It can be a daunting challenge to contextualize mystics within Christianity, as they often occupy a fringe position within the realm of official church and canon. Mystical visions stretch the strictures of established dogma, and appeal more rapturously to Christian hearts than to questioning analytic intellects. This is especially true in the case of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). Although self-identified as a Swedish Lutheran theologian—“Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ”—dedicated to reforming, not upending Christianity, it is difficult to find any contemporary branch of Christianity willing to unreservedly embrace him, or even acknowledge his contributions as possibly salient. At the time of Swedenborg’s death in 1772, many of his followers created a Swedenborgian church to propagate his teachings, something Swedenborg himself never saw the necessity for. Today, Swedenborg’s teachings are mainly circulated by the Swedenborgian Foundation located in Eastern Pennsylvania, and nearly all of his voluminous theological publications (twenty-four volumes with more coming) originate there, including 10 Commandments: The Secrets of Spiritual Growth Found In God’s Principles for Living, the short paperback anthology of Swedenborg’s ruminations on the meanings of the Ten Commandments reviewed here.
Any consideration of the value of Swedenborg’s books needs to acknowledge the following facts about the man and his lifelong focus: Swedenborg was a visionary who claimed that, through his mystical states of spiritual consciousness, he travelled through Heaven and Hell, visited other planets, conversed with angels and demons, and learned three levels constituting the deep truth of Christianity. He identified these levels as “earthly” (referring to the literal surface), “spiritual” (how we relate to other persons), and “heavenly” (our relationship with God). Writing in complex Latin, Swedenborg interpreted Judeo-Christian scripture in surprisingly novel ways. As one might expect from a cosmic traveler, he was most interested in proceeding through Biblical exegesis by means of leaps of imagination and intuition. If you look for the historical roots of Swedenborg’s theology, your search might easily be frustrated. As a non-Trinitarian Christian, he believed in Jesus as the embodiment of God on earth, but not Jesus as the son of God. Yet he thoughtfully and copiously quoted the Gospels, both to highlight his sense of Christianity’s deep relevance to daily life, and to illuminate the essential insights of Hebrew scripture.
In spite of his close reading of Hebrew scripture over decades, Swedenborg never wrote a book focused upon the Ten Commandments. Which brings us to the conundrum of 10 Commandments. What is this book exactly? Left with thousands of pages from Swedenborg at the time of his death, his followers were faced with the promethean task of assembling this mass of visionary experiences and Biblical exegesis into a usable library. This challenge was magnified by the fact that Swedenborg, despite a brilliant career as a scientist prior to his midlife visions, was a wildly discursive writer. Putting a single line of scripture under his scrutiny, he could expound upon it with extraordinary poetic and spiritual imagination. In the tradition of medieval Jewish Kabbalistic commentators (there is no evidence of his knowledge of the subject), he probed the inner meanings of a single Biblical word or image until one sensed that only the author’s death would stop his quest for ultimate inner divine meaning. The extreme thoroughness of treating key Biblical words and concepts led to theories that Swedenborg composed his books entirely during trance states, or that they were examples of automatic writers anticipating Dadaist and Surrealist poets.
How could such a copious outpouring of mystical experience and theological formation drawn from scripture be shaped into a meaningful corpus for seekers and religious scholars? Books published during the author’s lifetime were only a portion of his output. What to do with the rest? As might be expected, the Swedenborg Foundation has “sliced and diced” Swedenborg’s legacy into digestible portions. For example, there is A Swedenborg Sampler volume that offers a collection of excerpts thematically organized, that is recommended for the curious. In addition, there is an inviting Swedenborg biography, that makes his principle concepts explicable, written by Gary Lachman, Emanuel Swedenborg: An Introduction to his Life and Ideas (Tarcher, 2012).
10 Commandments culls selections from four of Swedenborg’s books published during his lifetime: Secrets of Heaven (1754), Revelation Explained (1758-59), Life (1763), and True Christianity (1771). One might question whether the Ten Commandments were a major obsession for Swedenborg, although these excerpts illustrate a high level of interest in the subject. Swedenborg wrote that the, “10 commandments … summarizes everything that constitutes religion.” Yet Swedenborg was not interested in proving his assertions analytically as much as he was with free-association on an idea. For example, in his interpretations of the commandment forbidding adultery, he soars into poetic prose disclosing how a chaste commandment-directed earthly marriage—by “chaste” he means “faithful while being sexually passionate”—prepares a married couple for erotic ecstasy in heaven. This delightful theme—written by an author who was never married—was foreshadowed in more detail in the excerpts from the other books included in this selection. Unfortunately, there is nothing culled from his major book on the subject of Christianity and sex—Conjugal Love—found in these pages.
10 Commandments seems an inessential publication to this reviewer, who finds Swedenborg intriguing. The Swedenborg Foundation website offers suggestions for studying Swedenborg from various angles and perhaps best understand his ongoing influence to spiritual seekers and religion scholars alike, read the poetry of William Blake and William Butler Yeats. They wrestled with Swedenborg’s visions that inspired their own.
Norman Weinstein is a widely-published poet and critic.
Norman Weinstein
Date Of Review:
April 19, 2019
