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

heavenly things, to know the correspondences that exist between the visible and imponderable things of the earthly globe and invisible and imponderable things of the spiritual world, is to ‘have the heavens in your understanding.’ ‘“‘Hvery object of every creation proceeded from the hand of God, and has, therefore, necessarily a hidden meaning, as we see in those grand words of Isaiah, ‘The earth is as a garment’ (Isaiah, li. 6). This mysterious tie between the smallest atoms of matter and the heavens constitutes what Swedenborg calls a Celestial Arcanum. Indeed, his ‘Treatise on the Celestial Arcana,’ in which he explains the correspondences or symbolism of the natural and spiritual, containing, as Jacob Boehm has it, the ‘sign and sealing of all things,’ contains no less than thirteen thousand propositions, filling sixteen volumes. ‘This wonderful apprehension of correspondences which the grace of God vouchsafed to Swedenborg,’ says one of his disciples, ‘is the secret of the interest taken in his works.’ According to this commentator, ‘everything is derived - from heaven, everything returns to heaven. The prophet’s words are sublime and lucid; he speaks in the heavens, and is understood on earth. A volume might be written on any one of his phrases.’ And, among a thousand others, -he quotes this text: ‘The realm of heaven,’ says Swedenborg (‘Arcana Celestia’), ‘is the realm of impulsion. Action takes form in heaven, and thence in the world, and by degrees in the minutest details of earthly life; earthly effects being thus continuous with heavenly causes, the result in every case is correspondent and symbolical. Man is the link of union between the Natural and the Spiritual.’ ‘Angelic spirits, then, inevitably know the correspondences that link each earthly thing to heaven, and they know (4)—Vol. 25 3the inmost sense of the prophetic words which foretell their evolution. Thus, to these spirits everything here below has its hidden meaning. The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition. To them the adulteries and debauchery of which the Scripture and the Prophets speak, and which are often misapprehended by self-styled scribes, signify the state of the souls who in this world persist in debasing themselves with earthly affections, and so confirm their divorce from heaven. Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God. The candlesticks, the shewbread, the horses and riders, the whores, the jewels—everything in the Scriptures has for them a super-sensual meaning, and reveals the future of earthly history in its relation to heaven. They can all enter into the truth of the declarations of Saint John, which human science demonstrates, and substantially proves at a later time, such as this, ‘pregnant,’ says - Swedenborg, ‘with many human sciences’: ‘I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away’ (Rev. xxi. 1). They know the suppers where ‘they eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captives, and the flesh of mighty men,’ to which [the fowls] are bidden by an angel standing in the sun (Rev. xix. 17, 18). They see the woman with wings, clothed with the sun, and the man always armed. ‘The horse of the A pocalypse,’ says Swedenborg, ‘is the visible image of the human intellect ridden by death, because it bears in itself the element of its own destruction.’ Finally, they recognize the nations hidden under forms which, to the ignorant, seem grotesque. ‘“When a man is prepared to receive the prophetical insufflation of correspondences, the Spirit of the Word moves