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A,
Il i>'
11
'''^'v Sj^ va'*
frs
VV
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
PROM THE LIBRARY OP
PROFESSOR FELICIEN VICTOR PAGET
BY BEQUEST OF MADAME PAGET
NO.
S5I
y^^-
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DANTE AND SWEDENBORG
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Dante and
swedenborg
WITH OTHER ESSAYS ON THE
NEW RENAISSANCE
BY
FRANK SEWALL
AUTROS OF " THE BTHICS OF SERVICE ; " " THE NEW METAPHYSICS ;
OS, THE LAW OF END, CAUSE AND EFFECT," BTC.
OF
JAMES SPEIRS
36 BLOOMSBURY STREET, LONDON
1893
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CONTENTS.
PAGB
I. SoNNET — Dante, i
II. Dante and Swedenborg, ... 24
III. "The Spiritual Sense of Dante" — A
Review, 60
IV. The Greek Philosophy in its Relation
TO the Lord's First Advent, . .81
V. The Italian Renaissance in its Relation
TO the Lord's Second Advent, . . 91
VI. The New Renaissance, . . . .104
VII. Faust in Music, 123
Vili. The Secret of Wagner, .... 144
IX. SoNNET — The One and the Many, . .150
X. SoNNET — Good Friday IN St. Mungo's, . 151
XI. Sonnet — " All that DOTH Pass AwAY," . 152
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
The Author acknowledges his indebtedness to the
Editor Qf the Contemporary Review for kindly
allowing the republication here of the article on
"Faust in Music."
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DANTE.
Ah ! not as one who builds a world while dreamìng,
And wakes to find his shadowy visions flee,
Oh, man of during wing, thine eye did see
The things that are to mortai sense but seeming.
In the strange stuff of shadows palely gleaming
Take awful shapes the things men dread to know,
From hell's abyss to heaven's high roseate glow,
Marking the pathway of our souFs redeeming.
But now the night is past ; the sun is high.
Ghosts flee, and fancied action calls for deeds.
Whither then, Dante, is thy shade- world going ?
O wonder ! see its very substance glowing !
Glitter in sunshine ali its dewy meads !
Its dismal cliffs stand black against the sky !
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DANTE AND SWEDENBORG.
I.
Dante has been read and re-read, translated and
commented upon, now for five centuries. But has
any one ever undertaken to discover how much of
truth there is in Dante ?
Perhaps the age for seeking the truth in any-
thing is gone by ? Rather, the scientist would be
likely to say, it has never come, till now. For ages,
it would seem as if the world had never seriously
asked for the truth regarding the spiritual world, and
that which must constitute by far the most impor-
tant part of man's life and destiny. In Dante's own
time, if we may judge from Boccaccio's comments
on his life and his great poem, theology and poesy
were regarded as occupying nearly the same rank
in importance and in authority. Even the dogmatic
assertions of the church respecting the unseen world
were regarded with a kind of ceremonial respect,
as if they belonged to a class of things more
fictitious than real, sacred fictions, indeed, but stili
fictions, like the myths of old and the. tales of the
poets.
In the history of literature there have been
produced works which, while not claiming to be
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Dante and Swedenborg. 3
the utterances of revelatìon, have yet occupied a
place of authority and influence resembling that
which is accorded to the Divine oracles themselves.
Such, for instance, was the whole system of the
Platonic philosophy, but espècially the doctrine
concerning the spiritual and intellectual nature of
man and the immortality of the soul. Such we may
say has been the position allotted to the Divina
Commedia of Dante, and perhaps, in less degree, to
the Paradise Lost of Milton. While not accepted
as Divine revelations on these hidden subjects, they
h^ve been regarded as a treasury of consecrated and
hallowed fictions — descriptions which if not true are
about as likely to be true as anything we can know
on the subject, and as therefore good substitutes for ~
the truth where no absolute or demonstrated truth
is to be obtained on the subjects in question. So
have grown up, as Swedenborg describes such ^
phenomena in the world of spirits, a whole system /
of artificial heavens and hells and their hierarchies,
having no immediate basis in anything revealed,
and yet held in popular religious estimation as^
practically about as valid as revelation itself
Says Milman in his History of Latin Christianity^
Book xiv. eh. 2, — a passage quoted by Longfellow
in the notes to his translation of the Divina
Commedia :
" Throughout the Middle Ages the world after death
continued to reveal more and more fuUy its awful secrets.
Hell, Purgatory, Heaven became more distinct, if it may
be so said, more visible. Their site, their topography,
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4 Dante and Swedenborg.
their torments, their trials, their enjoyments, became
more conceivable, almost more palpable to sense: till
Dante summed up the whole of this traditional lore, or at- —
least, with a Poet's intuitive sagacity, seized on ali which
was most imposing, effective, real, and condensed it in bis
three co-ordinate poems. That Hell had a locai existence,
that immaterial spirits suffered bodily and material
torments, none, or scarcely one hardy speculative mind,
presumed to doubt. . . .
" The mediaeval Hell had gathered from ali ages, ali
lands, ali races, its imagery, its denizens, its site, its
access, its commingling horrors; from the old Jewish
traditions, perhaps from the regions beyond the sphere of
the Old Testamenti from the Pagan poets, with their
black rivers, their Cerberus, their boatman and bis crazy
vessel ; perhaps from the Teutonic Hela, through some of
the early visions. Then carpe the great Poet, and reduced
ali this chaos to a kind of order, moulded it up with the
cosmical notions of the times, and made it, as it were,
one with the prevalent mundane system. Above ali, he
brought it to the very borders of our world ; "^t^TEraSfi.
the life bgypnd the grave one with out. presenl life; he^^
mitìgléd in dose aria mtimàte relation the present and
the future. Hell, Purgatory, Heaven, were but an
immediate expansion and extension of the present
world. . . .
" . . . Of that which Hell, Purgatory, Heaven, were inf
popular opinion during the Middle AgQS, Dante was but
the full, deep, concentred expression ; what he embodiedj
in verse, ali men believed, feared, hoped." j
The actual validity of these speculations and their
influence as touching the religious life of men must
always depend, however, on the amount of super-
natura! authority ascribed to them or the amount of
revelation recognized in them, and, therefore, first of
ali, on the amount and kind of truth recognized in
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Dante and Swedenborg. 5
revelation itself. It is a question whether the
Platonic philosophy, even its sublime doctrine of
the souFs immortality, exerted a strictly reh'gious i^
efTect on the Hellenic people until after the Christian
Church had in a sense accepted, approved, and
given it its supreme sanction. In other words,
Platonism did its refining, spiritualizing, and ele-
vating work more after the Christian theologians ^
accepted it as a precious vehicle of the church's
teaching than it had ever done before. What it
needed was a standard by which the actual truth
in it might be estimated, and so admiration for it as
a philosophy be turned into reverence for it as
revelation. This standard was found in the Gospel u
of Christianity. That it had meanwhile exerted a
certain intellectual influence of the highest import-
ance in preparing, not only the Hellenic world, but
the whole mind of the intelligent world at that
period, for its future reception of the revealed Word,
cannot be questioned ; rather we may say it was an
indispensable forerunner sent by the Divine Provi- •^
dence for this training of the ** understanding, so
that it might be elevated into the light of heaven,"
even while the will of humanity lay stili degraded
in its lost and helpless condition.
In an article elsewhere on the " Italian Renaissance
in its Relation to the Lord's Second Advent," I en-
deavour to show how these extraordinary intellec-
tual illuminations have preceded alike, and in both
instances by a period of about four centuries, the
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6 Dante and Swedenborg.
two immediate revelations of Divine truth to man-
kind, namely, that of the Incamation, and that of a^-
the opening of the Spiritual Sense of the Word, '^^
which constitute in spiritual reality the first and the
second . Advents of the Lord ; and that the wide
prevalence óf Hellenìc^ culture, which antìcipated
the first coming of the Lord as the Word made
Flesh, has its remarkable counterpart in the intel-
lectual influence of the Italian Renaissance or the
revival of learning in preparing the world for the
reception of that deeper revelation of the Word in
His Second Coming, which has enabled the Church
to " enter intellectually into the things of faith."
Referring the reader to the following essays for
a treatment of this subject in its bròader aspects, I
wish in the present paper to examine in the briefest
possible scope the part which Dante's Commedia
has had to play in this providential course of the
world's education, and the estimate we are to put
upon the description he gives us of the life after
death. While not contributing directly to the
Revival of Learning, the great Italian epic may be
said to be a summary of ali the learning of that—
time, whether astrological, geographical, politicai,
theological, or moral. It is not so much a poem as
a great realistic picture of the whole universe, spiri-
tual and naturai, as it then stood clearly outlined in
the view of the mighty intellect of its author. The
language in which it was written became thereby
elevated to the dignity of a literary tongue to be
honoured by a glorious succession of poets.
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Dante and Swedenborg. 7
historians, and philosophers ; while the subject-
matter became, as above described, a kind of
universally accepted " working hypothesis " regard-
ing the nature of the spiritual world, whereby the
great gap in authentic dogmatic teaching was con-
veniently filled out in a manner suited to the
imaginative wants of the people, and to the practical
demands of moral and religious discipline. By a
comparison with such works as Milton*s Paradise
Lost and Bunyan's Pilgrinis Progress^ we can forni,
I believe, an approximate estimate of the actual
effect produced by this grand epic of the unseen
world upon the popular religious mind, not only of
contemporary, but of succeeding generations, —
remembering too, as we must, that Dante. preceded
Milton by a period as long as that from the discovery
of America by Columbus to the end of the Revolu-
tionary War.
Referring to the analogy briefly alluded to above,
I think we shall find a dose resemblance between
the kind of authority hitherto attributed to Dante's
visions of the other world, and that which, before
the Christian era, was attributed to the teachings of
Socrates and Plato in relation to the life after death.
According to the light of the time, these visions
were neither improbable nor unreasonable ; not only
not contrary to Scripture, they seemed like the
boldest literal confirmation of the teaching of both
the Bible and the Church Fathers. Stili there was
much in them that could be traced directly to no
sacred source of authority, and this sometimes
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8 Dante and Swedenborg.
embraced principles of vast and fundamental
importance. How much, then, of truthful informa-
tion might men really look for in this vastly popular
allegory, this great myth that has been throwing its
awful lustre, now bright, now dark, over the groping
thoughts of the Christian world during the centuries
that preceded the Lord's Second Advent ?
To this question no answer couid be given but by
comparing the visions of Dante with something that
could be accepted as a standard of truth on these
same subjects, and such a standard could only be
found in Revelation. But, as Revelation, beyond the
bare indications of a few broad, general truths on
the subject of the judgment and heaven and hell,
has been believed to contain no particulars regarding
the life after death, therefore there has been for the
Christian Church no means of estimating the amount
of actual truth in Dante's description of heaven,
purgatory, and hell.
In a state of similar doubt, or mere guessing at
the reality, in regard to which there is no accepted
standard of revealed truth, stands the world at the
present day except for such as receive the revelation
given in the writings of Enianu©l--Swfìienborg.
This messenger and servant of the Lord has, so he
avers, been permitted by the Lord to enter that
hitherto hidden world, and to teli now in plain,
unpoetical, and unfanciful terms the facts regarding
its nature, its order, its government^^ and its life^
For the first time are men, in the possession of these
writings, possessed of a standard whereby, on the
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Dante and Swedenborg. g
ground of their authenticity, they may, with an
accuracy and a certainty no less than scìentific,
determine the amount of truth really embodied im#
the visions of Dante.
It is not for a moment to be understood that
Dante ever gave his visions forth as other than pure
poetry, or as having more than an allegorie basis
of truth ; nor that the world has ever formally
sanctioned them as having anything of a super-
natural character ; neither^ Jias it ^one^jsa-Jvith
vj ^lton or Bu nyan ; and yet who will say that the
religiòus thougEt and the anticipations of the other
life of Protestant Christian minds for the past two
centuries, have not been greatly tinged by the
reflections cast from the imaginations of these two
writers ? So with Dante, while neither professedly
prophet nor seer, nor pope, nor doctor of theology ;
yet in reality the power of his great poem has been
that of ali these combined in colouring the thoughts
and affections of men in their visions of the world to
come. And, while granting to Dante his full title
of poet as a truly great creator of these imaginary
worlds through which he leads us in his awful
pilgrimage, yet even the imagination must have
some material, and some scaffolding of Information,
of former doctrine or knowledge of some kind, on
which and with whicl;i to build. And it is this
question as to fundamental sources of Dante's
ideas of the spiritual world that chiefly interests
US in attempting a comparison between Dante and
Swedenborg.
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IO Dante and Swedenborg.
The naturai inference would be that Dante, in
writing an account of an imaginary pilgrimage
through hell and purgatory and heaven, would
describe those realms according to the vulgar con- w-
ceptions then entertained, something as the miracle t^
plays have done, or that the common traditions of
the church and the few grand hints of the Hteral
Scriptures would have sufficed for the material to
be employed. As a matter of fact, we find, in one
sense, the heaven and the hell of Dante a very**
narrow, commonplace, every-day kind of world ;
more so even than that of the Memorable Relations^
or those interviews with spirits and descriptions of
the scenery of the spiritual world which Sweden-
borg has interspersed in the course of his doctrinal
writings. The people that Dante meets with in
that world are his former over-the-way, Fiorentine
neighbours, who inquire about their relatives, or wish
to be informed as to the progress of public affairs
in their quarrelsome little town. The rewards
and punishments of eternity are dispensed very con-
siderably according to the poet's own resentment
or favour towards his former politicai associates ;
the scenery, the manners and customs, the cour-
tesies and the jeers and insults he meets with are
ali reflected from the narrow sphere of north
Italian life. When we come to broader subjects,
we find indeed the poet's vision and grasp widening
accordingly, but stili subject to the limitations of
traditional leaming.
Thus his cosmology and geography are those of
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Dante and Swedenborg. 1 1
Homer, Plato, and the literal Bible combined ; the*-
earth being in the centre of the universe surrounded
by the seven planetary spheres, or revolving heavens,
beyond which is the heaven of fixed stars, then the
moving but unmoved sphere of the seraphim and
angels ali concentring above in the " Rose of the
blessed," on whose petals as on thrones in succes-
sive ranks are seated the saints and innocent
children ali surrounding the lake of the Light
inapproachable, where dwells the Atomic Point,
the eternai Three-in-One. On the earth's surface,
in the middle of the eastem hemisphere, is situated
Jerusalem, directly beneath which the hells descend
in successive deg^ees to the inmost point or the
earth's centre, where is the abode of Lucifer;
thence is an ascent through the other side of the
earth to a high projection or mountain far out in
the midst of the ocean beyond the gates of Hercules,
forming the middle point of the western hemisphere
and the exact antipodes of Jerusalem. On this
mountain are the successive planes or spheres of
purgatory, culminating in the terrestrial Eden, from
which the ascent opens into the lowest of the
planetary heavens or abodes of saved souls.
The assignment of souls to their several degrees
and kinds and places of punishment and reward
involves a classification of moral virtues partly
traceable to the Aristotelian ethics and partly to
the theology of the Christian Fathers ; and the
discussions introduced, here and there, of profound
theological topics reveal the poet's familiarity with
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1 2 Dante and Swedenborg.
the best fruits of both the philosophy and theology
of ali the ages that had preceded him. So we find
the man mounting with his theme ; minute, blunt, -
and familiar in his descriptions of the Inferno^ in
the Paradiso his language wears the garb of an -
archangel, dazzling us with its splendour and open-
ing to US vistas of unsearchable light It is said
that his name was, in its originai form, Durante,
and so his whole name. Durante Allighieri, might
be said to mean the Enduring Winged One. And
with an eagle's flight his imagination, his ardour,
and his philosophy and Christian faith combined,
mount straight upward to the sun, the more and
more unhindered in his gaze as he soars away from
earth.
But whether, taking him in his widest and
sublimest capacity as a poet, or in his most locai
and personal narrowness as an exiled and embittered
Fiorentine, and giving due credit to both contem-
porary and older philosophy and theology for his
ideas, whether of earth or heaven or of the nature
of man, we shall stili, I believe, find in Dante much
that is difficult to trace literally to any earlier
source, much that seems wholly beyond and above
the ordinary theological scope of Christian teaching,
much that in its strong, direct declaring of things
untold before, makes the poet seem to speak rather
like a seer and prophet than like a mere rhymster
of the sacred fictions of his time.
I refer especially to certain broad features of the
pian of the ppem, involving principles of classifica-
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Dante and Swedenborg. 1 3
tìon which bear a dose resemblance to those of
Swedenborg, and also to certain ideas and defini-
tions, both of human and Divine nature, which
gleam with the unmistakable light of revealed truth.
That these were never understood fully by even the*'
poet himself, in ali their deepest significance, in fact
as anything more than poetic intuition or invention,
may be readily admitted ; that thejr_^never bave
brought to man any accredked /Divine message is
also true^ but that'tEey are in reality foregleams of
that great dawn of light which has in this later time
ris en upon t he world through the rgvelatigns granted
to Swed enborg , and tHaFthe great poem is thus rich
in a wìsdom whose worth will rather brighten than
diminish in lustre as it is brought under the light of
the knowledge now revealed, we may confidently
believe. By the side of its numerous passages
luminous with spiritual truth, we shall indeed find
others in dose contiguity so intrinsically absurd, so
grossly offensive to our sense of charity and of
justice, or characterized by so rigid and blind an
adherence to the orthodoxy of the poet*s time,
whether in things theological, politicai, or scientific,
that we can be in no danger of forgetting the frail
human authorship of the poem and the wide dis-
tinction that must ever be drawn between this epic
of mediaeval imagination and the great relation
which now comes to us, in terms of unmistakable
authority, ex visis et auditis^ from " things heard •
and seen." Nothing could more emphatically
declare this distinction than the words with which
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14 Dante and Swedenborg.
Swedenborg, in ali the consciousness of his sacred
and responsible mission as a revealer of things
hitherto kept secret from the foundation of the
world, explains the purpose of his intromission into
the spiritual world. Here we find nothing of the
g^ey twilight of the land of dreams, nothing of the
splendours of ecstatic vision ; rather is it the plain
testimony of a man charged with an important-*
message to his fellow-men, of which he was more
mindful that the substance be truly given than
that the form should be pleasing to the recipient
H^nry James, sen., says of Swedenborg's style of
writingT'
. . . . " His books are a dry, unimpassioned, unexag- ^
gerated expositìon of the things he daily saw and heard
in the world of spirits, and of the spiritual laws which
these things illustrate ; with scarcely any effort whatever
to blink the obvious outrage his experiences ofFer to
sensuous prejudice, or to conciliate any interest in his
reader which is net prompted by the latter's own originai
and unaffected relish of the truth. Such sincere books,
it seems to me, were never before written " (Substance t-
and Shadow),
Dante begins his poem by narrating how, —
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found me in a dark and dreary wood
Where the straight way to me no more appeared.
Nor know I how to teli how I did come there.
So full of sleep was I at that strange moment
When the true way I had abandoned.
He falls in with three wild beasts, and in his
terror comes upon the shade of Virgil, who offers
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Dante and Swedenborg. 1 5
to become his guide through the fearful caverns of
the lower world and out into the upper spheres
again. After much fear and hesitation he consents
to follow his guide upon this sombre pilgrimage.
And so they enter the fearful gate which forms
the entrance to the hells, over which is written the
memorable words :
By me they enter to the doleful city,
By me they go into eternai pain,
By me they seek the dwellings of the lost,
Justice did move the hand of my great builder ;
I was constnicted by the power Divine
The highest Wisdom and the primal Love.
Before my being, were no things created,
Only th' eternai ; and I shall ever be.
Bid hope farewell, ali ye who enter bere.
Virgil explains the meaning of these words, leads
the poet within, and thus, says Dante,
He ushered me within the secret things.
Compare this with the foUowing announcement
which Swedenborg makes at the beginning of his
Heaven and Hell:
" In the end of the church, when there is no longer
love and thence no faith, the 'Lord is to open the Wor
as to its internai sense and to reveal the hidden things of
heaven. The hidden things which are revealed in what
now follows (that is, in the treatise on Heaven and Hell)
concern heaven and hell and the life of men after death.
The man of the Church at this day knows scarcely any--
thing about heaven and hell, nor about his life after
death, although they are ali described in the Word ; yea,
many also who were born within the church deny those
things, saying, Who has come thence and told us ?
i6 Dante and Swedenborg.
" Lest therefore such denial, which reigns especially with
those who bave much wisdom of the world, should also
infect and corrapt the simple in heart and the simple in
faith, it has been given me to be together with the angels,
and to speak with them as man with man, and also to see
the things which are in the heavens and in the hells, and
this during thirteen years; and now to describe them
from things seen and heard, hoping that thus ignorance
may be enlightened and incredulity dispelled" (Intro-
duction to Heaven and ffell).
In what manner, then, we are led to inquire, does
the picture drawn in the Divina Commedia bear
the test of that Hght of actual knowledge which
has now, according to this declaration, been given
to the world ?
To trace in detail ali the coincidences of descrip-
tìon between the poem of Dante and the Heaven
and Hell of Swedenborg would require volumes
rather than the few pages at our disposai. The
most I can attempt will be to point out a few of the
remarkable analogies and resemblances between
the two Works, leaving the reader at his pleasure to
pursue the subject more into particulars.*
The first thing I would cali attention to is the
every-day, human reality which Dante gives to the
spiritual world. No world is more substantial,
visible, and tangible, or crowded with more busy,
* For a study of this kind I know of no English work more helpfal
than the very interesting volume entitled, -<4 Shadow of Dante; being
an Essay tffwards studying Htmselft His World, and His Piìgrimage,
by Maria Francesca Rossetti. London: Rivingtons. 1871. For
a translation, I believe Longfellow's to be far superior to any other.
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Dante and Swedenborg. 1 7
practical, human activity than the spheres vìsited
by the poet's imagination. This is no world of
ghosts or of shades leading an unconscious exist-
enee until some future judgment-day shall wakc
them to life again ; they are ali intensely alive now,
and alive as men and women in human bodies,
recognizable and stili possessing ali the leading
traits of character that they had in the world, Of
this human reality of the life after death Sweden-
borg writes as follows :
"That man when he passes cut of the naturai world
into the spiritual, as is the case when he dies, carries
with him ali things that are his, or which belong to him
as a man, except his earthly body, has been testified to
me by manifold experience ; for man when he enters the
spiritual world, or the life after death, is in a body as in
the world ; to appearance there is no difference, since
he does not perceive or see any difference. But
his body is then spiritual, and thus separated or puri-
fied from earthly things, and when what is spiritual
touches and sees what is spiritual, it is just as when what
is naturai touches and sees what is naturai : hence a man,
when he has become a spirit, does not know otherwise
than that he is in his body in which he was in the world,
and thus does not know that he has deceased. A man-
spirit also enjoys every externai and internai sense which
he enjoyed in the world ; he sees as before, he hears and
speaks as before, he also smells and tastes, and when he
is touched, he feels the touch as before ; he also longs,
desires, craves, thinks, reflects, is affected, loves, wills, as
before ; and he who is delighted with studies, reads and
writes as before. In a word, when a man passes from
one life into the other, or from one world into the other,
it is as if he passed from one place into another ; and he
carries with him ali things which he possessed in himself
6
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1 8 Dante and Swedenborg.
as a man, so that it cannot be said that the man after
death, which is only the death of the earthly body, has
lost anything of himself. He also carries with him the
naturai memory, for he retains ali things whatsoever
which he has in the world heard, seen, read, learned, and
thought, from earliest infancy even to the end of life ; the
naturai objects however which are in the memory, because
they cannot be reproduced in the spiritual world, are
quiescent, as is the case with a man when he does not
think from them ; but stili they are reproduced when it
pleases the Lord " (Heaven and Hell^ no. 461).
It is true, Dante speaks of the Last Judgment as
yet to come, but the wicked are in hell already,*^
notwithstanding, and ali the change the final judg-
ment will efTect in their case will be to finally dose
the pits which stili remain open only for more to
enter. So are the good already enjoying the
blessed life of heaven, and the spirits not yet puri-
fied are Hngering a longer and shorter time in the
outer courts according to the preparation they need
to undergo. In a word, it is a perfectly human-
world that Dante visits ; it is almost a Fiorentine
world in parts, so real and familiar does the poet
make its scenes; even as Swedenborg speaks of
certain cities of earth having their counterparts in
the world of spirits. Unlike Milton, who makes
his personages wear a kind of stage-like, artificial
dignity in speech and hearing corresponding with
his lofty theme, Dante puts the commonest, every- \
day phrases into his conversations, and so intensely
human are the very griefs and sorrows he describes,
that we are moved by a pathos that is irresistible.
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Dante and Swedenborg. 1 9
It may seem as as if the realism of Dante^s
description must be largely destroyed by bis intro-
duction of griffons, centaurs, ^nd otber monstrous
forms more suggestive of pagan mythology tban of
ordinary human experience; but it is well to re-
member that even the monsters of mythology were 'V
not without a cause and a meaning, often a very
practical one; and how large a part such actual
perversions and distortions of humanity do actually
play in the real hells of Swedenborg, we need only
read such passages as the following to learn :
" At the apertures (to the infemal societies), which are
called the gates of hell, for the most part appears a
monster which in general represents the form of those
who are within. The fìerce passions of those who dwell
there are then at the same time represented by dreadful
and atrocious things, the particular mention of which I
omit. . . . From an inspection of those monstrous forms
of spirits in the hells, which as was said are ali forms of
contempt of others, and of menaces against those who
do not pay them honour and respect, also forms of
hatred and revenge against those who do not favour
them, it appeared evident that ali in general were forms
of the love of self and the love of the world ; and that
the evils of which they are the specific forms derive their
origin from these two loves" (Heaven and Hell^ nos. 553,
554).
We bave next to notice that in the general
divisions of the spiritual world. Dante adheres to
the numbers three, seven, and nine, in a manner
wholly in accord with their real spiritual meaning ;
and in bis trinai classification there is a strong
semblance of the doctrine of the degrees of the
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20 Dante and Swedenborg.
human mind. These degrees are thus described by
Swedenborg :
" He who does not know how it is with Divine order as
to d^rees, cannot comprehend how the heavens are dis-
tinct, nor even what the internai and the extemal man
are. Most people in the world have no other notion
conceming interiors and exteriors, or concerning superiors
and inferiors, than as of something continuous or of
what coheres by continuity from purer to grosser ; and
yet interiors and exteriors are not continuous with each
other but discrete. There are degrees of two kinds;
there are continuous degrees and degrees not continuous.
Continuous degrees are as the degrees of the decrease of
light from flame even to its obscurity ; or as the degrees
of the decrease of sight, from those things which are in
light to those which are in shade ; or as the degrees of
the purity of the atmosphere, from the lowest part of it
to the highest : distances determine these degrees. On
the other band, degrees not continuous, but discrete, are
discriminated as prior and posterior, as cause and effect,
as what produces and what is produced. He who ex-
amines will see, that in ali and each of the things in the
imiversal world, whatever they are, there are such degrees
of production and composition ; namely, that from one is
another, and from the other a third, and so on. He who
does not procure to himself a perception of these degrees
cannot possibly know the distinctions of the heavens,
and the distinctions of the interior and exterior faculties
of man ; nor the distinction between the spiritual world
and the naturai world ; nor the distinction between the
spirit of man and bis body. Hence he cannot under-
stand what and whence correspondences and representa-
tions are, nor what influx is. Sensual men do not com-
*prehend these distinctions, for they make increments and
decrements even according to these degrees, continuous ;
hence they cannot conceive of what is spiritual otherwise
than as a purer naturai. . . .
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:iJ. ■•■a^ A
Dante and Swedenborg. 2 1
" The interiors of man, which are of his mind {mens)
and mind (animus), are alscy in similar order [of degrees] ;
he has an inmost, a middle, and a lowest : for into man
when he was created, ali things of Divine order were
brought together, so that he was made Divine order in
form, and thence a heaven in its least effigy. Therefore
also man communicates with the heavens as to his in-
teriors, and likewise comes among the angels after death ;
among the angels of the inmost heaven, of the middle, or
of the lowest, according to his reception of Divine Good
and Truth from the Lord, while he lived in the world "
{Heaven and Hell, nos. 38, 30).
According to the Christian belief, universally
entertained up to the time of the Reformation, the
v^QxXà of the departed consists of three grand
divisions, hell, purgatory, and heaven ; and the
descriptions of these in the order of the poet's
pilgrimage through them constitute respectively
the three great canticles of the Divina Commedia,
named accordingly, // Inferno, Il Purgatorio, and
// Paradiso, Of this trinai division of the whole
spiritual world, Swedenborg says :
" The world of spirits is a middle place between heaven
and hell, and also it is a middle state of man after death.
That it is a middle place, was manifest to me from this,
that the hells are beneath, and the heavens above ; and
that it is a middle state, from this, that man, so long as
he is there, is not yet in heaven or in hell. The state
of heaven with man is the conjunction of good and truth
with him, and the state of hell is the conjunction of evi!
and falsity with him. When with a man-spirit good
is conjoined to truth, then he comes into heaven, because,
as was said, that conjunction is heaven with him; but
when with a man-spirit evil is conjoined with falsity.
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22 Dante and Swedenborg,
then he comes into hell, because that conjunction is hell
with him. This conjunctioA is made in the world of
spirits, since man is then in a middle state. It is alike,
whether you say the conjunction of the understanding /
and the will, or the conjunction of tnith and good"^
(Heaven and Hell^ no. 422).
The purgatory or intermediate world between
hell and heaven corresponds to the world of spirits
of Swedenborg in so far as it is the place of pre-
paration for heaven for ali those departing from this
world who can be saved ; but those who are fit only
Fòr hell are carried thither at once across the dark
flood of Acheron, accordlng to the poet ; whereas
we are taught in Swedenborg that ali those who .
dte, both good and bad alike, enter the intermediate/
world of spirits, and that there they undergo the
jùdgment, and are prepared for their future lot
either in the realms above or below. Swedenborg,
however, draws this distinction between the use of
this intermediate world for those who can and
those who cannot be saved, that the former undergo
there the three states, namely, " of their exteriors "
and " of their interiors," which two states constitute
their jùdgment, or the determination of their ruling
love, and the third state which ìs that of " instruc-
tìon and preparation " for heaven.
" This third state is therefore only for those who come
into heaven and become angels, but not for those who
come into hell, since these cannot be instructed, and
their second state is also their third " {Heaven and Hell^
no, 512).
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Dante and Swedenborg, 23
Indeed we read that there are some
" who immediately after death are either taken up into
heaven, or cast into hell. Those who are immediately
taken up into heaven are those who have been regenerated, -
and thus prepared for heaven in the world. Those who
are so regenerated and prepared that they have need only
to reject naturai impurities with the body, are home
immediately by the angels into heaven. I have seen them ,
taken up soon after the hour of death. But those who
have been interiorly wicked, and exteriorly, as to appear-
ance, good, thus who have filled their malignity with deceit
and have used goodness as a means of deceiving, are
immediately cast into hell*' {Heaven and Helly no. 491).
Here it may be well to notice that in Dante as
in Swedenborg ali the bodily conditions and sur-
-roundings of souls in the other world, are really
representatives and effects of inward moral con-
ditions. For in a letter to one of his patrons Dante
writes:
" The subject of ali the work, accepted literally only, is
the state of souls after death, taken simply; because
respecting it and around it the process of ali the work
revolves. But if the work is accepted allegorically, the
subject is man, in so far as by free-will meriting and
demeriting he is amenable to the justice of reward and
punishment " {Letter to Car, Grande delia Scala^ 7).
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II.
PURGATORY AND THE INTERMEDIATE WORLD.
The purgatory of Dante is a mountain of seven
terraces, each occupied by the penitents who
patiently endure the sufferings necessary for their
purgation from their respective grade of sins.
These grades, seven in ali, are divided into three
grand classes according to the perversion of love in
which they consist. The Angel of Judgment
engraves the sevenfold "P" {peccata^ sins) on the
poet's forehead, indicating that in the penitent the
consciousness of these inward defects is brought
forth and their stains one by one removed as he
ascends the scale. The first three sins are those of
love distorted, namely, pride, envy, and anger ; the
fourth is from love defective or indifferent, sloth ;
the last three are from love excessive, avarice,
gluttony, lasciviousness. The first class, it will be
noticed, consists in the turning of love from its
trae object, its holy source and giver ; the second
in a lack of determination, a state of vacillation
between the higher and lower objects of love ;
the third, the excessive gratification of the lower
or naturai loves to the detriment of the higher.
The ascent is from the inmost and most difficult
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Dante and Swedenborg. 25
to overcome, which is pride. Ali the terraces are
comparatively easy to clìmb after this one is
passed.
We now were mounting up the sacred stairs,
And it appeared to me by far more easy
Than on the plain it has appeared before.
Whence I ? " My Master, say, what heavy thing
Has been uplifted from me, so that hardly
Aught of fatigue is felt by me in walking?"
He answered : " When the P's which bave remàined
Stili in thy fece, almost obliterate,
Shall wholly, as the first is, be erased,
Thy feet shall be so vanquished by good-will
That not alone they shall not feel fatigue,
But urging up will be to them delight."
(Purgatorio XIL 114, Longfeilow's translation,)
Thus with the overcoming of pride more than
half of our human battle is fought, and the " way
that leads to heaven is not so difficult as has been
supposed." Moreover, the doctrine seems distinctly
stated bere that, as each evil is overcome in tempta-
tion, the Lord gives a good will or good affection in
its place which makes the way upward ever more a
delight and less a labour. Sins of appetite and of
worldly love are placed above those of pride, envy,
and anger, being more extemal and less deadly.
It is in the Purgatorio that, perhaps more than
in any other part of the whole poem, we find our
common human sympathies appealed to, and feel
the singular tendemess that forms so beautiful a
trait of the great poet. We find ourselves not
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2 6 Dante and Swedenborg.
wholly lifted above the earthly atmospheres, so
that, as it were, the sound of church bells, the
chant of evening hymn, the old, famìHar anthems
sung by the Church on earth through centuries
after centuries, and the words of the old Bible,
stili linger in our ears.
Of this first state of man on his entrance at death
into the spiritual world, Swedenborg teaches :
" The spirit of man is held in its last thought when the
body expires, until it returns to the thoughts which are
from its general or niling affection in this world " . . . .
" His first state after death ìs similar to his state in the
world, because then he is sìmilarly in the extemals of his
life. Hence it is that he then knows no otherwise than that
he is stili in the world, unless he pays attention to those
things which present themselves, and to those which were
said to him by the angels when he was raised up, that he
is now a spirit. Thus one life is continued into the other,
and death is only the passage. Because tlie spirit of
man recently departed from the world is such, therefore
he is then recognized by his friends, and by those whom
hfe had known in the world ; for spirits perceìve this, not
only from his face and speech, but also from the sphere
of hi8 life when they approach. Every one in the other
life, when he thinks of another, presents also to himself
his face in thought, and at the same time some things
which are of his life ; and when he does this, the other
bscomes present, as if he was sent for and odled. This
exists in the spiritual world from the fact that thoughts
are there communicated, and that there are not such
spaces there as exist in the naturai world. Hence it
is that ali when they first come into the other life, are
recognized by their friends, their relatives, and those
known to them in any way; and also that they talk
together, and afterwards associate according to their
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Dante and Swedenborg. 27
frìèndshìp in the world. I bave frequently heard ^hat
tnose who bave come from tbe world, bave rejoiced at
Seeing their friends again, and tbat theìr friends in tiìrh
bave rejoiced tbat tbey bad come to tbem " {Htùven àHd
Bel/, nos. 493, 494).
After this first state, according to Swedenborg,
follows the second, whìch ìs that of being admitted
into the interior knowledge of one's own nature and
undergoing the consequent judgments, conviction,
and condemnation of one's evils : after whìch, Ibr
those who shall enter heaven, follows the third state,
which is that of instruction and initiation into the
angelic life. Thus we read :
" After spirits bave been by instructions prepated for
heaven in tbe above-mentioned places, wbicb is effected
in a short time, on account of their being in spiritual ideas,
wbicb comprebend several tbings togetber, tbey are tben
ciotbed with angelic garments, wbicb are mostly white, as
Df fine linen ; and thus tbey are brougbt to the way which
tends upwards to heaven, and are delivered to tbe angel-
guards there, and are afterwards received by otber angela
ahd introduced into societies, and into many blessed
things. Every one is next led by the Lord into bis own
society, wbicb also is effected by various ways, sotnetimes
by winding paths. Tbe ways by wbicb tbey are led are
not known to any angel, but to tbe Lord alone. Wben
tbey come to their own society, their interiors are tbeh
opened, and since tbese are conformable to tbe interiors
of tbe angels who are in tbat society, tbey are therefore
immediately acknowledged and received with joy "
{Heaven and Hell, no. 519).
In Dante's picture of the progress upward
through Purgatory, as each sin is overcome, the
sound of angel voices is heard singìng the anthem of
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28 Dante and Swedenborg.
victory in the words of the corresponding blessing
from Matt v., and the approach of the liberating
angel is thus described :
Towards us carne the being beautiful,
Vested in white, and in bis countenance
Such as appears the tremulous morning star.
One penitent is heard softly singing the familiar
complin hymn, " Te lucis ante terminum " — " Before
the ending of the day," when
Twas now the hour that turneth back desire
In those who sail the sea^ and melts the heart
The day theyVe said to their sweet friends farewell,
And the new pilgrim penetrates with love,
If he doth bear from far away a beli
That seemeth to deplore the dying day.
A great company of newly-arrived spirits brought
by the angel of death to the shores of this world of
trial, is heard chanting altogether in one voice the
Psalm," When Israel went out of Egypt" ; and as
the gate is opened admitting to the first terrace, Te
Deum Laudamus is heard resounding from within.
At length from the suffering throng of the penitents
for pride —
— more or less bent down
According as they more or less were laden,
and of whom —
—he who had most patience in bis looks,
Weeping did seem to say, " I can no more,"
Is heard this utterance of the Lord's Prayer :
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Dante and Swedenborg. 29
Our Father, Thou who dwellest in the heavens,
Not circumscribed, but from the greater love
Thou bearest to the first effects on high,
Praised be Thy Name and Thine Omnipotence
By every creature, as befitting is,
To render thanks to Thy sweet effluence.
Come unto us the peace of Thy dominion,
For unto it we cannot of ourselves,
If it come not, with ali our intellect.
Even as Thine own angels of their will
Make sacrifice to Thee, hosanna singing.
So may ali men make sacrifice of theirs.
Give unto us this day our daily manna,
Withouten which in this rough wilderness
Backward goes he who toils most to advance.
And even as we the trespass we bave suffered
Pardon in one another, pardon Thou
Benignly, and regard not our desert.
Our virtue, which is easily o'ercome,
Put not to proof with the old adversary,
But Thou from him who spurs it so, deliver.
{Purgatorio XI, 1-24.)
A spirit reflecting on the utter corruption of the
world, thus instructs Dante on the cause of evi! and
on man's responsibility :
Ye who are living every cause refer
Stili upward to the heavens, as if ali things
They of necessity moved with themselves.
If this were so, in you would be destroyed
Free-will, nor any justice would there be
In having joy for good, or grief fòr evil.
The heavens your movements do initiate, —
I say not ali ; but grantìng that I say it,
Light has been given you for good and evil
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30 Dante and Swedenborg.
And free volition, which, if some fatigue
In the first battles with the heavens it suffers,
Afterwards conquers ali, if well 'tis nurtured.
To greater force and to a better nature,
Though free, ye subject are, and that creates
The mind in you the heavens bave not in charge.
Hence if the present world doth go astray,
In you the cause is, be it sought in you.
(Purgatorio XVL 67-85.)
Of this free volition of man, or bis foUowing bis
life's ruling love as determining bis future state, and
no intervention of God's mercy, wbicb would
destroy that freedom, Swedenborg teaches :
" I can testify from much experience that it is impos-
sible to implant the life of heaven in those who bave in
the world led a life opposite to the life of heaven. There
were some who believed that they should easily receive
Divine Truths after death, when they heard them from the
angds, and that they should believe them, and should
then change their lives, and thus could be received into
heaven. But this was tried with very many, yet only with
tbose who were in such a belief, to whom the trial ^as
P^rmitted in order that they might know that repentance
is not given after death. Some of those with whom the
trial was made, understood truths and seemed to receive
them, but as soon as they turned to the life of their love,
they rejected them, and even spoke against them. Some
rejected them immediately, being unwilling to bear them.
Some were desirous that the life of their love, which they
had acquired in the world, might be taken away from
them, and that angelic life, or the life of heaven might be
infused in its place. This likewise, by permission, was
accomplished, but when the life of their love was taken
a»ay, ^oss^ lay as dead, and had no longer the use of their
faculties. From these and other kinds of experience the
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Dante and Swedenborg, 3 1
simply good were instructed, that the life of any one can-
not in any wise be changed after death, and tfaìat evil life
cannot in any degree be transmuted into good life, or
infemal life into angelic, inasmuch as every spirit, from
head to foot, is in quality such as his love is, and thence
such as his life is, and thus to transmute this life into the
opposite is altogether to destroy the spirit. The angels
declare that it were easier to change a night-bird into a
dove, and an owl into a bird of paradise, than an infernal
spirit into an angel of heaven. Man after death, there-
fore, remains of such a quality as his life had been
in the world. From these things it may now be manifest,
that no one can be received into heaven by immediate
mercy" (Heaven and Hell^ no. 527).
I cannot leave this brief notice of the Purgatorio
without quoting a few lines of rare beauty, describing
the appearing to the poet of two noted women, the
one supposed to be identified with the Countess
Matilda of Tuscany, a wealthy and zealous adherent
of the Guelph party in the eleventh century;
and the other the saintly Beatrice, who on earth
had been the idol of the poet's early love, and
afterwards had, in his almost religious devotion,
become transfigured into the embodiment of celes-
tial wisdom, and who as such now, when the
earthly Eden is reached on the uppermost plain of
purgatory, is ready to conduct Dante upward
through these heavenly spheres which the unbap-
tized Virgll may not presume to enter. Of the
first vision of Matilda we read :
And lo ! my further course a stream cut off
Which toward the left band with its little waves
Bent down the grass that on its margin sprang.
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32 Dante and Swedenborg,
With feet I stayed, and with mine eyes I passed
Beyond the rivulet, to look upon
The great variety of the fresh May ;
And there appeared to me (even as appears
Suddenly something that doth turn aside
Through very wonder every other thought)
A lady ali alone, who went along
Singing and cuUing floweret after floweret,
With which her pathway was ali painted over.
{Purgatorio XXVIIL 24.)
A great procession is seen in which patriarchs,
prophets, and elders, the symbolic Uving beings of
Ezekiers vision, the eagle and the lion typical of
ourLord's Divine and human natures, the theological
and the cardinal virtues, the evangelists and apostles,
pass by in impressive pomp amid the shining of
the seven golden candlesticks and the singing of
hosannas ; and at last the descent of Beatrice is thus
announced :
Ere now have I beheld as day began.
The eastem hemisphere ali tinged with rose,
And the other heaven with fair serene adorned ;
And the sun's face, uprising, overshadowed
So that by tempering influence of vapours
For a long interval the eye sustained it ;
Thus in the bosom of a cloud of flowers
Which from those hands angelical ascended.
And downward fell again inside and out
Over her snow-white veil with olive cinct,
Appeared a lady under a green mantle
Vested in colour of the living flame.
(Purgatorio XXX. 23.)
Is there not a kind of heavenly atmosphere
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Dante and Swedenborg. 33
about these visions, reminding us of similar passages
here and there in the Memorabilia of Swedenborg ?
The following is his description of the approach of
an angel :
"There appeared to me an angel flying beneath the
eastern heaven with a trumpet in his hand, which he
held to his mouth, and sounded towards the north, the
west, and the south. He was clad in a robe which waved
behind him as he flew along, and was girded around the
waist with a band which seemed as it were on fìre and
radiant with carbuncles and sapphires : he flew with his
body in a horizontal posture, and gently alighted on the
ground near where I was standing. As soon as he
touched the earth with his feet, he stood erect and walked
to and fro ; but on seeing me he immediately directed
his steps toward me. I was in the spirit, and was stand-
ing in that state on a bill in the southern quarter of the
spiritual world" (Conjugial Love^ no. 2).
But before following the poet upward in his
joumey through the heavens, we must now for a
moment tum back and notice some interesting
coincidences between the picture of the hells which
Dante has drawn, and the teachings afTorded us in
Swedenborg on that subject
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III.
The Hells.
Accordino to Dante the hells like the heavens
are nine in number, but exist in three grand divisions
or degrees. These three degrees of the hells may
be named those of Incontinence, Folly, and Malice.
Incontinence comprises the bodily lusts and pas-
sions, the victims of which are punished in the upper
circles and in descending order ; these are lascivious-
ness, gluttony, avance with prodigality, and anger
with melancholy. The middle circle or intermediate
degree is occupi'ed by the sins of folly, or to use the
poet's term, bestialism, by which he means that
character " like unto the beast that perisheth," which
belongs to him who *' is in honour and understandeth
not" Sins of heresy, infidelity, and materialism
are here included — in a word of the "fools that
have said in their hearts, There is no God."
Beneath these are the hells of malice in their
descending degrees, divided chiefly into the two
classes, of the hells of violence and the hells of
fraud and treachery.
Here we see a division corresponding to the three
degrees of the human mind, the naturai, the spiritual,
and the celestial, but with their respective love
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Dante and Swedenborg. 35
perverted to their opposites. In the hells these
become degrees of the naturai mind, for the
spiritual and celestial degrees are never opened in
those who go there, and the trine is that of the
perverted sensual appetites, the perverted scientific
and rational faculties, and the perverted inmost
love. We read in Swedenborg :
" Most of the hells are threefold, the superior ones with-
in appearing in thick darkness, because inhabited by those
in the falsities of evil, but the inferior ones appearing
fiery, because inhabited by those who are in the evils
themselves. In the deeper hells are those who bave
acted interiorly from evil, but in the less deep those who
bave acted exteriorly " {Heaven and Hell^ no. 586).
New it is net a little remarkable that in the lowest
circles of beli, among the lowest of the malicious,
Dante places the treacherous and fraudulent, and
these embrace ali seducers, flatterers, hypocrites,
discord breeders, and thieves ; and Swedenborg says,
in treating of the fifth Commandment, " Thou shalt
not steal : "
" The evil of theft enters more deeply into a man than
any other evil, because it is conjoined with cunning and
deceit ; and cunning and deceit insinuate themselves even
into the spiritual mind of a man, wherein is bis thought
with the understanding " (Doctrine ofLife^ no. 81).
The trinai division of the hells follows that of the
heavens in, of course, an inverted order. And as
there are the three heavens corresponding to the
celestial, spiritual, and naturai degrees, so must there
be corresponding hells.
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36 Dante and Swedenborg.
" Inasmuch as in general there are three heavens, there-
fore also there are in general three hells : the lowest which
is opposed to the inmost or third heaven, the middle
which is opposed to the middle or second heaven, and the
highest which is opposed to the lowest or first heaven "
(Heaven and Hell^ no. 542).
The lowest of the hells must therefore be in-
habited by those who are in the most intense lust of
dominion from self-love, and in the most intense
hatred to the Lord. Dante calls these the violent
and the fraudulent, observing a kind of distinction
into the two kingdoms of the voluntary and the
intellectual, but stili placing the fraudulent at the
bottom because of the interior nature of their
cunning and deceit
The love of falsity and the selfish love of the
world occupy the middle degree, corresponding to
the perverted rational principle, and here Dante
places the City of Dis, the habitation of the fools,
or those who bave become as beasts through
infidelity and heresy. Of these two hells, namely,
of the perverted loves of the world and of self which
constitute, we may say, the corruption and death of
the spiritual and celestial degrees of man's mind,
Swedenborg says :
" The hells in the western quarter are the worst of ali,
and are most horrible ; in these are they who in the world
have been in the love of self, and thence in the contempt
of others and in enmity against those who did not favour
themselves. It is their greatest delight to exercise cruelty;
but this delight in the other life is tumed against them-
selves. . . . The dreadfulnessof the hells decreases from
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Dante and Swedenborg. 37
the northem quarter to the southern, and likewise toward
the east. To the east are they who have been haughty,
and have not believed in a Divine, but stili have not
been in such hatred and revenge, nor in such deceit, as
they who are in a greater depth there in the western
quarter " {Heaven and HeU^ no. 587).
How horrible these hells are, how grievous the
punishments there suffered, how gross and revolting
the delights of evi! in which the wicked find their
life, and how monstrous the forms into which their
bodies are distorted, we are enabled by Swedenborg
to judge from the examples he has given in Heaven
and Helly and especially when we reflect that there
were seen things so revolting that he was not per-
mitted to reveal them. He tells us of the appear-
ance as of ruined cities and houses after fires, of
habitations of filth ; of barren, sandy deserts, ragged
rocks and dark caves and dens, chasms and whirl-
pools and bogs and lakesof fire (seenos. 583-587).
Of the appearance of those in hell we read :
" In general they are forms of their own evils ; thus of
contempt of others, of hatred of various kinds, and of
various kinds of revenge. Fierceness and cruelty from
their interiors are manifest through ali their forms : but
when others commend, venerate, and worship them, their
faces are contracted and have an appearance of gladness
from delight. In general their faces are dreadful and
void of life like corpses ; in some black ; in some fiery
like little torches; in some disfigured with sores and
ulcers j in some no face appears, but in its stead some-
thing hairy or bony ; and in some teeth only are exhibited"
{Heaven and Hell^ no. 553).
What reader of Dante will not recali bere that
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38 Dante and Swedenborg.
most fearful picture ever drawn perhaps by human
pen, the scene in the lowest hells where two heads
are seen, the one fast frozen in the ice, the other
protruding above it and "gfnawing, gnawing it."
At Dante's inquiry :
That sinner from the savage meal his mouth
Uplifted, wiping it upon the hair
Of the head which he had wasted from behind,
and proceeds to teli who he is, and at the dose we
read:
When he had spoken this, with eyes askew
He took again the wretched skull with teeth
Which like a dog's upon the bone were strong.
(Inferno XXXIIL 1-78.)
We see bere a man tumed ìnto the likeness of a
dog, and we reflect on the correspondence of the
teeth and the hair, and we feel that from this one
picture» of Dante's imagination we may sufficiently
understand how it was possible that there were
things seen by Swedenborg too horrible to reveal.
In the deepest abyss of beli. Dante places Lucifer
in the appearance of a gigantic monster, and
Swedenborg says :
"By Lucifer are meant those who are of Babel or
Babylon, or those who extend their dominion unto heaven,
[but] that there is not any one devil to whom the hells
are subject, since ali who are in the hells, like ali who are
in the heavens, are from the human race ; [and yet] the
universal hell in one mass resembles one devil, and may
likewise be presented in the image of one devil " {Heaven
and Helly nos. 544, 553).
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Dante and Swedenborg. 39
One further interestìng coincidence lies in the
doctrine given and the pictures the poet draws
regarding the intense cold of the lowest hells.
Dante in reaching the circle, next to the abyss itself
where Lucifer is held frozen in the ice, comes upon
those " whose tears, congealing even as they sprang,
blocked up the cavity of the eye with ice, which
while permitting sight greatly increased torment by
stopping up the vent of pain."
And one of the moumful of the freezing rind,
Cried unto us : O spirits cruci, so
As that the final frost is given ye,
Take from my face the hardened veils that I
May vent the sorrow which impregns my heart,
A little, ere again the weeping freeze.
And Swedenborg in speaking of the fire of hell
says :
" It is to be known that those who are in the hells are
not in fire, but that the fire is an appearance ; for they
are not sensible there of any burning, but only of a beat
such as they experienced in the world. The appearance
of fire is from correspondence, for love corresponds to
fire, and ali things which appear in the spiritual world
are according to correspondences.
" The above described fire or infernal beat is tumed into
intense cold when heat from heaven flows in ; and then
the infernal inhabitants shiver like those who are seized
with a cold fever, and are likewise inwardly tormented "
{Heaven andHell^ nos. 571, 572).
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IV.
The Heavens.
The heavens, lìke the hells, in Dante, are divided
into three great divisions according to mental traits
which prevail in them. Thus between the heavens
of the more or less sanctified will, those whose
affections " are stili within the reach of the earth's
shadow," being placed below, and those of pure,
unshadowed heavenly love being above, there
intervenes the mediate or transitional heaven of the
understanding sanctified by the wisdom and know-
ledge growingoutof faith and true heavenly doctrine.
Here then, as in the hells, is clearly seen a distinction
of the heavenly societies which corresponds to the
naturai, the intellectual or spiritual, and the inmost
or celestial degrees of the human mind as taught
by Swedenborg.
" There are three heavens, and these most distinct from
each other ; the inmost or third, the middle or second,
and the lowest or first. They foUow in succession, and
subsist together, as the highest of man, which is the head,
his middle, which is the body, and the lowest, which is
the feet ; and as the highest part of a house, its middle,
and its lowest. In such order also is the Divine which
proceeds and descends from the Lord : thence, from the
necessity of order, heaven is threefold.
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Dante and Swedenborg. 41
"The Divine which flows in from the Lord and is
received in the inmost or third heaven, is called celestial,
and hence the angels who are there are called celestial
angels. The Divine which flows into the second or middle
heaven, is called spiritual, and hence the angels who are
there are called spiritual angels. But the Divine which
flows in from the Lord and is received in the lowest or
first heaven, is called naturai. But because the naturai
of that heaven is not as the naturai of the world, but has in
it the spiritual and celestial, therefore that heaven is called
spiritual and celestial-natural ; and hence the angels who
are there are also called spiritual and celestial-natural.
" The love in which those are who are in the celestial
kingdom is called celestial love ; and the love in which
those are who are in the spiritual kingdom is called
spiritual love. Celestial love is love to the Lord, and
spiritual love is charity towards the neighbour. And
because ali good is of love, for what any one loves is to
him good, therefore also the good of one kingdom is
called celestial, and the good of the other spiritual"
{Heaven and Hell, nos. 29, 31, 23).
Especially do we find a clear indication of the
celestial sphere in those "blessed babes" who,
according to Dante, are placed in the bosom of the
white rose of the enthroned worshìppers of the
eternai. Of the infantile character of the celestial
or third heaven, Swedenborg states :
" Those of the Third Heaven are the very innocences
of heaven, for they, above ali, love to be led by the Lord,
as infants by their Father. Before the eyes of the angels
of the lower heavens they appear as infants and as * little
ones,' and as not very wise, although they are the wisest
of the angels of heaven. It was represented what
genuine innocence is, by a most beautiful infant full of
life, and naked : for the innocent themselves, who are in
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42 Dante and Swedenborg.
the inmost heaven, and thus nearest to the Lord, before
the eyes of other angels do not appear otherwise than as
infants, and some of them naked ; for innocence is repre-
sented by nakedness without shame, as is read conceming
the first man and his wife in paradise (Gen. ii. 25);
wherefore also, when their state of innocence was lost,
tbey were ashamed of their nakedness, and hid themselves
(chap. iii. 7, IO, II). In a word, the wiser the angels
are, the more innocent they are, and the more innocent
they are, the more they appear to themselves as infants ;
hence it is that infancy in the Word signifies innocence "
{Heaven and Hell, no. 341). '
No one is in heaven who is not a worshipper of
Christ, either as having once looked forward, or as
now looking back to Him and His redemption.
Central in this white rose of heaven is the lake of
Divine light whose circumference would outreach
the sun. And above and beyond this there is and
can be nought save the Alpha and the Omega, the
First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, the
eternai Trinity existing in the glorified Humanity
of God incarnate. Says Swedenborg :
" In the universal heaven no other is acknowledged for
the God of heaven but the Lord alone. They say there,
as He Himself taught, that He is one withthe Father ;
that the Father is in Him and He in the Father ;
that he that seeth Him, seeth the Father ; and that every-
thing holy proceedeth from Him (John x. 30, 38; xiv.
IO, 11; xvi. 13-15). I bave often spoken with angels
on this subject, and they bave always said, that they can-
not in heaven distinguish the Divine into three, since
they know and perceive that the Divine is one, and that
it is one in the Lord. They said, also, that those members
of the Church who come from the world, entertaining
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Dante and Swedenbor^^ ■ " 43
an idea of three Divines, cannot be admitted into
heaven, since their thought wanders from one to another ;
and it is not lawful there to think three and say one,
because every one in heaven speaks from thought, for
there speech is cogitative, or thought-speaking. Those
therefore who in the world bave distinguished the Divine
into three, and received a separate idea conceming each,
and bave not made that idea one, and concentrated it in
the Lord, cannot be received : for there is given in heaven
a communìcation of ali thoughts ; on which account, if
one should come thither who thinks three and says one,
he would be immediately discovered and rejected. But
it is to be known, that ali those who bave not separated
truth from good, or faith from love, in the other life, when
instructed, receive the heavenly idea concerning the Lord,
that He is the God of the universe " {Heaven and Hell^
no. 2).
The nine heavens succeed one above another
according to the order of the planets, and in visiting
them Dante seems to be conversing with the inhabi-
tants of the planets in succession, until in the last
two or highest heavens he reaches the abode of the
fixed stars and the crystalline sphere which sur-
rounds the Eternai Light.
Beatrice, in explaining to Dante the appearance
of the saints from the highest in the spheres of the
lower planetary heavens, says :
These bave not in any other heaven their seats
But ali make beautiful the primal circle,
And bave sweet life in different degrees
By feeling more or less the eternai Breath.
They showed themselves bere, not because allotted
This sphere has been to them, but to give sign
Of the celestial which is least exalted.
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44 Dante and Swedenborg.
To speak thus is adapted to your mind,
Since only through the sense it apprehendeth
What then it worthy makes of intellect.
On this account the Scripture condescends
Unto your faculties, and feet and hands
To God attributes, and means something else ;
And Holy Church under an aspect human
Gabriel and Michael represent to you
And him who made Tobias whole again.
{Paradiso IV, 31-48.)
Here we recognize a resemblance to what
Swedenborg teaches, not only concerning the
descent of angels from higher to lower heavens for
purposes of instruction, but also concerning the
descent of truths in the Word by means of corres-
pondences from the celestial to the Uteral sense.
Regarding the descent of the Word by its succes-
sive adaptations to lower planes of the minds of
angels and men, we read in Swedenborg :
" From the Lord proceed the celestial, the spiritual, and
the naturai, one after another. That which proceeds from
the Divine Love is called celestial and is the Divine
Good : that from the Divine Wisdom is called spiritual,
and is Divine Truth : and the naturai is from both these,
and is their combination in the lowest. The angels of
the Lord's celestial kingdom, of whom is the third or
highest heaven, are in the Divine proceeding from the
Lord which is called celestial, for they are in the good of
love from the Lord. Those of the spiritual kingdom, of
whom are the second or middle heaven, are in the Divine
proceeding from the Lord which is called spiritual, for
they are in truths of wisdom from the Lord. But men
of the Church in the world are in the Naturai Divine
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Dante and Swedenborg. 45
which also proceeds from the Lord. It foUows, there-
fore, that the Divine proceeding from the Lord to its
outermost forms descends by three degrees, and is named
celestial, spiritual, and naturai. The Divine which
descends from the Lord to human beings descends
through these three degrees, and when it has descended
it contains these three degrees in itself. Such is the case
with everything divine; therefore, when it is in its
outermost degree it is in its ftilness. Such is the Word.
In its outermost sense this is naturai; in its interior
sense it is spiritual ; in its inmost it is celestial ; and in
every sense it is Divine !
" That the Word is such is not apparent in the sense of
its letter, which is naturai, for the reason that man in the
world has heretofore known nothing concerning the
heavens, and so has not known what the spiritual is, nor
what the celestial : and consequently he has not known
the difference between them and the naturai " {Doctrine
concerning the Sacred Scripture^ no. 6).
And of the appearance of the archangels, Sweden-
borg says :
" As an entire society is a heaven in less form, so like-
wise an angel is a heaven in least form : for heaven is not
outside an angel, but within him; for his interiors,
which are of his mind, are disposed into the form of
heaven, thus for the reception of ali things of heaven
which are without him. He also receives those things
according to the quality of the good which is in him
from the Lord : hence an angel is also a heaven.
" An entire angelic society sometimes appears as one, in
the form of an angel ; which also it has been granted to
me by the Lord to see. When also the Lord appears in
the midst of the angels. He does not then appear encom-
passed by several, but as one [angel] in angelic form.
Thence it is that the Lord in the Word is called an
angel; and also that an entire society is so called.
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46 Dante and Swedenborg.
Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael are only angelic societies,
which are so named from their function " {Heaven and
Hell, nos. 53, 52).
In the " heaven of Mercury " Beatrice unfolds to
Dante the doctrine or what she calls the " Gran
Sentenzia " of the Incarnation, from which I will
quote only the following remarkable lines :
By not submitting to the power that wills
Curb for his good, that man who ne'er was born
Damning himself damned ali his progeny ;
Whereby the human species down below
Lay sick for many centuries in great error,
Till to descend it pleased the Word of God
To where the nature, which from its own Maker
Estrayed itself. He joined to Him in person
By the sole act of His eternai love.
{Paradiso VII, 25-34.)
Continuing in this explanation, Beatrice states
that after man " by sin had become disfranchised,"
there remained only two ways by which he could
be restored to his pristine dignity and freedom :
Either that God through clemency alone
Had pardon granted, or that man himself
Had satisfaction for his foUy made.
But inasmuch as man in his limitations has no
power to render satisfaction for his sìns :
Therefore it God behoved in His own ways
Man to restore unto his perfect life, —
I say in one, or else in both of them,
meaning the two ways of justice and mercy :
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Dante and Swedenborg. 47
But since the action of the doer is
So much more grateful, as it more presents,
The goodness of the heart from which it issues,
Goodness Divine, that doth imprint the world,
Has been contented to proceed by each
And ali Its ways to lift you up again ;
Nor 'twixt the first day and the final night
Such high and such magnificent proceeding
By one or by the other, was or shall be ;
For God more bounteous was Himself to give
To make man able to uplift himself
Than if He only of Himself had pardoned ;
And ali the other modes were insufficient
For justice, were it not the Son of God
Himself had humbled to become incarnate.
{Paradiso VIL 103.)
This condescension of God to man's estate in
order to redeem it is thus stated by Swedenborg in
his Doctrine conceming the Lord (nos. 29-36) :
"The Lord from eternity who is Jehovah took on
Himself a human nature in order to save men : from the
Divine in Himself He made the humanity Divine by
means of temptations admitted into Himself, the last of
which temptations was the passion of the cross. Thus
He successively put off the humanity assumed from the
mother and put on a humanity from the Divine in Him-
self, and this is the Divine Human and the * Son of God.'
Thus God became man, as in first principles so in the last
and lowest."
It is when among the blessed in the heaven of
the son (reckoned at that time as fourth in the
order of the planets), that a voice instructs Dante
regarding the vesture of light with which the saints
are clothed :
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48 Dante and Swedenborg.
-As long as the festivity
Of Paradise shall be, so long our love
Shall radiate round about us such a vesture.
Its brightness is proportioned to the ardour,
The ardour to the vision ; and the vision
Equals what grace it has above its worth.
{Paradiso XIV. 37-42.)
And it is here that the holy circles or choirs " in
their revolving and their wondrous song" so show
forth the joy of their life that the poet cries :
Whoso lamenteth him that here we die
That we may live above, has never there
Seen the refreshment of the eternai rain.
Here is beautifully expressed not only the truth
which the Word utters in saying, " He clothes
Himself with light as with a garment," but also the
interior truth that it is the inner heat or ardour of
love that radiates this light, and that thus fumishes
its own substance with a visible form. The power
of vision is also said to be equal to the inward
reception of Divine grace in accordance with the
truth, that ali the life, delight, and beauty of the
angels is according to their acknowledgment that
their life is from the Lord, that is, a "grace above
their own worth." Swedenborg thus speaks of the
clothing of the angels, and of the spheres of light
about them :
" The things which appear before the eyes of angels in
the heavens, and are perceived by their senses, appear and
are perceived as much to the life, as the things which are
on the earth appear to man ; yea, much more clearly,
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Dante and Swedenborg, 49
distinctly, and perceptibly. The appearances which are
from this source in the heavens, are called real appearances^
because they exist really. There are also given appearances
not real, which are those things which indeed appear, but
do not correspond to the interiors. As angelic wisdom
exceeds human wisdom in such a degree that it is called
inefifable, so likewise do ali things which are perceived by
them, and appear to them ; since ali things which are
perceived by the angels, and appear to them, correspond
to their wisdom.
"The garments with which angels are clothed, corre-
spond to their intelligence ; therefore ali in the heavens
appear clothed according to intelligence; and because
one excels another in intelligence, one has more excellent
garments than another. The most intelligent have
garments glowing as from flame, some shining as from
light ; the less intelligent have bright and white garments
without brilliancy; and the stili less intelligent have
garments of various colours ; but the angels of the in-
most heavens are without clothing.
" Because the garments of the angels correspond to their
intelligence, therefore also they correspond to truth, since
ali intelligence is from Divine Truth ; whether therefore
you say that angels are clothed according to intelligence,
or according to Divine Truth, it is the same thing. That
the garments of some glow as from flame, and those of
others shine as from light, is because flame corresponds to
good, and light to truth from good. That the garments
of some are bright and white without brilliancy, and those
of others of various colours, is because the Divine Good
and Truth are less refulgent, and also are variously re-
ceived, with the less intelligent: brightness also, and white
ness correspond to truth, and colour to its varieties. That
those in the inmost heaven are without clothing, is because
they are in innocence, and innocence corresponds to
nudity " (Heaven and ffeliy nos. 175, 177, 178).
The doctrine of the Divine operation from centro
D
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50 Dante and Swedenborg.
to circumference is thus expressed by Dante, in the
course of a discussion in the planet Jupiter regarding
the Divine justice and the fate of the heathen :
The primal Will, that in Itself is good
Ne'er from itself, the Good Supreme, has moved.
So much is just as is accordant with It :
No good created draws It to itself
But It, by raying forth, occasions that
Unto this kingdom never
Ascended one who had not faith in Christ
Before or since He to the tree was nailed.
But look thou, many crying are, " Christ, Christ ! "
Who at the judgment shall be far less near
To Him than some shall be who knew not Christ.
Such Christians shall the Ethiop condemn,
When the two companies shall be divided,
The one forever rich, the other poor.
{Paradiso XIX, 86-1 ii.)
Regarding the salvation of the heathen, and
especially of the African race, Swedenborg thus
writes :
" That the Gentiles are saved as well as Christians,
those may know who know what it is which makes
heaven with man j for heaven is in man, and those who
bave heaven in themselves come into heaven. Heaven
in man is to acknowledge the Divine, and to be led by
the Divine. The first and primary thing of every religion
is, to acknowledge a Divine. A religion which does not
acknowledge a Divine, is not a religion j and the precepts
of every religion have respect to worship, thus they teach
how the Divine is to be worshipped, so that the worship
may be acceptable to Him ; and when this is fixed in
one's mind, thus as far as he wills it, or as far as he loves
it, so far he is led by the Lord. It is known that the
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Dante and Swedenborg. 5 1
Gentiles live a moral life as well as Christians, and that
many of them live a better life than Christians.
" I bave been instructed on many occasions, tbat the
Gentiles who bave led a moral life and in obedience and
subordination, and bave lived in mutuai charity accord-
ing to tbeir religion, and bave tbence received sometbing
of conscience, are accepted in tbe otber lifè, and are
tbere instructed witb solicitous care by angels, in the
goods and truths of faith ; and tbat wben they are being
instructed, they bebave themselves modestly, intelligently, *
and wisely, and easily receive truths, and are imbued
with them. They bave formed to themselves no prin-
ciples of falsity contrary to the truths of faith, which
ifire to be shaken off, stili less scandals against the Lord,
like many Christians, who cherish no otber idea of Him
than as of a common man. The Gentiles, on the contrary,
wben they bear that God became Man, and thus mani-
fested Etimself in the world, immediately acknowledge
and adore the Lord, saying that God has fully manifested
Himself because He is the God of heaven and of earth,
and because the human race are His. It is a Divine
Truth, that without the Lord tbere is no salvation ; but
this is to be understood thus, that there is no salvation
but from the Lord. There are in the universe many
eartbs, and ali full of inhabitants, of whom scarcely any
know that the Lord assumed tbe Human in our earth.
Yet because they adore the Divine under a human form,
they are accepted and led of the Lord. Among the
Gentiles in heaven, the Africans are most beloved, for
they receive the goods and truths of heaven more easily
than others. They wish especially to be called obedient,
but not faithful ; they say that Christians, because they
bave the doctrine of faith, may be called faithful, but not
they, unless they receive the doctrine, or, as they say, are
able to receive it " (Heaven and Hell^ nos. 319, 321, 326);
In his ascent into the higher heavens, Dante ìs
examined in succession by St Peter as to his faith,,
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52 Dante and Swedenborg,
by St James as to his hope, and by St John as to
his love. In hìs confession of faith there occurs
this singular expression, reminding one strongly of
Swedenborg's use of the singular verb with a plural
subject when the two subjects are distinctly one,
like love and wisdom, or esse and existere. The
poet believes in three eternai persons, and these —
One essence, I believe, so one and trine,
They bear conjunction both with sunf and est
{Paradiso XXIV. 140.)
Compare this with Swedenborg's mode of expres-
sion in his work SapientiaAngelica de Divino Amore :
" Quod Dìvinus Amor et Divina Sapientia sit substantia
et forma, mox confirmatum est . . . Quia ipsa illa substantia
et forma est Divinus Amor et Divina Sapientia, sequitur
quod sit ipse et unicus amor ac ipsa et unica sapientia,
consequenter quod sit ipsa et unica essentia, tum ipsa et
unica vita, nam amor et sapientia est vita " (nos. 44, 45).
Dante's confession of his love, in answer to the
inquiry of St John the evangelist, begins thus :
The good, that gives contentment in this court,
The Alpha and Omega is of ali
The writing that love reads me low or loud.
For good, so far as good, when comprehended
Doth straight enkindle love and so much greater
As more of goodness in itself it holds.
Then to that Essence (whose is such advantage
That every good which out of It is found
Is nothing but a ray of Its own light)
More than else whither must the mind be moved
Of every one in loving, who discerns
The truth in which this evidence is founded.
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Dante and Swedenborg. 53
The voice reveals it of the truthful Author,
Who says to Moses, speaking of Himself,
" I will make ali My goodness pass before thee."
Thou, too, revealest it to me, beginning
The loud evangel that proclaims the secret
Of heaven and earth above ali other edict
Here Dante evidently refers to the opening of
St John's Gospel : "In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God ; " and then he concludes :
The being of the world, and my own being.
The death which He endured that I may live,
And that which ali the faithful hope, as I do,
With the forementioned vivid consciousness,
Have drawn me from the sea of love perverse,
And of the night have placed me on the shore.
The leaves wherewith embowered is ali the garden
Of the Eternai Gardener, do I love
As much as He has granted them of good.
That is to say that true love loves even the truth
not for its own sake but for the good which is in it ;
and then the poet continues :
As soon as I had ceased, a song most sweet
Throughout the heaven resounded, and my Lady
Said with the others, " Holy, holy, holy ! "
{Paradiso XXVL 16-69.)
The emanation of creative spheres from the
Divine Love in the beginning, and thus the creation
of the universe, not from nothing but from itself,
by discrete degrees of proceeding, is thus beauti-
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54 Dante and Swedenborg.
fully outUned by Beatrice's instruction to Dante in
the twenty-nìnth canto :
Not to acquìre some good unto Himself,
Which is impossible, but that bis splendour
In its resplendency may say " Subsisto I "
In His etemity outside of time,
Outside ali other lìmìts, as it pleased Hiro,
Into new loves the Eternai Love unfolded.
Of this unfolding of heaven and of ali life out of
the Divine Love, Swedenborg wrìtes :
"The Divine proceeding from the Lord is called in
heaven DivineTruth. This Divine Truth flows into heaven
from the Lord out of His Divine Love. Divine Love, and
thence Divine Truth, are comparatively as the fire of the
sun and the light thence, in the world ; love as the fire of
the sun, and truth thence as light from the sun. From
correspondence also fire signifies love, and light the truth
thence proceeding. Thence it may be evident, what the
Divine Truth proceeding from the Divine Love of the
Lord is, that it is in its essence Divine Good conjoined to
Divine Truth; and because it is conjoined, it vivifies
ali things of heaven, as the beat of the sun conjoined
to light in the world fructifies ali things of the earth,
as in the time of spring and summer. It is otherwise
when beat is not conjoined to light, thus when the
light is cold ; then ali things are torpid, and lie without
life. The Divine Good, which is compared to beat, is the
good of love with the angels, and the Divine Truth, which
is compared to light, is that by which and from which is
the good of love.
" That the Divine in heaven, which makes heaven, is
love, is because love is spiritual conjunction ; it conjoins
angels to the I-^rd, and it conjoins them one with another ;
and it so conjoins, that they are ali as one in the sight of
the Lord. Moreover, love is the very esse of life to every
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Dante and Swedenborg. 55
one, hence from it an angel has life, and also man has
life. That from love is the inmost vital [principle] of
man, every one may know who considers ; for from the
presente of it he grows warm, from the absence of it he
grows cold, and from the privation of it he dies. But it
is to be known that the life of every one is such as his
love is" {Heaven and Helly nos. 13, 14).
And of the infinite multiplyìng of angelic forms
according to the various modes of reception of the
Divine life, we read :
This nature doth so multiply itself
In numbers, that there never yet was speech
Nor mortai fancy that can go so far.
And if thou notest that which is revealed
By Daniel, thou wilt see that in his thousands
Number determinate is kept concealed.
The primal Light that ali irradiates it
By modes as many is received thereìn,
As are the splendours wherewith It is mated.
The height behold now and the amplitude
Of the eternai Power, since it hath made
Itself so many mirrors, where 'tis broken,
One in Itself remaining as before.
{Paradiso XXIX. 130.)
It is from hence that the poet now mounts up in
his final flight to the blessed vision of the Divine
Light in its various forms, as of a river and of
sparks thence issuing, and of the flowers upon its
banks ; of the lake and the rose and the angelic
bees of which we read :
— the other host, that flyìng sees and sings
The glory of Him who doth enamour it.
And the goodness that created it so noble,
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56 Dante and Swedenborg.
Even as a swarm of bees that sinks in flowers
One moment ànd the next returns again
To where its labour is to sweetness turned,
Sank into the great flower, that is adorned
With leaves so many, and thence reascended
To where its love abideth evermore.
Their faces had they ali of living flame
And wings of gold, and ali the rest so white
No snow unto that limit doth attain.
Then the poet beholds his Beatrice enthroned,
and the " faithful Bernard," and Mary the mother
of our Lord,* the spheres of blessed infants, the
angels and archangels, and finally thus he tells, " as
best he may," of his crowning vision of the Incarnate
God:
Not because more than one unmingled substance
Was in the living Light on which I looked,
For It was always what It was before,
But through the sight, that forti fied itself
In me, by looking, one appearance only
To me was ever changing as I changed.
Within the deep and luminous subsistence
Of the High Light appeared to me Three Circles
Of threefold colour and of one dimension,
And by the Second seemed the First reflected,
As Iris is by Iris, and the Third
Seemed Fire that equally from Both is breathed.
* Compare this with Swedenborg's reverent and impressive
mention oi what he calls a most memorable event : hoc dignissimum :
" Mary the Mother of the Lord once passed by and
appeared above my head in white raiment ; there she paused a
moment and said that she was the mother of the Lord, that He was
indeed bom of her, but that being made God He had put off ali the
humanity which He had from her ; so that now she worships Him
as her God, and is unwillìng that any one should acknowledge Him
as her son since ali in Him is Divine** {True Christian Religione
no. 827).
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Dante and Swedenborg. 57
That Circulation, which being thus conceived
Appeared in Thee as a reflected Light
When somewhat contemplated by mine eyes,
Within Itself, of Its own very colour,
Seemed to me painted with our effigy,
Wherefore my sight was ali absorbed therein.
Here the poet is referring to the Divine Humanity
of the Lord as hearing the image of our nature, and
being the object of our sight. Compare Sweden-
borg*s sublime statement of this truth :
"Ali the angels in the heavens never perceive the
Divine under any other form but the human ; and what
is wonderful, those who are in the superior heavens
cannot think otherwise of the Divine. They are brought
into that necessity of thinking, from the Divine itself
which flows in, and also from the form of heaven, accord-
ing to which their thoughts extend themselves around :
for every thought which the angels bave, has extension
into heaven, and according to that extension they bave
intelligence and wisdom. Hence it is that ali there
acknowledge the Lord, because the Divine Human is
given only in Him. These things bave not only been
told me by the angels, but it has also been given me to
perceive them, when elevated into the interior sphere of
heaven. Hence it is manifest, that the wiser the angels
are, the more clearly they perceive this ; and hence it is,
that the Lord appears to them : for the Lord appears in
a Divine angelic form, which is the human, to those who
acknowledge and believe in a visible Divine, but not to
those who acknowledge and believe in an invisible
Divine; for the former can see their Divine, but the
latter cannot " (Heaven and Hell^ no. 79).
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58 Dante and Swedenborg.
I wìshed to see how the Image to the Circle
Conformed Itself, and how It there finds place ;
But my own wings were not enough for this,
Had it not been that then my mind there smote
A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.
Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy,
But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
The Love which moves the sun and other stars.
{Paradiso XXXIIL 109-145.)
Thus ends the Divina Commedia in the acqui-
escence of the poet*s own with the Divine centrai
will of the universe, so that he is content with the
shortcoming of his own endeavour to fully compre-
hend the Divine Being and His being made Man,
since the all-guiding Love so rules.
In these extracts from the great Italian epic I
think the reader will see how, with the elevation of
the subject, the poet's own mind seems to become
itself elevated, refined, and illumined, and into what
wisdom almost angelic, and into what beatific visions
of heaven his prophetic intuitions admitted him.
The poem remains a poem and a poem only, but
in the light of the doctrines we now enjoy, we see
how many deep truths He here imbedded, truths
which could heretofore be only half received, as in-
genious fancies and daring guesses, but which now
not only shine with the clear and holy light that
revelation alone can give, but may remaìn for our
delight stili enclosed in ali the rich and varied
setting which the language of the poet has given
them.
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Dante and Swedenborg. 59
My thought in conducting my readers through
this comparative study of Dante and Swedenborg
has been not to prove Dante a prophet, even though
he spoke often wiser than he knew, but to show the
unity of truth, and the power of reveaied truth, to
vìvify and reduce to order and beauty ali the other-
wìse dead and inert fragments of the true that lie
scattered bere and there in the wide realms of our
knowledge, whether of nature, art, or literature. It
is spiritual truth that quickens ali knowledge ; and
even Dante, wide as is bis repute and lofty bis place
among the great poets of the world, must yet come
to be read and studied with higher enjoyment, truer
appreciation, and more profit by those who can read
hìm in the Hght afforded by Swedenborg, than he
has ever yet been by even bis warmest admirers
and profoundest commentators.
Florence, Italy, 1889.
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"THE SPIRITUAL SENSE OF DANTE."*
A Review.
In view of the materialìstic tendency of thought
prevaìHng at the present time, it is encouraging to
find a public writer recognizing a " spiritual sense "
in anything ; but when the writer is one who holds
the position of Dr. Harris, among the deeper thinkers
of our time and country, and his topic the great
religious poem of Latin Christianity, the " spiritual
sense," so inquired into, becomes a subject of more
than ordinary interest
In the brief but very complete and in every way
interesting treatise by Dr. Harris, on " The Spiritual
Sense of Dante's Divina Commediai' we have a new
interpretation added to the long catalogue of the
explanations of Dante, dating from the poet*s own
statement of the four ways in which a poem is to
be understood : " There is in a poem a literal, an
allegorical, a moral, and a mystical sense " (Dante's
Convito^ Ch. I.). But it is in neither of these senses
that the new interpretation bere offered us consists.
Rather we must cali this of Dr. Harris the philo-
* " The Spiritual Sense of Dante's Divina Commedia,'' by W. T.
Harris [United States Commissioner of Education]. New York :
D. Appleton & Co., 1889.
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The Spiritimi Sense of Dante. 6i
Sophie interpretation, or that of the ground or the
"supreme principle," in the knowledge of which
consists, according to our reviewer, the "angelìc
knowing " itself, as well as the genuine poetic and
prophetic faculty.
The " spiritual sense " which the wrìter here dìs-
covers, is that which is grounded in philosophy.
•' The Divina Commedial^ he says, " may be justly
claimed to have a spiritual sense, for it possesses a
philosophic system and admits of allegorical inter-
pretation. It \spar excellence the religious poem of
the world. And religion, like philosophy, deals
directly with a first principle of the universe, while
like poetry it clothes its universal ideas in the garb
of special events and sìtuatìons, making them
types and hence symbols of the kind which may
become allegories."
Any poem that "exhibits a supreme principle
operating in the affairs of a world, and hence
exhibits a philosophy realized or incamated," as it
were "under the form of events and situations
chosen to be universal types," may be said to have
a " spiritual sense." The discovery of this spiritual
sense therefore must belong only to philosophic ìn-
sight, or to the mind capable of apprehending these
first principles of things. But the poet's insight
reaches farther than any formulated system of
philosophy, and the "art structure of the poem
reveals a deeper spiritual sense than is covered
by the Allegory." This art structure grows out
of the poet's natìonality, in Dante's case the
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62 The Spiritual Sense of Dante.
Roman, as distinguished from the Hebrew and the
Greek.
The Hebrew discovers the highest principle
through the emotions of the heart ; the Greek
realizes it intellectually, as the pure or essential
Form ; the Roman experiences it as will or volition.
We would say, rather, as the act in which both the
wìll and the intellect find the outmost expression
and power. According to the view which regards
the absolute first principle as Will, each being, in
acting, acts upon itself and thereby becomes its
own fate. It creates its environment. The re-
sponsibility of the free agent is infinite. And here
follows the interpretation, in the briefest form, of
the deep ethical meaning of Dante's poem, as based,
according to the author, on this poetic intuition of
the supreme principle as will.
" If the wìll of the free agent acts so as to make for
itself an environment of deeds that are in harmony with
its freedom, it lives in the * Paradiso.' If it acts so as
to contradict its nature, it makes for itself the * Inferno.'
" As the individuai man by his will creates an environ-
ment through society, therefore his deeds are to be
judged by their efifect upon society, whether they re-
enforce the freedom of others, or curtail that freedom."
It is in Christianity that the perfect freedom and
perfect responsibility of man is recognized, and this
is done in the Church's Doctrine of Hell as that of
the complete return of the deed upon the doer.
" A man can conjoin himself to the social whole or
can sunder himself from it He can on the one hand
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The Spiritual Sense of Dante. 63
mediate himself through ali men, placing his personal
interest at the raost distant part of the universe, and
seeking his own good through first serving the interest of
ali others; or he can seek his selfish interest directly,
and before that of ali others, and in preferente to theirs.
Thus he can make for himself one of two utterly different
worlds, an Inferno or a Paradiso."
It is on entering hell that Virgil informs Dante
that bere dwell tbe wretcbed people wbo bave lost
the " good of tbe intellect," meaning, according to
Aristotle's doctrine of tbe bigbest good, tbe vision
of absolute Trutb and Goodness. Tbe wicked do
not see God. To tbem He seems an extemal
tyrant, oppressing tbem and inflicting pain on tbem.
Tbey are conquered but not obedient " Tbis state
is beli, and even tbis is tbe evidence of Divine love
wben rigbtly understood."
" Were God a formless abyss, as in the Orientai idea,
ali finite being would be lost in Him, and ali rebellion or
imperfection would constitute annihilation. But with a
Christian idea of God as pure Form the finite can sub-
sist as real and true substance, and God in protecting
the absolute free-will of the individuai gives him im-
mortai existence, even in hell. Hell is the alienation
firom God, but not annihilation. It arose with the creating
of finite things and their limitations, and it will exist as
long as the finite is created — that is eternally.
" Before me [says the inscription over the gate of hell]
were no things created, but eternai : and eternai to
endure. . . . Hell therefore signifies the continuance of
free-will, supported by Divine Grace. . . . It is a state
of rebellion against the Divine world — order ; the indi-
viduai seeks his selfish good before the good of his
fellow-men and instead of their good. Accordingly he
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64 The Spiritual Sense of Dante.
wills that humanity shall be his enemies. . . . The con-
tradiction hence arisi ng exìsts in the shape of pain and
hellish torment.
" The sinner is in hell because he looks upon his own
pain, not as produced by his own freedom, but as thnist
upon him undeservedly from without. . . . Could hp see
that his pain comes from his own act of freedom, from
his opposition to the social whole, then he would welcome
pain as the evidence of his own substantial participation in
his race and in the Divine Being. Then he would be at
once in purgatory, and ali his pain would become purifying
instead of hardening to his soul. ... In purgatory the
individuai looks upon society as the centre and raeasure,
and strives to rid himself of his selfishness. He struggles
against the lusts of the flesh and the pride and envy of
his soul. Such lusts and passions now seem to him
horrible when they arise within him, and this is
the torment of purgatory. In purgatory ali pain and
inconvenience, ali the ills of the flesh and of the soul are
made means of purification, means of conquest over
selfishness."
I bave quoted thus abundantly from Dr. Harris
to illustrate what he means by the art structure of
Dante's poem. This consists of the threefold world
of will exercise : man at enmity with society and
suffering from the evil without, the state of hell ;
man at enmity with himself and suffering from the
evil recognized as from within, or from the absence
of his own freedom, the state of purgatory ; finally,
man at peace with himself and with his fellow-man,
which is heaven. In the second — the purgatory —
we see the struggles endured in the spiritual
temptation ; the being faithful unto death in the
hope and confidence of final victory. In the last
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The Spintual Sense of Dante. 65
the final victory and peace of heaven itself. Thus
the poem is eminently the Christian epic ; it is the
great poem of salvation — of the restoration of man
to the true salus, health, or the Divine order of
things. That the ordinary reader would see, in the
various scenes depicted by Dante in hell and in
purgatory, the representation of these deep-lying
principles is not to be supposed. The question
might arise whether, as philosophically-defined
principles, the poet himself ever saw them, and
whether, therefore, they are not read into the poem
by the philosophic insight of the interpreter. There
would be nothing in the latter supposition inconsis-
tent with the true " spiritual sense " of the poem,
provided the characters and scenes introduced are
such as really belong to the hells and to the inter-
mediate and the heavenly worlds ; for, given any
fact of nature or of humanity, which is true in its
own piane, it must contain depths of spiritual
meaning far outreaching any knowledge possessed
by the narrator of the fact itself. In seeing, there-
fore, the spiritual meaning of Dante, Dr. Harris is
really penetrating not so much into the poet's
individuai meaning as into the Divine meaning
itself of the great facts of an eternai hell, an inter-
mediate world, and a heaven. These he interprets
according to the philosophic system which he sees
underlying ali Christianity. It is interesting to
read Dr. Harris*s description of the change which
his own feeling toward the man Dante undergoes,
regarding him first as "more of a fiend than a man,"
E
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66 The Spiritual Sense of Dante. '
and at length " struck with the apt correspondence
between the punishments of the * Inferno ' and the
actual state of mind of the sinner on committing
the sin." The conviction arises that Dante has
done nothing arbitrary — that what seemed at first
" his fertility of genius in inventing extemal, physical
symbols for the expression of internai states of the
soul," proves to be only the poet's deep sense of
justice and truth to what he has actually observed
in the world about him. Thence we come to
recognize " the tendemess and divine charity of this
world-poet and see his loving-kindness in the very
instances in which we at first could see only malig-
nant spite or heartless cruelty."
More than this could hardly be said of the Word
itself as the Creative Logos, or true World Poet,
and we find it difficult to see wherein Dr. Harris
draws a line between Dante's poem and Revelation
itself. Perhaps he means, indeed, to draw no such
line, but would regard both the Italian poem and
the Christian Scriptures as alike the self-revealings
of the Supreme Reason or Absolute Idea in the
consciousness of the human mind.
The "angelic knowing" is according to Dante
that of "pure illumination ; " while to men it is
accorded to know "by means of the symbolism
involved in objects perceptible by the senses." The
progress of human knowledge is, according to Dr.
Harris, from that of the classification of facts to that
of laws, and finally to the knowledge of principles
or energies acting in the form of laws. Sweden-
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The Spiritual Sense of Dante. 67
borg defines ìt as progress through the three stages
or degrees of: knowledge {sdentid)^ intelligence,
and wisdom ; and as contemplating in these, respec-
tìvely : effects, causes, and ends. Thus in the Divine
Love and Wisdom^ no. 202, he says : " To think
from ends is of wisdom: to think from causes
ìs of intelligence: to think from effects is of
science."
" Could a man become/' says Dr. Harris, " so well
acquainted with principles as to habitually make
his knowledge a deduction from first principles, he
would then know by * pure illumination ' as angels
are said to know." In the passage of Dante to
which Dr. Harris refers for illustration of this
knowing, we do not see defined, although it may
be symbolized, this deduction from first principles.
What Dante actually says is in correction of those
who have asserted that the angels "can hear, re-
coUect, and will ; " and he would describe, in its
purity, that truth which men on earth see and
teach only confusedly :
These substances [the angels] since in God's countenance
They jocund were, turned not away their sight
From that wherefrom not anything is hidden ;
Hence they have not their vision intercepted
By object new, and hence they do not need
To recollect, through interrupted thought.
So that, below, people do dream, awake,
Believing they speak truth, and not believing,
And in the last is greater sin and shame.
Below you do not joumey in one path,
Philosophizìng : so transporteth you
Love of appearance and the thought thereof.
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68 The Spiritual Sense of Dante.
And even this, above bere, is endured
Witb less disdain, tban when is set aside
Tbe Holy Writ, or wben it is distorted.
Tbey tbink not tbere how mudi of blood it costs
To sow it in the world, and bow be pleases
Wbo in bumility keeps dose to it.
Eacb striveth fot appearance and dotb make
His own inventions : and tbese treated are
By preacbers, wbile tb' Evangel bolds its peace.
{Paradiso XXIX, 76-96.)
Any one will find bere a suggestion of the pas-
sage of the Word where are described the " pure in
heart who see God," and the little children " whose
angels do always behold the face of My Father
in heaven," and of those tbings which are " hidden
from the wise and prudent, but are revealed unto
babes/' and especially when by these infantile
States, are understood, as Swedenborg explains,
the innocence of the third or celestial degree of the
angelic heavens. The angelic and human knowing
is described by Swedenborg as progressing through
three discrete planes or degrees — ^the naturai, which
is knowledge of effects and appearances of truth ;
the spiritual, which is knowledge of causes or the
spiritual laws controlling ali naturai phenomena ;
the celestial, which is knowledge of ends, or what
Dr. Harris calls the first principles. Swedenborg
says of the several planes of the angelic know-
ledge :
" The thoughts of tbe angels of tht higbest or third
heaven are thoughts of ends, those of the second heaven
are those of causes, those of the lowest or first heaven
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The Spiritual Sense of Dante. 69
are those of effects. . . . The angels of the lower heavens
think about causes and about ends ; the angels of the
higher heavens think from causes and from ends"
{Divine Love and Wisdom^ no. 202).
The progress from the thinking from appearances,
such as Dante describes as belonging to the lower
or naturai piane, to the thinking from ends which
belongs to those " who rejoice in their unchanging
view of God's face," finds illustration in the contrast
drawn by Dr. Harris between the seeming cruelty
of the hells when regarded purely as effect, or as
ultìmated in suffering and pain, and the mercy
which is implied in their permission when viewed
from the ends of Divine love in creating and pre-
serving the freedom of man. As to the means of
attaining this angelic knowledge of ends, or im-
mediate vision of truth in first principles, Dr.
Harris seems to restrict this to the philosophic
order of minds, or to admit, if any others, only the
poets into the ranks of those enjoying this pure..*
illumination. It does not appear from this treatise
whether the author regards the Word as the**^
source itself of such illumination, or whether the
life of regeneration in accordance with the revealed***
Word is the path into this highest light. He
speaks, indeed, of this highest wisdom as being the
gift of the Holy Spirit to those who are of th^*
Church, but he seems to use these terms in the
Hegelian philosophic sense rather than in the
strictly religious sense — the Holy Spirit being,
according to Hegel, the Absolute Idea or the
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70 The Spiritual Sense of Dante.
Supreme Reason realizing Itself objectively in the i
kingdom of God or the invisible Church. In this
infinite, immortai Church man reaches perfection
and the knowledge of the highest truth, but as
philosophy, and not as religion or objective revela-
tion ; for religion, according to Hegel, is the truth
in the form of mental representation or imagination,
probably as the myth, while philosophy is the
thinking of absolute truth, or the true in the form
of truth. Dr. Harris says that this, according to
Dante, is revealed and knowable :
Well I perceive that never sated is
Our intellect unless the Truth illumine it *—
Beyond which nothing true expands itself.
It rests thereìn as wild beast in his lair
When it attains it ; and it can attain it :
If not, then each desire would frustrate be.
{Paradiso IV, 124.)
"And it can attain it"! Dante was, then, no
agfnostic. Not only to him was that " Truth beyond
which nothing true expands itself" attainable, but
without it the ideal human life itself would perish,
for " each desire would frustrate be." It is not of
the humble, patient agnosticism which limits its
denial to the confession, " I do not know," while
stili holding the eyes lifted to where the Light
shall shine, that this desire is spoken, but rather
of that denial of the possibility of Divine revelation
which is contained in the arbitrary but persistent
assumption, " I can not know." This is what cuts
the chain of lifting desire, that which destroys the
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The Spiritual Sense of Dante. 7 1
faìth-principle ; which blots out that "wisdom
which is the knowledge of ends, and that intelli-
gence which is the knowlege of causes," and leaves
the mind the blinded victim to the pseudo-science
which "knows" only effects. Of this kind of
agnosticism and its fatai effect upon the whole
interior structure of the mind, Swedenborg says In
the Spiritual Diary :
"The majority of these are such as bave thought in
the world — when they heard from preaching, or carne
into any thought from the speech of another, and seemed
to be vanquished by some reason which they could not
gainsay — that, whether it is or is not true, they do not
know ; whether there is a God, whether there is a heaven,
whether there is faith, whether such things as belong to
the Church; (saying to themselves,) *I might easily
believe them if I were to see them in another life — if I
come thither ; ' supposing that they will believe if they
see for certain or bear for certain. But this by no means
happens. TAey who have not faith when in the worldy do ^
not have faith in the other life. I have spoken with such
ones ; and they were convicted of being in error, They
seized upon the truth. And when they turned the face
to me they believed. But immediately they tum them-
selves to their own loves, or turn themselves away from
me to themselves, then they are instantly in the like
faith to that in which they were in the world and alto-
gether against those things which they have hèard. Nor
are they any longer able to be led to the truths of faith : for
the whole interior intellectual life is from these principles :
wherefore to be so led would be to destroy that life "
(no. 5659).
As to the manner by which this angelic knowing
or contemplation of the truth is attainable, both reve-
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72 The Spiritual Sense of Dante.
lation and philosophy are named as the available
means to this end. But according to Dr. Harris
these means are not co-ordinate ; philosophy ìs the
prior and chief, and religion the secondary and in-
strumentai means. Or we may better say that, as
philosophy, this knowledge of the truth is the self-
thinking of pure reason, rather than the contempla-
tion of a Divine revelation to the finite mind. Dr.
Harris speaks of the " world view of Christianity "
as that of " nature and human history as a revela-
tion of Divine reason." Tohim Beatrice is the
symbol at once of "Hivlnp l^m2wr^g^e]"^rh|jgHan
theology, òF revelation, and so of philosophy,
because ali these mean "the insight into a^Divine^
Reason as First Cause," and aS^*^ Reason is Divine
Human " the contemplation of this is the " vision of
God " (p. 112). But the doctrine of the Logos, or
the Word, and of the operation of these both in
creation and redemption as well as that of the
Holy Spirit or "the institutional Spirit" (p. 135),
are traced by Dr. Harris from Aristotle and Plato
down through the Alexandrian mysticism to St
John and St Paul. The redemption and the Re-
deemer of the Gospels seem therefore to be the
mythoSy which is the representative, symbolic, and
religious form of the absolute truth, rather than the
truth itself Christianjty jeems to be evolved fr om
philosophy rather than philosopKy tromX^hr istianity
^^as Ttself the^ highest and ìiiltesL Divine" revelation,
the "Word made Flesh in whom we behold the
Only-Begotten of the Father full of grace and
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The Spiritual Sense of Dante. 73
truth." Of the evolution or self-development of the
Logos, Dr. Harris says :
" In religious symbolism He is spoken of as redeeming
finite beings through His incarnation and death on the
cross. This expresses symbolically the act of the Logos
in creation " (p. 138).
Thus the redemption of man through the over-
throwing of the dominion of the hells by Jesus
Christ in His warfare in our flesh and in the glori-
fying of His Humanity, becomes, apparently, only
one of the forms of that mythos or religious sym-
bolism which poets use to convey the truths of the
highest wisdom revealed to their philosophy. In
the same way the mythos of the three worlds — ^hell,
purgatory, and heaven — are traced down from
Homer, through Plato and Virgil to Dante, and in
this way this world poem is represented as the
sensuous or representative form in which the Divine
idea embodies itself in the conceptions ofart,religion,
and philosophy. Singularly, in ali this, the funda- ^
ntefftàl'ground of Dante's great poem is set aside to
make way for the Hegelian interpretation of it.
The ground of Dante's theology is the Revelation
of the Christian Scriptures and the traditions of
the Catholic Church. If in their literal form these
revelations are symbolic, it is the Divine Word itself,
and neither Homer nor Plato, that has dictated the
choice of symbols, and so an infinite truth lies within
them.
gi^ing the " spiritual sense " of the Word claims to
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74 ^^ Spiritimi Sense of Dante.
give not the self-revealing of hìs own reason, but
revelations vouchsafed to him by God Himself ;v
equally in his visions of the hells, of the intermediate
world, and of heaven, Swedenborg declares that ali
that he saw was truly symbolic or representative,
corresponding exactly to the interior qualities and
States of spirits and angels there. These repre-
sentatives resulted from the very law of spiritual
creation itself, or the correspondence existing
between cause and effect, between the spiritual and
the naturai worlds. The " spiritual sense " of the
Word, or of any symbol or representation grounded
in the Divine law of correspondence, means there-
fore the truth of the spiritual world or world of
causes lying within the truth as it " appears " in the
world of nature or of literal revelation. The angels
and spirits in the spiritual world are in these higher
tniths, and therefore perceive the vast number and
the vast reach of truths which are contained within
each literal truth of the Word. Those angels are
in the knowledge of Divine ends which are nearest
God, or are in the celestial or highest heavens;
they are therefore in the deepest senses of the truth
embodied in the letter of holy Scripture, but theìr n
attainment of the highest knowledge is not a prò- j
cess of philosophizing, but the result of the real j
illumination which is given in heaven to those who J
see God, that is to the pure in heart. In Sweden-
borg the Lord and the Word stand first as the
sources of revelation itself, and the elementary
principles of the spiritual rational faculty.
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The Spiritual Sense of Dante. 75
These and the knowledge of the spiritual worid
ex visis et auditis^ are the elementary but inductive
knowledges, to be "leamed from without," from
which as the basis of a great Divine science, the
deductive principles of a true philosophy are to be
obtained. With these fixed knowledges of the
true, because Divinely given, symbols, we need
"not go by various paths in our philosophizing,**
as we are sure to do if we accept as the symbols of
truth every imagining of the poet, and every vagary
of Christian dogmatists. In this case it has too
often happened that
Each striveth for appearance, and doth make
Its own inventions \ but these treated are
By preachers, and the Gospel holds its peace !
What we find fault with, therefore, in Dr. Harris,
is not his regarding ali literal revelation as in a
sense symbolical or representative, for this must be
the case. Swedenborg says :
" By means of his naturai mind beìng elevated into the
light of heaven, a man can think with the angels, yea,
speak with them ; but the thought and speech of the
angels then flow into the naturai thought and speech of
the man, and not contrariwise. Human wisdom can by
no means be elevated into angelic wisdom, but only into a
certain image of it " {Divine Love and Wisdom^ no. 257).
But the defect lìes in there being no apparent
line of demarcation between the Divine and revealed
symbolism of the Word and the arbitrary symbolism
of the poets and the philosophers as such. If these
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76 The Spiritual Sense of Dante.
latter are true, we would trace them not to the
general intuitive power of the human reason, but
to a Divine source in some special earlier revelation.
To the existence of such earlier revelations of the
supernatural world to the human race, in age3 pre-
historic, but which have yielded, through various
channels, their contributions to what may seem now
the naturai inheritance of the human reason, Mr.
Gladst^e alludes in an article cited elsewhere in
this volume :
. . . . "It is of the deepest interest to ex-
amine whether in any and what particulars, now recog-
nized by Christians as undoubted portions of revealed
truth, those religions (of the Assyrians and Egyptians)
were more advanced and more enlarged than the religion
of the favoured race. ... No doubt if it be
found that these extraneous and independent religions
taught in any point more fully than the Hebrews what
Christians now acknowledge, this will be for Christians a
new and striking proof that, in the infancy of the race
of Adam, and before its distribution over the earth, the
Almighty imparted to it precious knowledges which it
could hardly have discovered and was but indifferently
able to retain."
Swedenborg did not invent the punishments of
the hells or the paradises of heaven from any im-
agination of bis own. He beheld these things as
real creations not of bis imagining, but as created ^
by the one Creator. Speaking of objects seen about
the angels in heaven, Swedenborg says :
" Ali these things exist according to the affections and
thence the thoughts of the angels, for they are correspon-
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The Spiritual Sense of Dante. Tj
dences ; and because things that correspond make one
with that to which they correspond, they are therefore an
image representative of it. . . . They do not exist
around the man-angel from the angel, but from the Lord
through the angel ; for they exist from the influx of the
Divine Love and Wisdom of the Lord into the angel
who is a recipient, and before whose sight it is ali
produced like the creation of a universe ! " {Divine
Love and Wisdom^ nos. 322, 326).
It might look indeed as if this kind of creation
were identical with that which the Hegelians ascribe
to the Divine reason, and which is the source, ac-
cording to Dr. Harris, of the myths in the great
world poets, and so of the visions which Dante
describes. The supreme reason operating through
the poet*s mind produces thus its mythical, sym-
bolic world. But the defect that seems to belong to
this conception is, that the object thus created is but
a myth, having its existence only in the humariy
consciousness or contemplation, and not in sub-
stantial reality or fact The symbolic myths,
however true and admirable, would seem to leave
US, if we read Dr. Harris aright, without any actual
he^aven, hell, or intermediate world, as the sure
destination of himself and ourselves, to be reached
by US in a few years from now ; and equally with-
out any actual historic incarnation of Deity in the
person of Jesus Christ, and so any actual battles
fought by Him with the hells for our deliverance
from the power of accumulated evil wìll — without
any written revelation, and without any visible
Church. In place of these as facts the Hegelian
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78 The Spiritimi Scuse of Dante.
philosophy seems to content itself with the con-
templation of them as ideas or representations
createci in the imaginations of the human mind,
or as what Swedenborg designates as merely an
ens rationiSy having no ultimation in the piane of
actual effect. To inquire into the spiritual sense of
things that are, or actually have been, is to make a
step forward in our learning ; but to find a spiritual
sense in things that have no being but as fictions of
the reason in human imaginations, can add but
little of practical value to our stock of Information.
Dante's mention of the angels as those who
"happy in God's countenance tum never away,"v^
reminds one of Swedenborg's statement in Heaven
and Helly that "the reigning love is the origin of
ali determinations with angels and spirits, and as
this love is constantly before their faces, and the
face exists from the interiors, therefore that love
which reigns is always before their face," and which-
ever way they tum " the East is ever before their
eyes — the whole heaven turning itself toward the
Lord as its common centre." Also in the Divine
Providence (no. 29), he says : " Ali the angels turn
their faces to the Lord, but not of themselves, but
the Lord tums them to Himself through an influx
into their life's love, and so into their perceptions
and thoughts." As to the superiority of the angelic
wisdom, Swedenborg says, " It is so ineffable, that
only one of a thousand ideas in the thought of the
angels from their wisdom, can come into the thought
of men from their wisdom."
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The Spiritual Sense of Dante. 79
As to the means of attaining this wisdom, there-
fore, far from its being the result of philosophizing,
Swedenborg declares that no one can come into
this ineffable wisdom of the angels except through
conjunction with the Lord and according to it. ^
" The angels can receive such great wisdom because
they are devoid of self-love, and being without this,
the heavenly loves in which they are, open the
interiors, because these loves are from the Lord,
and in them is the Lord Himself " {Heaven and
Helly no. 271).
How ineffable is angelic wisdom may be illus-
trated by Swedenborg*s statement that, "In one
angelic word there are innumerable things that
cannot be expressed at ali in the words of human
language, for in each word that angels speak there
are arcana of wisdom in a continuous connection to
which human sciences never attain" {Ibid.^ 269).
And although in heaven " ali long for wisdom and
have an appetite for it, yet the infinite or the
perfect wisdom is never attained," for although
"the angels are continually being perfected in
wisdom, stili to etemity they cannot be so far per-
fected that there can be any proportion between
theìr wisdom and the Divine wisdom of the Lord "
(Jbid.y 273). Man may therefore forever approach ^
but never attain to the perfect reason ; at the same
time from the revelation of the Divine end or
principle, even man in his humblest estate on earth
may see earthly and tempora! things in the light of
heaven and of the eternai wisdom.
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8o The Spiritual Sense of Dante.
It is not through the intuitions of reason, but by
saintly guidance and the great Hght of Christian
theology, that Dante acknowledges, in the last ^
canto of the Paradiso^ that he has been led to
the vision of the Supreme Good and True which
calls forth this rapturous song of adoration :
Light Supreme, that dost so far uplift thee
From the conceits of mortals, to my mind
Of what thou didst appear re-lend a little,
And make my tongue of so great puissance,
That but a single sparkle of thy glory
It may bequeath unto the future people ;
For by returning to my mémory somewhat,
And by a little sounding in these verses,
More of thy victory shall be conceived !
1 think the keenness of the living ray
Which I endured would bave bewildered me,
If but mine eyes had been averted from it ;
And I remember that I was more bold
On this account to bear, so that I joined
My aspect with the Glory Infinite.
grace abundant, by which I presumed
To fix my sight upon the Light Eternai,
So that the seeing I consumed therein !
1 saw that in its depth far down is lying,
Bound up with love together in one volume
What through the universe in leaves is scattered ;
Substance, and accident, and their operations,
Ali interfused together in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple Light.
{Paradiso XXXIII. 67-90.)
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GREEK PHILOSOPHY IN ITS RELATION
TO THE LORD'S FIRST ADVENT.
One of the most profound as well as universal
themes treated of in the writings of Swedenborg
ìs the relation of the will and the intellect, and the
modifications they mutually undergo in the progress
of man*s regeneration. The intellectual and volun-
tary principles of the mind are shown to be as
fundamental to our life, spiritually, as are the
respiratory and circulatory principles of our physio-
logicai nature to our bodily life ; and the complete
solution of ali the problems of human anatomy is
declared to be contained in a true knowledge of the
form, functions, and relations of these two principles
of the human mind. As man is a microcism, it
will follow that in society as a larger man these two
principles must also exist, and the same relation
and mutuai operation be manifest; and, since
history is the "mind written large," it also must
find the solution of its problems in the mutuai hear-
ing of these two fundamental forms and organs of
life — the human will and understanding.
A wonderful and most interesting exhibition of
the presence of mental law in human history, show-
F
OF Th:^
UNIVERSITY
OF
82 Greek Philosophy in its Relation
ing how the progress of society is no haphazard suc-
cession of events, but is controlied by a law of growth
as real and unerring as that which governs a plant
or a single human mind, seems to me to be found
in certain remarkable coincidences in the circum-
stances attending and preceding the two greatest
epochs of the world's annals — the First and the
Second Advents of the Lord. I refer to the pro-
cess of the world's preparation for these two events
respectively. Both events were for essentially the
same end — the regeneration of society, the re-
opening of a spiritual piane of life in human souls,
and the inflowing and reception there of new im-
pulses of life from above. The First Advent pro-
vided for a new birth of mankind into a heavenly
life on the naturai piane, a following of the Lord in
child-like obedience, in heroic confession, in faith-
fulness unto the death of this body — the body in
which He, our Master, was crucified. The Second
Advent provides for a new birth of mankind into a
spiritual knowledge of the Word and a spiritual
following of its precepts, and so into a more interior
and spiritual reception of the Lord and life in Him.
To prepare the world for the Advent of the Lord
meant, in both instances, to prepare the mind on a
large scale, or in the sense of human society, for the
descent of Divine Truth, and thereby of Divine
Good, into the two great organic receptacles of life
— ^the human intellect and the human will.
The writings of Swedenborg contain the remark-
able statement that, since the fall of man and the
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to the LoriTs First Advent. 83
decadence of the successive Churches on this earth,
the human will, or man*s voluntary part, has become
so whoUy corrupt or spoiled as to be incapable of
regeneration, and that the only possible salvation
remaining for man will consist of the building up of
a new will in his intellectual pari, This is equivalent
to saying that man cannot be regenerated im-
mediately by and in the love of good, but that
the truth and the love of truth must be first ac-
quii^d, and must serve as a medium for the im-
planting of the higher and truly heavenly love,
which is the love of good for its own sake.
In accordance with this law, in any great epoch
of the world*s reformation we are led to expect not
any sudden breaking out of new higher impulses of
good, until, at leàst, a preparation has first been
made in the " intellectual part " of human society.
The truth is ever to be the instrument by which the
good effects its ends ; even as it was the Divine
Word, or Truth itself, which was made flesh, that
thereby God might dwell with man and effect
man*s redemption. But the receptacle of truth in
the " intellectual part " of man, and the preparation
of this intellectual part for the reception of new
truth, that thereby a " new will " may afterwards
be implanted, is what we may expect to find
exhibited in any true and complete history of
those periods which have preceded both the First
and the Second Advents of the Lord into the
World.
If we were asked where we might have looked
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84 Greek Philosophy in its Relation
for the " intellectual part " of the human race in the
time preceding the Lord's First Advent, I think we
would readily agree in answering, in the Hellenic
people. In the fourth century before Christ, Greece
might not improperly have been called the intellect
of the Grand Man upon this earth. And it is just
here, in this mighty mind which sent forth from the
academies and the^r^ of the Greek cities impulses
of thought and imagination more powerful even
than the great fleets that sailed from her harbours
to conquer and to colonize distant lands — here it is
that we witness a wonderful intellectual movement,
such as the world nowhere else exhibited, and such
as could have taken place in no other race of people
then existing. It was the birth and culmination of
a system of philosophy so originai, so sublime in its
scope, so elevated and pure, and so full of light in
its higher planes, as to seem more akin to Divine
revelation than to mere human invention. " Divine"
we may indeed cali it, in so far as we recognize in
it something Divinely prophetic — something provi-
dentìally given to an exceptional and high class of
human intellects, to kindle anew a desire for and a
love of the truth among men, and to cultivate an
ability to recognize the truth, and to receive it when
it should be revealed.
The broad mind of that distinguished statesman
and scholar the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone has not
failed to fuUy recognize this important fact in the
mental development of the race, and has admirably
described it in the foUowing passage extracted from
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to the LorcCs First Advent. 85
an article in the Nineteenth Century for October
1891, entitled, Greece and Christianity :
" It has been the belief of the Christian Church and
community that the history noi only of the chosen people^
but of the world throughout a very wide circle, was, before
the coming of the Lord, a grand praparatio evangelica.
In some respects the forms of the preliminary discipHne
were obvious enough. The conquests of Alexander secured
for that marvellous instrument of thought the Greek
language, such a currency as, when backed by the
influence which in the West had been acquired by its
literary monuments, dispensed, as it were, with the day
of Pentecost, in the general action of the Christian Churcl^
and supplied a channel of communication and a vehicle
of worship available in most parts of the civilized world.
What the genius of Greece was to secure in the r^on of
thought, the vast extension of the Roman Erapire effected
in the world of outward fact. It prepared the way of the
Lord and made the rough places plain. Immediately
before and after the Advent it levelled the barriers between
separated and hostile communities, and for the first time
established the idea of police in its highest form, and
made peaceable and safe intercourse everywhere possible
among men. Everywhere it was as with us in Britain,
*When the Roman left us,' then it was that again *the
ways were filled with rapine.'
" Another stage to the comprehension of a truth of the
widest reach and highest value was attained when the
world began to be sensible of its debt to ancient Greece.
It may well be, to us of this day, a marvel to conceive
how it could bave been that, down to a time when poetry
and the arts had already achieved the most splendid
progress, the Christian world remained insensible to the
superlative dignity and value of the ancient Greek litera-
ture and art In Italy at least, the compositions of the
Greeks must ali along bave survived in numerous manu-
scripts. But the Greeks had not merely produced a
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86 Greek Philosophy in its Relation
certain number, not after ali a very large one, of great
Works of mind and band ; tbey bad establisbed babits of
mind and of performance alike in art, in letters, and in
pbilosopby, sucb tbat tbey fumisbed tbe norm for civilized
man in tbe ages to come. Hellenism became a capital
fact for tbe race. Greece supplied tbe intellectual factor
under tbe new dispensation of Cbristianity as truly as tbe
Hebrew race supplied us witb tbe spiritual force wbich
was to regenerate tbe beart and will of man. And tbis
was done for millions wbo knew but little but tbe name
eitber of Greeks or Jews. And if tbis transcendental
function was assigned to tbe Hellenic race outside tbe
bounds of any continuous revelation, tbe question surely
arises wbetber otber races may tbrougb tbeir power of
religion or otberwise bave made tbeir special contribution
to tbe fulfilment of tbe grand design for establisbing tbe
religion of tbe Cross, and for giving it an ascendency
wbicb is already beyond dispute, and wbicb may be
destined even to become in tbe course of time, universal
over tbe face of tbe eartb."
The history of Greek philosophy has been called
the history of the world's philosophy, as if there
had been and could be no other. And tbis we
must admit to be true, if we bave regard to the
great human organism wbich society and its history
presents, and observe the distinct function allotted
to each part in the grand ordering of the whole.
Beginnìng with the comparatively gross conceptions
of the dementai or physical philosophy of Thales
and bis followers, and ending with tbe sublime
speculations of Socrates and Plato on morals, on
the nature of the soul, on the beautiful, the true and
the good, on the souFs immortality and the nature
of the gods, on the truly blessed Hfe, the perfection
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to the LorcTs First Advent. 87
of the human nature in the individuai and in the
model state ; and, in immediate sequence, the
splendid inductive philosophy of Aristotle, who,
with reverence for the gods and for the supernatural,
yet lifts again the study of nature into its true
dignity, and so completes the ideal survey of the
whole universe, spiritual and naturai ; such a com-
plete intellectual growth was this whole beautiful
creation of the Hellenic philosophy, that it seems
more like the orderly development of a single
human mind than the result of scattered frag-
mentary efTorts of successive scholars, extending
over some two hundred years. Can we fail to see
here some altogether unexceptional and remarkable
preparation going on under an overseeing and
directing Divine providence, "in the intellectual
part " of the human race ? *
What may seem at first an objection to this
exceptional position being assigned to the Greeks —
a people entirely remote in race and religion from
that people disting^ished as the chosen of God and
the depository of Divine revelation — will, on further
examination, be found to rather corroborate than
invalidate our view.
In the first place, the direct influence of Héllenic
culture — embracing leaming, philosophy, and the
fine arts, and ali the intellectual stimulus which
these imply — upon the Hebrew nation and upon
* See Dean Stanley's Htstory ofthejewish Church, espedally the
chapter on Socrates, for a very instructive survey of the relation of
HeUenìsm to Christìanity.
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88 Greek Philosophy in its Relation
ali the various races going to make up the Roman
empire in the time of the Caesars, is evident at a
glance into the literary and politicai history of the
three centuries preceding the Lord's First Advent.
The conquests of Alexander carried the language
and, in some measure, the leaming of the Greeks
into Egypt, to Palestine, and the far east, and gave
them predominance. It was Greek learning that
gave Alexandria its intellectual pre-eminence under
the Ptolemies ; it was to translate the Old Testa-
ment into Greek that the great college of the
Seventy were assembled in that Egyptian capital ;
the Greek language thus became more and more
the one avenue of intellectual intercourse in ali the
eastern world ; and it was in the Greek language
that the books of the New Testament were ulti-
mately to be given to the whole race of mankind
on earth.
But, together with this historical corroboration,
we have the remarkable doctrine set forth in Swe-
denborg's writings, that in raising up a new Church
or new Divine dispensation in this world, the Lord
never makes use of the former or fallen church, but
rather of a foreign and Gentile race, who hitherto
not having known, and thus not having profaned
and rejected, the Divine Truth already revealed, are
in a state of comparative innocence, and so can
receive and be profited by the new truth to be given
to men. Taking the two doctrinal statements to-
gether — namely, that referring to the forming of the
new or regenerated will in the intellectual part of
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to the LorcCs First Advent. 89
man, and this conceming the setting aside of the
former Church in the introduction of a new one —
does it not appear as if the Jewìsh people at the
time of our Lord's First Advent represented the
corrupted will which could not be regenerated, and
whose house is therefore " left unto them desolate ;'*
. while the Hellenic race was pre-eminently the
Gentile people — the people that sat for a long time
in spiritual darkness, and yet upon whom more im-
mediately and more fully than elsewhere the " great
light " was to shine ? The first extensive sowing of
Christianity was, it will be remembered, not among
the Hebrews, not among the Romans, but among
the Greeks — Roman subjects it is true, but Greek
in language and in culture — the people of Asia
Minor, of Athens and Corinth and Alexandria. It
was at Byzantium, the Greek capital of the east,
that Christianity was publicly owned by the Roman
emperor as the acknowledged religion of the world ;
and it was in this language that its great creeds
were written, and its great battles carried on with
the prevailing systems of pagan religion and philo-
sophy. The whole doctrinal formulating of Chris-
tianity in creeds, apologies, sermons, apostolic
epistles and rituals, was essentially Greek — done
in the Greek language, and the result of centuries
of Hellenic culture. In this way did the intellect
of our race, as represented or actually embodied in
that extraordinary people, serve as the vehicle by
which the Word of the New Testament, and so the
Gospel of redemption, could be given to humanity ;
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90 Greek Philosophy.
an intellectual instrument not itself regenerated or
perfect, but providentially prepared for receiving
and giving abroad the truth. This truth was an
absolutely new gift to the world ; it was higher
than ali philosophy and than ali science ; it was that
of which a Roman govemor asked, What is truth ?
the truth as at once the discoverer and the con-
queror of sin ; the truth as the Word incarnate;
the truth, not as the world-maker only — for as such
had the Platonists already known it — but as the
World-Redeemer, the Anointed One, the Messiah !
It was in anticipation of this truth that Socrates
talked of virtue and duty, and Plato depicted the
struggle of the soul between the spiritual and the
sensual loves, and the true life of the philosopher as
one who was governed by his knowledge of the
eternai ideas. Is it not a beautiful historic coinci-
dence that we read in the gospel of the Incarnation
of the Word, that **There were certain Greeks
among them that had come up to the feast, saying,
We too would see Jesus " ?
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THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE IN ITS
RELATION TO THE LORD'S SECOND
ADVENT.
About four hundred years elapsed between the
highest perfection of Greek art and philosophy and
the First Advent of the Lord. That length of tìme
was necessary, we are justified in believing, for the
diffusing of the intellectual spirit as well as the
language of the Greeks among ali those nations to
whom the Gospel was first to come, and so to pre-
pare them intellectually for its reception and its
subsequent transmission to others. No one can
doubt that parts of the fourth Gospel are in the
letter couched in language as perfectly suited to a
world to whom Hellenic ideas were familiar, as is
the epistle to the Hebrews to the people of that
name. The translation of the Old Testament into
the Greek of what is known as the Septuagint, not
only seems like an anticipation of a complete Bible
of both Old and New Testaments in that language,
but it actually became the vehicle of the translation
afterwards of the Old Testament into the Latin
edition known as the Vulgate, and so of the diffu-
sion of the Word throughout the whole of western
Christendom.
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92 Italian Renaissance in its Relation
Another four hundred years, constituting a period
of a sìmìlar preparing of mankind for another
Divine advent, seems to be clearly manifest in the
history of the centuries that elapsed between the
beginnìng of the Italian Renaissance and the time
of the Second Corning of the Lord ; and it is to the
remarkable and interesting historical coincidences
fumished by these two periods that I chiefly desire
now to cali attention.
The movement known as the Renaissance or the
Revival of Learning had its origin chiefly in Italy,
and pre-eminently among the princes, the scholars,
the poets, the artists, and the monastic orders of
Florence. If we begin with Dante and Boccaccio
and Petrarch, the two latter of whom were impor-
tant contributors to the introduction of the new
learning, while the first we may cali the creator of
the Italian language as a literary repository, we are
carried back to the latter part of the thirteenth or
the beginning of the fourteenth century. Thence
the movement lasted to the downfall of the Fioren-
tine republic, under the later Medicean dukes, a
space of about two hundred and fifty years ; during
which time the Roman Empire of the east had come
to its end in the capture of Constantinople by the
Turks. The great religious and politicai revolution
known as the Reformation had been going on in ali
Europe, and special revivals or new births of science
and literature had been taking place in the leading
cities of France and Germany, but especially in
England during that which we cali the Elizabethan
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to the LorcTs Second Advent. 93
Age. Chaucer — ^who, although later than Dante
by a lifetime, yet occupies a position so similar to
the great Italian as the father of his nation's poetry,
if not of its language — ^will serve as a convenient
landmark for our fixing the beginning of that period
of revival, of great intellectual activity, and of crea-
tive power, which extended for over two hundred
years after his death, and embraced the times and
productions of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon,
as well as the whole beginning, rise, struggles, and
final establishment of the Protestant Church of
England.
This revival of learning — a movement which ex-
tended throughout Europe, and constituted a genuine
intellectual awakening of the mental life of the
various nations — ^had, as I have said, its chief
centre and source in Florence. Again was human
society to enter upon a new preparation in its
" intellectual part " for the reception of a new, re-
generating, spiritual life. Like the era of Greek
philosophy, the Italian Renaissance preceded by
four hundred years the advent of the Lord in a
new revelation of Divine Truth to men. In what
consisted this second intellectual preparation of
mankind for the reception of this truth ?
First, we observe that the Renaissance was itself
a revival of that same Hellenism, and even, we may
say, that same Paganism, which, forming no part of
the former or Jewish Church, in Athens, B.C. 400,
equally formed no part of Christianity, in Florence,
A.D. 1400. It was essentially an introduction, not
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94 Italian Renaissance in its Relation
only of the Greek language, but of the pagan Greek
Uterature and pagan philosophy into the learning
of Latin or Western Europe. Pico della Mirandola,
Petrarch, Ficino, Boccaccio, and others, seized upon
the treasures of Greek pagan literature which the
poor scholars, driven from the east by the inroads
of the ever-advancing Turks, had brought with
them to the hospitable doors of the wealthy
Fiorentine patrons of learning, like nuggets of gold
or strings of pearls washed up on the shore after the
wreck of a costly merchantman. Greek learning
was the fashion of the day ; Greek grammars and
lexicons began to be elaborated and published ;
Plato's philosophy began to be placed high above
the theology of the Christian fathers ; and the
Greek poets, their mythology and morals, began to
either supplant — or, more frequently, transform
into semblances of themselves — the religion, the
superstitions, and the worship of the Church. Hos-
tile as this pagan revival may seem at first thought
to the Christianity of the time, it was not more so
than the Hellenism of old to the Jews in the time
of the Maccabees ; and just as the Greek language
became the vehicle of the revelation of the whole
Word to the non-Hebraic world, so did it now again
become the vehicle of its new dissemination, through
the revived study of the Word in its originai forms,
the translation of its multiplied texts into the vari-
ous popular languages of Europe, and its publica-
tion by the now newly-invented printing-press.
Hither then to Florence, in these days of the
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to the Lord*s Second Advent. 95
intellectual new birth of Europe, carne the scholars
of England and France and Germany. Erasmus,
More, Colet, Melancthon, and Reuchlin drank alike
at the pure source of the Greek texts of the New
Testament here brought to light; and those
draughts of new mental vìgour and life were to
set ali Europe astir in the pursuit of a deeper
and truer knowledge of the fundamental facts of
Christianity. Not only began now a sifting of old
traditions and dogmas in the light of the newly-
found standards of revelation ; but the stimulus of
this new leaming — or, rather, of this old leaming
revived, because released from the restraints of
bigotry and superstition — ^had set minds to enquir-
ing in every direction, and science and invention,
and the various industries and arts belonging to our
modem civilization, began now a course of refined
development. The religious and politicai upheavals
that accompanied the Italian Renaissance are evi-
dences indeed of something more than any mere
intellectual influence. The reformation preached by
Savonarola in Florence was in many senses a far
more genuinely religious movement than that of
Luther and of John Knox ; and while it attracted
the attention of Lorenzo de Medici and the Pla-
tonists of his court, it can hardly be said to have
owed anything to either Greek texts or pagan
leaming. The fermentations, the terrible disturb-
ances attending the breaking up of an old and
cormpted church, were beginning even then to
make themselves felt in the spiritual world, and
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96 Italian Renaissance in its Relation
thence in society in ali its forms upon earth : but,
at the same time, in the ordering of Divine Provi-
dence, while everything was becoming only more
corrupt and demoralized in the voluntary and
affectional part, in the intellectual part of society
there was a quickened life, a process of cleansing,
repairing, and putting in order; so that in this
renewed or reformed intellect of Christendom the
truth to be revealed in the Lord's Second Advent
might at length find a suitable abiding-place, and
so help to the birth of a new will, the restoration of
a living Church on earth once more. The agen-
cìes of this intellectual renewal were, as I have
said, chiefly the stimulus afforded by the fresh
delight of contact with pagan myth, art, poetry,
and philosophy, consequent upon the introduction
of Greek letters from the east ; the access this
afforded also to the books of the New Testament
in their originai tongue; the awakening of the
criticai spirit, and the sense of freedom in matters
of belief ; and, finally, the translation of the Bible
in various languages, and its dissemination through
the printing-press. These were not only means of
intellectual quickening and discipline; but the
more we examine, the more we shall find these
the absolutely necessary requisites for the subse-
quent reception by Christendom of the truths to be
revealed in the Lord's Second Advent. Sweden-
borg calls this great intellectual change " the coming
into a freer way of thinking about spiritual things : "
but this acquiring of " a freer way " is not the work
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to the Lords Second Corning. 97
of a few years, but of hundreds of years ; although
the final result — ^the final casting off of the broken
shackles — may seem like the work of an instant in
the striking of a blow.
It was the death of charity, and the ultimate
separation of faith from charity, even by the force
of a dogma, that constituted, says Swedenborg,
the death or consummation of the First Christian
Church. In Rome, its utterly corrupt fountain-head,
allCatholic Christendom beheld the death of charity,
the trampling under foot of the moral law, the
substitution of the authority of man for that of the
Decalogue and of Christ — the ever-living Word.
In Germany and England the spirit of free enquiry
and the protest against religious tyranny resulted
in the twofold effect, on the one hand of a rational-
ism leading ultimately to the total unbelief or the
agnosticism of to-day, on the other, of the terrible
dogmas of a Trinity of Gods, and of faith in the
vicarious atonement of one of these as the sole con-
dition of human salvation. Truly the regeneration
of the world required the implanting of a new will
in a new intellect, totally apart from both of these
comiptions of the Christian Church. Again it
became necessary that a new intellect should be
formed, not in the Church already corrupt, but
somewhere outside of it This new intellect was
formed in the new leaming — ^pagan in origin, and
necessarily, at that day, infidel, because criticai in its
tendency — of which the Italian Renaissance was the
chief vehicle to the nations of western Christendom.
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98 Italian Renaissance in its Relation
It may be urged — and not unreasonably, I am
well aware — that the parallelism is stili lacking
between the ancient and the more recent periods
and processes of preparatìon for the Lord's Advent;,
in that, whereas tìie New Dispensation at the Lord's
First Corning was manifestly gfranted to a wholly
Gentile world — ^the old or Jewish Church proving
itself unable to receive the Word in spirit, whom in
the body they had crucified— on the other hand, the
dispensation now given in the Lord's Second Coni'*
ing is, not only as a matter of fact but of necessity^
addressed to the former or the consummated
Church ; inasmuch as " the Church is there wher^
the Word is," and the invitation to ali the " Seveij
Churches which are in Asia" to come and enter
into the New Jerusalem, is expressly held by
Swedenborg to be addressed, in its spiritual mean-
ing, to ali those who are in the light of the Word
{Apocalypse Revealed^ Nos. io, 11). In what sense,
then, can it be stili true that the new will in the
" intellectual part " of the Grand Man of the New
Age is not to be witnessed in a renewal of the Old
Church itself, but in the choosing of a new stock, a
Gentile people, as foreign to the old or discarded
Christianity as Hellenism was foreign to the Jews ?
It is in admitting fully the many difficulties
attending this part of Swedenborg's teaching, that
I nevertheless think I can see much helpful light
thrown on the problem itself by the historic^l
parallel I bave attempted to draw.
In one sense, we must admit that the truths of
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to the LorcFs Second AdvenL 99
the Lord's Second Advcnt have been given directly
and solely to the Christian Church, as to those
nations of mankind " who have the Word ; " since,
if for no other reason, the Second Corning is
nothing else but the revelation of this same Divine
Word in its spiritual sense. *
But, on the other hand, in what sense has the
Church truly the Word at the present day ? and
how far is the " intellectual part " of mankind — in
which the " new will " of the Lord's New Church Is
necessarily to be implanted — how far is this to be
identified with the old or former Christian Church,
as represented by its leading denominations or
establishments as now existing?
In this connection we may well bear in mind that
a Church is a Church, not through its possession of
the Bible, but "according to its understanding of
thQ Word " (5. 5. 76). If the present Churches of
Christendom, even though they possess copies of
the Bible, stili do not understand the Word, they
have in so far ceased to be a Church in a true
sense : they may stili be nurseries of religion, more
or less beneficiai to the various sections of man-
kind, but stili not the genuine Christian Church at
ali ; even as we are distinctly taught that Roman
Catholicism, while a religion, yet forms properly no
part of the Christian Church {Apocalypse Revealed^
no. 718). A new Church, then, will have as
one of its chief conditions a new understanding
of the Word. But this Word, to be newly
understood, must first be possessed as a hook or
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icxD Italian Renaissance in its Relation
Bible in ali the integrity of its letter, and freed
utterly from the shackles of traditional interpretation
and the bias of the dogmas of the past To provide
for the new age such an absolutely free Bible seems
to me the manifest Providence-leading in ali the
history of Christendom, from the Italian Renais-
sance down to the present day. The Bible has
become itself, in one sense, an entirely new book ;
new in its literal form, as translated into the various
modem languages ; new in the manner of its use ;
new in the senses in which it is studied and under-
stood. Even though Swedenborg gave the doctrines
revealed from the internai sense of the Word in the
Latin language, the home language of the old or
Roman Church, stili in their diffusion in the world
it is rather through those languages, once whoUy
barbarous and pagan to the Christian capital, the
English, German, French, and Scandinavian, that
the doctrines of the New Church, by which alone
the Word is henceforth to be understood, are made
known, as well as the Divine text of the Word it-
self The English and the Dutch, whom Sweden-
borg places in the centre of the Christian world
because of their possession of the Word and their
freedom of thought in relipous things {True Chris-
tian Religiofiy nos. 800, 807), were possessed of
neither of these qualifications, we may say, at the
time of the beginning of the Renaissance. What
elevated them to this high distinction was nothing
but this new learning which England, pre-eminently
among European nations, imbibed from the Floren-
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to the LorcPs Second Advent loi
tine schools. It was England and Geneva and
HoUand that gave us the new Bible in* newly-
authenticated texts, and in the introduction of the
.sacred languages of the Word into the curriculum
of the schools. The Greek was thus the medium
of the new leaming and the new Bible, just as the
Latin is the medium of Swedenborg's own com-
munication of its doctrines alike to ali the nations
of the world ; but neither in the Latin nor the
Greek, neither to the Latin nor the Greek race,
are the doctrines of the New Church given
primarily, but rather to "a people of a strange
language," to "barbarians and Gentiles," remote from
both Rome and Constantinople and Jerusalem
physically, and hardly less so in ali their mental
characteristics and religious instincts. And what I
have endeavoured to show is that, apart from ali
the established forms and institutes of the Christian
Church, there has been going on for the last four or
five hundred years in the midst of Christendom, but
distinct from ali the accepted or established forms
of Christian teaching, a purely intellectual training ;
as wholly foreign to the Church meanwhile existing
as the Hellenic influence, which widened itself to
almost universal prevalence, was nevertheless really
foreign to the spirit and institutions of Judaism.
This newly-acquired intellect, thus won by our
modem Grand Man at the cost of so mudi hard
struggle, so much doubt and despair, so much
wrestling with past traditions, so much painful
breaking of old attachments and going out from
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I02 Italian Renaissance in its Relation
the father's country — a struggle lasting through the
many long years of religious warfare which the
btates of Europe have witnessed since the days of
the Reformation — this ìntellectual state, so acquired,
raay seem only partially to meet ali the conditions
of that Gentile world, " remote from Christianity,".
to which the new dispensation seems to be particu^
larly promised {Last Jtutgment^ no. 74). Yet,
viewed in the broad light of history, it assumes
more and more this character. If we remove
the idea of earthly distance and think of remote-
ness of state, nothing could be more remote from
former or even the present dogmatic Christianity
than just this attitude of the free intellect of
tìie modem civilized mind. It assumes ali kinds
of guises ; it lives in ali climes ; it takes and
burvives on ali kinds of food. One thing alone
it rejects ; one country it shuns ; one house it never
seeks — namely, that of the old Christian theology
with its council-made dogmas, its falsified Bible, ìts
irrational demands upon the human reason, its
ofFensiveness to the sense of morality and justice.
The modem human intellect — freed from the
rcstraints of the past, equipped with the " forces of
tìie Gentiles " (Isa. Ix. 5, 11) — in its rich stores of
naturai knowledges and its ability to explore
subjects with philosophical insight, seems to nfie
to be the specially-prepared ground in which the
seeds of the new dispensation are to be sown. ' It
surely is not the ground of the stili dogma-bound
theologian of the existing Churches ; nor is it the
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to the Lord's Second Advent. 103
ground of the ranting atheist and blasphemer ; nor
of the proud agnostic, who is more bigoted in his
no-faith than was ever a papist of olden time in his
faith. The attitude of the thought of the present
day — free to admit the errors, the shortcomings,
the utter incapacity of the existing Churches to
rebuild a living faith in the world, yet humbly
distrusting even its own doubts, and steadfastly in
secret tuming its face to the light in prayer that
ìt may yet see and believe — attests, to my mind,
the new intellect which constitutes the Gentile land
Vb which the truths of the New Church are sent.
*rhese are the Gentiles that shall come to that light
Which shines forth from the newly-opened Word at
tìié Second Advent of the Lord (Isa. Ix. 3). These
àtó, in our own day, the Greeks who also would see
jfèsus (John xii. 20, 21).
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THE NEW RENAISSANCE.
Centuries in the world's history are as years in a
man's life. No man in looking back can assign to
each day or to each year its own event, and the part
that each has played in making up the total of
his life's experience ; at most he can single out
certain decisive moments and prominent events
which have had a controlling influence in shaping
his life*s career, and these will stand as monuments
marking a whole series of years — an epoch in his
life history. A retrospect over the history of the
world yields much the same vision. Years, decades,
centuries fall at no g^eat distance into a vast
monotone of obscurity to the eye of the uncritical
observer of the history of the past It is only here
and there that a gfreat event or a great personage
looms up, and brings with itself into prominence
some influence that gave character to a wide group
of years or centuries, which the historian thence
names an age or period.
If now we examine those age-forming events and
influences, we shall find them, — not as we might
expect, primarily personal and hcroic, but rather
intellectual and spiritual. The person, the hero,
the achievement is there, but only as subordinate
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The New Renaissance. 105
to a certain spiritual or intellectual inflowing from
some vast resource of age-forming power, and not
as originating this power from themselves. The
primary spiritual quality of this mysterious power
is acknowledged in the term so happily applied to
it by the Germans — ^the Zeit (7^/j/— or, as we use it,
although in a less philosophical sense, the Spirit of
the Times. This spirit is supreme ; individuals are
but its instruments, and events are but its working
out into the surface of the life of humanity.
If we look back into the earliest beginnings of
human traditions — the legendary and heroic periods
— ^we, therefore, find not the histories of men but of
the gods. What we see are not the petty achieve-
ments of man, but great age-dramas in which some
mighty Divine agencies are revealing themselves for
the waming and instruction of mankind. Thus ali
the primitive histories are not of nations, but of
religions ; not of kingdoms, but of Divine dispensa-
tions, which we may desigpnate as vast world or
race Churches. And the fact remains through ali
the panorama of history, from those early
legendary periods till to-day, that the epoch-
making changes in the world's life bave been
those of religion.
The history of the world resolves itself, when
viewed from its inward forces, into a history of
Churches. It is the Church that looms up in mysteri-
ous majesty as the great age-shaping agency in the
world's growth, and the Church is but the grander
man of each age — ^the universal soul acknowledging
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io6 The New Renaissance.
certain truths of faith, and reception thereby of
certain spiritual inflowings from the spiritual worid.
* Thus the Eden of the worid's history is the
Golden Age of a celestial religion, which ended in
a deluge of monstrous falsity and sin. The Noatic
itge is a succeeding Church embracing the whole
i*eligious sense of mankind for a vast and in-
definite period of years — pre-historic except as
written in the spiritual development of mankind,
ànd ending with a second great Judgment Day
and Word*s End — Consummatio sceculi — in the
Dispersion of the Races at the Tower of Babel.
Eden— The Deluge— Babel !
' * These three vast scenes lying across the distant
hoHzon of our earliest world's history in fields one
above and beyond another, like strata of clouds
ttì a clear deep sky at sunset, are what form the
eàrliest life events of every race or nation whose
traditions have been preserved for record. Savage
ànd civilized races, Assyrian, Egyptian, and
Hebrew, alike behold these g^reat essentially re-
Bgiòus forms, when their eyes turn to the past,
iòoming dimly up, and, alone, out of the abyss
of darkness taking any definite shape.
^' With the Hebrew Church began the authentic
lìteral history of revealed religion, but of only that
line of it which found its instrument in the Hebrew
race. The externality and racial obstinàcy of
this people fitted them to be the depository òf
the monotheistic worship, and of a system of
Holy symbols or representations whereby certain
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The New Renaissance. 107
Divine impressions couW be kept alive in the
sensuous chambers of the mind of humanity, as
by no other means. These same symbols, con-
Stìtuting the Mosaic ritual and the inspired
history of the Chosen People, were at the same
tìme wholly prophetic and spiritual in their hiddén
iheaning, and were such as could be infilled whert
the time should come with the Divine Spirit, and
become the instrument of making over the moral
and spiritual world into a veritable kingdom dF
God, and of " creating Jerusalem, forever, a joy
upon the earth."
Thus this Old Covenant of the ritual law and
tetter was in time succeeded by that grace and
truth that came by Jesus Christ, not however by
His destroying the law, but by His fulfiUing it
The Incamation was the real tuming-point ili
the world's history, from that of the involution of
the Divine in the letter, and so in the Wofd madé
Flesh, to the evolution thence of a Divine life intò
humanity and the beginning of the reign of tìie
Spirit
It is surely not difficult to see how from the be-
ginning of the historic period the development of
the civilized world had for its goal and centre the
Roman Empire. The ìmplanting therein of
Christianity, the diffusion thereby of the Gospel
in the Greek and Latin tongues, and so the making
of a new world — the inaugurating of a Fourth
world-age.
"I bave shown in another essay how the way iòk
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io8 The New Renaissance.
the implanting of Christianity in the world was
laid in the intellectual preparation brought about
by the Greek learning and phìlosophy which
preceded the Incamation by some four hundred
years, and how a revival of Greek learning occurred in
Europe in the age known as that of the Renaissance
— the I4th to the i6th centuries — as if preparatory
in like manner to another great day of spiritual
illumination which was to be ushered in upon the
world.
The Greek enlightenment which was to refine
the intellectual sense of the vast rude hordes of the
Roman Empire, and, like the inscription on the
Cross in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, was to become
the channel of revelation to the early and mediaeval
Empire of the King of the Jews, — the same
enlightenment had now begun to make itself felt
again, not only in awaking out of its superstitious
stupor and blind obedience the mediaeval Church,
but in raising from its racial sluggishness and
dreams the great rude Scandinavian savage of the
north. I n the Revival of Learning the great trumpet
was truly sounded announcing the coming of the
Son of Man, of the Day of Judgment, and of the
End of the World.
Four hundred years bave passed away since the
discovery of America by Columbus; and that
sound, as of a mighty rushing wind, has been
heard through the courts and the schools and
Churches, the hovels and the palaces alike, bidding
the world awake and get ready, although by a stili
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The New Renaissance. 109
long and toilsome and blood-marked progress, for a
new advent of the Spirit, the beginning of a new
historic age.
The spirit of the Revival of Leaming was essen-
tially religious, as is proved by its result, that
uptuming of the ecclesiastical world which we cali
the Reformation. Truly regarded, however, the
immediate influence of that movement was almost
wholly intellectual, and as such only preparatory to
a much more remote religious result The Refor-
mation was by no means confined to religion. The
severance of the Protestant sects from the Roman
mother Church was but a small part of the reform-
ing the world underwent at that time. The
immediate religious change it wrought, whether
in men's beliefs or morals, were not of vast import-
ance. Morally, the Catholic Church underwent as
great an improvement as did the Protestants ; while
doctrinally considered, Calvinism was only the wine
of Augustine tumed sour.
The real change wrought in the Reformation
was the intellectual one, the change in the recep-
tìvity of human minds toward new truth. It was
a setting free from the traditions and superstitions
and slavery of the past: the entering upon a freer
way of thinking about spiritual things.
The remark has frequently been made, How
slight a part of the life of humanity is written in
the history of the world's kings, heroes, and wars.
This is because the spirit of a time is vaster and
broader than any of its several agencies taken
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I IO The New Renaissance.
singly. The Greek philosophy was the message
which Alexander's conquests cut the road for into
ali parts of the intellectual world of that data
Caesar became the ruler of Europe in order that his
successor Constantine might fasten the cross to the
standards of the imperiai army. The wars from
the seventh to the fifteenth century, when the last
sigh of the Caesars was breathed out at Constanti-
nople, including the conquests of the Saracens, the
invasions of the Moors, the ravages of Tamerlane,
the Crusades, and the final settlement of the Turks
in the Palace of the first Christian Emperor, were
ali religious wars ; that is, they were not for the
conquest of lands but of souls, for the extension
and ascendency of a religious faith. The religious
idea was what filled Europe for the whole period
from the Nicene Council to the downfall of Con-
stantinople. In the awakening of the Renaissance
a new spirit spoke ; not to make wars cease, but to
point to a new goal, a new victory, a new redemp-
tion of the world. Liberty, — not mere cìvil, but
intellectual and spiritual liberty — the entire release
of the human spirit from bondage — ^this became
now the aspiration of the minds that were to control
the movements of the world, and everything began to
shape itself to this end as if by magic. The crooked
paths began to be made straight and the rough
places plain. Education, the restoration of the
learning of the Greeks which for ages had been
obliterated, the translation of the Bible and its
publication through the printing-press, the circum-
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The New Renaissance. 1 1 1
navigatìon of the world, the beginnings of modern
physical science and the invention of labour-saving
machines, — these ali united as tributary influences
in preparing mankind for entrance upon an entirely
new stage of life.
But while relìgion, in its active and reactive inf|u«-
ences, has been at the heart of ali the great wc^-ldr
movements durìng the nineteen Christian centurìes^
yet it cannot be said to have undergone, meanwhile,
in itself, any essential change since the first great
change from the Church of the Apostles to the
Church of the Empire. The Reformation did net
so much change the traditional faith as open the
way to its total rejectipn, and to the substitution
of nationalism and the modem agnosticism in its
place. The great fundamental doctrines of Angus*
tine and Calvin, the Tripersonal Deity, the Vicarious
Atonement, the Resurrection of the Material Body,
and the personal Second Coming of Christ attended
with a physical destruction of the universe, — these
have remained practically unchanged, whether by
Catholic or Protestant Councils.
But in the minds of the people there has been a
vast change going on, and, as if the preparatoiy
process exhibited by the four centuries which have
elapsed since the Revival of Leaming had bom its
intellectual fruit, the whole world of thought seems
now to have assumed again a receptive and expec-
tant attitude toward a new revelation of the Word,
a new descent of a world-creative, epoch-making
Spirit
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112 The New Renaissance.
And, as in the former great criticai transitions of
the worid, so it is now again the religious, that is
the vital change. At last, after eighteen centuries,
the Paulìne interpretation of Christianity, based
upon a lawyer*s reading of the letter of the Gospel,
is to give place to a revelation of the Divine Doc-
trine contained within the Word itself. No longer
stagnant, the whole vast surface of religious
thought is now being stirred ; so that on the stan-
dard which the closing century holds up to our
gaze as she wanders back in the long ranks of the
departed ages, if there is any record the world can
read more unmistakably than another, it is that
which proclaims her to the future historian as the
century of the making over of religion.
It is not the revision of the creeds, the " higher
criticism " of the Bible, nor any movement eccle-
siastical or ritualistic among the various Christian
denominations,that constitutes this new age-forming
movement These are ali only special and inci-
dental phases of religious life among the organized
sects of the Christian Church. But the new reli-
gious movement embraces those without as well as
those within the communion of the Church, and it
extends its thrilling impulse into ali avenues of
human life and interest of the present day. It stirs
in the mind of the inventor, the artist, the writer,
the musician, the scholar, and the statesman.
Realistic to the most unsparing degree, it lays bare
the life of society as never did a Judgment Day
before. It removes concealments and conventional
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The New Renaissance. 113
hypocrisies ; it proclaims its readiness to look upon
the truth. In politicai, in social, and moral life it
lays its axe to the root of the tree. But none the
less does it bring the vision of a new ideal, the
delight of a new hope, the thrill of a new love to
the heart of humanity. It bids man to be content
no longer with the mere life in symbols and
shadows, as it bids science to grovel no longer,
with face down, in the mere dust of effects. It
opens a fair and entrancing vision into the realms
of spiritual causes, and of the Divine and heavenly
ends or purposes of things. "Behold," says the
spirit of this new religion, " a New Heaven and a
New Earth : for the former things are passed
away."
That the world is actually entering upon a new
age seems to be universally acknowledged by wit-
nesses from every grade and department of human
life. New incentives are stirring men's hearts, new
ideals inspire their arts, new physical achievements
beckon them on to one marvellous mastery after
another of the mysterious forces of the universe,
until it seems as if mankind were on the verge of
demonstrating, even to their naturai senses, the
universality of spirit as the only substance and
force and the comparative non-substantiality of
matter. The reaction against the blind literalism
of Christian dog^a in its interpretation of the
Scriptures, as well as against the essential injustice
and savagery of the Calvinistic scheme of atone-
ment, have driven thoughtful and refined natures
H
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1 1 4 The New Renaissance.
to the extreme of rejecting altogether the idea of a
written revelation and of a physical incamation of
Deity. These revolts are however more often against
the perverted traditional interpretations of the
Church of the past than against the sublime mys-
teries themselves which have been so profanely
handled ; while, on the other hand, much of the
pretended " higher criticism " of the Bible by those
within the Churches is pursued with a far more
destructive and agnostic spirit than inspires the
humble and reverent seeker of God through the
paths of nature's revelations to science. But both
agnosticism on the one hand, and a dessicated
theology on the other, stand equally witnesses to
the fact that an old order of thought and motive
in spiritual things is passing away, if it has not
already passed away, as a vital agency in human
life, and that a new religious impulse and a new
religious vision is coming over the world.
Contrasting the new life, the wonderful awaken-
ing in every branch of human activity, individuai,
national, and intemational, and the general exten-
sion of human knowledge and achievement since
the French Revolution, with the stagnation, cor-
ruption, and darkness into which the world seemed
to be settling, and chiefly the Church, before the
middle of the last century, ali the historians agree
in declaring that the world has passed through a
mysterious and stupendous crisis, that the present
century has witnessed a new Renaissance — a birth
into a new life and a higher piane of activity than
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The New Renaissance. 115
the race has ever known before. While writing
this article, my eye has fallen on the following
utterances of a writer in the current number of the
Atlantic Monthly in an article on " The Prometheus
Unboundof Shelley:"*
" The beginning of our century witnessed the dawn of
a new cosmic day. We may say in sober reverence that
not since the Coming of Christ had so vital a renovating
power entered human life as entered it one hundred
years ago.
" The world was indeed born anew ; but this its second
birth was the birth of the Spirit. . . .
"The ideal toward which the drama presses is fer
different from the temperate uprightness of the Greeks ;
it is no less than the absolute union with the spirit of
Divine Love. For the time when the Prometheus Un-
bound is written is the nineteenth Christian century, and
the vision of holiness has been beheld by the world."
But it is te writers in every line of Hterature and to
the leaders and moulders of human thought in these
days, that we may look for the evidence of this new
age-forming Spirit The characteristics, universally,
of this New Renaissance are : Freedom in spiritual
thinking, by which is meant the disposition to look
at ali topics, religious and other, from the ground of
rational thinking, and not from that of dogmatic
tradition ; a profound reverence for the extemal
actuality of facts and the sacredness of matter as
the embodiment, somehow, of a Divine Wisdom and
a beneficent purpose; a recognition of Law as
* See Atlantic Monthly for July 1892.
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1 16 The New Renaissance.
universal and the acceptance therein, although un-
consciously with many, of the sacred doctrine of
the Divine Omnipresence and Providence ; a re-
cognition of the inmost force and substance of
things as being of spirit, and, therefore, of man as
being essentially a spirit clothed temporarily with
a material body ; the consequent recognition of the
unity of art, of philosophy, and of science as exist-
ing in the unity of spirit or the unity of life in its
source in a Supreme Being whose essence is Love
and Wisdom, and whose operation is beneficent Use.
Further, it recognizes the politicai equality of ali
men before the law and the relation of the nations
of the earth as that of a vast fratemity. Its
aspiration to heaven is that to a life in the spiritual
world in which the Divine ideal is reached in a
perfect human society^ — a regenerated maximus
homo ; it conceives of heaven and hell as those
abiding future conditions which are the inevitable
working out of the life freely adopted by man on
earth in a world which takes its objective
character wholly from the subject within. It sees
the moral reformatory forces of society as lying,
therefore, mainly within and before ali else, in that
knowledge of the truth which alone makes free.
Finally, it beholds the world, nature, the earthly
life, not as existing of itself or for itself as an end,
but as the shadows projected from some vast and
eternai reality, within which is more and more re-
vealed to the prophetic spirit of poet, artist, and
seer, and which shall stand wholly revealed to ali
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The New Renaissance. 1 1 7
illuminateci souls when death shall at last take the
veil away.
Such are some of the characteristics of the New
Renaissance. It will be seen that they are pre-
dominanti/ spiritual. Even under the most material-
istic and negative tendencies exhibited in these
days of the end of this world, this motive has been
that of an intenser radicalism — a desire to strike
deeper at the root of things, not for the purpose of
remaining there, but of starting anew.
It is in this essentially spiritual element that the
New Renaissance differs from that of the fourteenth
century. That was in its spirit essentially pagan.
Its ideals were objective ones ; the realization of
the beautiful to the senses, and the freédom of the
sensual life. The spirit of the New Renaissance is
Norse rather than Hellenic ; it sees its ideals with-
in, and seeks their realization in the perfection of a
spiritual life as instrumentai to the whole redemp-
tion of man. And so while the former caught its
breath from the south, the latter spoke from the
north. The prophet of the one was Dante, that of
the other was Swedenborg.
It is Swedenborg alone, who, amid the vast crowd
of witnesses to the fact of an entering upon a new
age of the world's history, has been gifted with that
prophetic vision to know the deeper and Diviner
meaning of this wonderful transition, and to see
that it involves not merely a change of religion in
the sense of a change of the attitude of humanity
towards its God and His revelation, but a change
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1 1 8 The New Renaissance.
in the revelation of God Himsdf to men ; that, in
other words, just as the former great epochs of the
world have been marked by a Corning of God to
man and the execution of a great spiritual judg-
ment in this world, so at this time we are witnessing
nothing less sublime than the promised Second
Advent of the Lord and the consequent crisis or
Last Judgment, by which the whole intellectual and
moral world is being made new and the former
things are passing away. What we now are wit-
nessing is indeed only the result, in this mundane
sphere, of a general judgment already executed in
the world of spirits, whereby new influences from
heaven are descending into mankind, and greater
capacities are beìng imparted to men for their
human development into the true stature of a
man, " which is that of an angel."
This Second Advent of the Lord is not an advent
in person, in any physical or material sense, but is
purely a spiritual advent in the revelation to men
of the Divine Truth of the Word or written revelation
by opening to man's knowledge their heretofore
hidden, spiritual meaning, and at the same time by
opening the eyes of a Divinely chosen messenger to
the vision of the reality of the spiritual world, of
heaven, the intermediate world, and hell, and so the
solving of the mystery of death and the problem of
the goal of human life. The world's new birth amid
which we are living and which ali Churches and
schools and governments are recognizing, is there-
ibre, accordìng to Swedenborg, the realization of
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The New Renaissance. 119
the prophetic vision of the Revelation : " Behold a
new heaven and a new earth," — but it is equally a
fulfilment of that which the Churches and the
historians have not known or not recog^ized,
namely, that Second Corning of the Lord without
which no new earth is promised and no Holy City
descends to earth from God out of heaven.
Startling as has been Swedenborg's claim to
intromission into the spiritual world and an open
vision of its reality and its distinct nature and life,
far more stupendous is the assertion that the Word
is revealed anew and the Lord's promised Second
Advent accomplished in the opening of the spiritual
sense of the Scriptures and the revelation of the
Law of Discrete Degrees showing in what manner
matter stands related to spirit, the naturai to the
spiritual world, and, accordingly, the naturai or
literal sense of Scripture to its internai and spiritual
meaning. It is not theology, in its former narrow
sense, that is now made new ; but here is given the
foundation for a new philosophy, a new science, a
new human society, a new world. This is therefore
an age-forming revelation. Its power is that of a
Divine Zeit Geisty a breath which bloweth where it
listeth, and the world hears the sound thereof, but
cannot teli whence it cometh or whither it goeth.
So is this new birth of the Spirit which the race is
now undergoing. The theology of Swedenborg,
ignored alike, officially, by theologian, scientist, and
hierarch, is nevertheless the heaven that is chang^ng
the face of ali Christendom and preparing the way
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1 20 The New Renaissance.
for a unìversal religion in which the Lord Jesus
Christ shall dwell as in " Hìs tabernacle with men ;
and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall
be with them their God."
No longer separated from them in awful remote-
ness, but present with them in an acknowledged
system of Divine Truth and of Divine and heavenly
law, men shall realize the fact of the Divine pre-
sence on earth, of the spiritual within the naturai,
of the kingdom of God as having passed from the
symbol of prophecy into practical fulfilment
The ideal monarchy of Dante, with its Emperor
and its Pope, its State and its Church executing in
harmonious co-operation the will of the Divine
Ruler on earth, will bave given place to the spiritual
realization of the Holy City descending from God
out of heaven in a system of Divine doctrine re-
vealed to man*s rational apprehension out of the
opened depths of the written Word, and constitut-
ing for ali men the law of true human charity on
earth and the gate into the eternai citizenship of
the City of God above.
In this prophetic mission Swedenborg stands out,
his vision sweeping the horizon of the ages, and his
voice from the north telling us of the entering of
mankind upon the Fifth Age of the world. The
voice of the prophet is lost to men amid their
wonder at beholding the fulfilment of the things
foretold. Not indeed in a heaven already realized
on earth ; but in the working out of the Divine
judgments, the discrimination and separation of
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The New RenatsstmkèSS^ ^ ^ ,' 121
good from evil, of the real from the false, the
detection of shams, the assertion of the real and the
true. In this way the world is yielding its witness
to the advent of Him who ever comes, at first, not
to bring peace but a sword. It is " His judgments
that are in ali the earth," which are now rectifying
the judgments of men, establishing new ideals of
justice, of charity, of liberty, of beauty, of govem-
ment, and of service. These ideals are the heart of
the new religion out of which will grow new art, new
letters, new States, and a new worth of human living.
That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that
which is born of the spirit is spirit The Hellenic
revival which followed Dante was intellectual and
extemal, and prepared a body for the reception of the
new impulses of the present It began the making
of a new earth, the fiUing of the valleys, the casting
up a highway for the coming of God. Without
the Bible translated, without the printing-press, the
art of navigation, the railroad, and the material
improvements of man*s condition, the time for the
new birth could not have come ; nay, without the
wars with weapons which led to the liberation of
men from physical bondage, and the wars of science
which led to their mental liberation. But to the
new earth thus prepared, comes now the new
heaven, in the descent out of the firmament of
revelation of those spiritual truths which contain
the long-hidden secrets of God's dealings with man,
of the nature of man's spirit, and of the final destiny
of human life.
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122 The New Renaissance.
Hereìn is the sweet essence of the new Hfe the
world is tasting ; the origin of the realism that is
not material. It is this new revelation of the
Divine and spiritual within the naturai, that gives
rise to a delight in form and its beauty, which is not
the idolatrous worship of an empty image, but the
recognition of the holy substance of Good in its
own person of Truth and its proceeding life of Use,
which is Charity. It was an inspiration of this
Renaissance which enabled Goethe to fix the " fair
moment " of Faust's longing not in sensual delight,
not in ambitious conquests, but in the conception
of a deed of unselfish sacrifice for his fellow-man.
The world's new birth is in the restoration of the
Holy Trine of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful
to their rightful and no longer divided sway. For
the beautiful is the true and the good in their effect
which is charity — the Divine breath in man. Hence
it is that of those angels which were of a beauty
inconceivable and indescribable by man, Sweden-
borg relates that they were seen as " Charities in
form."
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FAUST IN MUSIC.
I ONCE asked Bayard Taylor, who, in his opinion,
among the composers was best able to set " Faust "
to music ? supposing meanwhile, without knowing
why, that he would answer, " Wagner ; " and I felt
a kind of just rebuke when, without a moment's
hesitation, he replied, " Beethoven."
We are so accustomed in these days to think of
Wagner as the mighty and all-sufficient interpreter
of human emotion and passion, as to forget that the
singular depth and strength of his portrayal is not
accompanied by that breadth and calm which is
necessary to a complete representation of humànity.
What Wagner portrays is rather the travail-pangs
attending the birth of society out of barbarism than
the repose of a fixed dominion of mind and art
over brute force and disorder. The triumph of the
spirit, with its law and its beauty, in a firm un-
deviating rule, setting bounds to the wildest
storms of passion, tuming evil into good, and
awarding the victor's garland to every worthy
contestant — this reign of a beneficent law finds its
expression in Beethoven as in no one else.
The quick perception of this by the gifted
American poet and translator led me to reflect
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124 Faust in Music.
whether, after ali, the real interpretation of Faust
be not already given in Beethoven's various writ-
ings, particularly in the symphonies. It would be
certainly an interesting and perhaps not unre-
munerative task for a mind of sufficiently broad
sympathies and power of analysis to search through
these great tone-tragedies for passages giving suit-
able expression to the several movements of the
drama. The ability to do this would of course
involve a very deep appreciation of the universality
of both the poem and the music. It is not for a
moment to be supposed that the composer had the
incidents of the drama of Goethe, then, in fact, stili
incomplete, before his mind when writing the
symphonies ; but he had in his heart, and he con-
veyed in those marvellous tone creations, ali un-
heard by himself, except by the immortai spirit's
ear, the movements and the action of the great
drama of the ages, the life of man, the aspirations,
the struggles, the defeats, and the triumphs of the
human soul. I am aware, however, that this, even
if it were well done, would be in large measure a
thankless task, in view of a widely prevalent aver-
sion nowadays to what is called " programmo
music." The conditions of success would be almost
wholly subjective ones, and in the same degree
uncertain and variable. And yet I am quite con-
fident that in the " Eroica," the " Pastoral," and the
" Choral " symphonies, there are easily to be found
motifs that would instantly strike an audience of
average musical intelligence as more exactly and
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Faust in Music. 125
distinctly portraying the Faust-idea, or ìts par-
ticular phases, than is done in the overtures and
symphonies distinctly so labelled by Wagner and
his disciple Liszt
If the Faust-idea in its broadest conception is
that of a drama of humanity, or the struggles of the
human soul against the limitations of the finite and
imperfect, and its final triumph in its self-reconcilia-
tion to the eternai law of the AU-wise and the AU-
loving, and its attainment in this to true freedom
and to true satisfaction, then we may most reason-
ably expect to find ali truly human music embody-
ing in some measure this idea. Objection may be
made to our attempting to read the Faust-idea in
this fashion into music, just as the same objection
has been made to the efforts of those scholars who
would read into Goethe's own version of the Faust-
legend a universal moral import But I do not
think the question primarily regards the particular
moral import of either poem or music, but rather
the prior fact of their truthfulness as portrayals of
humanity. If they are true to human nature the
moral will be already there, with or without our
" reading in." The question will only be that of
our ability to discover it, and the wider one's
knowledge, and the deeper one's sympathy with
one's human kind, the better able will one be to
detect wherein the art of tone has been the true
ìnterpreter of the art of words.
Dismissing this general discussion, it is my pur-
pose in this paper to consider in detail the respec-
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1 26 Faust in Musu.
tive qualitìes of the more important musical settings
of the Faust-drama by our modem composers —
namely, those of Spohr, Gounod, Berlioz, Boito, and
Schumann.
Remarkable as is the fact that this drama of the
ages, as the Faust-legend has been not unfitly called,
should have waited until the nineteenth Christian
century for its adequate literary embodiment ; not
less so are the remarkable efforts in the same period
to give the legend a proper musical setting. The
intellectual and the emotional contents of the deeply
graved story find simultaneous utterance. It is in
this coincidence of artistic endeavour that a very
interesting psychological phenomenon occurs, in,
namely, the exhibition here afforded of the power
of the musician to penetrate and seize the most
subtle phases of ethical and religious emotion, and to
give these due expression in his art A comparison
of these several musical settings is therefore at the
same time a kind of psychological study of the
several composers. The effort will be not to
form any absolute judgment as to comparative
excellence, but to detect, as far as we may be able,
that peculiar moral and religious phase of the
drama which is emphasized in each of the musical
Works under consideration.
I have named Spohr at the head of the list
because his opera was the earliest to be produced,
and also requires the briefest notice here. It is
with some hesitation that I include him in the list
of interpreters of the " Faust-idea," for the reason
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Faust in Music. 127
that his Hbrettist's idea was as remote as possible
from that, at least, of Goethe, however eamestly it
may bave reflected some of the cruder mediaeval
versions of the legend. Faust, after going through
a number of exploits of very doubtful valour or
honour, is finally carried off triumphantly to Hell,
amid the . rejoicing shouts of the infemal hosts.
The story reads more like the popular Don Juan of
other operas, and the music is alike sensational in
character, hardly anywhere acquiring the dignity of
a moral import. The composition is by no means
without merit musically considered, several of the
soprano arias being remarkable for their brilliancy,
and even to this day popular on the concert stage,
and bere and there a deep strong pathos, com-
bined with sober purity of form, reminds one even
of GlQck. But we do not think of this music as
belonging to the subjective school in which the real
opera alone finds its place — a school whose art is
bom of an idea clearly conceived in the mind and
afterwards shaping to itself a musical form as its
purest and fullest manifestation. The music of
Spohr's "Faust" might readily be sung to the
libretti of many other operas of the time without
any apparent lack of adaptation. It is pleasant
Society-music, if we may use the term — a sort of
delicious and exhilarating accompaniment to the
waving of perfumed fans, the drawing on of gloves,
hastily snatched glimpses of the brilliantly dressed
house, and a half-suppressed murmur of gay con-
versation. If we could conceive of Faust as in the
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128 Faust in Music.
modem sense a " Society man," whìch somehow
we find it impossible to do, we might find this
somewhat flippant opera more deserving of study
than it at present seems to us.
With the other four compositions to which I
invite attention, there is surely no lack of subjec-
tive and eamest content. It is doubtful if, except
in the oratorios and sacred cantatas of the masters
of sacred music, there is manifest anywhere so
eamest an intent in musical writing as we find in
these Works — the " Faust " of Schumann and that
of Gounod, the " Damnation " of Berlioz, and the
" Mefistofele " of Boìto. In none, with the excep-
tion of Schumann's " Scenes," is the text precisely
that of Goethe, but ali derive their theme from his
version of the legend, and foUow his drama with
sufficient nearness to enable them to be judged as
by a common standard in their literary content
They differ so widely, however, in the special
theme or phase of the drama chosen by each com-
poser for musical setting, that they are rather to be
regarded as constituting together one complete
expression, than as so many various treatments of
a single subject The deep ijitellectual insight
into the meaning of the drama, and the vivid
realization of its successive great motives in the
language of tone by those writers, are a significant
indication of the real progress of the musical art
In neither of these works is the dramatic theme
subordinated to the mere play of musical sounds.
It is everywhere true opera in the genuine sense.
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Faust in Music. 129
and that so lofty a theme should have found even
so many worthy interpreters is a fact that lends a
new dignity to the vocation of the musical com-
poser.
Of the five composers named, two have extended
their libretti into the Second Part of the drama, and
two have ended with the First The moral content
of the Faust-idea is of course incomplete without
the Second Part We may look for the reason of
this variety of choice in the peculiar moral sensi-
bility or receptivity in the mind of the respective
composer with regard to the phases which he has
chosen to embody in his work. Viewed in this
light our study ought to illustrate the universality
of both the poem and the music to which the Faust-
idea has been the common inspiration.
It is to this kind of ethico-musical analysis that
I shall mainly confine my observations on tìie works
before us. A purely musical criticism would be
quite remote from my present purpose ; and I
humbly hope that to many readers, who would
shrink from a merely technical disquisition on a
musical subject, my proposed treatment of the one
before us may not be wholly unattractive.
The four phases of the drama which, I believe,
have found each its distinctive expression in the
several works before us are the following : The
Satanic or Infernal, the Pagan and Classic, the
Spiritual and the Religious.
The first, I hardly need say, is that which lends
its lurid and fateful hue to the music throughout of
I
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130 Faust in Music.
the "Damnation de Faust," by Berlioz. Terrible
as it sounds to characterize the exquisite writing of
this gifted genius as infernal, I know of no other
term by which to distinguish the power and the
speli of his music. Not here alone, but in much
else that he has written, we seem to hear the chant
of the death angel, the chorus of the accursed, the
sad — how sad and penetrating! — lament of the
despairing and the lost Beauty, a depth of hectic
colour, a kind of feverish glow and gleam, the repose
which is that of languor rather than of rest, the
awful, irresistible tread of Fate — pleasure tasted on
the brink of endless sorrow, the hope which is
against hope — ^these are what pulsate beneath the
weirdly beautiful tones of this saddest of musical
writers. The title of the work speaks for the
thorough honesty of the writer. It is not the
elevation but the degradatìon of the human soul —
the despair of humanity — before the awful doom of
" him that accuses " and denies, that is here depicted
in most feeling language. The triumph of Satan,
the jubilant howl of evil spirits, the stifling speli of
the infernal atmospheres, give a kind of undertoné
to ali the scenes described, even those in which a
certain mockery of peace, love, and happiness sheds
a thin, faint gleam of warmth and light If there
is a delicious sorrow in the prelude and in Faust's
soliloquy under the influence of Nature, it is nòt
that which is born of sympathy with an infinite life,
but of an anticipation of the inevitable decay and
death that threatens ali. It is the music of pessi-
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Faust in Music. 131
mism and of despair. That this triumph of
Mephistopheles should have proved so acceptable
to the public as is evinced by the wide popularity
of Berlioz's work, and also by the recent successful
run of Irving's version of the play at the Lyceum,
in which Satan's róle is in every sense the leading
one, must not necessarily be construed as indicating
a correspondingly diabolical predilection in the
public sentiment that finds its satisfaction in these
portrayals. I attribute it rather to the intense
realism of both productions, a feature that appeals
more than any other to the dominant mental
craving of this time, as well as to a negative cause
in, namely, the failure of the general playgoing
public to penetrate deeply enough into the mora!
of the Faust-idea as wrought out by Goethe, to
know how really superficial and delusive this
triumph of "the evil one" is. The discipline of
temptation, the awful combat between the angel
principle and the devil principle in man, is only
seemingly closed by physical death or the captivity
of the body. An intense conflict is to follow — ^a
conflict lying deeper than the piane of the body's
passions ; a conflict among the principles that go
to make up human society. The soul of the larger
man is to be tried ; the field of this temptation
widens beyond the limitations of the Saxon race
and the Christian religion ; the struggling tenden-
cies inherited from the past existence of the race
must come to their conscious realization and de-
cision bere in the breast of this typical prophet and
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132 Faust in Music.
martyr. Those who see the drama closed with the
awful flight to Hell, depicted as no one but Berlioz
could do it, and carry away only the vision of its
lurid depths, are, however, hardly more deficient in
a true apprehension of the moral scope of the legend
than the majority of those good sober-minded
people who object on principle to the finding of any
good and wholesome moral in a play of this nature.
Both classes fall far short of that conception which,
in the initial germ, as well as in the completed de-
velopment of the Faust-idea, is at once its redeem-
ing element and its lasting glory. For, whether in
the ancient story of Job, in which Fronde has
detected the substance of the legend, or in Goethe's
drama, the dominant idea is undoubtedly that of an
all-ruling Divine Providence, which embraces even
the hells in its dominion, and whose laws include
even the permission of evil that thereby greater
good may come. That the dark side of the argu-
ment should have been the first to be recognized is
only naturai, and that hence should be drawn a
theme for popular presentation, rather than from
the other more subtle and deeply hidden one,
whether by the musician or stage-manager, is not a
matter of surprise. If we judge a work of art by
the thoroughness with which its end is attained, no
one will withhold the highest tribute of praise from
Berlioz's most successful work. It is not alone the
musical representation of passion, grief, and despair,
in their deepest throes ; it is the apotheosis of the
inhuman, the bestiai, the vile. Witness the songs
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Faust in Music. 133
of the " Rat " and the " Flea." Was music ever put
to so base a use before ? And yet ìt is realistic art,
in precisely the same sense that we apply this term
to the carnai and cadaverous canvasses that occupy
so large a space in the French Salon. It hymns, as
the latter record, the triumph of matter, of the flesh,
and of death. Sweet and pathetic beyond ali words
to describe is this dying Psyche song ; the wail of
the human soul, as the last gleam of the noble, the
tender, the beautiful in man and woman, fades from
our vision.
Unlike Berlioz, Boito, while also choosing the
Satanic title for his work, writes in a more nor-
mally human spirit, and gives us a far healthier
and more genial rendering of the story. His
theme embraces the Second Part, and thus intro-
duces the idea of the final redemption of Faust ;
but it is not this completion of the moral motive of
the drama that constitutes the distinguishing traìt
of this composition, so much as that which is inci-
dental to it — namely, the introduction of the
Hellenic, or classic element, through the admission
of the Helena episode from the Second Part. This
supplies the key-note for our understanding the
peculiar charm which the work of Boi'to possesses
throughout. It is the loveliness of Helen, the
Greek passion for the beautiful as such ; it is
human love, neither refined by the elimination of
passion nor yet seasoned with the guilty lust of sin,
but rather purely naturai and free. This element,
while suffusing the whole work with a certain
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134 Faust in Music.
voluptuous and sensual glamour, is yet not fraught
with the seed of corruption and death. If it is
sin, it isyet not the sin done in the light, but in
the sleep of Nature, in which the Christian con-
science is not yet awakened. It may be animai ;
it is not bestiai. This peculiar character of the
moral sentiment embodied in Boito's music is what
leads me to cali it Pagan in contrast with the Saxon-
Christian element which pervades the other three.
The music of the revel and the dance is that of the
dithyrambic chorus of the Greeks; a Dionysian
sweetness and mellowness runs through the half-
dreamy bars introducing the garden scene and the
light-hearted play of the lovers ; the mocking gal-
lantries of Mefistofele with Marta are like the
innocent pranks of the Satyr of old — the declaration
of love, the pledge, the flight, ali teem with the
fervid passion of inexperienced youth ; the un-
stayed current of unreflecting, unquestioning love.
Even where the composer has attempted to portray
the calmer, deeper emotions, as in Faust's soliloquy
on his return from his walk in the fields, and in his
prayer addressed to Helen as the ideal type of the
beautiful, the vein of music struck is not one that
reaches deeper than the senses, beautiful as these
passages undoubtedly are. Three scenes in the
opera do, however, deserve special notice, on
account of the immense power of artistic interpre-
tation which they exhibit. Naturai and earthly as
the emotions may be which they portray, they are
nevertheless deep and strong, and such as awaken
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Faust in Music. 135
a response in the human heart at ali times. I refer
to the wail of grief, the frenzy of despair, that is
uttered in Margaret's song, " Al Mare ; " to the
sweet but delusive vision of the peace of unending
love, in the duet, " Lontano, lontano ; " and, finally,
to the description of the night in Greece, which, in
the whiteness of its moonlight, its clear-cut shadows,
the very stars reflected in the bosom of the lake,
the melancholy fragrance of summer roses in the
air, is so marvellously drawn, in the duet between
Helen and her attendant in the classic scene.
Rarely do we find in music so exquisite an intellect
as here. It is the beauty of form left unveiled,
except with the merest film of a material covering.
It is Hke a Doric frieze, standing out white, pure,
and sharply defined against the purpling sky of an
Attic twilight Not more truly did Goethe bring
back the Hellenic spirit to German poetry than
has this Italian composer translated in this single
scene the classic modes into the musical form of our
time. The performance of this duet by Mesdames
Trebelli and Nilsson I remember, as I would a
veritable vision of a night in Athens.
From the " Mefistofele," let us pass now to the
" Scenes from Faust " of Schumann. This alone of
ali the compositions before us attempts to embody
in musical language the complete moral import of
the " Faust " of Goethe. The scenes of course
embrace the Second Part, and even include the
passage in which the solution of the deep problem
of human happiness is reached — in, namely, the
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136 Faust in Music.
discovery of the law of use, of mutuai service of
man to man, as the highest ideal of society — ^the
Divine destiny of man.
That the plots of Satan should have to yield to
a prosaic proposition of politicai economy — that the
charms of learning, of sensual pleasure, of intel-
lectual beauty, of empire, should ali lose their
potency in the face of a scheme to redeem some
waste land and provide for a comfortable home for
some poor tenants — this has been a difficult point
for the critics to reconcile to their ideas of aesthetic
unity and harmony. It has required a profounder
appreciation of human delight and human destiny
than was possessed by the ordinary poetasters and
their critics of the Roman tic school, to gain even a
glimpse of the sublime idea which the poet has
thus embodied. If it was a daring thing, such as
only a genuine master could have had the courage
and the strength to do, must we not admire the
musician who has dared even to attempt a worthy
musical expression of so lofty and yet so unpopular
a theme ! This Schumann has done in passages of
singular power and depth. In his portrayal of
Faust as that human soul that struggles for the
complete reconciliation of himself to the primeval
beneficent order of a Divine purpose, and that con-
sequently yearns for the sympathy of even the
inanimate world of Nature as well as for the com-
munion of an actual human brotherhood, there is a
lofty reach in Schumann's music which we are able
to describe by no other term than spiritual. In-
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Faust in Music. 137
tensely human throughout, it is nevertheless
thrilled ali the while with emotions that come
rather from the spiritual than from the sensual side
of our nature. The angelic choruses are indeed
strains, worthy to be heard in Heaven — mystery,
infinity, the sweet but awful secrets of the inter-
course of angels and men, the dreamy but joyous
ecstacies of the "blessed boys," the prayers and
adorations of martyrs and prophets — ali these seem
to be breathed into these numbers as if from some
bright door ajar into the upper world. A calm and
noble dignity, the repose which foretells the sure ful-
filment of the Divine purposes of good, stamps the
work with a distinctly ethical character in keeping
with its lofty theme. We feel that to divert and
amuse are functions almost too trivial for such art
as this: to elevate, to purify, and ennoble the
aspirations of men becomes alike the mission of the
poet and the musician. I know how lame my
attempts must be to define in words what I have
ventured to characterize as the spiritual character
of Schumann's interpretation of the drama. I can
only throw myself upon a supposed sympathetic
intuition of my reader in any appeal for his
approvai. The composer is only employing bere,
in a field adequate to his genius, the same deep
human insight and power of expression which
have characterized his other works, and which have
constituted him a kind of musical prophet. A
voice speaks bere which is deeper than intellect ; it
is rather the utterance of some celestial principle in
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138 Fatisi in Music.
the human soul, of a faculty that sees, and that
enables congenial souls to see, what cannot be put
in words. As Boìto's music was described as
sensuous without the element of sin, so Schumann
is human without being sensuous. In this subtle
influence of the affectional part of the mind,
that which arrives at perceptions and conveys them
to other minds without the formai intervention of
intellect, and thus awakens lofty emotions, even
without the aid of words, truly the music of
Schumann's "Faust " illustrates in no feeble way
in what manner
" Das ewig weibliche
Zieht uns heran."
It remains for me to point out in what manner
Gounod's opera holds a complementary relation to
ali the foregoing, and also combines in one work
their several distinctive qualities. It is as the
universal commingling of ali these characteristics
that I bave called Gounod's rendering of the drama
a pre-eminently religious one. For religion is the
name for that emotion in the human race which
makes possible the mutuai approach of the lowest
with the highest elements in our nature, which per-
mits Satan to converse face to face with Deity, and
equally enables the compassionate love of the
Father of mankind to reach down to the uttermost
depths to recali His lost child to Himself. But the
religious feeling which Gounod has bere painted in
tones, with truly a master's touch, is that of the
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Faust in Music, 139
Catholic Church. It has not the profoundly ethical
and universal character that finds expression in
Schumann, and that can comprehend a solution
of Faust's destiny like that which the Second
Part evolves ; but for this very reason it strikes
home more directly to the conscience of the masses,
who see somehow in Margaret's awful punish-
ment and death a kind of vicarious atonement for
the sin of her lover, and in the angelic strains of
the postlude hear the triumph of that Divine Love
which can by some means, more marvellous and
instantaneous than the slow process of moral
combat in the penitent soul, bring about the desired
heavenly transformation. The closing of the opera
with the First Part was, therefore, we may say, a
dramatic necessity, when the underlying motive
was the portrayal of the ordinary Christian senti-
ment. It is this echo of a deeply interwoven
consciousness of sin, of holy love profaned, of the
terrors of the Judgment Day, of the compas-
sionate mercy and the pardoning grace of God,
that has given Gounod's opera its vast ascendancy
over ali the others in popular favour. That it is
a profoundly religìous work does by no means
imply the absence of other characteristics, any more
than the religion of the Catholic Church excludes
the idea of what is sensuous, frolicsome, or even
diabolical. But the triumph of Divine compassion
is foretold alike in the condemnation of guilt, in
the awful throes of a remorseful conscience, in the
sensitive recoiling of a pure nature from the pre-
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I40 Faust in Music.
sence of the evil one, as in the last prayer of
Margaret, wherein the very music she sings seems
to break the prison bars and let her soul fly free to
Heaven. Powerfully as Mephistopheles is depicted
here, it is as a power that is rebuked, and must
crouch and crawl away defeated, rather than as the
real winner and victor in the struggle with the All-
Father. It is life rather than death that in the end
triumphs ; and if the sin is deep, it is deeply atoned
for, and the end is redemption.
The absence of the Pagan or classic scenes of the
drama, as well as of the Walpurgis-Nacht episode,
leaves the subject to be treated to much circum-
scribed limits, and the locai colouring given by both
the poet and the composer is decidedly Saxon in
its prevailing tone. The deep undertone of sadness
which is heard in the scenes where strong feeling is
described, even from the first note of the marvel-
lously subjective overture, is not an unfit expression
in tones of that most true analysis of the Saxon
religious character which the composer's country-
man, Taine, gives us in his History of Englisk
Literature. But, while the religious feeling is
Saxon, the power and presence of the Church as
described by Gounod is thoroughly Roman or
Latin. Thus the religious spirit breathes in the
choruses of angels and spirits in the earlier scenes :
it is shown in the mystic power of the Cross used
by the students in repelling Mephistopheles ; in the
holy dread which Faust feels on entering Margaret's
chamber, where
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Faust in Music. 141
" . . . . day by day each influence pure
Of heaven and earth her heart mature,
And fain would welcome forth, and win
To light, the angel from within."
We feel its awful presence in the curse of Valentina ;
in the delirious fears, the cairn, and the ecstasies of
Margaret in the Prison Scene ; and, most of ali, in
the sublime death-struggle, in which the soul finds
release and victory for herself and her beloved.
The Church, on the other hand, not only as
mocked by Mephistopheles, but as introduced in
her solemn offices as a factor in the drama, is purely
of the Roman type. It speaks the verdicts of the
irrevocable judgment of Deity, it pronounces the
calm and immovable exactions of the law. Terrible
and implacable as the Fates of the ancient tragedy
rises before the conscience-stricken Margaret the
impending sentence of her guilt Nowhere has this
feeling of the immutability of law, of the hopeless-
ness of doom, been depicted in the body and in the
form of music, more vividly than in the organ-pre-
lude to the Cathedral Scene. Is it not almost
cruelty intoned, in its steady, calm, but irresistible
onward movement, undeviating, heedless, merciless ?
The accusations of Satan from within find their
echo from without in the awful strains of the " Dies
irae," the Church's great objective representation of
the Divine judgment and of the just desert of sin.
The majesty, the power of the Church, speak in the
solemn tones of her own Gregorian chant. The
imprecations, the despair of centuries of lost and
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142 Faust in Music.
doomed lives, press down with their burden in these
massive and mighty chords. In these passages
from the Church's ritual the religious element of
the drama becomes localized and particularized, just
as the religious element itself is the particularizing
of the more uhiversal etìlica! spirit We can with-
out difficulty locate the drama of the First Part in
any of the quaint mùnster-cities of Southern
Germany, but the limits of our earth are almost
too narrow to meet the demands of the wider ex-
periences of the Second Part.
I have attempted neither an exhaustive descrip-
tion of these musical works, nor to form any
judgment as to their comparative merits, but have
adhered to my purpose of discovering the moral
moiif which distinguished each, or of which each
seemed to be a more complete embodiment. I
have spoken of Gounod's work as in a manner
embracing the motifs of the others, as well as sup-
plementing them with a distinct one of its own,
because this universality is what characterizes the
religious feeling itself It would be an interesting
psychological study to inquire how far the choice
of these several elements as subjects for their re-
spective treatment is the result of some prevailing
disposition or aptitude of the several composers, as
shown in their other works. We can hardly doubt
that the musical writing of each is the response
which his own artistic sense gives back on his being
impressed with a certain moral import of the legend.
The responses vary according to the differences in
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Faust in Music. 143
the impressions received, and these according to
the differences in the receptive organs. Such would
be a bold and intrusive kind of mental analysis, a
calling of these men to a kind of moral judgment
pronounced by their own works ; and I confess
that I should hesitate in daring to apply my own
method in estimating them as I have in estimating
their writing ; but in one case I feel that my
method is fully vindicated by the writer's sub-
sequent choice of theme — namely, in that of
Gounod. Not only has the real bent of his musical
genius, in spite of apparent efforts to tum it in
other directions, proved itself a distinctly religious
one by his virtual abandonment of secular for sacred
subjects, his decided preference for oratorio over
opera, ballet, and ali other forms of orchestrai
writing, but I doubt if in ali that he has written
there has been at bottom a religious feeling so
strong and all-pervading in its influence as in the
opera of "Faust" On this, rather than on the
later work so designated by the author himself, will
the public judgment of the future see written the
rightful tìtle — Opm vita mece.
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THE SECRET OF WAGNER.
To the interesting problem of the secret of
Wagner's power there is an added importance,
from the fact of the influence which this composer
has undoubtedly exerted on a vast number of
young and enthusiastic disciples the world over.
It is because there ìs in Wagner's music a power of
endurance, something which stimulates to effort
and tends to self-perpetuation through the voluntary
dìscipleship of loving and ardent votaries, that we
are compelled to admit that there is something real
in it, something based upon truth and nature, and
therèfore capable of appealing to human sympathy,
and of taking a real hold on the affections of men
and women every where.
In undertakìng to describe what this something
is, and so to account for the strange phenomenon
in the history of art of a popularity with the masses
of that which tasks the highest criticai powers of
musical scholars, I am confident I shall not
meet the views of any thorough Wagnerìan ; since
I am prepared neither to allow to the famous com-
poser the exclusive credit for that which is best in
his theories, nor can I accept his music as the
highest outcome yet witnessed of the practìcal
application of his theories to the musical art
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The Secret of Wagner. 145
What has been, by bis critics, called Wagner's
grave blunder — bis assuming tbe doublé function
of poet and composer, wbicb is at tbe same time
beld by bis admirers to be a conspicuous merit — is
in reality only tbe carrying out, in fuller detail, of
a principle exbibited in many illustrious works by
greater composers before bim. Ali tbe great
masters of tbe musical art bave been poets, or tbeir
own librettists, in a large and true sense. AH
music is " programme music," and tbe programme
exists in tbe mind of tbe composer wbetber be is
intellectually conscious of it or not, before or
simultaneously witb, bis writing. Tbe varying
abilities of tbe hearers to read tbe meaning of tbe
writing, is alone wbat makes tbe artificial distinc-
tion between wbat is commonly recognized as
programme music and wbat is not AH can read
tbe unwritten libretto of tbe Pastoral Sympbony,
and of tbe sympbonic poems of Berlioz. In bis
great trilogy, Wagner bas only added tbe pro-
gramme written out in full, so tbat wbat was in
bis mind, fornung tbe tbeme of bis musical work,
may tbereby be tbe more distinctly in tbe bearer's
mind wbile listening.
Nor can we concede tbe claim of originality in
wbat is called tbe musical etbics of Wagner, the
place be assigns to music as nearest of ali tbe
arts to tbe " originai idea " and tbe ** will to Uve."
Pbilosopby bas always taugbt tbat tbere is some-
tbing in life deeper than tbougbt and lying beyond
tbe scope of verbal utterance, and tbat to appeal
K
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146 The Secret of Wagner.
to this and to g^ve this expression is the highest
vocation of art. The theory elaborately clothed
by Wagner in metaphysical terms is only what
every lover of music can confirm from his own
experience. AH who know the true power of
music are aware of that supreme satisfaction and
sense of relief one feels in listening to a great
musical work, as if the soul within had found a
mode of realizing its infinite longings which no
other form of art could furnish. Such music
approaches indeed the "infinite idea" so far as it
g^ves form to an infinite and ever-varying emotion,
or " will to live." Wagner has not so much erred
in his lofty conception of the musical art, or in his
ambitious striving to attain its realization, as bave
those who would attribute the origin of this con-
ception to Wagner, or hold that he alone has
achieved this realization. In my own judgment,
Bach, Handel, and Beethoven bave more fully than
Wagner himself realized the lofty scope and the
peculiarly Divine power of the art of musical com-
position.
But if I deny to Wagner the title of musìcian of
the future, it is because I accord to him so fully
that of musician of to-day ; and herein I think is
to be found the answer to the whole question of his
extraordinary popularity and influence. The
music of Wagner has given voice to the spirit of
the present age as that of no other composer has
done. It is not the spirit of perfected humanity, of
calm and elevated contemplation, of perfectly ad-
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The Secret of Wagner. 147
justed and harmonious activities, of wholesome and
enduring delight — of Hfe, in a word, at its best ; it
is rather the spirit of unrest, of doubt, of mingled
despair and hope, of struggle and ambition, of
pride and presumptìon mingled with the weak
yielding of the cowardly, the ignoble and base.
Our age is not the age of humanity at its best ;
the affectional light tìiat inspires it and seeks an
utterance in music does not differ from that which
seeks its expression in other forms of art, in the
painting, the architecture, and the literature of our
day. Without wishing to be pessimistic, it is
difficult to convince ourselves in these days that the
productions of our time in either of these directions
are really great in the sense that we feel the works
of the masters of other days to be. We have
neither a Michael Angelo, a Leonardo, a Dante, nor
a Shakespeare to point to as the eminent embodi-
ment of the spirit of our time. Our time itself is
not an ideal but an essentially materialistic time.
Its distinguishing virtue, if it have any, is its
realism. Its mis3Ìon is that of striking at the roots
of things ; and amid the blows, the cruel gashes
of the axe and the crash of the falling monarchs
of the past, there is little space for heeding the
gentler voices of the spirits that hover in the
upper air.
An age whose architectural triumphs are to be
chiefly seen in Railway Stations, Stock Exchanges,
and Eiffel Towers; whose art delights chiefly in
depicting the carnage of the battlefield or the dis-
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148 The Secret of Wagner.
secting-room, or the life of the slums or of the
demi-monde ; whose plea of " realism '* is made to
cover, like a mantle, a multitude of sins in its
literature more corrupting even than the grossness of
its art, in what music can such an age find its own
awful struggle for life depicted in tone better than in
those manifold creations of real genius in which
Wagner has repeated again and again the same sad
and tragic tale ? It is at once a tale and a confession.
The whole chaotic disorder of our time, our menta!
perplexities, our social and moral confusion, rolls on
in its turbid, remorseless, resistless flood, through
these prophetic strains of Wagner's music. We
read in the libretto, indeed, of Brunhild and Sieg-
fried ; we hear voices whispering about the music of
the future. As a matter of fact, we are beholding,
under whatever mediaeval name or guise, only the
drama of to-day, the awful struggle of its own real-
ism with what is left of its ideal or spiritual life.
To have given this spirit of degraded but struggling
humanity a voice in that language, which of ali
forms of utterance is the most immediate language
of the soul, is surely no mean service. It is some-
thing to have written even the music of Bedlam :
and at a time like this — ^when, in a very real sense
because applying to the things of mind, the world
has reached its judgment day and is witnessing the
" consummation of the age," the struggle of the
shadows of the past with the dawning gleams of the
new day — to have given prophetic voice to this
state of our humanity ; to its yearnings, its despair.
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The Secret of Wagner. 149
to its striving and its hope of ultimate victory ; is
the highest office of the musical composer, and con-
stitutes the great and enduring merit of Richard
Wagner, and the secret of his powerful hold upon
the popular mind.
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THE ONE AND THE MANY.
The moming sun lies mirrored in the sea,
Whose glassy waves, heaving in noiseless swell,
Break it in many shapes. In dancing glee
The many suns their glittering falsehoods teli
To skipper's children, who, with idle gaze,
Stare down the gently rising schooner's side.
" Oh, count the little suns ! " the younger says ;
"See how they come and shine, and quickly
hide."
" Black suns for every shining one I see,"
The elder cries, " and dragon-shaped and queer ! "
At evening, in one vast tranquillity.
The seas a fair, reflected heaven appear,
While the great sun drops calmly to his rest,
The manifold, at last, as one confessed.
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GOOD FRIDAY IN ST. MUNGO'S.
That day our blessed Lord was cnicified
I entered a cathedral vast and gfrey,
Whose builders with their faith have passed away.
No more by fervent worship occupied,
A deathful chili did there instead abide,
While idly gazing visitors dìd stray,
Forgetful ali of sacred place and day ;
If but the sight were seen, well satisfied.
Only aloft the organ's plaintive tone
A player hid from vulgar gaze did wake,
And such sweet music through the arches pour
That the old shrine did tremble with a moan,
As if in that its very heart did break
In longing for its ancient prayer once more.
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"ALL THAT DOTH PASS AWAY.'
" Alles Vergànliche ist nur ein Gleichniss." — Goethe.
All that doth pass away is but the form
Reflected from the real that remains.
'Tis I that bear within me peace and storm,
The world with ali its losses and its gains.
Even the body*s shape and all its sense
Is but the mirror wherein I may scan
My inner self ; but bear the mirror hence
Or break to atoms, stili remains the man.
So death may change the outer circumstance
But to reveal the real world within,
And let me see, in one astonished glance, ^
The vision of my virtue or my sin ;
And going hence from out this shattered shell
I carry with me my own heaven or hell.
'> ROBERT K. SUTHBRLAND, PRINTBX, BDINBUXCH. .. "^
x^N^by Google
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it
TmS BOOK Id BUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW
AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS
WILL BE A88E88ED FOR FAILURE TO RCTURN
THI8 BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY
WILL INCREA8E TO 50 CEHTB ON THE FOURTH
DAY AND TO $I.OO ON THE 8EVENTH ÓAY
OVERDUE.
MOV 20 1932
DEC 26 1933
LD 21-50w-8,.32
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YB 0IC3
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