Correspondences. The three degrees of the human mind correspond to the
three kingdoms of Nature: animal, vegetable, and mineral, corresponding
to spirit, soul, and body. “Degrees,” Swedenborg tells us, “are of two
kinds, discrete and continuous.” “All things, from least to greatest, in
both the spiritual and natural worlds, co-exist at once from discrete
and continuous degrees. In respect of discrete degrees there can be no
intercourse between either by continuity.” It follows, therefore, with
regard to the degrees of the human mind, the celestial, spiritual, and
the natural, that they cannot communicate under normal conditions one
with another. Thus, too, men on earth can have no sensible communication
with the spiritual world or see things of that world without a special
opening of the spiritual sight. Elsewhere Swedenborg tells us “to the
intent that anything may be perfect it must be distinguished into three
degrees. The ground and reason of this is because there must be end,
cause, and effect.” Another doctrine of Swedenborg’s was that of
regeneration. In order to be partaker of the higher life, man, he held,
must be born again, but this regeneration was not a special occurrence
of any particular date, but a continuous process. One of the orthodox
doctrines which Swedenborg attacked was that of the Trinity. He denied
that Jesus Christ was merely the Second Person of a Divine Trinity. He
cites St Paul’s statement that “in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the
Godhead bodily,” and maintains that the whole Trinity is centred in his
Person. “In consequence,” he says, “of separating the Divine Trinity
into Three Persons each of which is declared to be God and Lord, a sort
of frenzy has infected the whole system of theology as well as the
Christian Church so called from its Divine Founder.... That a trinity of
gods occupies the minds of Christians, although they deny it from shame,
is very evident from the ingenuity of many who contrive methods to prove
that three are one, and one three, by geometry, arithmetic, and
physics.... Others have trifled with the Divine Trinity as jugglers play
one with another. Their juggling on this subject may be compared to
those sick of a fever who see a single object, such as a man, a table,
or a candle, as three; or three as one.”
The basis of this orthodox Christian teaching with regard to the Trinity
is, of course, the Athanasian Creed, which attempts to explain the
matter by the absurd method of a juxtaposition of contradictions. It is
well to bear in mind, in view of the enormous amount of theological
twaddle that has been talked on this subject, that the Athanasian Creed
was in the nature of a political concordat to meet the exigencies of a
time of acute religious difficulty, and in no sense an exposition of
spiritual truth.
As the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity was false, argued Swedenborg,
and there were no three Persons, as supposed, it was, of course,
impossible for one of them, the Son, to offer Himself as sacrifice to
appease the wrath of another, the Father. The doctrine of the atonement,
therefore, as taught by the Church, had no basis in fact. God needed no
reconciliation to His creatures. It was they who needed to be reconciled
to Him before they could be fitted to appear in His presence. Christ
took upon Himself human nature that He might conquer mankind’s spiritual
enemies which were keeping him in bondage and estranged from his Divine
Source.
One of Swedenborg’s most astounding statements had reference to the Last
Judgment. This was not, maintained Swedenborg, as the orthodox generally
hold, the final consummation of all things. The event was an occurrence
in the spiritual sphere which actually took place in the year 1757! It
appears from this amazing account that in the Intermediate State so many
undesirable and evil spiritual entities had accumulated that they were
threatening the whole world with imminent catastrophe. It may be
remembered, in this connection, that in Swedenborg’s time scepticism was
everywhere rampant, and that religious life had reached its lowest ebb.
This was the case not only on the Continent, but pre-eminently in
England, where the movement headed by John Wesley led to such remarkable
scenes in connection with the great spiritual revival which followed
this period of religious apathy. To avert the catastrophe threatened to
the world according to Swedenborg’s theory, a general judgment was
executed upon the spirits who were in revolt and were imperilling the
divine order. These powers of evil were at that date placed under
restraint, so that an influx of new spiritual forces among men might be
made possible. Swedenborg actually goes so far as to affirm that he
himself was permitted to witness this judgment in fulfilment of the
prophecies made in the Gospels and in the Book of Revelation.
The Swedenborgian teaching which has come in probably for most criticism
is that with regard to Marriage. Swedenborg (thus far as it appears to
me quite rightly) insisted that sex is a spiritual as well as a physical
distinction. He denied the virtues of celibacy and declared that true
chastity resides in the perfect marriage relation. Marriage, according
to Swedenborg, is not a physical relationship till death part the united
pair, but is eternal in its character. “Conjugial love” being the
central and fundamental love of man’s life is also the source of his
fullest joy. The delights of the true conjugial love exceed the delights
of all other loves. All delights that are felt by man proceed from love,
and it follows, therefore, that the principal happiness in the celestial
life must have a similar source, and the highest joy of heaven must
therefore be the spiritual counterpart of the conjugial life of earth.
It does not, of course, necessarily follow from this that earthly
marriages are perpetuated in heaven. If the feelings of the marriage
partners towards one another are concordant and sympathetic, they
continue indeed their married life; but if they are discordant and
antipathetic, they dissolve it. For true conjugial love is the only
possible form of marriage in heaven, and “as their love lasts to
eternity, it follows that the wife becomes more and more a wife and the
husband more and more a husband. The true reason of this is that in a
marriage of truly conjugial love each married partner becomes
continually a more interior man. For that love opens the interiors of
their minds and in the proportion in which these are opened the man
becomes more and more a man.”
Swedenborg has some very beautiful observations with regard to the
rejuvenescence of those who have passed into the higher life. “All who
come into heaven,” he says, “return into their vernal youth, and remain
so to eternity. The more thousands of years they live the more beautiful
and happy is the spring to which they attain.... In a word, to grow old
in heaven is to grow young.... They who live in the chaste life of
marriage are above all others in the order and form of Heaven after
death. Their beauty, therefore, is surpassing, and the flower of their
youth endures for ever.”
What are we to say of this man who propounded this amazing gospel as a
direct message from the highest spheres? What are we to say of his
communications and conversations with the unseen world? Of his _bona
fides_ it is impossible to entertain a doubt. The ordinary hypothesis is
that he suffered from hallucinations. It has been argued on the other
hand, that for a man so sane and so shrewd in the ordinary affairs of
the world, hallucinations of the kind were an impossibility. This,
however, seems going rather too far. Some of the sanest men in the world
have had special points on which they were not mentally sound. Monomania
is a recognised form of mental aberration, and the man who suffers from
it is as sane as his fellows on all matters except one.
This spiritual communion, however, was continuous in the case of
Swedenborg for many years, and during those years occupied either in
itself or in the activities that arose from it the larger portion of his
life. In spite of this absorption, his relations with his fellow men
continued as sane and responsible as those of any of his neighbours.
Would this have been possible, one may ask, in the face of so absorbing
an interest, had this interest merely been founded on a monomania? It
would, I think, be difficult to parallel such a case. If, however, we
decide to take Swedenborg’s relations with the other world at his own
valuation, are we called upon to accept his gospel at his own valuation
on that account? Certainly I think not. Swedenborg’s estimate of the
status of the spiritual beings with whom he communicated, even if we
accept their reality, need not be ours. Recent investigations and
records of innumerable psychic experiences have tended to show what a
miscellaneous crowd of spirits hover around the confines of this
material world. Swedenborg’s mistake has been made by many spiritualists
of the present day, and sometimes with disastrous results. Swedenborg
had not before him the evidence which we now hold to warn him of the
necessity of testing the quality of his spiritual communicants. The
experiences encountered overwhelmed him by their unexpected and
apparently miraculous character, and his naturally sane judgment was at
fault for want of a criterion by which to estimate them.[12] Few of
those who now accept the genuineness of psychical phenomena are prepared
to question Swedenborg’s exceptional mediumistic powers. To allow them
to their fullest extent is by no means to accept the doctrine which was
preached through his mediumship.
Of Swedenborg’s psychic gifts there is indeed plenty of evidence quite
outside the teachings of his celestial visitors. On one occasion he
disclosed to the Queen of Sweden a secret that had existed between her
and her deceased brother, the Crown Prince Augustus William of Prussia,
which was unknown to any living person. On another he described to a
whole company of people at Gothenburg a destructive fire which had
broken out at that very moment in Stockholm. Again on another occasion
he revealed to the widow of Monsieur de Marteville the hiding place of a
missing receipt for money which had been paid by her husband, the Dutch
Ambassador at Stockholm. These incidents are among the best
authenticated of any extant historical records of a psychic character.
The philosopher Kant, among others, made a searching investigation into
the evidence on which they rested, and came away absolutely convinced of
their truth. It is curious to note that John Wesley was not a little
interested in the Swedenborgian propagandism. The great Methodist
preacher was impressed with a strong desire to meet the Swedish seer—a
desire to which, however, he had never given open expression. The Rev.
Samuel Smith, one of Wesley’s preachers, records how, about the end of
February 1772 he was in attendance upon John Wesley, when the latter
received a communication as follows from Swedenborg, who was then in
London, which he read aloud.
GREAT BATH STREET,
GREAT BATH FIELDS.
SIR,—I have been informed in the world of spirits that you have a
strong desire to converse with me. I shall be happy to see you if
you will favour me with a visit. I am, sir, your humble servant,
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG.
Mr Wesley wrote in reply that he was then on the point of starting for a
six months’ journey, but would be pleased to wait on Swedenborg after
his return to London. Swedenborg replied to this, that the visit
proposed by Wesley would be too late, as he, Swedenborg, would enter the
world of spirits on the 29th day of the next month, never more to
return, a prediction which proved perfectly correct.
Other men have written many books. It is Swedenborg’s unique
distinction, if distinction it is, to be the one man in history who has
written a library on his own account. The encyclopædic brain does not,
as a rule, tend to perspicuity in style, and Swedenborg has suffered
from neglect owing to the fact that the fertility of his genius was not
sufficiently associated with the powers of selection and condensation.
To search for the treasures of his knowledge among his published works
is like looking, in the words of the hackneyed proverb, “for needles in
a haystack.” Had he given us far less in volume the world would
doubtless have profited more by the very valuable information contained
in his writings.
There are times when one is inclined to regret (if also to feel
thankfulness) that Swedenborg was side-tracked by his Celestials and
that he did not complete his phenomenal career on the lines which he had
marked out for himself. It is a vain, though a most alluring
speculation, to consider how the destinies of nations might have evolved
if certain incidents in a single life history had eventuated otherwise
than they did. We may conceive of Swedenborg bringing to completion his
schemes for the construction of flying machines and submarines, nearly
two centuries earlier than was decreed by destiny, and ask ourselves, if
we will, what use the great Napoleon might not have made of these
formidable implements of destructive warfare, and how far the map of
Europe, and indeed of the world, might have been changed through their
employment by his formidable genius; or, again, to what extent the
linking up of the New and Old Worlds might have been accelerated by such
developments. Here at least we must admit was a phenomenon—a man who
realised, in a measure undreamed of by his contemporaries, not only in
the physical but also in the spiritual sphere, the stupendous
possibilities of the Coming Time.
Footnote 10:
Church property being free from taxation.
Footnote 11:
See _Life of Emanuel Swedenborg_. By George Trobridge. London:
Frederick Warne & Co. To which book I must acknowledge my great
indebtedness.
Footnote 12:
There are not a few of the communications recorded, notably in the
“Spiritual Diary,” which might be advanced to support the hypothesis
of a disordered brain; and we must not lose sight of the fact that
Swedenborg’s tireless activities taxed his intellectual faculties
beyond the powers of any but the most exceptional human organism.
VI
COUNT CAGLIOSTRO
Who has not heard of Cagliostro? And yet who but a few students have any
real knowledge of that mysterious character, of whom it may be said, as
it was of Melchizedek, that he had “neither beginning of life nor end of
days.” Both, at least, like the king of Salem’s, are wrapped in
uncertainty, and though popular tradition, repeated again and again by
the uncritical historian, has identified Cagliostro’s early life with
that of the Italian scoundrel Joseph Balsamo, the evidence is as near
conclusive as presumptive evidence can well be, that the two had no
connection whatever with one another, beyond having married Italian
wives with the same surname[13]—and that by no means an uncommon one—and
the fact that Balsamo is said to have had an uncle of the name of
Cagliostro. From what we know of Balsamo it may fairly be said that two
people more opposite in character than himself and Count Cagliostro
would be difficult to discover, and the identification of the two would
seem to involve the assumption that Cagliostro had discarded his first
wife and taken a second, a supposition which would render worthless the
argument based on the identity of their surnames.
Cagliostro’s whole career, as far as we know it, shows a character in
which generosity is perpetually being carried to the verge of folly. His
credulity was constantly making him the dupe of designing knaves, in
whose honesty he placed a pathetic faith, and had he ever had the
misfortune to encounter his alter ego, a common rogue of the most
ordinary type, it is safe to predict that he would not have escaped from
his clutches till he had been fleeced of the bulk of his possessions. As
late as the date of his trial in the affair of the Diamond Necklace, no
suggestion of the identity of the two characters was even mooted. The
story owes its origin to the fertile brain of one of the greatest
scoundrels of whom European history holds record, the notorious
blackmailer, Theveneau de Morande.
A short _résumé_ of this arch-villain’s history will probably be
sufficient to dissipate any credence which has ever been placed in a
narrative for which his assertions are our only authority. Theveneau de
Morande was born in 1741, the son of a lawyer, at Arnay-le-Duc, in
Burgundy. As a boy he was arrested for theft in a house of ill-fame.
Subsequently he enlisted, obtained his discharge through his father’s
intervention, found himself once more in prison at For-l’Evêque, and was
then confined in a convent at Armentières, from which he was released
two years after at the age of four-and-twenty. Having shortly after
lampooned one of the members of the government, he was compelled to fly
the country and took refuge in England, where he arrived in a state of
destitution.
[Illustration: Count Cagliostro. From an engraving by Bartolozzi, in the
British Museum.]
Needs must when the devil drives, and, the pinch of poverty sharpening
his wits, he now turned his attention to the black-mailing business, in
the pursuit of which he was soon to evince a quite uncommon aptitude and
adroitness. His talents in this direction were ably seconded by a facile
pen and a command of vituperative language and personal abuse which the
author of the Letters of Junius could scarcely have outdone. His first
effort of importance in this direction was _Le Gazetier Cuirassé, ou
Anecdotes Scandaleuses sur la Cour de France_. Those who would not
purchase immunity by a lump sum down had their characters and private
lives mercilessly torn to pieces in its pages. The book is said to have
brought him £1000. An attempt to blackmail Voltaire was less successful.
The veteran _philosophe_ published the blackmailer’s letter with
comments by his own satiric pen. The blackmailer’s path has indeed its
ups and downs, and once he was fain to accept a horsewhipping and
publish an abject apology, the price extorted by an offended French
nobleman. Madame du Barry, however, Louis XV.’s notorious favourite, was
made of other stuff, and in consequence the _Memoires d’une Femme
Publique_, compared with which _Le Gazetier Cuirassé_ was said to have
been “rosewater,” were never published. Morande accepted the sum of
32,000 livres in solatium for his wounded literary _amour propre_.
Before, however, paying him his price the French Government had
attempted to kidnap the audacious libeller. This was the ancient
substitute for the more prosaic extradition methods of modern times. The
plot, however, failed. With a dexterity worthy of a better cause,
Morande, warned in time, was able to pose in the English press as a
political exile and avenger of public morality. The sympathy of the
susceptible public responded warmly to the unscrupulous appeal, and the
representatives of French authority escaped with difficulty from the
clutches of an infuriated London mob.
It not unfrequently happens with countries that have been at war, that
the signature of the treaty of peace is followed after no long lapse of
time by a formal alliance between the erstwhile foes, there being
obviously two methods of gaining one’s ends, the method of grab and the
method of give and take, and the failure of one suggesting the
advisability of adopting the other. So at least reasoned the French
Government, and the payment of Morande’s price was followed in due
course by his employment on behalf of the said Government in the
capacity of subsidised journalist, and spy. Morande was nothing loth to
come to terms, and eventually blossomed out into the Editor of the
_Courier de l’Europe_. This journal, originally started by Latour under
the ægis of the French Government, was soon read in every corner of the
Continent. This was the weapon which of all others the blackmailer
desired for his purposes. “In it,” says Brisset, “he tore to pieces the
most estimable people, and manufactured, or caused to be manufactured,
articles to ruin any one whom he feared.”
Cagliostro had—all unwittingly—made dire enemies of the French Court
through his acquittal in the trial over the Diamond Necklace affair. To
acquit Cagliostro, who had no more to do with the matter in question
than the man in the moon, appeared from the royal standpoint to be
tantamount to incriminating the Queen, on whom, in fact, suspicion long
and not unnaturally rested. Morande, therefore, received his
instructions from Paris to ruin Cagliostro’s reputation. The means ready
to his hand was the _Courier de l’Europe_. Hence the story of Joseph
Balsamo and his identification with the _soi-disant_ Count Cagliostro.
To say that the authority hardly seems adequate is surely to put it
mildly. And yet Carlyle, and others before and after him, have quietly
accepted the statement of the paid blackmailer as sufficient evidence of
the character and history of his victim!
Who, then, was Cagliostro? The answer to this question must ever remain
among the unsolved problems of history. There is, however, no reason to
dismiss as incredible—even if there is reason to doubt—the account which
he gave of himself on the occasion of the “Diamond Necklace” trial. From
what we know of Cagliostro we may, I think, say that his character was
far too ingenuous for him to have been likely to invent so remarkable a
tale. Everything, however, in his history points to the fact that he was
just the person to take a record of the kind and colour it with the hues
of his own fertile imagination. In any case, the impartial historian,
while dismissing as preposterous the Balsamo fiction is bound to give
some weight—however slight—to the only evidence on the subject we
possess which is not manifestly untrue. Cagliostro, however, himself did
not pretend to have knowledge of his parentage. “I cannot,” he states,
“speak positively as to the place of my nativity, nor as to the parents
who gave me birth. All my inquiries have ended only in giving me some
great notions, it is true, but altogether vague and uncertain,
concerning my family.” The gist, however, of his story was that he spent
his childhood in Arabia, where he was brought up under the name of
Acherat. He had then, he states, four persons attached to his
service—the chief of whom was a certain Althotas, a man between
fifty-five and sixty years of age. This man (whom it has been attempted
to identify with a certain Kölmer, a Jutland merchant, who had travelled
extensively and had the reputation of being a master-magician) informed
Cagliostro that he had been left an orphan when three months old, and
that his parents were Christian and nobly born. All his attempts,
however, to discover the secret of his birth were doomed to
disappointment. The matter was one which was treated as taboo. In his
twelfth year (to follow his own story) he left Medina for Mecca, where
he remained three years, until, wearying of the monotonous round of the
Cherif’s Court, he obtained leave to travel.
One day (he narrates), when I was alone, the prince entered my
apartment; he strained me to his bosom with more than usual
tenderness, bid me never cease to adore the Almighty, and added,
bedewing my cheeks with his tears: “Nature’s unfortunate child,
adieu!”
From this date commenced, according to his own account, Cagliostro’s
travels, first in company with Althotas, for whom he ever expressed the
warmest affection, afterwards with the wife whom he chose for himself in
Italy. For upwards of three years he claims to have travelled through
Egypt, Africa, and Asia, finally reaching the island of Rhodes in the
year 1766, and thence embarking on a French ship bound for Malta. Here
he and his guardian were received with all honour, Pinto, the Grand
Master of the Knights of Malta, giving them apartments in his palace.
It was here (he notes) that I first assumed European dress and with
it the name of Count Cagliostro; nor was it a small matter of
surprise to me to see Althotas appear in a clerical dress with the
insignia of the Order of Malta.