4. The Word's literal meaning alone, when it monopolizes our thinking, can never provide a view of the inner contents. Take for example this first chapter of Genesis. The literal meaning by itself offers no clue that it is speaking of anything but the world's creation, the Garden of Eden (paradise), and Adam, the first human ever created. 1 Who supposes anything else?
The wisdom hidden in these details (and never before revealed) will be clear enough from what follows. The inner sense of the first chapter of Genesis deals in general with the process that creates us anew — that is to say, with regeneration — and in particular with the very earliest church; 2 and it does so in such a way that not even the smallest syllable fails to represent, symbolize, and incorporate this meaning. 3
Footnotes:
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]
