith in those who are being created anew is as follows. Initially such people are without any life, as no life exists in evil or falsity, only in goodness and truth. Afterward they receive life from the Lord through faith. The first form of faith to bring life is a memorized thing — a matter of fact. The next is faith in the intellect — faith truly understood. The last is faith in the heart, which is faith born of love, or saving faith.

In verses 3-13 the things that had no living soul represent factual faith and faith truly understood. Faith brought alive by love, however, is represented by the animate creatures in verses 20-25. Consequently this is the point at which love and the faith that rises out of it are first dealt with, and they are called lights. Love is the greater light that rules by day; faith springing from love is the smaller light that rules by night. 1 And because they must unite as one, the verb used with "lights" is singular, "let it be" rather than "let them be." 2

[3] Love and faith work the same way in our inner being as warmth and light work in our outer flesh and are therefore represented by warmth and light. This is why the lights are said to be placed in the expanse of the heavens, or our inner being, the greater light in our will and the smaller in our intellect. 3 But they only seem to be present there, just as the light of the sun only appears to be in physical objects. It is the Lord's mercy alone that stirs our will with love and our intellect with truth or faith.

Footnotes:

1. Here Swedenborg begins to set out one of the central themes of his work: the dynamic between goodness and truth. Goodness is associated with love and the will; truth is associated with faith and the intellect. Swedenborg's entire system is based on the relationship between these two forces, which, as he notes here, entails the superiority of goodness (here, as love) over truth (here, as faith). He furthermore associates these two forces, goodness and truth, with the "heavenly" and the "spiritual" respectively, the former being more inward and closer to the Lord than the latter. In Heaven and Hell 20-27, Swedenborg describes heaven itself as being divided into separate kingdoms based upon the angels' capacity to resonate with the Lord. Those who resonate with him on the basis of goodness, through love, are in a higher heaven, and are called "heavenly," while those who resonate with him on the basis of truth — that is, through the intellect — are called "spiritual." It would be hard to overstate the importance of this dynamic in Swedenborg's thought. Much of Secrets of Heaven, as well as of his other writings, is devoted to expanding on it. For further discussion, a diagram of this dynamic, and illustrative passages, see the reader's guide, pages 45-46. [RS]

2. In both the original Hebrew and Swedenborg's Latin version, Genesis 1:14 combines a plural subject with a singular verb. (The Hebrew is יְהִי‭ ‬מְאֹרֹת [yǝhî mǝ'ōrōṯ]; the Latin is sit luminaria.) The disagreement in number cannot easily be represented in English. [LHC]

3. Swedenborg characterizes the mind as being possessed of two basic faculties: the will (Latin voluntas, elsewhere in this edition rendered "volition" or "intention") and the intellect (Latin intellectus, also translated "understanding" and "discernment"); see §35. In Swedenborg's use, intellect has a somewhat broader connotation than it has today, one more consonant with its use in the system of the medieval Christian philosophers who were known as the Scholastics. For example, in the philosophy of the major figure of Scholastic thought, Thomas Aquinas (1224 or 1225-1274), which underlies the terminology of much of philosophical language up to and including Swedenborg's time, intellect encompasses all of what we associate with the faculties of mind, not only the capacity to reason and understand, but the capacity to perceive ideas in the abstract, as well as the ability to be aware of itself (Shallo 1923, 115-116). The complementarity of will and intellect is also something Swedenborg shares with Scholastic thought. Aquinas, for example, observes, "We can easily understand why these powers include one another in their acts, because the intellect understands that the will wills, and the will wills the intellect to understand. In the same way, the good is contained under the true, inasmuch as it is an understood truth, and the true under the good, inasmuch as it is a desired good" (Summa Theologiae 82:4; translation in Pegis 1948, 366-367). Note again the complementarity of the "true" and the "good." [RS]

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

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