303. We build a life through all the things whose truth we persuade ourselves of, that is, the things we acknowledge and believe. What we are not persuaded of — what we do not acknowledge and believe — has no effect on our mind. As a result, we cannot profane holy things unless we are persuaded to the point of acknowledgment and yet deny them.
Those who do not acknowledge are capable of knowing, but it is as if they do not know. They are like people who know things but whose knowledge amounts to nothing. This describes the Jews at the time of the Lord's Coming. Since that is their nature, the Word depicts them as spiritually devastated, or no longer possessing faith. 1 At that point, there is no harm in opening the inner depths of the Word to them because they then resemble sighted people who do not see, hearing people who do not hear, whose hearts are coarsened. The Lord spoke of them through Isaiah:
Go, and you are to tell this people, "Listen — listen! — but you are not to understand, and see — see! — but you are not to know." Make the heart of this people fat and make their ears heavy and smear over their eyes, to prevent them from seeing with their eyes and hearing with their ears and understanding in their heart and turning to be healed. (Isaiah 6:9-10)
[2] Religious mysteries are not opened up to them before they fall into this condition, in which they are devastated or stripped of any continuing ability to believe. The delay until then, as I said, is to make it impossible for them to commit profanation. This too the Lord clearly states in the very next verses in Isaiah:
I said, "How long, Lord?" and he said, "Until the cities are ruined (so that there is not a resident) and the houses (so that there is not a [single] person) and the ground is desolated with ruination; and Jehovah will take humankind away." (Isaiah 6:11-12)
A person or humankind refers to those who are wise, or who acknowledge and believe.
These scenes describe the Jews at the time of the Lord's Coming, as I said; and for the same reasons as then, their cravings (especially their greed) continue to chain them to a condition of desolation. 2 The emptiness is so complete that even if they hear a thousand times about the Lord, about the objects and practices among them that represent the church, and how these symbolize the Lord in every detail, they still acknowledge and believe none of it.
This, then, is the reason that the people who brought on the Flood were thrown out of the Garden of Eden and suffered devastation, to the point where they were unable to acknowledge anything true.
Footnotes:
1. For passages that Swedenborg may be thinking of here, see those quoted in §5376, including the following: Isaiah 24:1-23; 51:17-23; Ezekiel 12:19-20; 26:19-21; 36:3-12; Matthew 24:15-16. In the Gospels Christ frequently stresses the lack of faith of his hearers: see Matthew 6:30; 8:10, 26; 14:31; 16:8; Mark 4:40; Luke 7:9; 8:25; 12:28; 17:6; 18:8. [LHC, RS]
2. Swedenborg here is picking up a longstanding, though regrettable, polemic against the greed of Jews. This is possibly a reflection of his upbringing in the Protestant church of his day. The Protestant reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546), although at first inclined to be sympathetic to the Jews after his break with the Catholic Church, was disappointed by their response to his evangelizing and ended his career indulging in anti-Semitic vituperations (see, for example, Luther 1543). See also note 4 in §259 and the reader's guide, pages 51-55. [RS]
