Swedenborg's state was a state of reason, whether he viewed this world or
the other. His early scientific studies, unbalanced by any real
appreciation of art, moulded his mind into a rigid state which was
impervious to any outside stimulus. When he turned to religion, he made
the barren attempt to trim the mysteries of the Faith until they came
wholly within the grasp of the understanding. This is a rationalizing
process. Swedenborgians may object to hear their master called a
rationalist. It is true that that term is usually applied to those who
have no supersensual vision, and even deny its existence. Swedenborg is,
of course, sharply distinguished from all such, but he has with them the
same fundamental trust of reason, which in their case is used to gauge the
things of this world, in his the things of the other. Hence when he has
raised our expectations to a dizzy height, as he is about to report on
things seen and heard in heaven and hell, there is a ludicrous anticlimax
when we find that the angels are simply religious and talk theology
everlastingly, that heaven is like a well arranged Dutch tulip field, and
excepting one or two phases of hell the whole is just as exciting as a
problem in Euclid and as dull as a sanitary report. Hell alone stirred
some interest because its inmates had energy and blood. And therefore one
sympathizes with those spirits who, allowed to peep into heaven,
immediately chose to plunge themselves head-first into hell.
Now Blake, being a visionary, knew that vision depended on will, and he
learnt further from Swedenborg that it depended also on state, and so, as
a man's state changed, his vision changed also. Blake's state was the
imagination of the poetic genius (Los), Swedenborg's the dry logical
faculty of the unassisted reason (Urizen), and as Blake looked at
Swedenborg's heaven and hell, he saw them approaching one to the other and
finally with an impetuous rush locked in a marital embrace.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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