Estudo Bíblico do Novo Cristianismo

Das Obras de Swedenborg

 

Secrets of Heaven # 0

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First seek God's kingdom and its justice and you will gain all. — Matthew 6:33

[Author's Table of Contents]

THE "secrets 1 of heaven" that have been disclosed to us in Sacred Scripture, or the Lord's Word, 2 can be found in the exposition of the Word's inner meaning. To learn about the nature of this meaning, see what my experience has shown in §§1767-1777 and 1869-1879; and see too what appears in the body of the text in §§1-5, 64, 65, 66, 167, 605, 920, 937, 1143, 1224, 1404, 1405, 1408, 1409, 1502 at the end, 1540, 1659, 1756, 1783, 1807.

Accounts of the wonders I have seen in the world of spirits and in the heaven of angels 3 are appended at the beginning and end of each chapter. In this first volume they are as follows: 4

1. Our resurrection from death and entry into eternal life §§168-181

2. Our entry, once revived, into eternal life (continued) 182-189

3. Our entry into eternal life (continued) 314-319

4. What the life of the soul or spirit is then like 320-323

5. Several examples from spirits of opinions they adopted during their physical lives concerning the soul or spirit 443-448

6. Heaven and heavenly joy 449-459

7. Heaven and heavenly joy (continued) 537-546

8. Heaven and heavenly joy (continued) 547-553

9. The communities that make up heaven 684-691

10. Hell 692-700

11. The hells of those who spent their lives in hatred, revenge, and cruelty 814-823

12. The hells of those who spent their lives in adultery and lechery; in addition, the hells of deceivers and witches 824-831

13. Misers' hells; the foul Jerusalem and outlaws in the wilderness; and the feces-laden hells of those who have pursued sensual pleasure alone 938-946

14. A different set of hells than those already mentioned 947-970

15. Spiritual devastation 1106-1113

16. The earliest church, called "humankind," or Adam 1114-1129

17. The pre-Flood people who died out 1265-1272

18. Location in the "universal human;" 5 in addition, place and distance in the other life 1273-1278

19. Location and place in the other life; distance and time there as well (continued) 1376-1382

20. The ability of spirits and angels to perceive things; auras in the other life 1383-1400

21. Perception and auras in the other life (continued) 1504-1520

22. The light in which angels live 1521-1534

23. The light in which angels live (continued); their magnificent gardens and their dwellings 1619-1633

24. The way spirits and angels talk 1634-1650

25. The way spirits talk (continued) and how it varies 1757-1764

26. Sacred Scripture, or the Word, which conceals a divine message that lies open to the view of good spirits and angels 1767-1777

27. Sacred Scripture or the Word (continued) 1869-1879

General information about spirits and angels 1880-1885

Notas de rodapé:

1. The Latin word here translated "secrets" is arcana, which generally refers to sacred secrets or mysteries; the English equivalent, "arcana," has a similar sense, but has come to have a more limited use. Most previous translations of this work retained the Latin title Arcana Coelestia, literally, "heavenly arcana." [RS]

2. Although the use of the term "the Word" for the Bible was common in Swedenborg's time, his conception of "the Word" does not include all the books of which the Bible is generally understood to be composed. He generally limits his definition of "the Word" to those parts of Scripture that he believes to have an inner meaning throughout: the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), the historical books (Joshua, Judges, 1, 2 Samuel, 1, 2 Kings), the Psalms, the prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi), the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John), and Revelation. He thus omits certain parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, such as 1, 2 Chronicles, Ruth, Proverbs, and the Song of Solomon, as well as the writings of the apostles in the Greek Scriptures. For a discussion of his reasons for these omissions, see his letter to his friend Gabriel Beyer (1720-1779) dated April 15, 1766, cited in Acton 1948-1955, 612-613, and quoted in the introduction to this volume, pages 86-87 [NCBSP: in the printed edition]. On the use of the term "the Lord" in Swedenborg's writings, see note 2 in §1. [GFD, RS]

3. Swedenborg describes the next world as being divided into three major areas: heaven, hell, and a middle region called the world of spirits (see §5852, for example). A fourth area could be added: the "underground realm" (see note 2 in §247). [LHC] In his 1758 work Heaven and Hell 421, Swedenborg says, "The world of spirits is neither heaven nor hell but a place or state between the two. It is where we first arrive after death, being in due time either raised into heaven or cast into hell from it depending on our life in this world." (The translations from Heaven and Hell quoted in these notes are those of George F. Dole.) Angels form an extremely important part of Swedenborg's metaphysical system. Key aspects of his thought in this regard are that angels are persons in the strict sense, not abstract forces or entities. They have bodies as we do, and even wear clothing and live in houses in heaven (Heaven and Hell 73-77, 177-190). Moreover, angels were not originally created as such: every angel was at one point a person alive either on this earth or on some other planet (see his 1758 work Other Planets 1). Much of Swedenborg's information about the unseen worlds is reported in the form of conversations with angels. [RS]

4. Swedenborg later came to refer to these "accounts of the wonders ... seen in the world of spirits and in the heaven of angels" with the Latin term memorabilia. Traditionally they have been referred to in English as either "memorabilia" or "memorable relations;" in the annotations to this edition they are called "accounts of memorable occurrences," or some variation of that term. (Strictly speaking, the first separate "memorable occurrences" distinctly labeled in small capitals in the first editions appeared in Swedenborg's 1766 work Revelation Unveiled, but the term has since been applied to the shorter accounts embedded in his previous material.) Because of their basis in Swedenborg's spiritual experiences, these accounts are also sometimes referred to as "experiential" material (as opposed to doctrinal or exegetical). Swedenborg apparently saw the experiential material in the Secrets of Heaven volumes as the reader's easiest avenue of access to the work; in order to distinguish it, he had it printed in italics, in slightly larger type, and with more space between the lines. In this table of experiential material in the first volume, the first edition (the Latin edition of 1749) cites the passages by page number, an odd exception to Swedenborg's customary use of section numbers to refer to his text. He may have felt that the use of page numbers would make these topics more accessible to the browsing reader. The corresponding section numbers have been substituted in this edition. It should be noted that this first volume of the present edition contains about half the material in the first volume of Swedenborg's edition; so that when he here refers to "accounts of the wonders" (Latin mirabilia) appearing "in this first volume," the reader must understand that the passages cited after §946 appear now in volume 2. The same applies to the section numbers cited just above in the text. [SS]

5. Swedenborg describes heaven as having the form of a single human being, which he calls maximus homo, here translated "universal human." See §§550, 911:2, and the sections referred to here by Swedenborg. See also note 1 in §318 below. [LHC]

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

Das Obras de Swedenborg

 

Secrets of Heaven # 920

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920. This verse depicts the worship of the ancient church in general, using the images of an altar and a burnt offering, which were the main elements in all representative worship. First, however, I need to tell what the worship of the earliest church was like and how people came to worship the Lord in a representative manner.

The people of the earliest church had no other kind of worship than internal worship — the kind of worship in heaven. In that church, heaven communicated with humankind in such a way as to form a single unit with it. The method of communication was perception, which is discussed frequently above. 1 So because the people of that church were angelic and had depth, they did not care about superficial bodily or worldly things, although they were, of course, aware of them. In the individual objects of the senses, rather, they perceived something divine and heavenly.

When they saw a tall mountain, for example, they did not picture a mountain but perceived the idea of height, and the idea of height led them to the idea of heaven and the Lord. This is how it came about that the Lord was said to live on the heights, that he was called the Highest One and Most Exalted, and that worship of him was later held on mountains.

It was the same with all other phenomena. When they thought of morning, for instance, they did not think of the early hours of the day but of the quality of heaven, which is like the morning or dawn in a person's mind. So they called the Lord the morning, the east, and the dawn. Likewise when they perceived a tree with its fruit and leaves, they ignored these details, seeing in them instead the representation of a human being — love and charity being the fruit, and faith, the leaves. As a result they not only compared members of the church to a tree (and to a whole paradise), and character traits to the fruit and leaves, but also called them such.

This is what people who have a heavenly, angelic way of thinking are like.

[2] Everyone is capable of realizing that our general viewpoint governs all our specific perceptions, including, of course, all our sense impressions, whether acquired through our eyes or ears. In fact we lack any interest in the objects of our senses unless they make part of that overall picture. To those whose hearts are glad, for instance, everything they hear or see appears cheerful and smiling. But to the depressed, everything they see or hear seems grim and melancholy. The same is true in all other cases as well, because our general mood pervades everything and causes us to see and hear everything within the context of our overall mood. Nothing outside that context is even visible but is virtually absent or irrelevant.

The situation was the same with the people of the earliest church. Whatever they saw with their eyes had a heavenly character for them. So for them, absolutely everything seemed alive. This indicates what their worship of God was like: internal and not at all external.

[3] When the church deteriorated, as it did in succeeding generations, and that perception, that communication with heaven, began to die out, the situation started to change. People were no longer perceiving anything of heaven in the objects of their senses as earlier generations had, but only things of the world, and the less perception they had left, the more this tendency increased. At last their final inheritors, who lived just before the Flood, saw nothing but what was worldly, physical, and earthly in those objects.

By this means, heaven was separated from humankind and ceased to communicate with it, except in a very remote way. A line of contact with hell then opened for humanity, and this became the source of their general perspective, which in turn is the source of all particular notions, as has been noted. After that, when the suggestion of something heavenly came up, they discounted it, until finally they did not even want to admit that anything spiritual or heavenly existed. So humankind's condition turned upside down.

[4] Since the Lord foresaw that this was what the human condition would become, he arranged for religious teachings to remain preserved and available, so that from them people could learn what was heavenly and what was spiritual. Those teachings, obtained from the people of the earliest church, were gathered by the individuals known as Cain and as Enoch, who have already been discussed. This is why it is said of Cain that a mark was put on him to prevent his murder, and of Enoch that God took him. See the treatment of these details at Genesis 4:15, §§392, 394, and at Genesis 5:24 [§521].

These doctrinal formulations consisted exclusively in symbolic language and so in what seem to be enigmatic sayings, telling what was meant by things found on earth, such as mountains (symbolizing heavenly attributes and the Lord), the morning and the east (again heavenly attributes and the Lord), different kinds of trees and their fruits (people and their heavenly qualities), and so on.

In such things did their articles of doctrine consist, and they were gathered together out of the signs and symbols of the earliest church. In consequence, their writing exhibited the same character. Since what they admired for its antiquity (and felt they could discern) in that literature was the divine and heavenly component, they were allowed to establish for themselves a form of worship based on similar features. That was the inspiration for their worship on mountains, in groves, and among the trees; for their open-air sculpture; and for the altars and burnt offerings that eventually became the main features of all worship.

The people of the ancient church initiated this worship, and from them it spread to their descendants and to all the surrounding nations, as did many other aspects of their worship. This will be discussed later [§§1238, 1241, 2180:4], the Lord in his divine mercy willing.

Notas de rodapé:

1. On the topic of perception, see, for example, §§104, 125, 202-203, 371, 483, 502-503, 521, 597. [LHC]

  
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