...As
the story goes, since early 1744, Swedenborg started experiencing strange dreams and
visions, recorded by him in his diary. In the October 26-27, 1744, entry, he
appeared clear about the path he was destined to follow. He felt he should drop
his current project and write a new book about the worship of God. He soon
began work on one such book De cultu et amore Dei with many more of such
writings to follow. There is a well-known story of how in April 1745 he happened
to be dining in a private room at a London tavern when by the end of the meal,
a darkness fell upon his eyes, and the room "shifted character." Suddenly, he saw
a person sitting in the corner of the room telling him: “Do not eat too
much!” Swedenborg,
scared, hurried home. Later that night, the same man appeared in a dream. He
told Swedenborg that He was the Lord, that He had appointed Swedenborg to
reveal the spiritual meaning of the Bible, and that, from now on, He would be directing
Swedenborg in what to write. The same night, the spiritual world was opened to
Swedenborg. Out of this experience, many radical reinterpretations of the Bible
and revisions of the Christian dogma would follow, such as, for instance, the
new explanation of the Trinity. He was vehemently against seeing the Trinity as
Three Persons, that is, the idea of One God being three separate Persons: the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Instead, he declared that the
three were, in fact, different aspects of one God, in whom is the Divine
Trinity, and that divinity is impossible, if divided into three Persons. (This
is exactly my own understanding of the concept of the Trinity, yet it does not
make me a Swedenborgian, of course, since I arrived at my idea independently
from him, through my own thinking.) He saw that one and only Person in the Lord
Jesus Christ, in whom was a trinity of the soul, body, and spirit, such as
exists in every person. (Curiously, although my personal view of the Trinity
used to be also as three different aspects of One God, I identified Jesus
Christ not as the one and only Person of the Trinity, but as the only knowable
and comprehensible aspect of God.)
Having
made such claims to the authority of Jesus Christ, no wonder that Swedenborg’s
teachings caused an uproar, instantly lining up his followers and detractors
alike. The supernatural character of his dreams and visions was dismissed by
all of his critics, including Kant, who concluded his investigation by denying
them validity, and calling them all illusions.
There
was however a bizarre incident in Swedenborg’s life, which Kant, as a
magnanimous man, refrained from explaining away as a fluke, or as a conspiracy
of the alleged witnesses. (The number of these reported psychic experiences was
actually three, but only this one possessed the necessary objectivity,
to be investigated seriously.) This incident took place in 1759 when during a
dinner in the Swedish town of Gothenburg Swedenborg most excitedly told his
dinner party that there was a fire in Stockholm at that exact time, that it had
already consumed his neighbor’s home and was now threatening his own. Two hours
later, he informed his company with relief that the fire had stopped three
doors from his house. Two days later, reports were to confirm every statement,
to the precise hour when Swedenborg first shared the information. As the final
point of proof for the validity of his experience, Gothenburg is four hundred
kilometers from Stockholm!
Many
people were stunned by this and other such experiences, of which perhaps only
this one could not be explained by way of a special susceptibility to intense
suggestion on the part of Swedenborg’s witnesses, to his ESP powers. Much to
his credit, none of his even most vicious critics ever suggested that
Swedenborg, in an effort to promote his psychic bona fides, could have had a
paid, or willing, accomplice in Stockholm, with whom he might have wickedly
conspired to arrange, arson included, this most successful demonstration.
As
for my own explanation of what really happened there, simultaneously in
Gothenburg and Stockholm, on July 29, 1759, I frankly have none, and
furthermore, I have no interest in indulging in vain speculations. My main
attraction to this incident is that it uncannily floats in the border zone
between the rational and the irrational. As a "religious" experience, it is
clearly irrational, but as soon as we switch into the area of parapsychology, a
rational element suddenly looms large. I have previously mentioned the very
real and rational Alexander Popov Radio
and Electronics Research Center in Moscow. Aren’t we all in agreement that
in Swedenborg’s time the very idea of radio and electronic transmission and
communication would have been deemed exceedingly irrational by an overwhelming
majority of the scientific community? Come to think of it, how many more
transfers from the mist of the irrational into the sunlight of the rational are
we to expect in the next hundred years or so?...
(Part
II ends here. The Supplement to this
entry will be posted tomorrow.)
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