Church of the Holy City

The Good of Life

The Good of Life
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
March 15, 2009

Genesis 41:17-40 Mark 4:1-20

Last Sunday I talked about the way truth points to good. Our topic today is taking the truth a person has learned, applying it to life, and finally doing the good one has learned. This process contains all the stages of spiritual rebirth, which, for Swedenborg, takes place gradually over a whole lifetime.
Both our Bible readings today talk about this process. The Old Testament reading talks about fat cattle and plentiful grain. In the literal story, this is about a famine that was going to take place in Egypt. But these images can take on symbolic meaning. And in Swedenborg’s Bible interpretation, there is a deeper layer of meaning inside the symbols of the Bible story. The multiplication of grain and cattle are the acquisition of truths and the emotions of love that accompany them. Grain being truths that a person learns and cattle being spiritual affections for goodness and The process symbolized by storing food for the famine is how truth is planted in good affections and how these good affections become actualized in a person’s actions. The same meaning is found in Jesus’ parable of the sower. Swedenborg explains this parable as we all would probably understand it:
That the seed here is the Word of the Lord, thus truth, which is said to be of faith, and that the good ground is good which is of charity, is plain, for it is the good in a person that receives the Word; the wayside is falsity; a stony place is truth that has no root in good; thorns are evils (AC 3310).
There are a few terms Swedenborg uses when he describes this process that require brief explanation. Swedenborg uses terms from traditional Christianity, but their meanings are so different in his theology that he could have used different terms altogether. So the possibility is there for a person to hear Swedenborg’s terms and to think about how they are used in traditional Christianity. Lest this happen, I will take a few minutes to define the terms he uses.
The first, and most important term is “rebirth”. Almost every Christian sect talks about the need to be born again. This is Biblical, when Jesus says that we need to be reborn to enter the kingdom of God. For many Christians, this all happens in an instant when one accepts Christ as one’s personal savior. But for Swedenborg, actual personality change takes place. One’s ideas grow, and one’s actual emotions change, as do a person’s motivations and intentions. This cannot take place in an instant—that is if the change and growth is real. The process of rebirth begins in infancy and continues even to the very last days of life here, and even continually ever after in the next life.
He also uses the terms “faith” and “charity.” Faith isn’t just belief that Jesus saves. For Swedenborg, faith is the whole complex of truth that we hold in our consciousness. It is knowledges of all sorts; it is doctrines we learn from religious education; and it is truth we acquire from any source. Actually, faith is nothing else except truth. Charity isn’t just donating food to food banks or donating money to build hospitals. Charity is every feeling of love for God and for the neighbor. It is our emotional complex in its totality. And this comes down to good for Swedenborg. So faith is truth and charity if good. Faith is also wisdom and charity is also love in every and all meanings those words have.
Spiritual rebirth, then, is a lifelong process. It starts by our learning truth and doctrine from church, personal study, and experience. This stage in spiritual growth is especially evident in youth and early adulthood. Then, a person is delighted as he or she learns knowledge. Knowledge as an end in itself is the primary goal in this period of life. Later in life, one wants to learn about life and how to live better. Then knowledge is acquired with the goal of amending life. Then the truth one learned in early life is put into practice, and more truth is acquired with living well as a motivation. Throughout these stages in life, truth takes the leading role. Truth tells us how to act and we are essentially doing truth, when we do good from what we know.
But there finally comes a time when we are doing good from a love for good. At this point, truth takes a secondary role. When we are so completely accustomed to doing good from practice and habit that it is second nature to us, we then act from our heart, not our head. We feel what it is to be good, and we do good because our heart tells us what it is to do good. This is a very advanced stage in spiritual growth. It comes late in life. Confucius describes this process almost identically with the way Swedenborg describes it. In The Analects of Confucius, we find,
The Master said, At fifteen I set my heart upon learning. At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of Heaven. At sixty, I heard them with docile ear. At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right (Confucius, Analects, Book II, no. 4).
Notice how cognitive Confucius’ system is. He sets his heart on learning in his teens. At forty his confusion is cleared up—but he is still involved with truth in a cognitive way. At fifty, he knows the will of heaven. Sixty years is very interesting. He says that at sixty he hears the biddings of heaven with a docile ear. That is, his life and his mind accepted the truths of heaven. This implies that before sixty he may have rebelled against what he knew, or struggled to align his life with the biddings of heaven. His emotions and his desires may have not always been in accord with what he knew. Then at the ripe old age of seventy, he could follow his heart. He had worked to so align his emotions, desires, and intentions with what he knew to be the biddings of heaven, that now his will was the same as the will of heaven. He no longer needed to think about what to do. He no longer needed to meditate on what the right thing was. He could follow his heart because he had trained it to follow heaven’s biddings. Swedenborg describes this state of attainment similarly to Confucius:
faith, when the spiritual man has been reborn, becomes charity; for he then acts from charity . . . and then he cares nothing for the things of faith or truth, for he lives from the good of faith, and no longer from its truth; for truth has so conjoined itself to good that it no longer appears, except only as the form of good; that is, faith appears no otherwise than as the form of charity (AC 3122).
Recall that for Swedenborg, faith means truth, and charity means good or love. When a person is reborn, then love or good is what drives a person. Issues or doctrine or faith no longer perplex him or her. The person is no longer driven by the promptings of truth. As Swedenborg puts it, “he then acts from charity . . . and then cares nothing for the things of faith or truth.”
The way a person gets there is about the same for Swedenborg as it is for Confucius. Swedenborg writes,
. . . they who are reborn, first do good from doctrines, for of themselves they do not know good, but learn it from the doctrines of love and charity; from these they know who the Lord is, who is the neighbor; what love is, and what charity, thus what good is. . . . afterward when they are reborn, they do not do good from doctrines, but from love and charity, for then they are in the good itself which they have learned from doctrines . . . . (AC 3310).
I think that it is remarkable that a man from the Age of Enlightenment would so subordinate truth. Swedenborg’s Age valued reason above all things. Yet for Swedenborg, reason is simply a tool that gets a person into good, or a tool that tells a person how to love. But another way to view Swedenborg is as a man in between the Enlightenment and the Romantic Periods. Just after Swedenborg’s life, and perhaps in large part because of his influence, the Romantic Period burst into Europe’s consciousness. And in the Romantic Age, the primacy of feelings and passion becomes the driving force in the arts and literature.
For us, I don’t think that this process of turning cognitive motives into affective motives is a cut-and-dried process. I think that we are continually doing this one truth at a time. For instance, I no longer need to fight against my craving for alcohol. I’ve done the leg work, and I could say that I am now in the good of sobriety. I stay away from alcohol because I love the feeling of sobriety. I am now acting from love in that area of my life. I think the process is similar for all the many issues that a person deals with in life. Each issue one overcomes or masters becomes a sort of platform on which he or she stands to move ever upward and ever inward. What I am saying is that moving from truth to good is a continual process. It may well be that a time will come when we are so filled with God’s love that truth does then become entirely subordinate. But for most of us, that very high level of attainment is probably a long way off. Still, we can look toward the day when love moves us to do good, no longer truth. This is what spiritual rebirth finally comes down to in Swedenborg.