981. God blessed symbolizes the Lord's presence and favor, as can be seen from the symbolism of blessing.
In the Word, 1 on its surface, blessing people means enriching them with every earthly, personal benefit. This is how the Word is interpreted by all who restrict themselves to its surface meaning — Jews of the past and present, for instance, and Christians as well, today especially. 2 So they have identified and continue to identify divine blessings with wealth, an abundance of every resource, and glory for themselves.
In a deeper sense, though, blessing people means enriching them with every kind of spiritual and heavenly goodness. As the Lord is the only one who grants this kind of blessing, or is even capable of granting it, the act of blessing symbolizes the Lord's presence and favor. The Lord's presence and favor carry such a blessing with them.
[2] The word presence is used because only in charity is the Lord present, and the subject here is a regenerate spiritual person, who acts out of charity. The Lord is present in each of us, but the further we distance ourselves from neighborly love, the more the Lord's presence is absent, so to speak — which is to say, the more remote the Lord is.
The word favor is used rather than mercy because of something I believe is unknown today: people of heavenly character speak not of favor, [or grace,] but of mercy, while those of spiritual character speak not of mercy but of grace. 3 The reason for the difference is this: Heavenly people acknowledge that the human race is sheer filth, that in itself it is made of excrement and is hellish. On this account they beg the Lord for mercy, since mercy is the fitting word for people who feel this way.
[3] Spiritual people, on the other hand, might know intellectually that the human race is such, but they do not accept it internally, because they hold fast to their sense of self-sufficiency and love it. As a consequence, they have a hard time saying the word mercy but an easy time saying grace. This results from the type of humility in each of the two.
The more we love ourselves and consider ourselves capable of doing good on our own in order to earn salvation, the less able we are to plead for the Lord's mercy. The reason some are able to ask the Lord's grace, [or favor,] is that it has become a customary way of speaking. When the request is merely formal, grace contains little of the Lord, but is full of oneself. You can examine this in yourself, when you call on the Lord's grace.
Footnotes:
1. By "the Word" Swedenborg generally means the Bible — a terminology that was prominent in the world of his Lutheran upbringing. However, the particular Bible books he includes in this designation vary over time. In his earlier theological works, in three roughly parallel passages (Secrets of Heaven 10325; New Jerusalem 266; White Horse 16), he defines "the Word" as only those books of the Bible that have an inner meaning, by which he apparently means a generally hidden layer of meaning that concerns the Lord and his kingdom, running continuously behind the literal text; see Secrets of Heaven 3540:4, 9942:5. In fact, in the three parallel passages just mentioned he provides a list of the books that have an inner meaning: "The books of the Word in the Old Testament are the five books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, the two books of Samuel, the two books of Kings, David's Psalms, and the prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Those in the New Testament are the four Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — and Revelation." The clear implication is that the Bible books not on this list are not part of the Word — namely, Ruth, 1, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) in the Old Testament; all the books now included in the Apocrypha; and Acts and the Epistles in the New Testament. Nevertheless, although he never retracts these strong statements or explains that he has changed his mind, in his last theological works and manuscripts he extends the term "the Word" to apply to Acts and the Epistles as well; see True Christianity 158, 176, 585:4, 601, 675:2, 730:1; Draft for "Coda to True Christianity" (Swedenborg 1996b) §§2:3, 23:2; Draft Invitation to the New Church (Swedenborg 1996c) §47. In one of these passages, for example, he cites a phrase that is "frequently mentioned in the Word of the New Testament, both in the Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles and their Epistles" (True Christianity 158). In two other passages, he apparently refers to Acts and the Epistles as "the Apostolic Word" (Draft for "Coda to True Christianity" [Swedenborg 1996b] §§1, 59:5; compare True Christianity 730:1). By contrast, he never overtly quotes or cites Acts or the Epistles in Secrets of Heaven. [JSR]
2. The idea that Scripture possesses an inner meaning was widely held in early times, but was growing less popular by Swedenborg's day. On older interpretations of the Bible's inner meaning, see note 3 in §1 and note 1 in §606. See also notes 85, 309 below. In this specific instance, however, Swedenborg may be criticizing a materialistic understanding of the term blessing rather than referring to particular schools of hermeneutics. [RS, SS]
3. For an earlier discussion of the distinction between mercy (misericordia) and grace or favor (gratia), see §598. [LHC]
