What the Writings Testify
What the Writings Testify
NOTES:
States Experienced for the Sake of Instruction
For the sake of learning the manner in which the Old Testament was "inspired as to every letter", Swedenborg was also permitted to experience certain states like those of the prophets. Thus spirits were occasionally permitted to dictate to him and even seemingly to lead his hand:
"This [happened] very rarely, and only for the sake of information that revelations are effected in this way also. But these papers have been destroyed (deletae) because God Messiah was unwilling that it should be effected in this way. Nor has it been permitted that anything should be dictated viva voce ...but while it was being written, the [spirits] were silent.(6) These matters, God Messiah granting, will be spoken of more fully elsewhere, in order that men may know how revelations took place formerly ..." (WE 7006, written in 1746)
" ... It was not allowed me to tell anything here of what was dictated to me orally by any one of them. When this was done, the writing had to be obliterated, it being allowed me to tell only such things as flowed in from God Messiah alone, both mediately through them, and also immediately - which yet was manifest to me." (WE 1892)
"When I was writing and was in a certain intermediate celestial perception, it was perceived and said that each and all the words and syllables, with their little curves, were perceived by the celestials, and as it were spoke to them. This is effected from the affection in which the man then is, having been communicated to the hand, or being in the hand; for the hand, being power, is the man himself. Hence it was evident in what manner the Word has been inspired, that it is so, as to every single jot and apex. Hence it is that the handwriting is according to the affection and obscurity of the animus with me." (SD 4820)
"[The spirits] who now spoke to me said that the things which I had written are so crude and gross, that they judged that nothing interior could
One crossed-off passage reads: "The above was written only by my hand, not by my mind".
be understood from those words or from the mere sense of the words. I perceived also by a spiritual idea that this was so, that they were indeed very crude; wherefore it was given me to answer that they are only vessels into which purer, better, and interior things can be infused, as a literal sense, and that there are many such vessels, as it were, of the sense of the letter in the prophetical books ...(SD 2185)
"[The angels] especially observed what the inspiration is of those things which are written in the Word of the Lord. For now it has appeared to them in what way, and in what an abundance, there inflowed into those things which were written by me; and this not only into the several words and the ideas of the words; nay, it seemed to them as if certain ones were holding my hand and were writing, claiming that they were the ones who were writing. It was also granted me to perceive by a spiritual idea, nay, as it were to feel beforehand, what was in the most minute singulars of each little letter which was being written. Hence it is as in clear light that the Word of the Lord is inspired as to every letter. 1748, June 10." (SD 2270; compare 557)
Swedenborg also was shown "by living experience" how the prophets of Israel had been obsessed," and how they had experienced various types of visions.(10) Yet the things ordinarily "seen and heard" by Swedenborg in the other life were not classed as "visions". He wrote, "I asseverate that these things are not visions, but sights in complete wakefulness" (CLJ 35) or "in the highest wakefulness of the body" (AC 1885).
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