15. Another reason people in the church have these ideas is that they believe no one will get to heaven or hell before the Last Judgment; and the picture of the Last Judgment they have adopted is that everything visible to the eye is going to be destroyed, that new things will come into being, and that souls will be reunited to their bodies, allowing people to live as human beings again. 1 This belief goes along with another, namely, a belief in angels as beings created in the beginning, since you cannot believe that heaven and hell are from humankind when you believe that no human being will get to heaven or hell until the end of the world.
[2] To convince people that this is not the case, I have been allowed to meet with angels and have conversations with people in hell. I have been engaged in this interaction for many years now, 2 sometimes without interruption from morning to evening; and in this way I have been taught about heaven and hell. This has happened so that people of the church will no longer remain in their misconceived beliefs about a resurrection on Judgment Day, about the state of souls in the meanwhile, and about the nature of angels and the Devil. Because these beliefs are false, they are full of darkness; and for people who base their thinking about these matters on a sense of their own intelligence, these beliefs lead to doubt and ultimately to denial. They say in their hearts, “How can such a vast heaven with so many stars, with the sun and the moon, be destroyed and disintegrate? How can stars then fall to earth from heaven, stars that are larger than the earth is? How can bodies that have been eaten by worms, devoured by rot, or scattered to the winds be reassembled and reattached to their souls, and where have these souls been in the meanwhile? What kind of experience have these souls been having without the physical senses they had in their bodies?” 3 These and many similar questions, because they are incomprehensible, are not believable; for many, they even destroy belief in our eternal life, in heaven and hell, and in all the rest of the principles of the church’s faith.
[3] We can see this destruction taking place in people who say, “Who has come from heaven and told us that this is true? 4 What is hell? Does it actually exist? What is this business of people being tormented by fire to eternity? What is the Judgment Day? Haven’t people been waiting in vain for it for centuries?” All this and more, leading to a rejection of everything. 5
To prevent people who think this way-as most people do who are held to be learned and well educated because they have worldly expertise-from further distressing and misleading people of simple faith and heart and bringing about hellish darkness in regard to God, heaven, eternal life, and related matters, the Lord has opened the deeper levels of my spirit. This has made it possible for me to talk after their deaths with all the people I have ever known during their physical lives; with some of these I have talked for days, with some for months, with some for a whole year. I have also talked with so many other people that saying there were a hundred thousand of them would be an understatement. Many of these were in the heavens and many were in the hells.
I have talked with some people on the third day after they died, and have told them that arrangements were being made for their burial and funeral, which prompted them to say that they had done well in casting off what had served them for a body and its functions in the world. They wanted me to tell [their loved ones] that they were not dead but alive, and were just as human now as ever. They said they had simply crossed over from one world into another and had no awareness of having lost anything, since they had a body and sensory faculties just as they had had before; they had understanding and will just as before; they had the same kinds of thoughts and feelings, the same kinds of sensations, even the same kinds of pleasures and desires as they had had in the world.
[4] Many who have just died, on seeing that they are still people and are still alive as they were before, and in similar circumstances (since for all of us, our first state after death is much like the one we had in the world, though this changes gradually for us into either heaven or hell), are touched with a new joy at being alive and say they had not believed it would be like this. They are also absolutely amazed that they had been so ignorant and blind about what happens to us after death, and are even more amazed that people in the church have the same ignorance and blindness, even though they of all people on the planet have access to light on such matters. 6
[5] Then they begin for the first time to see the reason for this blindness and ignorance-that outward concerns, worldly and bodily preoccupations, 7 had so completely taken over and filled their minds that they could not be raised into heaven’s light and look beyond the things they had been taught, and so see what the church is really all about. When bodily and worldly things are loved as much as they are nowadays, nothing but utter darkness flows in from them when we try to think about heavenly realities beyond the teachings on faith proclaimed by our church.
Сноски:
1. On the belief that all people who have died will be resurrected in their physical bodies at the end of the world, an event commonly identified with the Last Judgment, see note 1 in Other Planets 165. [Editors]
2. The exact point of commencement of Swedenborg’s daily, waking, ongoing interaction with angels and spirits is variously stated in his writings. To cite just a few representative examples: (1) In a diary passage apparently written in early 1746, Swedenborg states that his interaction with spirits and angels dates a medio Aprilis 1745, “from mid-April 1745” (Spiritual Experiences [= Swedenborg 1998-2013] §[8a]). (2) In two later passages, one in a theological manuscript of early 1763 and one in a letter of November 11, 1766, he assigns the commencement a date of 1744 (for the manuscript, see Draft on Divine Wisdom chapter 7, item 1 = §95 [Mongredien’s numbering] [= Swedenborg 1994-1997c, 480]; for the letter, see Acton 1948-1955, 627). (3) In a still later letter to a British follower, Thomas Hartley (1708-1784), on August 5, 1769, he states that his sight was “opened into the spiritual world” in 1743 (Acton 1948-1955, 679). In other words, as the years passed, Swedenborg saw the commencement of his interaction as having occurred earlier and earlier. Some of this variation may derive from his changing assessment of which event constituted the true beginning of his spiritual experiences. Even if the variations are taken at face value, the dates that he mentions for this commencement all fall within the range 1743-1745. See Tafel 1877, 1118-1127, for a list of the relevant passages, with discussion. For a detailed account of the onset of Swedenborg’s spiritual experiences, see Acton 1927, 26-118. [JSR, GFD, SS]
3. The popular belief concerning the future cosmic cataclysm described here is based on biblical passages such as Isaiah 13:9-13; 34:1-4; Revelation 21:1. In particular, the belief that the stars will fall is based on a literal interpretation of such biblical passages as Matthew 24:29; Mark 13:25; Revelation 6:13; 12:4. On the belief that bodies will be raised from the dead in the flesh, see note 1 in Other Planets 165. Swedenborg decries these beliefs in many passages, including Secrets of Heaven 931, 1850, 2117-2133; Heaven and Hell 312; Revelation Unveiled 877; Marriage Love 182:6; True Christianity 769-771. [LSW, SS]
4. On the theme of going to the spiritual world and returning to report on it, see note 2 in Other Planets 124. [Editors]
5. While Swedenborg’s characterization of the nonbeliever’s position is fairly general, it does reflect a polemic that took place in his time, as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment brought the validity and necessity of the Christian revelation into serious question for the first time since the creation of a monolithic European “Christendom” during the Middle Ages. Most of Christianity’s Enlightenment “deniers” were not atheists but Deists, who thought the existence of a benevolent and all-powerful God could be deduced from a rational contemplation of the elegant design of the universe. English Deists such as John Toland (1670-1722) and Matthew Tindal (1657-1733) argued that the Christian revelation was indeed authentic but provided no truths that human reason could not discern unaided. In France, more vehemently anticlerical thinkers such as Voltaire (1694-1778) rejected Christianity as a superstitious impediment to any true understanding of the Supreme Being. Atheism proper, however, was never openly professed, probably because of the threat of legal penalties, though it certainly can be documented among the members of the upper classes. One notable example of atheism can be found in the French salon of Paul-Henri Dietrich, Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789), who hosted radical luminaries like Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and published his own antitheistic polemics under a variety of pseudonyms (Kors 2003, 2:213-215). Another well-known atheist was the Catholic priest Jean Meslier (1664-1729), whose memoir repudiating Christianity in its entirety was discovered after his death. His book was subsequently abridged and published by Voltaire, and the abridgment includes such passages as: “What then are the worthless resources of these Christ-worshipers? . . . Their miracles? But what people do not have their own such things, and who among the wise do not scorn them as fables? Their prophecies? Has not their falsity been proven? . . . Their doctrine? But is that not the height of absurdity?” (Meslier 1830, 363-364; translated by SS). On the further movement from Deism to atheism in the later Enlightenment, see note 1 in Last Judgment 16. [RS, DNG, SS]
6. [Swedenborg note] Nowadays, few people in the Christian world believe that after we die we immediately rise again: preface to Genesis 16, §§4622, 10758. They believe instead that our resurrection will happen when the visible world is destroyed at the time of the Last Judgment: 10595. The reason for this belief:10595, 10758. But in fact we do rise again immediately after death, and are then complete human beings in every detail: 4527, 5006, 5078, 8939, 10594, 10758. The “soul” that lives after death is the human spirit, the true self that lies within us; in the other life it has a complete human form (322, 1880, 1881, 3633, 4622, 4735, 5883, 6054, 6605, 6626, 7021, 10594); illustrated by eyewitness experience (4527, 5006, 8939); illustrated from the Word (10597). An explanation of what is meant by the dead appearing in the holy city in Matthew 27:53: 9229. How we are revived from death: 168–189 (described on the basis of personal experience). Our state after being revived: 317, 318, 319, 2119, 5078, 10596. Some wrong opinions concerning the soul and resurrection: 444, 445, 4527, 4622, 4658.
7. On the meaning of the word “bodily” here, see note 3 in New Jerusalem 9 and note 3 in Last Judgment 38.[Editors]