In
het blog van 20-11-2015 “Ethan A. Hitchcock's vergelijking van Spinoza en
Swedenborg” schreef ik: “Daar ik geen aanleiding zie om nog eens een apart blog
aan Emanuel Swedenborg te wijden, plaats ik hier zijn afbeelding i.p.v. nog
eens Hitchcock.” Nu geeft Frank Sewall aanleiding om toch nog eens over Emanuel
Swedenborg te schrijven. Ethan A. Hitchcock gaf een vergelijkend overzicht dat
duidelijk maakte dat Swedenborg Spinoza goed bestudeerd moet hebben. Sewall
schrijft in de tekst die ik zo dadelijk citeer: “We find nowhere any mention of
Spinoza by Swedenborg, and can easily understand why he might not have felt
attracted to his teaching.”
Frank
Sewall, die zoals we in het vorige blog zagen, Swedenborgiaans geestelijke was,
leiding gaf aan het Swedenborgiaans Urbana College en veel over o.a. Swedenborg
publiceerde, deed in 1902 het volgende werk het licht zien, waarin hij –
afgezien van zijn inleiding op de Elwes-vertaling – het uitvoerigst over
Spinoza schreef:
Frank Sewall, Swedenborg and Modern Idealism: A Retrospect of Philosophy from Kant to
the Present Time. London: James Speirs, 1902, iv + 244 p. – HathiTrust. In deze
studie maakt hij een uitgebreide vergelijking tussen Spinoza en Swedenborg. Die
tekst, die gaat van p. 42-46, neem ik hier over:
In
Spinoza (1632-1677), who followed Descartes, and who was profoundly impressed
with his philosophy, there was a tendency back to a kind of idealistic monism
which has been interpreted by many as sheer pantheism. With him, as with
Descartes, there is but one substance, but this exists under the two attributes
of extension and thought, and this substance itself being God, it follows that
God is immanent in all things, or all things have their only true being in God.
There is, according to Spinoza, no discrete degree between thinking and
extended being. God thinks in all substance, and is everywhere obeying the
necessary laws of [hi]s own being. A perfect or "adequate" knowledge
in the human mind would see everything under the form of eternity and as
occurring under the necessity of the Divine law. All the changes and
imperfections of the finite are regarded as passing modes of these two Divine
attributes, extension and thought. It is easy to see how Spinoza may be classed
as a fatalist on the one hand, and on the other as a Christian of an exalted
type, namely, as he teaches that man's happiness and salvation consists in his
attaining to a true " intellectual love of God," which is a love that
sees all things as occurring according to the perfect law of Divine Order. The
true knowledge of oneself is that which sees oneself under the form of
eternity, in which case it sees oneself as thought by God. The mind can only as
eternal so know itself, and from this knowledge [43]
springs the " intellectual love of God." There is something here that
suggests Swedenborg's doctrine of the soul's immortality as consisting in its
" ability to know and to love God." [1]
Swedenborg's
opposition to the Pantheism of Spinoza is fundamental, because grounded in a
doctrine of Love the opposite of his. This appears from the following passages
in the Divine Love and Wisdom.
Swedenborg
on the Divine :—
The
Divine essence itself is love and wisdom: it is Divine love because it is of
Divine wisdom, and it is Divine wisdom because it is of Divine love; since
there is such a union of these principles therefore the Divine life is one
" (No. 35).
Love is also the Divine Esse, and Wisdom the Existere, since love does not exist but in wisdom, nor wisdom but from love, wherefore when love is in wisdom, then it exists. These two are such a one that they may be distinguished indeed, in thought, but not in act, therefore they may be said to be distincte unum, distinctly one, or one and yet distinct (No. 14).
Love is also the Divine Esse, and Wisdom the Existere, since love does not exist but in wisdom, nor wisdom but from love, wherefore when love is in wisdom, then it exists. These two are such a one that they may be distinguished indeed, in thought, but not in act, therefore they may be said to be distincte unum, distinctly one, or one and yet distinct (No. 14).
And
on God in Nature Swedenborg teaches as follows :—
The
created universe, viewed from a principle of order, is so full of wisdom
grounded in love that it may be said that all things in the complex are wisdom
itself, for indefinite things are in such successive and simultaneous order
that taken together they make one, and only thus can they be held together and
preserved perpetually (D. L. W., No. 30). [44]
Spinoza's
Doctrine of Love is quite another:—-
Love
is joy accompanied with the idea of its cause. . . . God loves Himself with
infinite intellectual love, for the Divine nature has 'joy' in infinite
perfection, the idea of which is accompanied by the idea of the Divine nature
as its cause. . . . The intellectual love of the mind to God is a part of the
infinite love with which God loves himself (i.e., of Infinite self-love).—
Spinoza, Ethics, Pt. 5.
This
is the joy of infinite self-love.
Compare
Swedenborg's definition of Love in Divine
Love and Wisdom :—
It
is an essential of love not to love itself but to love others, and to be joined
to them by love; it is also an essential of love to be loved by others, for
tliereby the conjunction is aff'ected. The essence of all love consists in
conjunction. Love consists in our willing what is our own to be another's, and
feeling his delight as delight in ourselves —this is to love; but for a man to
feel his own delight in another, and not the other's delight in himself, is not
to love, for, in this case, he loves himself, whereas in the former he loves
his neighbour. For what is it for a man to love himself alone and not anyone
out of himself, by whom he may be loved in turn? The conjunction of love arises
from reciprocation, and reciprocation does not exist in self alone.
Hence
it is that the Divine love cannot but be and exist in other beings or
existences whom it loves and by whom it is beloved.
With
respect to God, it is not possible that He can love and be reciprocally beloved
by other beings or existences in whom there is anything of the Infinite or
anything of the essence and life of love in itself—i.e., anything of the
Divine, for if there were anything of the Infinite or Divine in them then He
would not be beloved by others, but He would love Himself, for the Infinite or
the Divine is one. If this Infinite existed in others, it would be Itself, and
God would [45] be self-love, not the least of
which is possible with Him, for this is totally opposite to the Divine essence.
Wherefore this reciprocation of love must have place between God and other
beings or existences in whom there is nothing of the selfexistent Divine. It
must have its place in beings created from the Divine (No. 47, 49).
The
doctrine of love, both of Divine and human love, is essentially selfish in
Spinoza, being the love directed toward self in the contemplation of one's
perfection to eternity. God seeing Himself thus in man, man himself in God.
Whereas in Swedenborg the essence of love is the contemplation of one's own
good and happiness in another, and in God this is carried to an infinite
degree.
Spinoza
read a moral meaning into the Bible, declaring that it never pretends to reveal
natural laws, and yet that there must be a method of interpretating it as truly
as of interpretating nature. Although of early Jewish education, Spinoza, in
his Tractatus TheoJ. Polit, exalts
Christ above Moses and the Prophets, for the reason that Christ received the
revelation of God not like them, through words, but in His own consciousness,
and thus was, indeed, the incarnation of Divine wisdom in human nature. He was
the perfect knowledge, or God knowing Himself. In all this monistic doctrine,
in which the influence of the Jewish monotheism is distinctly traceable, there
appears the same fatal results of the absence of a recognition of the discrete
degrees between God and spirit and nature as are on every hand exhibited to-day
in those erratic schools of mysticism and occultism, which teach the soul's
immediate knowledge of God by selfabsorption in God, or by the realization of
self in God. Spinoza, the
"God-intoxicated," shows us what the [46]
doctrine of God the All, even as the Infinite Love, would be without the saving
doctrine of Discrete Degrees. It was, doubtless, owing to the conflicting and
confusing teaching of both Monists and Dualists regarding Mind and Body, that
the doctrine of Discrete Degrees assumed before Swedenborg's mind a constantly
increasing importance. We can easily understand why he lays such stress on that
which he calls the new doctrine of Series, Orders, Degrees, and Correspondence,
and why. he even claimed that up to his time "nothing has been known of the
doctrine of discrete degrees." He could not have meant that in the natural
plane there had been no recognition of the relation of end, cause, and effect,
as constituting the graded being of a thing, for, as we have seen, this had
been already taught centuries before in Aristotle. But he, doubtless, did see
in the philosophy about him, with its tendency on the one hand to Monism and
consequent Pantheism, and on the other to a helpless Dualism, with its two
irreconcilable Unlikes, the need of a third principle, which should preserve
the elements of truth in both, but should bridge over the difficulties in their
unification. We find nowhere any mention of Spinoza by Swedenborg, and can
easily understand why he might not have felt attracted to his teaching.
Otherwise,
indeed, was it with his other great contemporaries —Isaac Newton (1642-1727),
whom we know, from Swedenborg's London Letters, that " he read
daily," and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646-1716), whom, when he was
at Greifswalde, in 1715, he "should have liked to meet," but who was
then at Vienna, and whose disciple. Wolf, Swedenborg says, "may be justly
styled a true philosopher."
[Gaat dan verder door met Wolff en Leibniz]
In een volgend en laatste blog over Frank Sewall wil ik enige conclusies trekken uit de diverse teksten die hij over Spinoza schreef.
[Gaat dan verder door met Wolff en Leibniz]
In een volgend en laatste blog over Frank Sewall wil ik enige conclusies trekken uit de diverse teksten die hij over Spinoza schreef.
[1]
"Man
is so created that as to his internal he cannot die; for he is capable of
believing in and of loving God, and thus of being conjoined to God by faith and
love ; and to be thus conjoined to God is to live to eternitj^"
—Swedenborg's Heavenly
Doctrines, No. 223
Dmitri Plax schreef in 2004 een dialoog tussen de filosoof Baruch
de Spinoza (1632-1677) en de wetenschapper-mysticus Emanuel Swedenborg
(1688-1772). [cf. blog]
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