Icon by Chantal Heinegg

Swedenborg, on the essential seed of God in man

It is because the very essence of the Divine is love and wisdom that we have two abilities of life. From the one we get our discernment, and from the other our volition. Our discernment is supplied entirely by an inflow of wisdom from God, while our volition is supplied entirely by an inflow of love from God. Our failures to be appropriately wise and appropriately loving do not take these abilities away from us. They only close them off; and as long as they do, while we may call our discernment "discernment" and our volition "volition," essentially they are not. So if these abilities really were taken away from us, everything human about us would be destroyed—our thinking and the speech that results from thought, and our purpose in and the actions that result from purpose.

  Divine Love and Wisdom,  Emanuel Swedenborg,  Swedenborg foundation, 2003, page 62

Swedenborg, on the Divine nature of rationality in man

All the elements of human reason unite in, and in a sense center on, the fact that a single God is the creator of the universe. As a result, rational people, on the basis of their shared understanding, neither do nor can think in any other way... all the elements of human reason unite and center on the oneness of God.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that in its own right, our very ability to think rationally is not our own property. It is a property of God within us. Human rationality in general depends on this fact, and this general property causes our reason more or less spontaneously to see the oneness of God. The second is that through our rational ability either we are in heaven's light or we draw from it some general quality of its thought, and the all pervading element of heaven's light is that God is one.

This is not the case if we have used our rational ability to skew our lower understanding. In this case we still possess the ability, but by the distortion of our lower abilities we have steered it off course, and our rationality is not sound.

Ibid, page 62

Commentary

Like Ibn 'Arabi, Swedenborg considers wisdom — which 'Arabi called knowledge — as the highest property of God. In Divine Love and Wisdom, he actually conflates love and wisdom, which basically accords with Ibn 'Arabi's doctrine of unity, expressed through the names of God. These qualities appear as separate entities in the immanent, but must be considered as one in the transcendent. Swedenborg treats this particular subject in part one of the book, under his discussion of whether God can have multiple natures.

 Swedenborg's comment on essence as a property in man formed from a higher, that is, divine, source, are unambiguous, although he used terminology somewhat different than the way we understand the term today.

Particularly striking—and most extraordinary— is his description in Heaven and its Wonders and Hell of what happens to the essence and personality of man when he dies. According to Swedenborg, after death, the personality of a man or woman has some durability, but gradually evaporates, revealing only his essence, and how it was formed during his life.  Essences that form according to the higher principles of the good, regardless of religion (even heathens qualify) express themselves in a manner that allows eventual admission to heaven, and essences that are contaminated with the influences of evil choose, of their own volition, to enter hell. Any student of the Gurdjieff method will be fascinated by these descriptions. His reportage — which is, of course, not an idle theory, but a legitimate Divine Revelation — reminds us of the Sufi folktale about the dervish who puts off doing the necessary work in his life, only to discover, to his horror, that when he dies, nothing whatsoever can be changed anymore.

 My own observations on the nature of Divine Love, as expressed in Chakras and the Enneagram, are very nearly identical to Swedenborg's. I wrote the book before I encountered his ideas; but I can attest to the fact that what he writes is unerringly accurate. Serious students of esotericism should definitely set themselves the task of absorbing Swedenborg's books. He says essentially the same things Ibn Arabi does, allowing for differences in expression acquired over a span of centuries, geography, and language.

 The consonance of the material from these two masters underscores Gurdjieff's contention that there can be no substantial disagreement in material received from higher sources.

Portrait of Swedenborg by Carl Frederick von Breda