Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

‘Nevertheless, even when I was soaked, so to speak, in this torrent of celestial illumination, God did not open my inward eye; I judged of these writings by the reason of an unregenerate man. I have often been of opinion that Swedenborg, the imspired, must have misunderstood the angels. I laughed at many visions, which, according to the seers, I ought reverently to believe in. I could not, for instance, appreciate the inflected writing of the angels, nor their belts of thicker or thinner gold. Though the statement, ‘There are solitary angels,’ at first struck me as singularly pathetic, I could not reconcile this loneliness with their manner of marriage. I did not see why the Virgin Mary should wear white satin robes in heaven. I dared question why the giant demons Enakim and Hephilim came again and again to fight with the Cherubim in the Apocalyptic fields of Armageddon. I fail to see how the Satanic and heavenly angels can still hold discussions. Baron Seraphitus replied to me that these details referred to the angels who are yet on earth in human form.

‘The visions of the Swedish prophet are often disfigured by grotesque touches. One of his ‘Memorabilia’—the name he gives them—begins with these words: ‘I saw the spirits met together, and they had hats on their heads.’ In another

p. 69

of these ‘Memorabilia’ he received from heaven a small paper on which, he says, he saw the letters used by primitive races, composed of curved lines with little rings curling upward. For clearer proof of this communication from heaven I should have liked him to deposit this document with the Royal Academy of Sciences at Stockholm.

“After all, I may be wrong; the material absurdities that are scattered throughout his works have spiritual meanings perhaps. Otherwise, how can we account for the growing influence of his doctrine? His followers now number more than seven hundred thousand souls, partly in the United States of America, where many sects have joined them in a body, and partly in England, where there are seven thousand Swedenborgians in the city of Manchester alone. Men no less distinguished by their learning than by their worldly rank—some in Germany, and some in Prussia and the North—have publicly adopted Swedenborg’s beliefs, which indeed are more consolatory than those of many another Christian communion.

“‘T should now like to expound to you in a few short words the capital points of the doctrines set forth by Swedenborg to his Church; but such an abridgment, from memory, would necessarily be defective. 1 can, therefore, only enlarge on the arcana connected with the birth of Seraphita.”’

Here the pastor paused while meditating apparently to collect his reminiscences, and then he went on:

‘‘Having proved mathematically that man shall live forever in an upper or a lower sphere, Swedenborg gives the title of angelic spirits to such beings as, in this world, are prepared for heaven, where they become angels. According to him, God did not create angels independently; there arep. 70 none but those who have been human beings on earth. Thus the earth is the nursery ground for heaven. The angels are not angels by original nature; they are transformed into angels by an intimate union with God which God never refuses, the very essence of God being never negative, but always active (‘Angelic Wisdom’).