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

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EMANUEL SWEDENBORG

GOD, MAN AND THE COSMOS

IN INTRODUCING to you the philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg, I shall commence, where all sound thinking should commence, with the idea of God. Concerning this idea, Swedenborg remarks that

‘Nothing exists, subsists, is acted upon and moved by itself, but by something else: whence it follows that everything that exists and subsists is acted upon and moved from the First who is not from another, but is in Himself the living

force which is Life.’

You will notice Swedenborg’s use here of a personal pronoun “Himself” to describe the ‘First’. For him the primary cause of all created things is not an impersonal force or principle. The first or primary cause of creation is a Personal Being. Forthrightly he dees that ‘God is a Divine Man and the One only Man’. He is the ‘One only Man’ because He only is Life. He is life-in-itself. His Being is in no way contingent upon anyone or anything and therefore He is Infinite, Uncreate, existing only in Himself and from Himself. Every other form of Being, animate and inanimate alike, is derived being, and dependent; or in philosophical terms, ‘contingent Being’. Every other form of existence is created

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