16. A great many of the learned from the Christian world are dumbfounded when after they die they find themselves having bodies, wearing clothes, and living in houses just as they did in the world. When they are reminded of what they had thought about life after death, the soul, spirits, and heaven and hell, they feel embarrassed and ashamed. They say that their thought had been foolish and that ordinary people had been far wiser in their beliefs than they were.
Some scholars who had convinced themselves of such beliefs and had attributed everything to nature 1 were examined, and it turned out that the outer levels of their minds were opened but the inner levels were closed. This meant that they did not look toward heaven but toward the world and therefore toward hell, since to the extent that the deeper levels of our minds are opened, we look toward heaven, while to the extent that the inner levels are closed and the outer are opened, we look toward hell. 2 The inner levels of our minds are formed to be receptive to all things of heaven and the outer levels are formed to be receptive to all things of this world, but if we are receptive to the world and not at the same time to heaven, then we are receptive to hell. 3
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1. It was characteristic of a great deal of Enlightenment thinking to exalt “Nature” as the guide to truth and the guarantor of happiness. The work of the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus (around 94-51 B.C.E.)-rediscovered in the fifteenth century and much published thereafter-was highly influential in this regard: his Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), denied the existence of an afterlife and claimed that the gods had no influence on human affairs: “Nature is her own mistress and is exempt from the oppression of arrogant despots, accomplishing everything by herself spontaneously and independently and free from the jurisdiction of the gods” (Lucretius 2001, 63). Some of the key doctrines of ancient Epicureanism, including scientific atomism and ethical hedonism, enjoyed a great vogue during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Christian thinkers like René Descartes tried to reconcile the increasingly mechanistic understanding of the natural world with a traditional Judeo-Christian insistence on God’s omnipotence by identifying natural laws with divine edicts. As Descartes said: “By Nature, I do not understand some Goddess, or some other imaginary power; I make use of this word to signify matter itself . . . under the condition that God continues to preserve it in the same way he created it” (quoted in Wilson 2008, 91-92). The Dutch Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza went much further, setting Nature in apposition to God (for example, in the phrase Deus sive Natura, “God, or Nature”). He defined God as “an absolutely infinite being, that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes” (Spinoza [1677] 2006, 4), but held that another name for this “substance” was nature. While his views were more nuanced than this recapitulation may suggest, this was how he was often understood. Hence Spinoza was frequently characterized as an atheist, and in Swedenborg’s time, “Spinozism” was more or less synonymous with atheism (Edwards 1967, 7:533, 541). To view the matter in a larger context, Swedenborg lived in a time when the vanguard of philosophical thought was moving from Deism, which posited a rational order to the universe proceeding from God, to naturalism and materialistic monism, which held that physical reality-that is, nature-constituted the sole reality of the universe. Diverse thinkers held these views (such as the French-German philosopher Paul-Henri Dietrich, Baron d’Holbach; see note 5 in Last Judgment 15), and it is likely that Swedenborg had in mind such thinkers as a group, rather than any specific individuals. For a discussion of this issue, see Taylor 1989, 272, 283, 308. On the preeminence of “nature” as a concept in the eighteenth century, see Lovejoy 1960b, 184. [RS, DNG]
2. For a fuller discussion of the points of view of the different levels of the mind, see Revelation Explained (= Swedenborg 1994-1997a) §208:3. Similar imagery about two ways of viewing the world, involving a door that can open in either direction, can be found in Worship and Love of God 56. Compare also Marriage Love 146; True Christianity 366:2, 381:4. On the inner and outer self as described by Swedenborg, see New Jerusalem 36-53. [SS]
3. [Swedenborg note] The spiritual world and the earthly world are joined together in us: 6057. The inner self is formed to be an image of heaven, while the outer is formed to be an image of the world: 3628, 4523, 4524, 6013, 6057, 6314, 9706, 10156, 10472.
