By Rev. Dr. Reuben P. Bell
As comprehensive as Swedenborg’s scientific works appear, his theistic science can be distilled into the pursuit of a single question: How Spirit comes into Nature. To address this fundamental question, he had to start with simple explanations that predictably led to further questions, each with their own explanations, and so on in a lifelong series of discoveries. We can trace these discoveries in his published works, and in retrospect we can see how each solution to each major problem required the pursuit of yet more answers. At intervals, he developed major “doctrines” (which we might call models, or hypotheses) to answer questions and move his research program forward. Assembled end-to-end, we find a remarkable series of scientific principles, like steps, allowing him to ascend to within reach of that fundamental goal. These models, in the order of their discovery, were 1) a feasible model for the origin of natural matter from spiritual substance, 2) his concept of the Contiguum, 3) his Doctrine of Degrees and Series, 4) his Doctrine of Forms, and finally, his capstone Doctrine of Correspondence. These we need to discuss in some detail in what follows.
The Nature of Matter
Viewed in its entirety, Swedenborg’s scientific corpus attempts an analysis and explanation of the soul’s operation in the body. From an early speculative treatment of physiological action-at-a-distance in the short work On Tremulation (1719), he moved to human anatomy, first in a general way, and then to a more specific, detailed anatomy of the brain. The physiology of the nervous system followed on, with more analysis of the role of the blood and associated humors in carrying a spiritual-natural essence from its source to its destination in all parts of the body. In this grand narrative, he defines the soul and locates its residence in the substance of the cerebral cortex. With all this in mind, it is easy to question his early turn from this theme to a substantial interlude in chemistry and physics.
The answer to this question lies in his purpose for writing Principles of Chemistry (1721) and Principia (1734) before returning to anatomy and physiology. Physical sciences they may be, but for his purposes studies in chemistry and physics were simply starting from the beginning. In order to explain an interactive mechanism for spirit into nature, he had first to establish a rationale for bringing nature into being – deriving natural matter from its parent spiritual substance. This required a comprehensive treatment of matter itself – how it was established and how it behaved at its most primitive level. This was uncharted territory, and had first to be explored and mapped in order to move on to his soul-body research program.
The first, and perhaps most basic of foundational ideas in Swedenborg’s scientific works is his own description of the smallest component of extended matter, that particle giving rise to all other matter in a series of combinations. This was the philosophical prima materia, developed by Swedenborg over time into a model satisfactory to the requirements of his cosmology. Appearing first in The Chemistry as a dimensionless mathematical point (differing little from the classical Euclidean concept), matter was built up from this entity in motion, in a series of “crustals,” which compounded into particles of greater and greater complexity. Each crustal is contained in the crustal subsequent to it in the series, providing a functional continuity to matter at all levels of complexity.
Finding a purely mathematical point inadequate for the production of matter with both active and passive attributes, Swedenborg, in the Lesser Principia, revised this “simple” into an entity of two modes, fluent and quiescent, which combine to become matter. The first “bullular particle” has a surface of quiescent points, an active interior of fluent points, and a fluent sphere outside its surface. It is not difficult to see the rudiments of modern atomic theory in this energetic, bipolar representation of the bullular particle.
Building on this improved model of matter, the first natural point emerges in the Principia as the particle resulting from motion imparted to a dimensionless simple by the will of the Creator. This is the entity that bridges the Infinite and the finite, its perfectly circular internal motion imparting only one dimension, awaiting the addition of linear motion to become extended in space. Within this particle is contained all active and passive principles – all of matter in potential.
By means of the spiritual conatus[1] to motion internal to this “first natural point,” the first extended particle is produced – one of dimension because it moves, not only internally, but now in a line through space as well. Defining one dimension, and thereby part of space, and by combination of internal and external motions, the figure this “first finite” describes in space is a spiral, eternally reciprocating from center to circumference and back again.
Aggregates of connected first finites produce a passive entity, capable of receiving motion. This, the second finite, is produced from the combination of firsts, by contiguity. If, however, a first finite is independent of this contiguity, it becomes an active of the first finite, a particle of matter with inherent motion, and a functional reciprocal to its passive counterpart. It is the combination of these two – the passive “second finite” and the “active of the first finite” which finally produces the first atom, or elementary particle. This particle is truly matter, from which, through a series of combinations, all things of the universe are built up. It is a reciprocal association of active and passive, just as in The Chemistry, but developed to near perfection.[2] We will find this binary construct again, in the theological Writings, manifested as the Conjugial Principle, the presence of the Divine marriage of Love and Wisdom – the Creator Himself – in all things of heaven and earth.[3]
The Contiguum
The next foundational concept is the connected nature of all things in series, already implied in the creational sequence of the Principia as fundamental to the nature of matter itself. An idea appearing in the earliest scientific works, we find it first in On Tremulations (1719), in a discussion of the connection and harmony among all parts of the human body by means of the small nerves (called “fibers” here by Swedenborg). A stimulus to any single part, we are told, is essentially a stimulus to all parts as well, by means of a contiguous system of membranes, from the dura mater to the finest membranes investing the smallest parts.
Next, we find a restatement of this principle of the Principia, offered as an example in a discussion of connectedness prescient of the Doctrine of Degrees:
We see then that there is a contiguity in all things, and that nature produces them by means of connection, extending from one end to the other, both of substances and causes…. The case is the same in animals; parts cover over parts, and grow by contiguity. Both the nervous and membranous system is coherent and contiguous. There is not part in the whole animal to which fibers, muscles, veins, and arteries do not extend; no fiber, which is not derived and ramified by some larger nerve; no nerve, which does not proceed from the medulla spinalis or oblongata and its teguments; and no vein, but what originates from that great one which flows immediately from the heart. The medulla and its teguments, with which the nerves are connected, are in contiguity with the membranes of the whole brain; its grosser coats are contiguous to its more subtle ones; the dura mater to the pia mater; the pia mater to the more subtle parts; and thus the contiguity is continued till it arrives at those simple active substances, from which all motions or affections can afterwards reflect and expand themselves to the most principles of all. Hence it is manifest that there is a continual connection of the whole body with its minutest parts.[4]
Nowhere, not even in his major anatomical works to come, does Swedenborg describe contiguity more completely and elegantly than in this statement. This quotation demonstrates a mature concept of functional integration in the human body, in place by 1734.
In The Mechanism of the Operation of the Soul and Body (also of 1734), Swedenborg expands the concept of the functional nature of this anatomical contiguity, calling it the contiguum in this book, and explaining its importance in both physical and spiritual terms. “With the microscope,” he says, “we observe in the lesser the causes which produce motion and extension in the larger.”[5] All connection supposes contiguity, and the contiguum is the whole system of membranes and fibers, from grosser to finer, spanning and connecting the whole body to a level far below the limits of the microscope. At this finest level is the nexus of soul and body.
The contiguum next appears in The Fiber (1741), of the Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain series, in a discussion of the tunics of nerves and fibers, where a contiguum of nerves is described, from the brain to the finest peripheral branches, along with their tunics, in the whole body. In another context, the pia mater and arachnoid meninges of the brain are identified as universal membranes of the encephalon, in communication with this contiguum of fibers and nerves.
Swedenborg’s most rigorous description of the contiguum appears in The Soul’s Domain (1744), where, in the chapter entitled “The Peritoneum,” we find an exacting description of the three-dimensional membranous matrix spanning levels of complexity from grossest to finest parts.[6] This description does not end with anatomical relationships, but for the first time includes a consideration of the functional nature of the system. Here we find a statement of the role of these membranes in “communication, powers, and actions” – a purpose for this anatomical arrangement beyond that of mechanical support alone.
In the posthumously published Rational Psychology (1742), another in the Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain series, Swedenborg adds a consideration of this contiguum with respect to its function in the cerebral cortex. There is a contiguum of nerves and fibers in the whole brain, we are told, “so that there is no part of the cortex that does not share in the sensation that comes in.”[7] Another, separate treatise of this year (1742) discusses a holism of fibers, each acting separately but also promoting “the general cause.”[8]
From this brief review, it is evident that Swedenborg’s idea of the contiguum was well established early in his career, and was a concept that went far beyond purely descriptive anatomy. His vision of functional integration of myriad body parts, in the concurrently separate and collective operation of each, is a concept which has yet to be fully appreciated by the reductionist science of our own era.[9] And in an astonishing extension of this structure/function model of organic integration in the human body, we will find this same system, if we look for it, in the complex interactions of angels and their societies in the heavens, all existing and interacting in human form.[10]
The Doctrine of Degrees and Series
After the nature of matter and the contiguum, Swedenborg’s third major concept matures as his Doctrine of Degrees and Series but begins with his analysis of the nature of the connection between elements in a relational series. Growing out of the philosophical premise that all things must participate in a causal series of end, cause, and effect, Swedenborg expands this idea by application of his own experience in anatomy and the natural sciences into a practical principle beyond the hypothetical case.
A look at his personal notes reveals his debt to classical notions of the hierarchical nature of matter. In A Philosopher’s Notebook (1740-41)[11] we find a short section, “Degrees, Priors, Posteriors,” summarizing the thinking of Aristotle, Plato and Leibniz on the ordered relationship of substances and organisms in the universe. Things do not exist independently of other things, but exist prior and posterior to them, in a well-defined causal series. The very fabric of the universe rests on this structural pattern. As mentioned above, Leibniz’s interactive matrix of monads must have been particularly compelling in this respect. In developing a doctrine of relationship to fit his anatomical and physiological observations, he no doubt started with these philosophical notions in mind. His Doctrine of Degrees departed from the classical model in the particular extent to which he developed it; and it superseded the Leibnitzian model in its practical applications. As is common in Swedenborg’s work, familiar concepts are often put to use in new and expanded ways to serve the purposes of the program at hand.
No mention of a doctrine of degrees is found in On Tremulation (1719), but the concept is there nonetheless. The structural relationship of the elements of the fibrous contiguum are so arranged, but Swedenborg makes no statement about this arrangement as representative of any special principle. Similarly, within this same context, the Principia says that the elements of the contiguum “owe their existence to their mutual dependence on each other, there being a connection, by mediums, from ultimate, whence all things have respect to their first source from which they derive their existence.”[12] He completes this thought in a later section, by stating that “the visible world is a series of finite things both simultaneous and successive; modified and connected one with the other in a multiplicity of ways, and in a long extended order.”[13] The concept of degrees is here, virtually complete, but without a statement of its doctrinal status, and without a formal name.
A name does appear in The Infinite, in which we are told that for the world to exist, its elements must be related in a series of perfections, or degrees. “The essence of the finite consists in its subjection to degrees and the laws of succession and derived substantiality….”[14] By 1734 we have evidence of a relational scheme governed by certain laws. The general name of this scheme is “degrees.”
By 1740, this principle had become a well-developed doctrine of influence and connection, fully demonstrated in Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain. Chapter VIII of Part I (“An Introduction to Rational Psychology”) is devoted entirely to the explication of this doctrine of degrees, its practical applications, and its implications for other problems of causality. “This doctrine constitutes a principle part of the natural sciences; for everywhere in nature there is order, and everywhere the rules of order. It is a doctrine which expounds the nature of the veriest form itself, without which nothing which is predictable of anything can occur.”[15]
In this lengthy treatment of the subject, the general characteristics, varieties and special features of things related by degrees are fully described, and the fundamental nature of the doctrine is explained. Here we find that “the general series of the earth… are themselves also three, and are commonly called kingdoms; namely the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms.”[16] The same property applies to “every individual animal,” we are told. Each animal is “a series of several other series that are essential and proper to the general one. Its essential and proper series are the viscera… the higher series are the cerebrum, cerebellum, medulla oblongata and spinalis. The lower are the lungs, stomach, liver, pancreas, spleen, womb, kidneys, and several others. These, taken together, are constituent of the form.”[17] All things, we learn, from the universe itself, to the minutest parts of parts, are arranged in a structural and functional series of order inherent to them. And by this principle, all things are related, in a grand and orderly scheme.
This concept of discrete and continuous degrees of order is immediately the most pervasive of Swedenborg’s doctrines, explaining as it does the operations of nature on virtually every level, and by necessity attempting ultimately to explain the operation of the Divine in Nature as well. And at long last, in rational terms, the mystical paradox of pantheism[18] appeared approachable by his Doctrine of Degrees. Here was a single principle, at work on both spiritual and natural levels, that promised to explain the reality of the two as one.
The Doctrine of Forms
We find a notion of connectivity and interaction by discrete and continuous degrees in Swedenborg’s earliest anatomical works.[19] As described above, this relational scheme provides the functional basis for his anatomical and physiological works. But as did all of his doctrines, this one calls for yet another, supporting doctrine to take it to its logical conclusion. As he learned in an early attempt at explaining soul-body interaction[20], discrete degrees can take us from the level of the whole organism down to its inmost parts, but they cannot take us beyond that to the soul. Each degree is a step, just like the steps of a ladder, and there is no provision in the Doctrine of Degrees and Series for a jumping-off place, if we are looking to move from body to soul, nature to spirit. If spirit comes into nature, forming nature as it comes, and if this creational process involves an orderly series of steps, each successively less divine and more natural, down to the inert minerals of the earth, then where is the definitive step across which spirit is no longer spirit and nature becomes wholly inert? This presents a major problem of action-at-a-distance; Without a sufficient explanation, the infinite regress fallacy[21] collapses Swedenborg’s whole program.
We find the solution in The Fibre (1742), another in the Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain series, following the introduction of the Doctrine of Degrees. Its necessity is obvious; Swedenborg had been wrestling with this problem since his earliest works.[22] The Fibre gives a detailed description of the fine structure of the brain, with attention to the nature of the fibers that make up the cerebrum and cerebral cortex. It is here that he finally makes the case for a causal series allowing for spiritual-natural interaction. This he does by introduction of a powerful model of transmutation in seven consecutive forms, from the inert material of the mineral world, inwards to the divine form itself. In his Doctrine of Forms, each form is less fixed and more fluctuant than the one before, by means of subtle changes of geometry, and each is uniquely suited to a particular use. Angular gives way to circular, and circular to spiral. Spiral forms are suited to the movement and morphology of the medullary fibers and the brain itself. And then the series moves inward, to structures so abstracted that they are seen with the mind’s eye alone. The vortical form, moving towards a level beyond space and time, provides the structure of the mind that interacts with the matter of the brain. From here, we move inward, beyond the world of quantity and extension, to levels defined by qualities of divine intention.
In this sequence of seven forms we find the nexus – not a single “jumping off place,” but a series of steps from heaven to earth. Swedenborg explains it this way:
In each degree, when forms are carried up by this ladder, something earthly, material, and finite is cut away and put off, and a certain celestial, perpetual, and infinite is superadded and put on… until a last nothing except what is perpetual, infinite, eternal, pure, holy, that is, Divine, remain.[23]
In Chapter XVI we find a challenging 32-page treatment of Swedenborg’s Doctrine of Forms. The challenge is not just in archaic terminology or issues of translation, although these are always considerations in Swedenborg’s scientific works. The real challenge comes in comprehending a system that moves from our familiar world of measurable time and spatial extension to a pre-geometric world of intention and quality; and then comprehending that these are complementary attributes of a single reality. Swedenborg’s method is at work here, in a model that allows us to visualize the dynamic interface of spirit and nature, not in metaphysical language alone, but in terms of science and geometry as well. This is the goal of valid theistic science. But our minds and our science must be acclimated to navigate such a system as this.
The Doctrine of Correspondence between the Two Worlds
As we have seen, it was late in the development of the Doctrine of Degrees that the question of the nature of relationships of things distant in the hierarchy was raised, which led of necessity to a consideration of the ultimate problem of relationship and distance – that of the relationship of spiritual to natural things. How to get from the one to the other was addressed by the Doctrine of forms; the “jump” was no jump at all, but was instead was across the span of an orderly series of geometrical forms, each uniquely suited to a particular function of life. But there was no easy solution to the most important question of all. The new problem was that of action across this phase change of natural matter spiritual substance: what force or impulse connects spirit with nature across the divide, and what maintains this relationship?
Despite every effort to complete this progression of Influx to Degrees to Forms to what lies beyond, Swedenborg found himself increasingly frustrated by the elusive nature of this principle. There was still the problem of pantheistic connection to overcome: If even remotely connected, then all of Creation is nothing but an extension of the Creator. But with no connection, the Creator does not participate in creation. Dismissing these extremes of Pantheism and Deism, Swedenborg sought the mechanism whereby the two worlds could be linked in action, but apart in space. The problem was crucial to solve, and simple enough in principle, but it seemed impossible. The Doctrine of Correspondence, the last of Swedenborg’s major concepts to be considered here, proved to be the most demanding of them all.
Correspondence as a doctrine is not considered as early as On Tremulation, but we do find its rudiments in the “Fourth Rule of Tremulation”: There are sympathetic vibrations in strings if both strings are tuned to the same key.[24] Elsewhere in the book is a discussion of whole systems of sympathetic tremulations arising from a single small tremulatory force.[25]
It is in The Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain that Swedenborg demonstrates both the necessity and utility of a doctrine of correspondences. The discussion arises in Part I, Chapter VIII, I-IX, the same series dealing so completely with the doctrine of degrees examined above. He begins by stating that Aristotle’s “physical influx,” Descartes’ “occasional causes,” and the “preëstablished harmony” of Leibniz are all inadequate to solve the problem of spiritual/natural association. What is needed, he says, is a new doctrine of order and connection to explain the true condition. This condition he defined as coëstablished harmony.[26]
Later, we are given five rules governing the relationships of individual elements of different organizational levels which correspond (some general rules for correspondence).[27] This serves as an introduction to both the necessity and the general nature of correspondences, again called coëstablished harmony, but it offers little in the way of a mechanism for how things might interact by means of these relationships. His description is more anatomical at this point than dynamic and is confined to the relation of things on the natural plane alone.[28]
In Part II of the same book, however, in a section dealing with the human soul, Swedenborg finally discusses correspondences with respect to the spiritual/natural nexus. In concession to the transcendent nature of this conjunction, he says here that there “is no analysis and no abstraction that can reach so high….” It is “infinitely above the sphere of the human mind.”[29] The scientific method could not reach above its limits to find the soul.
In a final restatement of this disappointing observation, Swedenborg closes his Rational Psychology by reluctantly admitting that this knowledge of correspondences,[30] which “has hitherto been unknown to the world,” is still beyond his grasp. “…there are many rules to be premised, data to be set forth, and truths to be connected together before I can undertake the task…. For this reason, I forbear to make the attempt.” He promises instead another, future book, “which more surely and quickly leads us into hidden truths.”[31] Unknown to Swedenborg at this time, a complete doctrine of correspondences was not to come at all, by any amount of mental effort or analysis. What was to come was spiritual crisis, and a period of failure and doubt, followed by the answer he could not obtain – revealed at last in unifying spiritual visions of ultimate reality.
Revelation
This unifying vision would not be an instantaneous flash of insight, but the wisdom of continuous, cumulative experience in the spiritual world. Here Swedenborg saw the connections, the relationships of things with other things, and haltingly at first, he began to see what his natural eyes had not seen before. In his visions of “man the microcosm” of the cosmological macrocosm, or Maximus Homo, he saw the nexus, and in doing so, he found his correspondences; but he found more than this. The contiguum, and the finest things of nature were there, but they are no longer the center of his attention. Instead of the bloods, the membranes, the fibers and the cortical substance, he now tells us that
The soul, which lives after death, is the spirit, and is in complete form a person; the soul of this form is the Will and the Understanding, and the soul of these is Love and Wisdom from the Lord.[32]
In further application of this enlightenment, Swedenborg redefines the soul, its domain, and its operation in the natural body, and thus from experience,[33] finally defines his unifying doctrine of correspondence:
Before any statement can be made about influx and the operation of the soul into the body, it must be well understood that the internal man is formed according to the image of heaven, and the external man according to the image of the world; insomuch that the internal man is a heaven in the least form, and the external man is a world in the least form, thus is a microcosm. That the external man is an image of the world, may be seen from the external or bodily senses; for the ear is formed according to the whole nature of the modification of the air; the lungs according to the whole nature of its pressure, as also is the general surface of the body, which is held in its form by the circumpressure of the air, and so on.
From all this it is now evident that in man the spiritual world is conjoined with the natural world, consequently that with him the spiritual world flows into the natural world in so vivid a manner that he can notice it, provided he pays attention. All this shows the nature of the intercourse of the soul with the body, namely, that properly it is the communication of spiritual things which are of heaven, with natural things which are of the world, and that the communication is effected by means of influx, and is according to the conjunction.[34]
Using the familiar subject of the human body for his model, and a mystical image of the heavens in human form for his evidence, he shows the correspondences at work. Not surprisingly, sense-data and spiritual experience combined to perfect the doctrine of the two worlds, and a new philosophy was born to serve them both.
What has been said may be seen in a kind of image and thus corroborated by the correspondence of the heart with love and of the lungs with the understanding. For if the heart corresponds to love, its determinations, which are arteries and veins, correspond to affections, and in the lungs to affections for truth; and as there are also other vessels in the lungs called air vessels, whereby respiration is carried on, these vessels correspond to perceptions. It must be distinctly understood that the arteries and veins in the lungs are not affections, and that respirations are not perceptions and thoughts, but that they are correspondences, that is, they act correspondently or synchronously; likewise that the heart and the lungs are not the love and understanding, but correspondences: and inasmuch as they are correspondences the one can he seen in the other.[35]
These correspondences will not be found with the microscope or teased out with the dissection needle. They are beyond the senses, and yet they can be inferred as central to the operation of all things of the universe. What had been Swedenborg’s greatest disappointment became his conatus into a frame of reference where the causes of natural truths were evident.
[This is an excerpt from Bell, Reuben P., Intelligent Design: Swedenborg’s Theistic Science and the Problem of Organic Form, Swedenborg Scientific Association, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, 2019]
[1]Swedenborg uses an accepted technical term of his day here, that is rich with historical precedent and metaphysical virtue. Rendered “endeavor” by most English translators, the term implies a spiritual origin for the effort behind the motion the conatus imparts. This is a window into the theistic nature of Swedenborg’s program: a firm foundation in spiritual reality and the spiritual origin of natural things.
[2]Swedenborg’s detailed description of the simple and its progression to the “elementary particle” is presented in the Principia, chapters I-VI. Subsequent chapters in Part I deal with combinations of these elements in a series of “finites” in a creational sequence leading all the way to the formation of the solar system and earth.
[3]Examples of this universal principle are found in Arcana Coelestia n. 718, Divine Love and Wisdom, nn. 14, 34, 36, 46. See also Bell, Reuben P., “The Conjugial Principle,” New Philosophy, Vol. C, Nos. 1 & 2, January-June, 1997.
[4]Swedenborg, Emanuel, The Principia, Walton and Mitchell, London, 1848, reprinted by the Swedenborg Scientific Association, 1976, Vol. I, pp. 21-22.
[5]Swedenborg, Emanuel, The Infinite and the Final Cause of Creation, also the Mechanism of the Operation of the Soul and Body (1734), Swedenborg Society, London, 1965, p. 27.
[6]In The Soul’s Domain, Vol. I, Ch XVI, nn. 318, 19, 20, we find not only a very modern description of the matrix of connective tissue membranes and fibers linking all levels of organization in the human body, but a prescient appreciation of this system as communicative as well as structural.
[7]Swedenborg, Emanuel, Rational Psychology, A. Acton, Ed., Swedenborg Scientific Association, Philadelphia, 1950, n. 18.
[8]Swedenborg, Emanuel, Psychological Transactions and Other Posthumous Tracts, 1734-1744, Tr & Ed. by Alfred Acton, Swedenborg Scientific Association, Bryn Athyn, PA, 1984, Chapter III of Transaction No. 5, Action, pp. 118-19.
[9]Research in molecular biology and osteopathic medicine of only the last fifty years has produced a model of functional integration of fascial elements by means of electromagnetic as well as structural continuity. Swedenborg’s contiguum is now the matrix, a universalizing concept that promises to explain the unanimous action of all parts, long observed but never before explained in physiological terms. For an introduction to this concept, see
Bell, Reuben P., Experimental Consideration of Structural Proteins as Electron Conductors – A Conceptual Model of Functional Integration in Biological Systems, Master’s Thesis, University of Tulsa Graduate College, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1977; Lee, R. Paul, Interface: Mechanisms of Spirit in Osteopathy, Stillness Press, Portland, Oregon, 2005; Bell, Reuben P., The Osteopathic Hologram: A Multidimensional Model For Diagnosis and Treatment, Journal L’Ostéopathie Précisément, Numero 22, Été 2006; Paoletti, Serge, The Fasciae: Anatomy, Dysfunction, and Treatment, Eastland Press, Seattle, Washington, 2006
[10]There is a perennial mystical tradition recognizing the process of Creation by means of the Divine in human form. The “Primal Man of the Upanishads gives rise to the world, and the Macroanthropos of Plutarch was a similar creational figure in the Greek tradition. The Gnostic Anthropos of the heavens was the template by means of which the Demiurge fashioned the earthly Adam. The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, taught that the “body of Christ” was the collection of believers in the world who, as its “members” functioned as an organic human whole. The centerpiece of the Jewish Kabbalah is the sefirot (emanations)of Ein-Sof into Creation in the form of Adam Kadmon, or “primordial man,” by means of which spirit is translated into nature. As he so often did, Swedenborg saw this same spiritual principle, but through a larger lens, calling it Maximus Homo, or “universal human,” – the heavens, with the individuals there and their communities, functioning as organs in a single body. For Swedenborg the emanations become correspondences of these, giving form and life to all things of the natural world: “The whole visible universe is therefore nothing else than a theater that is representative of the Lord’s kingdom. And this in turn is a theater representative of the Lord Himself.” (Arcana Coelestia n. 3,483)
[11]Swedenborg, Emanuel, A Philosopher’s Notebook: Excerpts from Philosophical Writers and from the Sacred Scriptures on a Variety of Philosophical Subjects; Together with Some Reflections, and Sundry Notes and Memoranda, Alfred Acton, Tr. and Ed., Swedenborg Scientific Association, Philadelphia, PA 1931, pp. 236-240
[12]op. cit., Principia, p. 20.
[14]op. cit., The Infinite and the Final Cause of Creation, p. 116.
[15]Emanuel Swedenborg, Economy of the Animal Kingdom (Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain), Swedenborg Scientific Association, Bryn Athyn, PA, 1955., n. 581.
[18]Any creational scheme must deal with the problem of connection between Creator and Creation. In the kabbalistic series of sefirotic emanations by means of which Ein-Sof steps down into Creation, there is no identifiable point at which divine becomes natural; Malkut is no different than Keter, and Ein-Sof and nature are one. It is the same with the creational pleroma of the Gnostics, the series of worlds across which the divine descends to enter into Nature: divine is continuous with nature. This presents a major problem for human spiritual freedom or free will; if God creates the natural world from himself, with no mechanism to effectively separate himself from it, then nature is an extension of God, and its creatures, including human being, are gods as well. This is pantheism, a condition of continuity of God with Nature. Solutions to this problem must consider its opposite condition, that of complete separation, as seen in the eighteenth century development of Deism. Swedenborg developed a model in which there is a structural separation of God and Nature to allow for free will, but a functional relationship allowing for the operation of the divine providence in the natural world as well.
[19]As early as 1719, in On Tremulation we find a speculative model of communication between remote parts of the body by means of minute vibrations (tremulations), traveling along the nerves. But this communication could not be possible without an orderly, hierarchical arrangement of these nerves, and in describing this arrangement, we find Swedenborg’s notion of discrete and continuous degrees of order at work. And his description of these levels at work in the whole organism presages his later model of the matrix-like contiguum, here as well.
[20]In The Infinite and the Final Cause of Creation/The Mechanism of the Operation of the Soul and Body (1734) Swedenborg makes a measured case for climbing up to the soul but was unable to explain just where and how the nexus between these two levels of reality might be or operate. The nature of this elusive nexus within the relational series of discrete degrees, would require more work for him to find.
[21]We will encounter this claim in Part III, in opposition to theistic explanations of evolution, by proponents of scientific materialism. “Infinite regress” is an old argument, but one that cannot be easily tossed off, in the defense of any model of spiritual causation. It was famously framed by Stephen Hawking, in A Brief History of Time (1988), becoming a cliche of sorts, in scientific circles: “A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s tortoises all the way down!”
[22]As early as 1734, we see the necessity for an solution to this problem, when, in The Infinite and the Final Cause of Creation, Swedenborg is unable to identify a nexus, across which spirit and nature might interact. In this work, as in Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain, it is “discrete degrees, all the way down.”
[23]Swedenborg, Emanuel, The Economy of the Animal Kingdom, Transaction III: The Medullary Fibre of the Brain and the Nerve fibre of the Body, Swedenborg Scientific Association, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, 1918, n. 271.
[24]op.cit., On Tremulation, p. 2
[26]op. cit, Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain, n. 593
[28]In Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain, Part I, Chapter VIII we find a discussion of the correspondence between successive members of a series of degrees. One example of this is taken from the series of red blood, purer blood, spirituous fluid. Each of these “bloods” corresponds to the one above and below it in the series, and the vessels proper to each also correspond, as the one below subsists by means of the one above it in the series. Of significance here is that all of the elements of the series are on the same (natural) plane. Then follows a discussion of the correspondence between elements in a series of mental to natural, and the possibility is finally raised of a ladder of correspondences reaching to the soul itself. But the “universal mathematics” necessary to make this jump goes beyond the doctrine of degrees, and has yet to be worked out. Here is the doctrine of correspondence in potential, incomplete, and yet to be perfected.
[29]op. cit., Rational Psychology, nn. 251-52.
[30]The doctrine is referred to here as a “universal mathesis.”
[31]op. cit, Rational Psychology, n. 576.
[32]Swedenborg, Emanuel, Divine Love and Wisdom, Swedenborg Foundation, New York, 1988, n. 394.
[33]Of particular interest here is the audacity of Swedenborg to give spiritual experience the same weight as natural, sense-based experience. This is the prevailing character of his theological Writings, as compared with the methodical empiricism of the scientific works, but he does not abandon empiricism altogether; observations from spiritual experience and conclusions drawn from them are expected to square with the sense-data of this world, as both represent two poles of the same reality. This might be considered a radical empiricism of sorts, applied out of the necessity to deal with the spiritual experiences that informed Swedenborg’s theology.
[34]Swedenborg, Emanuel, Arcana Coelestia, Swedenborg Foundation, New York, 1984,
n. 6057.