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

receptacle of the life from God—which, as with all things else, is veritably his being—in the fulness of its human qualities. Endowed with the organs of will and understanding, he can receive life as love in the form of the affections of his will and the thoughts of his understanding. He can receive the idea of God and confirm it by reason. He can receive the divinely human life of God as the thought of right and wrong, good and evil. He is, indeed, the only kind of being whose life is of this quality and by it he can exercise moral judgements and form a conscience, make value-judgements of ponderable and imponderable things, conceive the idea of beauty and appreciate and delight in its presence. Above all, he can love the Divine Being who created him, by loving and revering the qualities which God, by revelation, has disclosed to him as being of His very nature; and with all this his will is free to choose between good and evil; and, although he has no other consciousness than that his life is his own and that he lives from himself, he yet can know and acknowledge that he lives from God, without whom he can do nothing.

Thus man can truly be the ‘other than God’ to whom the Divine Love can be given and by whom it can be reciprocated. In man the cycle of creative life is completed. Descending from its first principles in God, through the spiritual world as the efficient means, to ultimates, which are the things of the natural world, it ascends from mineral to vegetation; from vegetation to animal; from animal to man; from man to God, Thus is man created in the Divine image and likeness, and to this end the whole creation moves through all the gamut of approximations towards the human form, to its apotheosis in man himself, the potential and often actual lover of God; and from that love, to love of the neighbour.

Finally, I now briefly discuss the subject of the organic oneness of the human race. I say ‘organic oneness’ with deliberate intent, for Swedenborg affirms that the entire heaven of Angels and the whole race of mankind on earth appear before God as

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