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Those Flat-Earth People?
Address by Lars-Erik Wiberg
for Sunday, August 18, 2002
Readings: (Old Testament) Psalm 115:1-9, (New Testament) Matthew 22:15-22, (Swedenborg's "True Christian Religion") ¶360
At one time our denominational seminary received direction from two
separate boards. One of these was primarily concerned with matters
of religious instruction, the other with more worldly operational
realities. The one would develop programs for training ministers;
the other would see that they were practicable. Some 15 or so years
ago these boards were merged into what remains the current structure.
This combining of the boards has always perplexed me. It seems that
diverse purposes are being forced together, that religious oil is
being mixed with secular vinegar, the Lord burdened with Caesar. Now
that a similar configuration is being recommended for the
Massachusetts Association, in which the Executive and Standing
Committees would be combined, I feel called to object. Although the
following remarks may seem to start out in center field, they are all
in the ballpark, and will eventually reach home.
There was a time well before Columbus when our ancestors believed the
earth was flat. They believed the heavenly bodies were flat as well,
really weren't that far away, and probably had something to do with
the hereafter. But well before the advent of the Lord the
realization began to dawn that three-dimensional roundness prevailed
both on the earth and in the firmament. In the second century after
Christ, the astronomer and geographer, Claudius Ptolemaeus, proposed
a solar system with the earth at its center which, as we now know, is
wrong, just as is the flat-earth outlook.
But Ptolemaeus had a lot of pedigree going for him. He was from the
renowned Macedonian family now known as Ptolemy. 500 years before,
Ptolemy I had founded a royal dynasty in Egypt which was still
influential. Ptolemy II had founded the city of Alexandria. Our
Ptolemy worked and studied in the famous library there. He was
related somehow to Cleopatra - - herself a Ptolemy. Astronomer
Ptolemy's solar system may have been wrong; its mathematics was
exceedingly awkward, but he was on the right track in regard to many
of the fundamentals of a moving, rotating, revolving
solar-cum-planetary system. Indeed his theory was so persuasive
that both the Aristotelians at first, and later the Christian church,
adopted his concepts.
And they stuck with their adopted earth-centered outlook through
thick and thin. The going was easy for the first 1300 years, but
then in 1543 Mikolaj Kopernik published his treatise concerning the
revolution of the planets and promptly died. This work is
generally known as "De Revolutionibus" and it certainly touched off
an intellectual revolution. This Polish astronomer, whom we know as
Copernicus, postulated a sun-centered system to replace the
earth-ccntered version . The Catholic church, and even
more so the Aristotelians, who were at that time preeminent in the
interpretation of natural phenomena, dug in their heels against this
gross heresy. It took two hundred years of effort by such renowned
thinkers as Kepler, Galileo, Newton and Brahe before the "new"
heliocentered solar system replaced the "old" geocentered one and
began making its way into the general culture.
Why would what was going on over such a protracted interval capture
the interest of a Swedenborgian? The reason is simple and loaded
with irony when you consider how we as Swedenborgians are either
accustomed to viewing the natural world in terms of
correspondences, or at least to understanding what that practice
entails. Here we have an earth-centered system being replaced, after
enormous effort over a long interval, by a sun-centered one. How
glorious! Correspondentially speaking, the Lord, whose presence is
revealed in the spiritual world as a living sun, now takes a central
position in the natural solar system. Of course he was there all
along, however his location had now become official. But who
realized it? More to the point, who realizes it today?
Just what was happening during those two hundred or so years while
the Copernican solar system was replacing the Ptolemaic? For one
crucial thing, an intellectual outlook that we now call "science" was
gaining the upper hand, but doing so only gradually. The reason for
this was that the church, whether Protestant or Catholic, was
battling this new discipline every step of the way. With every
advance of knowledge that could be attributed to the new methodology,
it was the unvarying position of the church that it was a matter of
"thus far and no farther." From this point forward the God-centered,
religious view of the world must prevail. Then the cycle would
repeat itself. and God would be seen to have retreated again in the
face of new knowledge developed through what was now being termed
"natural philosophy".
The Aristotelians were no help. In fact they were a principle
hindrance. Religious or not, they adhered to the Aristotelian view
which, inasmuch as it was the natural philosophy of an earlier era,
was simply being superseded. This happens all the time as scientific
investigations progress and displace former theories. But
non-Aristotelian
notions were unacceptable out of hand thus giving rise to the
observation that the great Aristotle, himself a superb theeorist,
would have been a poor Aristotelian.
Well we all know what finally happened, however much we are familiar
with the inner details. The term "science" supplanted "natural
philosophy" and effectively submerged the valid inference that
science is a sort of philosophy after all. The sun did get to the
center of the solar system, yet what was becoming known as science
progressively
replaced what had been presumed to be the will of God as the accepted
explanation for
natural phenomena. Again ironically, we appear to lose God as our
authority here on earth by means of the very outlook that places him
correspondentially in the center of our lives. Looking at it another
way, God migrates to the center of our local universe from a place on
the periphery at the same time as his position as the grand arbiter
over our lives is being called to question. He now occupies the
center symbolically at the same time that we become more scientific
and humanistic. Does his heliocentricity ultimately bode well for
what we respectfully call the Arts and Sciences? Does not God's
symbolic locus give us a powerful indication that we might be headed
elsewhere?
As a practical matter, whether it does or not, we may as well face up
to where we are at this moment. We are surrounded by a humanistic
frame of culture in which the God-centered view has been largely
overtaken by human-centeredness. Humanism is defined as a philosophy
or attitude that is concerned with human beings, their achievements
and interests, rather than with problems of theology. We human
beings simply love to revel in our own abilities and preferences and
give the Lord small credit if any. The ascendency of humanism isn't
going to go away any time soon. It feels too good.
Our New Church way of looking at the human condition has a long road
to travel. This Cambridge Society of ours was founded in 1888,
precisely, and only, 200 years after the birth of Emanuel Swedenborg.
All Swedenborgians, whatever our differences as quasi- siblings may
be, are truly pioneers in this religious dispensation within which we
seek to find our spiritual way against a backdrop of virtually
unrestrained humanism.
And speaking of dispensations, to give you an idea of the time spans
involved, here is an interesting fact about the First Ancient Church.
This is the Church that is signified by Noah in scripture. It was
the prevailing dispensation over an interval from roughly
4000 to 2000 years BC and was gradually replaced by successive
churches. It persisted until the last temple to Vesta was finally
abandoned late in the first millennium. The Christian Church then
prevailed yet the Ancient Church of Noah only then expired.
Religions are gifts from God that match our capacity to receive them.
They take time to germinate; they flourish; they overlap and thus
take awhile to pass in succession from the scene. We Swedenborgians
believe that we are in the vanguard of a new church, in the
germination phase if you will. I think that we often forget just how
far out front we are in that vanguard. We focus too provincially on
our own faith, and we fail in our responsibilities to build our new
dispensation by not reaching out far enough beyond the
world-centeredness that is the prevailing hallmark of humanism.
Indeed, to a
Swedenborgian, this humanism is worldly love on a gross scale. There
is however a
saving grace which Swedenborg describes in Apocalypse Explained ¶950:
"He who loves himself, loves his own proprium . . . In
like manner, he who loves
the world, but in a less degree; for the world can not be
loved as much as the
proprium; and therefore the world is loved from proprium,
and for the sake of
proprium because it is of service to it."
Without discussing proprium, a complicated concept, we can see that
the love-of -the-world, humanistic, view is indeed of man's devising,
arising out of the source of his own love of self. It is ours to fix
because it is we who have stumbled into it out of self-centeredness
over many generations. The saving grace is that this world view does
not have the power of self-love, but exists in service to it. As
such it is a service that we can take or leave, feed or starve, and
at the very least be aware of. We are in the midst of a sea of
humanism. It's our sea to sink or swim in.
Now all of you are evidently swimmers; my remarks are really
"preaching to the choir." If going to church, praying, and living
useful lives isn't God-centered, what is? At an individual level, we
Swedenborgians, as well as other religiously and spiritually
motivated souls can do much that preserves us from being swamped by
humanistic blandishments. Useful work, whether paid or unpaid;
charitable expression, whether in word or deed, all help to keep the
Lord where he belongs in the central focus of our personal firmament;
they work to deflect our temptations toward self-centeredness.
But apart from what we can do individually, can we accomplish
anything comparable as members of organizations, as persons in the
general culture? Is there any way to foster God-centered behavior in
the larger scheme of being? Keeping in mind that neither
organizations nor prevailing cultural practices have a soul, is there
any way we can influence them to act as if they did? Can we
jump-start this natural world of ours to begin revolving around God
in actuality? Unfortunately there are few specifics for us to follow
beyond our persistent personal recognition of God, one by one, as we
collectively make our imprint on society. Wherever we can, and as
best we are able as individuals, we need to assert the strength and
autonomy of our religious feeling.
For our guidance there are instances of long-established practices
virtually dying out. Take the Roman Inquisition as an example.
Lasting for hundreds of years it seemed a virtual fact of life - -
and death - - until it finally collapsed. Its persistance now is
seen only in the vestigial mindset that fosters such aberrations as
political correctness. Take the millennia-old slave trade which was
ultimately repudiated across a broad spectrum
of nations and which lingers only in cultural backwaters. Take harsh
penal practices, including capital punishment, which are ever closer
to their final gruesome expressions. In the practice of criminal
justice, we are gradually becoming more concerned about how best to
confine those who are being punished rather than how to punish those
who are being confined. Take the current international concerns with
human rights which, to be sure, skip certain influential miscreants,
but are still gaining a foothold worldwide. Such progress
exemplifies the collective power of individual expressions of Faith
and Charity. This cultural thrust is away from self-centeredness and
a desire for domination. Love for the neighbor on a grand scale
ultimately allows the forces of betterment to supersede those of
punishment and dominion. We do see progress.
Still no country or corporation or campus or church escapes serious
failings. Governments are chronically plagued by pockets of
political chicanery that are utterly alien to the public good. In
the culture of corporations a kind of sneaky avarice has wormed its
way in. Institutions of higher learning have in many cases abandoned
a core curriculum for a smörgåsbord of irrelevant but oh-so-trendy
courses that old-fashioned renaissance humanism would sneer at. And
in some instances the church, a traditional well-spring of spiritual
guidance, suffers the evils of the love of self as documented for all
time in Genesis. We still seem to swim against many such worldly
humanistic currents with no life preserver other than wishy-washy
relativism.
But there are still more good examples around us today than
egregious, more sunny ones you might say. Equitable treatment for
women is now becoming so ingrained, and is acknowledged to such an
extent, that societies guilty of footdragging in this respect are
clearly perceived as socially challenged. What we call a New Age is
producing more and more spiritually centered ways of examining both
our selves and our perceptions. (It is also catering to both
paganism and the occult which isn't helpful.) Knowledge is
gradually being redefined to include recognition of the noetic.
Among the races, acceptance and understanding are becoming more and
more the norm. Science is more readily seen for what it is and
isn't, which is a logical methodology, and not a final authority.
There is increased emphasis on how we should take responsibility for
our actions as individuals. Adding it all up, we are making headway
in a sea of cultural cross currents. Faith and charity and love to
the neighbor do prevail.
Well, we have certainly covered the ball park; now what about home
plate? What about today's case in point which is whether to combine
the Executive and the Standing Committees of the Massachusetts
Association?
Reflecting on the foregoing examples affecting our world and our
lives, can we accept
the evidence from historical knowledge as to where we have been,
where we are, and where we are headed? Can we agree as
Swedenborgians that the location of our natural sun is the true
beacon demonstrating, correspondentially, that God really is at the
center of our lives? Can we remember not only to render unto the
Lord that which is the Lord's and unto Caesar that which is Caesar's,
but also who told us to do that? As a result, do not the Executive
Committee's spiritual objectives stand alone in their unique autonomy
for any day and age? Is not the Standing Committees's humanism
needed for functionality in this worldly day and age? Can we grasp
that these two Committees are so utterly different that they can
never blend no matter what?
Surrounded as we are by evidence, can we avoid acting as if we were
mere modern versions of Those Flat-Earth People?
Amen
Copyright 2002 by Lars-Erik Wiberg
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