The philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg : God, Man and the cosmos

“Upon the perception and recognition of this arcarnum depends the understanding of all things of existence or creation and of all things of subsistance or conservation by God,’

And he adds—

‘But do not, I beseech you, confound your ideas with time and space, for in proportion as space and time are in your ideas you will not understand it (i.e. creation) for the Divine is not in space and time.’..

It follows from all that I have so far advanced, that Divine Love and Divine Wisdom are the Ultimate Reality. Very Reality is that which alone is, and the One Only Reality of that from which every other thing is.

But if Ultimate Reality is the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom from which all created things are derived, it logically follows that Divine Love and Wisdom are substance and form in themselves. It follows logically because Creation is not effected from nothing—ex nihilo, nihil fit—‘out of nothing nothing comes’. Creation is effected by the successive putting forth, or emanation of Divine Substance, which is finited by the withdrawal from what is put forth of successive degrees of Divine Life. These first finite substances are what constitute the organic substances of the spiritual world, and of those substances are the soul and spirit of man compounded and organized, later to be, as it were, clothed upon, (as the substances of the spiritual world are also invested) with the relatively inert and dead substances of matter.

Creation, therefore, is continuous from God the Creator and Primary Cause, through the spiritual world, to ultimate things which are the physical Universe.

Continuous from God as they are, they are not God, neither are they in any way a part of God. For us to be able to see this we shall need to know something of Swedenborg’s unique doctrine of Degrees. This doctrine of Degrees I will shortly outline, but

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