The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty. By Juan Josafat
Ben-Ezra, a converted Jew. Translated from the Spanish, with a
preliminary Discourse. By the Rev. Edward Irving, A.M. London, 1827.
See
supra
, vol. iii. p. 93.—
Ed.
P. 157, 4th edit.—
Ed.
Contents / Index
Notes on Noble's Appeal1
1827.
How natural it is to mistake the weakness of an adversary's arguments
for the strength of our own cause! This is especially applicable to Mr.
Noble's Appeal. Assuredly as far as Mr. Beaumont's Notes are concerned,
his victory is complete.
Sect. IV. p. 210.
The intellectual spirit is moving upon the chaos of minds, which
ignorance and necessity have thrown into collision and confusion; and
the result will be a new creation. "Nature" (to use the nervous
language of an-old writer,) "will be melted down and recoined; and all
will be bright and beautiful."
Alas! if this be possible now, or at any time henceforward, whence came
the dross? If nature be bullion that can be melted and thus purified by
the conjoint action of heat and elective attraction, I pray Mr. Noble to
tell me to what name or
genus
he refers the dross? Will he tell me, to
the Devil? Whence came the Devil? And how was the pure bullion so
thoughtlessly made as to have an elective affinity for this Devil?
Sect. V. p. 286.
The next anecdote that I shall adduce is similar in its nature to the
last * * *. The relater is Dr. Stilling, Counsellor at the Court of
the Duke of Baden, in a work entitled Die Theorie der Geister-Kunde,
printed in 1808.
Mr. Noble is a man of too much English good sense to have relied on
Sung's (
alias
Dr. Stilling's) testimony, had he ever read the work in
which this passage is found. I happen to possess the work; and a more
anile, credulous, solemn fop never existed since the days of old Audley.
It is strange that Mr. Noble should not have heard, that these three
anecdotes were first related by Immanuel Kant, and still exist in his
miscellaneous writings.
Ib. p. 315.
"Can he be a sane man who records the subsequent reverie as matter of
fact? The Baron informs us, that on a certain night a man appeared to
him in the midst of a strong shining light, and said, I am God the
Lord, the Creator and Redeemer; I have chosen thee to explain to men
the interior and spiritual sense of the Sacred Writings: I will
dictate to thee what thou oughtest to write? From this period, the
Baron relates he was so illumined, as to behold, in the clearest
manner, what passed in the spiritual world, and that he could converse
with angels and spirits as with men," &c.
I remember no such passage as this in Swedenborg's works. Indeed it is
virtually contradicted by their whole tenor. Swedenborg asserts himself
to relate
visa et audita
,—his own experience, as a traveller and
visitor of the spiritual world,—not the words of another as a mere
amanuensis
. But altogether this Gulielmus must be a silly Billy.
Ib. p. 321.
The Apostolic canon in such cases is, 'Believe not every spirit, but
try the spirits whether they be of God'. (1 John iv. 1.) And the
touchstone to which they are to be brought is pointed out by the
Prophet: To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according
to this word, it is because there is no truth in them. (Is. viii.
20.) But instead of this canon you offer another * * *. It is simply
this: Whoever professes to be the bearer of divine communications, is
insane. To bring Swedenborg within the operation of this rule, you
quote, as if from his own works, a passage which is nowhere to be
found in them, but which you seem to have taken from some biographical
dictionary or cyclopædia; few or none of which give anything like a
fair account of the matter.
Aye! my memory did not fail me, I find. As to insanity in the sense
intended by Gulielmus, namely, as
mania
,—I should as little think of
charging Swedenborg with it, as of calling a friend mad who laboured
under an
acyanoblepsia
.
Ib. p. 323.
Did you never read of one who says, in words very like your version of
the Baron's reverie: It came to pass, that, as I took my journey, and
was come nigh unto Damascus, about noon, suddenly there shone from
heaven a great light round about me: and I fell on the ground, and
heard a voice saying unto me, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
In the short space of four years the newspapers contained three several
cases, two of which I cut out, and still have among my ocean of papers,
and which, as stated, were as nearly parallel, in external
accompaniments, to St. Paul's as cases can well be:—struck with
lightning,—heard the thunder as an articulate voice,—blind for a few
days, and suddenly recovered their sight. But then there was no Ananias,
no confirming revelation to another. This it was that justified St. Paul
as a wise man in regarding the incident as supernatural, or as more than
a providential omen.
N.B.
Not every revelation requires a sensible
miracle as the credential; but every revelation of a new series of
credenda
. The prophets appealed to records of acknowledged authority,
and to their obvious sense literally interpreted. The Baptist needed no
miracle to attest his right of calling sinners to repentance. See
Exodus
iv. 10.
Ib. pp. 346, 7.
This sentiment, that miracles are not the proper evidences of doctrinal
truth, is, assuredly, the decision of the Truth itself; as is obvious
from many passages in Scripture. We have seen that the design of the
miracles of Moses, as external performances, was not to instruct the
Israelites in spiritual subjects, but to make them obedient subjects of
a peculiar species of political state. And though the miracles of Jesus
Christ collaterally served as testimonies to his character, he
repeatedly intimates that this was not their main design. * * * At
another time more plainly still, he says, that it is a wicked and
adulterous generation (that) seeketh after a sign; on which occasion,
according to Mark, he sighed deeply in his spirit. How characteristic
is that touch of the Apostle, The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks
seek after wisdom! (where by wisdom he means the elegance and
refinement of Grecian literature.)
Agreeing, as in the main I do, with the sentiments here expressed by
this eloquent writer, I must notice that he has, however, mistaken the
sense of the
Greek: saemeion
which the Jews would have tempted our
Saviour to shew,—namely, the signal for revolt by openly declaring
himself their king, and leading them against the Romans. The
foreknowledge that this superstition would shortly hurry them into utter
ruin caused the deep sigh,—as on another occasion, the bitter tears.
Again, by the
Greek: sophía
of the Greeks their disputatious
Greek: sophistikàe
is meant. The sophists pretended to teach wisdom as an art:
and
sophistæ
may be literally rendered, wisdom-mongers, as we say,
iron-mongers.
Ib. p. 350.
Some probably will say, "What argument can induce us to believe a man
in a concern of this nature who gives no visible credentials to his
authority?" * * * But let us ask in return, "Is it worthy of a being
wearing the figure of a man to require such proofs as these to
determine his judgment?" * * * "The beasts act from the impulse of
their bodily senses, but are utterly incapable of seeing from reason
why they should so act: and it might easily be shewn, that while a man
thinks and acts under the influence of a miracle, he is as much
incapable of perceiving from any rational ground why he should thus
think and act, as a beast is." "What!" our opponents will perhaps
reply, * * * "Was it not by miracles that the prophets (some of them)
testified their authority? Do you not believe these facts?" Yes, my
friends, I do most entirely believe them, &c.
There is so much of truth in all this reasoning on miracles, that I feel
pain in the thought that the result is false,—because it was not the
whole truth. But this is the grounding, and at the same time pervading,
error of the Swedenborgians;—that they overlook the distinction between
congruity with reason, truth of consistency, or internal possibility of
this or that being objectively real, and the objective reality as fact.
Miracles, 'quoad' miracles, can never supply the place of subjective
evidence, that is, of insight. But neither can subjective insight supply
the place of objective sight. The certainty of the truth of a
mathematical arch can never prove the fact of its existence. I
anticipate the answers; but know that they likewise proceed from the
want of distinguishing between ideas, such as God, Eternity, the
responsible Will, the Good, and the like,—the actuality of which is
absolutely subjective, and includes both the relatively subjective and
the relatively objective as higher or transcendant realities, which
alone are the proper objects of faith, the great postulates of reason in
order to its own admission of its own being,—the not distinguishing, I
say, between these, and those positions which must be either matters of
fact or fictions. For such latter positions it is that miracles are
required in lieu of experience. A.'s testimony of experience supplies
the want of the same experience for B. C. D., &c. For example, how many
thousands believe the existence of red snow on the testimony of Captain
Parry! But who can expect more than hints in a marginal note?
Sect. VI. pp. 378, 9; 380, 1.
In the general views, then, which are presented in the writings of
Swedenborg on the subject of Heaven and Hell, as the abodes,
respectively, of happiness and of misery, while there certainly is not
anything which is not in the highest degree agreeable both to reason
and Scripture, there also seems nothing which could be deemed
inconsistent with the usual conceptions of the Christian world.
What tends to render thinking readers a little sceptical, is the want of
a distinct boundary between the deductions from reason, and the
articles, the truth of which is to rest on the Baron's personal
testimony, his
visa et audita
. Nor is the Baron himself (as it appears
to me) quite consistent on this point.
Ib. p. 434.
Witness, again, the poet Milton, who introduces active sports among
the recreations which he deemed worthy of angels, and (strange indeed
for a Puritan!) included even dancing among the number.
How could a man of Noble's sense and sensibility bring himself thus to
profane the awful name of Milton, by associating it with the epithet
"Puritan?"
I have often thought of writing a work to be entitled
Vindiciæ
Heterodoxæ, sive celebrium virorum Greek: paradogmatizóntôn defensio
;
that is, Vindication of Great Men unjustly branded; and at such times
the names prominent to my mind's eye have been Giordano Bruno, Jacob
Behmen, Benedict Spinoza, and Emanuel Swedenborg. Grant, that the origin
of the Swedenborgian theology is a problem; yet on which ever of the
three possible hypotheses—(possible I mean for gentlemen, scholars and
Christians)—it may be solved—-namely:
-
Swedenborg's own assertion
and constant belief in the hypothesis of a supernatural illumination;
or,
-
that the great and excellent man was led into this belief by
becoming the subject of a very rare, but not (it is said) altogether
unique, conjunction of the somniative faculty (by which the products of
the understanding, that is to say, words, conceptions and the like, are
rendered instantaneously into forms of sense) with the voluntary and
other powers of the waking state; or,
-
the modest suggestion that the first and second may not be so
incompatible as they appear—still it ought never to be forgotten that
the merit and value of Swedenborg's system do only in a very secondary
degree depend on any one of the three. For even though the first were
adopted, the conviction and conversion of such a believer must,
according to a fundamental principle of the New Church, have been
wrought by an insight into the intrinsic truth and goodness of the
doctrines, severally and collectively, and their entire consonance with
the light of the written and of the eternal word, that is, with the
Scriptures and with the sciential and the practical reason. Or say that
the second hypothesis were preferred, and that by some hitherto
unexplained affections of Swedenborg's brain and nervous system, he from
the year 1743, thought and reasoned through the 'medium' and
instrumentality of a series of appropriate and symbolic visual and
auditual images, spontaneously rising before him, and these so clear and
so distinct, as at length to overpower perhaps his first suspicions of
their subjective nature, and to become objective for him, that is, in
his own belief of their kind and origin,—still the thoughts, the
reasonings, the grounds, the deductions, the facts illustrative, or in
proof, and the conclusions, remain the same; and the reader might derive
the same benefit from them as from the sublime and impressive truths
conveyed in the Vision of Mirza or the Tablet of Cebes. So much even
from a very partial acquaintance with the works of Swedenborg, I can
venture to assert; that as a moralist Swedenborg is above all praise;
and that as a naturalist, psychologist, and theologian, he has strong
and varied claims on the gratitude and admiration of the professional
and philosophical student.—April 1827.
P. S.
Notwithstanding all that Mr. Noble says in justification of his
arrangement, it is greatly to be regretted that the contents of this
work are so confusedly tossed together. It is, however, a work of great
merit.
An Appeal in behalf of the views of the eternal world and
state, and the doctrines of faith and life, held by the body of
Christians who believe that a New Church is signified (in the
Revelation, c. xxi.) by the New Jerusalem, including Answers to
objections, particularly those of the Rev. G. Beaumont, in his work
entitled "The Anti-Swedenborg." Addressed to the reflecting of all
denominations. By Samuel Noble, Minister of Hanover Street Chapel,
London. London, 1826.
Ed.
Contents / Index
Faith may be defined, as fidelity to our own being—so far as such being
is not and cannot become an object of the senses; and hence, by clear
inference or implication, to being generally, as far as the same is not
the object of the senses: and again to whatever is affirmed or
understood as the condition, or concomitant, or consequence of the same.
This will be best explained by an instance or example. That I am
conscious of something within me peremptorily commanding me to do unto
others as I would they should do unto me;—in other words, a categorical
(that is, primary and unconditional) imperative;—that the maxim
(
regula maxima
or supreme rule) of my actions, both inward and
outward, should be such as I could, without any contradiction arising
therefrom, will to be the law of all moral and rational beings;—this, I
say, is a fact of which I am no less conscious (though in a different
way), nor less assured, than I am of any appearance presented by my
outward senses. Nor is this all; but in the very act of being conscious
of this in my own nature, I know that it is a fact of which all men
either are or ought to be conscious;—a fact, the ignorance of which
constitutes either the non-personality of the ignorant, or the guilt, in
which latter case the ignorance is equivalent to knowledge wilfully
darkened. I know that I possess this consciousness as a man, and not as
Samuel Taylor Coleridge; hence knowing that consciousness of this fact
is the root of all other consciousness, and the only practical
contradistinction of man from the brutes, we name it the conscience; by
the natural absence or presumed presence of which, the law, both divine
and human, determines whether X Y Z be a thing or a person:—the
conscience being that which never to have had places the objects in the
same order of things as the brutes, for example, idiots; and to have
lost which implies either insanity or apostasy. Well—this we have
affirmed is a fact of which every honest man is as fully assured as of
his seeing, hearing or smelling. But though the former assurance does
not differ from the latter in the degree, it is altogether diverse in
the kind; the senses being morally passive, while the conscience is
essentially connected with the will, though not always, nor indeed in
any case, except after frequent attempts and aversions of will,
dependent on the choice. Thence we call the presentations of the senses
impressions, those of the conscience commands or dictates. In the senses
we find our receptivity, and as far as our personal being is concerned,
we are passive;—but in the fact of the conscience we are not only
agents, but it is by this alone, that we know ourselves to be such; nay,
that our very passiveness in this latter is an act of passiveness, and
that we are patient (
patientes
)—not, as in the other case, 'simply'
passive. The result is, the consciousness of responsibility; and the
proof is afforded by the inward experience of the diversity between
regret and remorse.
If I have sound ears, and my companion speaks to me with a due
proportion of voice, I may persuade him that I did not hear, but cannot
deceive myself. But when my conscience speaks to me, I can, by repeated
efforts, render myself finally insensible; to which add this other
difference in the case of conscience, namely, that to make myself deaf
is one and the same thing with making my conscience dumb, till at length
I become unconscious of my conscience. Frequent are the instances in
which it is suspended, and as it were drowned, in the inundation of the
appetites, passions and imaginations, to which I have resigned myself,
making use of my will in order to abandon my free-will; and there are
not, I fear, examples wanting of the conscience being utterly destroyed,
or of the passage of wickedness into madness;—that species of madness,
namely, in which the reason is lost. For so long as the reason
continues, so long must the conscience exist either as a good
conscience, or as a bad conscience.
It appears then, that even the very first step, that the initiation of
the process, the becoming conscious of a conscience, partakes of the
nature of an act. It is an act, in and by which we take upon ourselves
an allegiance, and consequently the obligation of fealty; and this
fealty or fidelity implying the power of being unfaithful, it is the
first and fundamental sense of Faith. It is likewise the commencement of
experience, and the result of all other experience. In other words,
conscience, in this its simplest form, must be supposed in order to
consciousness, that is, to human consciousness. Brutes may be, and are
scions, but those beings only, who have an I,
scire possunt hoc vel
illud una cum seipsis
; that is,
conscire vel scire aliquid mecum
, or
to know a thing in relation to myself, and in the act of knowing myself
as acted upon by that something.
Now the third person could never have been distinguished from the first
but by means of the second. There can be no He without a previous Thou.
Much less could an I exist for us, except as it exists during the
suspension of the will, as in dreams; and the nature of brutes may be
best understood, by conceiving them as somnambulists. This is a deep
meditation, though the position is capable of the strictest
proof,—namely, that there can be no I without a Thou, and that a Thou
is only possible by an equation in which I is taken as equal to Thou,
and yet not the same. And this again is only possible by putting them in
opposition as correspondent opposites, or correlatives. In order to
this, a something must be affirmed in the one, which is rejected in the
other, and this something is the will. I do not will to consider myself
as equal to myself, for in the very act of constituting myself
I
, I
take it as the same, and therefore as incapable of comparison, that is,
of any application of the will.
then, I
minus
the will be the
thesis
; Thou
plus
will must be the
antithesis
, but the
equation of Thou with I, by means of a free act, negativing the sameness
in order to establish the equality, is the true definition of
conscience. But as without a Thou there can be no You, so without a You
no They, These or Those; and as all these conjointly form the materials
and subjects of consciousness, and the conditions of experience, it is
evident that the con-science is the root of all consciousness,—
a
fortiori
, the precondition of all experience,—and that the conscience
cannot have been in its first revelation deduced from experience. Soon,
however, experience comes into play. We learn that there are other
impulses beside the dictates of conscience; that there are powers within
us and without us ready to usurp the throne of conscience, and busy in
tempting us to transfer our allegiance. We learn that there are many
things contrary to conscience, and therefore to be rejected, and utterly
excluded, and many that can coexist with its supremacy only by being
subjugated, as beasts of burthen; and others again, as, for instance,
the social tendernesses and affections, and the faculties and
excitations of the intellect, which must be at least subordinated. The
preservation of our loyalty and fealty under these trials and against
these rivals constitutes the second sense of Faith; and we shall need
but one more point of view to complete its full import. This is the
consideration of what is presupposed in the human conscience. The answer
is ready. As in the equation of the correlative I and Thou, one of the
twin constituents is to be taken as
plus
will, the other as
minus
will, so is it here: and it is obvious that the reason or
super
-individual of each man, whereby he is man, is the factor we are
to take as
minus
will; and that the individual will or personalizing
principle of free agency (arbitrement is Milton's word) is the factor
marked
plus
will;—and again, that as the identity or coinherence of
the absolute will and the reason, is the peculiar character of God; so
is the
synthesis
of the individual will and the common reason, by the
subordination of the former to the latter, the only possible likeness or
image of the
prothesis
, or identity, and therefore the required proper
character of man. Conscience, then, is a witness respecting the identity
of the will and the reason effected by the self-subordination of the
will, or self, to the reason, as equal to, or representing, the will of
God. But the personal will is a factor in other moral
syntheses
; for
example, appetite
plus
personal will=sensuality; lust of power,
plus
personal will,=ambition, and so on, equally as in the
synthesis
, on
which the conscience is grounded. Not this therefore, but the other
synthesis
, must supply the specific character of the conscience; and
we must enter into an analysis of reason. Such as the nature and objects
of the reason are, such must be the functions and objects of the
conscience. And the former we shall best learn by recapitulating those
constituents of the total man which are either contrary to, or disparate
from, the reason.
-
Reason, and the proper objects of reason, are wholly alien from
sensation. Reason is supersensual, and its antagonist is appetite, and
the objects of appetite the lust of the flesh.
-
Reason and its objects do not appertain to the world of the senses
inward or outward; that is, they partake not of sense or fancy. Reason
is super-sensuous, and here its antagonist is the lust of the eye.
-
Reason and its objects are not things of reflection, association,
discursion, discourse in the old sense of the word as opposed to
intuition; "discursive or intuitive," as Milton has it. Reason does
not indeed necessarily exclude the finite, either in time or in space,
but it includes them eminenter. Thus the prime mover of the material
universe is affirmed to contain all motion as its cause, but not to
be, or to suffer, motion in itself.
Reason is not the faculty of the finite. But here I must premise the
following. The faculty of the finite is that which reduces the confused
impressions of sense to their essential forms,—quantity, quality,
relation, and in these action and reaction, cause and effect, and the
like; thus raises the materials furnished by the senses and sensations
into objects of reflection, and so makes experience possible. Without
it, man's representative powers would be a delirium, a chaos, a scudding
cloudage of shapes; and it is therefore most appropriately called the
understanding, or substantiative faculty. Our elder metaphysicians, down
to Hobbes inclusively, called this likewise discourse,
discursus,
discursio,
from its mode of action as not staying at any one object,
but running as it were to and fro to abstract, generalize, and classify.
Now when this faculty is employed in the service of the pure reason, it
brings out the necessary and universal truths contained in the infinite
into distinct contemplation by the pure act of the sensuous imagination,
that is, in the production of the forms of space and time abstracted
from all corporeity, and likewise of the inherent forms of the
understanding itself abstractedly from the consideration of particulars,
as in the case of geometry, numeral mathematics, universal logic, and
pure metaphysics. The discursive faculty then becomes what our
Shakspeare with happy precision calls "discourse of reason."
We will now take up our reasoning again from the words "motion in
itself."
It is evident then, that the reason, as the irradiative power, and the
representative of the infinite, judges the understanding as the faculty
of the finite, and cannot without error be judged by it. When this is
attempted, or when the understanding in its
synthesis
with the
personal will, usurps the supremacy of the reason, or affects to
supersede the reason, it is then what St. Paul calls the mind of the
flesh (
Greek: phrónaema sarkòs
) or the wisdom of this world. The
result is, that the reason is super-finite; and in this relation, its
antagonist is the insubordinate understanding, or mind of the flesh.
-
Reason, as one with the absolute will, (In the beginning was the
Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God,) and
therefore for man the certain representative of the will of God, is
above the will of man as an individual will. We have seen in III.
that it stands in antagonism to all mere particulars; but here it
stands in antagonism to all mere individual interests as so many
selves, to the personal will as seeking its objects in the
manifestation of itself for itself—sit pro ratione
voluntas;—whether this be realized with adjuncts, as in the lust
of the flesh, and in the lust of the eye; or without adjuncts, as in
the thirst and pride of power, despotism, egoistic ambition. The
fourth antagonist, then, of reason is the lust of the will.
Corollary
. Unlike a million of tigers, a million of men is very
different from a million times one man. Each man in a numerous society
is not only coexistent with, but virtually organized into, the multitude
of which he is an integral part. His
idem
is modified by the
alter
.
And there arise impulses and objects from this
synthesis
of the
alter
et idem
, myself and my neighbour. This, again, is strictly analogous to
what takes place in the vital organization of the individual man. The
cerebral system of nerves has its correspondent
antithesis
in the
abdominal system: but hence arises a
synthesis
of the two in the
pectoral system as the intermediate, and, like a drawbridge, at once
conductor and boundary. In the latter as objectized by the former arise
the emotions, affections, and in one word, the passions, as
distinguished from the cognitions and appetites. Now the reason has been
shown to be super-individual, generally, and therefore not less so when
the form of an individualization subsists in the
alter
, than when it
is confined to the
idem
; not less when the emotions have their
conscious or believed object in another, than when their subject is the
individual personal self. For though these emotions, affections,
attachments, and the like, are the prepared ladder by which the lower
nature is taken up into, and made to partake of, the highest room,—as
we are taught to give a feeling of reality to the higher
per medium
commune
with the lower, and thus gradually to see the reality of the
higher (namely, the objects of reason) and finally to know that the
latter are indeed and pre-eminently real, as if you love your earthly
parents whom you see, by these means you will learn to love your
Heavenly Father who is invisible;—yet this holds good only so far as
the reason is the president, and its objects the ultimate aim; and cases
may arise in which the Christ as the Logos or Redemptive Reason
declares,
He that loves father or mother more than me, is not worthy of
me
; nay, he that can permit his emotions to rise to an equality with
the universal reason, is in enmity with that reason. Here then reason
appears as the love of God; and its antagonist is the attachment to
individuals wherever it exists in diminution of, or in competition with,
the love which is reason.