24. As for the fact that all people without exception who have been born and have died since the beginning of the creation of the world are either in heaven or in hell, no explanation is needed to see that this follows from what was said and explained in the preceding chapter, namely, that heaven and hell come from humankind.
Until the present time, the most commonly held belief has been that we will not get to heaven or hell before the day of the Last Judgment, when souls will be reunited with their bodies and therefore enjoy the faculties believed to belong exclusively to the body. 1 Many ordinary people have adopted this belief on the authority of those who have hypothesized about the nature of what lies within us and have published their supposed wisdom. 2 Since these individuals give no thought at all to the existence of a spiritual world, but only consider the earthly one, and therefore do not think in terms of the spiritual self, they have not realized that the spiritual self each of us has within our earthly self is just as human in form as the earthly self is. So even though they are capable of seeing that the spiritual self is active at will throughout the earthly self and in its every detail and that the earthly self does absolutely nothing on its own, it has not crossed their minds that the earthly self gets its human form from the spiritual self.
[2] It is the spiritual self that thinks and wills, since on its own the earthly self cannot do so, and yet the thinking and willing of the spiritual self are vital to the earthly self. The earthly self does what the spiritual self wills, and says what the spiritual self thinks, so completely that there is no action without some will and no speech without some thought. This is because if you take away the thought and the will, the speech and action instantly cease.
We can see from this that the spiritual self is the true self and that it is present in each and every detail of the earthly self. This means that the earthly self is an image of the spiritual self, because any part or particle of the earthly self in which the spiritual self is not active is not alive.
Nevertheless, the spiritual self cannot be visible to the earthly self, because what is earthly cannot see what is spiritual. What is spiritual can see what is earthly, though: this is in keeping with the divine design, but the reverse is not. Therefore there is an inflow from what is spiritual into what is earthly but not the reverse; and this applies to our ability to see, because sight flows in as well. 3 Our spiritual self is what is called our spirit; it is visible in the spiritual world in a complete human form, and it lives on after death.
[3] Because the great thinkers have known nothing about the spiritual world and nothing about the human spirit, as already noted, they have embraced the idea that we cannot live as human beings until our souls get back into our bodies and once again have physical senses. This has given rise to ridiculous notions about our resurrection-that even though our bodies have been eaten by worms and fish and have completely disintegrated into dust, they will be put back together again by divine omnipotence and reunited with our souls, and that this will not happen until the end of the world, when the physical universe will be destroyed. There are other similar notions as well, all of which defy comprehension and which the mind immediately recognizes as impossible and in violation of the divine design. So these notions have undermined many people’s faith, since anyone whose thinking is based on wisdom cannot believe something that is utterly incomprehensible. There is no such thing as faith in impossibilities-that is, in things that we regard as impossible. 4 Furthermore, people who do not believe in life after death use the absurdity of these notions as support for their denial.
Support for the fact that we do rise again immediately after death and that we are then in a complete human form is given in a number of chapters in Heaven and Hell [§§432-469].
I mention all this as further reinforcement for the idea that heaven and hell come from humankind; and from this it follows that all humans without exception who have been born and have died since the beginning of creation are either in heaven or in hell.
Mga talababa:
1. An ancient and common strain of Christian thought taught that resurrection must occur in a material body-or, as it was usually termed, “in the flesh.” A representative selection of exponents of this belief would include such notables as Justin Martyr (around 100-around 165 C.E.), in On the Resurrection (= Justin Martyr 1994, 294-299); Tertullian (around 155 or 160-220), in On the Resurrection of the Flesh (= Tertullian 2001, 545-595); Athenagoras (second century C.E.), in On the Resurrection of the Dead (= Athenagoras 2001, 2:149-162); Cyril of Jerusalem (around 315-around 386), in Catechetical Lecture 18 (= Cyril of Jerusalem 2001, 136-143); Augustine (354-430), for example in the passage that Swedenborg paraphrases in Swedenborg 1976b, 155 (= Augustine’s On the Soul and Its Origin, book 4, chapter 14 [or, in other editions, chapter 10] = Augustine 1997, 360); and Thomas Aquinas (1224 or 1225-1274), in Supplement to the Summa Theologiae 70, 79 (= Aquinas 1952, 2:893-900; 2:951-956). (For belief in bodily resurrection among early Christians and the church fathers, see Badham 1976, 47-64; Bynum 1994; Bynum 1995; Vidal 2011, 337-341.) In addition to the theologians of earlier times, Swedenborg may be pointing to the large group of writers from the Enlightenment period who showed a lively interest in the actual mechanics of resurrection; for a survey see Strickland 2010, 163-183, and compare note 2 in Last Judgment 24 below. Strickland cites as examples British writers and treatises now more or less obscure, including John Pearson, An Exposition of the Creed (1676); Humphry Hody, The Resurrection of the (Same) Body Asserted (1694); William Wilson, A Discourse of the Resurrection (1694); Edward Stillingfleet, Fifty Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions (1707); William Lupton, The Resurrection of the Same Body (1711); Henry Felton, The Resurrection of the Same Numerical Body, and Its Reunion to the Same Soul (1733); Winch Holdsworth, A Defence of the Doctrine of the Resurrection of the Same Body (1727). Though it seems unlikely that Swedenborg knew of these particular writers and works, they are illustrative of the compelling interest the question of bodily resurrection held during the early modern era. More historically visible proponents of bodily resurrection, well known to Swedenborg, include Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), in On the Truth of the Christian Religion (1639), book 2, section 10 (= Grotius [1639] 1829, book 2, pages 94-97), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), on whose treatment of this topic see the discussion in Strickland 2009, 391-410. Between traditional Christian teachings and the conclusions drawn by most intellectuals in the early modern era, Swedenborg is justified in describing the belief in “resurrection in the flesh” as that which was “until the present time, the most commonly held.” [SS]
2. The Latin here translated “those who have hypothesized about the nature of what lies within us and have published their supposed wisdom” is illis qui professi sunt sapientiam, et inquisiverunt de interiori statu hominis, literally, “those who have made public their wisdom and inquired into the inner state of humankind.” Professi sunt would generally mean “have professed to believe,” but it also can mean to give lectures and thus publicize one’s opinions; in Swedenborg’s usage it generally carries a strong suggestion of deception. He does not seem to be thinking here of Christian theologians (see note 1 in Last Judgment 24), since in the next sentence, he describes these thinkers as giving “no thought at all to the existence of a spiritual world,” and just two subsections farther on, in Last Judgment 24:3, he says they know “nothing about the spiritual world and nothing about the human spirit.” Yet they seem to be the same scholars who are described in Last Judgment 17 as those whose “teachings about resurrection” are founded on the premise that the soul has no senses unless it is in the body. Thus they must be scholars who in their writings displayed an interest both in “the nature of what lies within us” (as indicated here) and in resurrection in the flesh (as indicated in Last Judgment 24:3). There are in fact a number of Enlightenment figures who demonstrate this combination of interests. A discipline that came to be called empirical psychology emerged during this time (see Vidal 2011); it attempted to understand the soul through its observable effects on the body, and thus, virtually by definition, it required that the soul be linked to, and act through, a material body; see Vidal 2000, 419-421. On the theorizing of these new “psychologists” about resurrection, see specifically Vidal 2011, 333-346. Swedenborg was familiar with the work of a large number of writers who contributed to the emerging discipline of psychology, as is demonstrated by the sources he cites in his Quotations on Various Philosophical and Theological Topics (= Swedenborg 1976b); they include Descartes, Leibniz, George Bernard Bilfinger (1693-1750), and Christian Wolff (1679-1754). The foremost example is John Locke (1632-1704), whom Swedenborg read and even praised at one point in his career (see Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain [= Swedenborg [1740-1741] 1955] part 2, §294, where he describes Locke as having “investigated the interior operations of the mind”). On Locke’s powerful influence on the general understanding of the soul and mind among the intelligentsia of the era, see Vidal 2011, 15-17; on his contribution to the ongoing conversation about resurrection, see Vidal 2002, 950-952. Whether the conclusions about resurrection drawn by the “psychologists” of the age actually percolated down to “ordinary people,” as Swedenborg asserts here, is another question. [SS]
3. A concise description of the inflow of the mind that accompanies the act of seeing is found in Soul-Body Interaction 1:2: “Specifically, the [divine] design calls for the thinking mind to flow into our sight in accordance with the state imposed on our eyes by the objects of vision, a state that the mind also adjusts to suit itself.” As Swedenborg explains this theory in Secrets of Heaven 994:4, our ability to see in dreams demonstrates that our sight arises from within; he implies there that the eye is only an external, physical apparatus that allows us to see what is physical and material: “We can still see just as well after the body’s death as when we were alive in the body, and much better. We simply do not see what is worldly and material but rather what belongs to the other life.” Compare Swedenborg’s explanation of the senses in Divine Love and Wisdom 363: “The appearance is that our eye is seeing, but our discernment is seeing through our eye, which is why we ascribe sight to our discernment. The appearance is that our ear is hearing, but our discernment is hearing through our ear. . . . The appearance is that our nostrils smell and that our tongue tastes, but discernment is smelling with its perceptiveness and is tasting as well.” For more on the ability of spiritual eyes to see objects that are earthly or physical, see Other Planets 134 and note 2 in Other Planets 134 there. [GFD, SS]
4. Swedenborg rejected the common religious idea that faith is believing something because the church teaches it, even though we cannot understand it. This he called “blind faith.” Rather, he said that “real faith is simply recognizing that something is so because it is true” (Faith 2). This, he goes on to say, requires that we understand it, or at least can sense within ourselves that it is true. See Faith 1-4; Divine Providence 144; True Christianity 346-347. For an experience in the spiritual world illustrating the principle that faith is a clear understanding of the truth, see True Christianity 508. [LSW]
