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Comparative Spiritual Hermeneutics
83
sion as a breach in the relationship between
zahir
and
batin,
the
external and the internal, the exoteric and the esoteric (see infra,
§ 2). Here, the breach is consummated with the
fifth posterity,
expelled from Paradise. Thereafter the Cherubim prevented ac-
cess to it. Before them is the flame of a turning sword, which is
the love of self and its senseless desires, its persuasions that push
man to want to reenter Paradise, but he is continually flung back
toward material and terrestrial things. For the Tree of Knowl-
edge having been profaned, henceforth it is access to the Tree of
Life that is forbidden.
113
The states of the
Antiquissima Ecclesia
were in the following
succession: (1)
Homo
in the state of oneness (masculine-femi-
nine); (2) externalization of ipseity, of the
proprium,
signified by
the formation of Eve; (3) the appearance of doubt; (4) the fall;
(5) the expulsion from Paradise. The sixth and seventh posteri-
ties (Gen. 3:24) fell below the level of man; these exiles from
Paradise, whose corruption was even greater because they fell
from a higher degree, were the people of the Flood. Chapters 4
and 5 of the book of Genesis treat of the degeneration of the
Antiquissima Ecclesia.114
The ten names (Seth, Enoch, Kenan,
etc.) that are spread out in the course of chapter 5, up to
Noah,
115
signify not personal individuals, but doctrines, schools,
stages in the decline of the
Antiquissima Ecclesia,
until finally no
more remain except the small number described under the name
of Noah as the
Nova Ecclesia,
reemerging from the darkness.
116
6. The Spiritual Sense of the History of Noah
"And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the
earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart
was only evil continually" (Gen. 6:5). In the literal sense the
earth is where man is, but in the internal sense it is where love is,
since man is such as is his love. Now, love is related to the basic
and constitutive force or reality in man that is called will; this is
why the earth signifies here the will itself of man; for it is from
his basic willing that man is man, and not so much from his
knowledge and intelligence, for these only proceed from his ba-
sic reality, to such an extent that he wants neither to know nor
to understand what does not proceed from it.
117
On the other hand, "Noah" signifies a
Nova Ecclesia,
which,
we know, will be called
Antiquua Ecclesia
to distinguish it from
both the one that preceded it, before the Flood, and the one
that succeeded it.
118
But the state of each differs profoundly
from the other. We have already seen this difference described.
The people of the
Antiquissima Ecclesia
had an immediate and
direct perception of the Divine Good and of the Truth that pro-
ceeds from it. Those of the
Antiqua Ecclesia,
"Noah," no longer
had direct perception, but they had a conscience and knowl-
edge. Now, direct perception designates something other than
conscience (vulnerable, if it is alone, to all sorts of doubts), and
it also is the entire difference between the person that Sweden-
borg characterizes as the celestial person and the one that he
designates as the spiritual person. For the first, it was by means
of love that he was given to perceive all truths, those of the intel-
ligence and of faith; in him, faith and knowledge were love. The
person of the
Antiqua Ecclesia
became entirely different.
119
As a prelude to his exegesis of chapter 6 of Genesis, Sweden-
borg repeats the warning that he has reiterated in his books. No
one can see or understand the history of Noah in its true sense if
he intends to apply himself exclusively to the sense of the letter,
for here again the
style
that is historical in appearance is in reality
symbolic, that is, metahistorical; it is not a matter of external
events that would impose their course upon a historical narra-
tive, it is a matter of events of the soul that are "historicized" in
the form of external history.
120
The
Ecclesia
called Noah was the
residue, the "remains," of the
Antiquissima Ecclesia
that was
saved; it is that which is signified by the
Ark
and which is de-
scribed in the measurements and the plan of the Ark.
121
How is
the Ark used as a symbol to describe the formation of this new
Ecclesia?
If it is its symbol, it is because everything that life still pos-
sessed and was worthy of possessing was received into it. But be-
fore it could be set up, it was necessary that the man of the new
Ecclesia
should pass through all sorts of ordeals, which are signi-
fied and described as the rising of the Ark upon the waters of the
Flood, its floating and drifting on the surface, the long duration
of the voyage, until this man finally became a spiritual man, a
man who was liberated and free, to whom it could be said: "Go
forth from the Ark."
122
The whole tale seems like the account of
a long initiatory ordeal, and it is important to stress how closely
Swedenborg's hermeneutics agree with what "traditional" sci-
ences teach us, and how, for their part, the latter are confirmed
by the testimony of visionary experiences that sustain his spiri-
tual hermeneutics of the Bible.
The state of the person of the
Ecclesia
called Noah is thus that
of a person in whom the organs of the internal person are
closed, in the sense that they can no longer have direct commu-
nication with the spiritual world, with "Heaven," except in such
a way that the person remains unconscious of it. Henceforth he
must be instructed in it by external means, those of the senses
and sensory things; he must learn how to transmute these into
symbols. This will be possible, thanks to what has been pre-
served of immediate revelations or "celestial ideas" of the
An-
tiquissima Ecclesia;
these will be the
doctrinalia
preserved by
Enoch, of whom it is said that "God took him" (Gen. 5:24), be-
cause these
doctrinalia—at
the moment when "he was taken"—
were not of use or purpose to anyone.
123
In addition, the state of humanity represented in the Noah
Ecclesia
as a residue, "remains" saved from the original celestial
Ecclesia
among the exiles from Paradise, is revealed in the pro-
found sense of these words: "And the Lord shut him [Noah]
in [to the Ark]" (Gen. 7:16). The man Noah could no longer
have interior communication with heaven. In fact, a communi-
cation remained possible, for the degrees and modalities of com-
munication with the spiritual world are limitless; even an evil or
86
Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam
malevolent person has one, however weak and remote it may be,
by means of the angels who are near him, otherwise the person
would not even be able to exist. Since "the door was shut,"
though, the spiritual worlds have not been open as they were for
the man of the
Antiquissima Ecclesia.
Afterward, many people,
such as Moses, Aaron, and numerous others, had conversations
with spirits and angels, but in an entirely different manner. The
barrier is of such a kind and the reason for it is so deeply hidden
that the person of our time does not even know that there are
spirits, much less that there are angels with him, and he imagines
that he is completely alone when there are no visible compan-
ions present and that he is thinking by himself, that is, only by
means of the deliberation of his
proprium,
his illusory self. The
reason for this occultation is profound, and Swedenborg ana-
lyzes it in an observation that is no less profound. It is that peo-
ple have so inverted the orders of life, have succumbed to the
obsession of wanting to judge suprasensory things only on the
basis of sensory things and according to their laws, that in this
state any manifestation of the things of heaven would be ex-
tremely perilous for them; it would lead inevitably to profana-
tion and blasphemy, to the confusion of the sacred and the pro-
fane (the spiritual and the social), which, if it occurs in a spirit,
places him in community with infernal spirits in the other
world.
124
A person acquires a life,
his
life, by means of all the things that
he professes, his inner convictions. Those that do not affect him
are as though nonexistent
for
him, since it is
by means of
him that
they must exist. Thus, the unpardonable profanation of holy
things is not possible except for someone who has once been
convinced of them and has then come to deny and reject them.
Those who do not acknowledge them and whom they do not af-
fect may always come to know; it is as though they had not
known, for their case is the same as that of people who accept
things that have no existence. This is why the mysteries of faith
are not revealed except when the state of men is such that they
Comparative Spiritual Hermeneutics
87
no longer believe in them and consequently cannot profane
them. This is the "total devastation."
125
It was therefore neces-
sary for the antediluvians to be expelled from Paradise, for they
had known; it was necessary that men should no longer know.
Thus, there is an extraordinary symmetry between the man
Adam driven out to the exterior of Paradise and the man Noah
entering into the
interior
of the Ark that is then closed upon
him. In this there is also a profound way of expressing the neces-
sity for esoterism. The man Noah does not "come forth from
the Ark" until he has overcome the ordeal of the Flood.
In order, then, to understand in what the Flood consisted, as
well as to understand the transition from the person of immedi-
ate spiritual perception
(Antiquissima Ecclesia)
to the person of
conscience
(Antiqua Ecclesia),
and with this transition the ne-
cessity for esoterism, it is essential to bear in mind the leitmotiv
that Swedenborg stresses particularly in this regard, namely, the
physiology of the celestial person compared to that of the spiri-
tual person. The first, we already know, had, aside from his ex-
ternal respiration, a totally silent internal respiration. Among
themselves, people did not communicate so much by means of
articulated words, as we do, but they did so by ideas, as the an-
gels do. Swedenborg knew that what he formulated in this way
would seem incredible, and yet it is so. He also knew that it
would be difficult, and perhaps futile, to describe the mode of
perception made possible by this internal respiration, for it
would not be understood. When the external respiration alone
remained, requiring language in words uttered and articulated,
in which ideas are delimited and captive, the human state was
entirely changed. This is the reason that people may no longer
have immediate perception; people no longer had anything but
conscience or, at best, something intermediate between immedi-
ate perception and conscience, an intermediary that is still
known in our time. In brief, however, the result was that people
could no longer be instructed directly by means of the internal
person; it was necessary to pass through the external person.
126
Expressed in these terms, the anthropological change allows
us to have an idea of the drama. A double danger threatens man:
the danger of suffocation by spiritual things, a knowledge of
which required that mysterious internal respiration, for he can
no longer "breathe" them; and suffocation caused precisely by
the absence of the things that had been his life. This double suf-
focation is the
Flood.
Throughout the Sacred Books, water or
waters are symbols of things that relate to intelligence and
knowledge, and, as a corollary, to lack of knowledge, for falsifi-
cation, lies, and deception pertain negatively to knowledge.
127
(Again, let us note in this spiritual exegesis a striking conver-
gence with the Isma'ili gnosis of the Flood; see infra, § 3.)
The Flood, in its internal signification and its spiritual truth, is
not a geological cataclysm, nor is it a cataclysm affecting the
physical totality of the earth, of its telluric mass. We know what
the designation
earth
symbolizes: those who constituted the last
posterity of the
Antiquissima Ecclesia.
In them there was still a
"breath of life," albeit in a germinal state, that they retained
from their distant ancestors, although they themselves were no
longer in the life of faith proceeding from love. Possessed by in-
sane desires, abominable appetites, they immersed the things of
faith in them; the deceitful persuasions of their being extin-
guished and suffocated all truth and all good, rendering inopera-
tive the residue, the "remains" of life that they still had. But in
suffocating that, in drowning and stifling the internal person and
his respiration, they destroyed themselves and expired. Such was
the death of the antediluvians, for no one succeeds in living,
liv-
ing in
the sense that excludes death, without a minimum of con-
junction with Heaven.
128
This conjunction is what maintained the man Noah in the
Ark, by preserving the "breath of life" there. But it was at the
cost of a long ordeal, a long combat and severe tribulations, be-
fore he could achieve the regeneration refused by those who
preferred the desolation of their own devastation. All the num-
bers that are given—the forty days of the Flood, the one hun-
dred fifty days of the submersion of the earth, the age of Noah,
as well as the date of the event ("the six hundredth year of
Noah's life")—have a symbolic, and consequently initiatory, sig-
nification. Thus, the signification is current, present. For the an-
gels of Heaven it is all the same whether a thing is past, present,
or to come: "What is to come is present, or what is to be done is
done."
129
We understand, then, the human ordeal symbolized in that of
the man Noah or the
Ecclesia
Noah. What our theosopher was
witness to in the course of his "visions in the Spirit" was the in-
flux of infernal spirits as something impulsive, furious. Their ob-
ject was the total subjugation of man, not only to make man one
of them, but to reduce him to nothing. People are not free of
their domination and their yoke except at the cost of the combat
that the Lord gives through the agency of the angels that are
with everyone. As long as this internal combat lasts, man re-
mains, for his salvation, in the Ark, ringed by the waters of the
Flood, shaken by ordeals, that is, by the attempts of the evil spir-
its. At the end of his regeneration, "God spake unto Noah, say-
ing, Go forth from the Ark" (Gen. 8:15-16). This address by
God to Noah is nothing other than the divine Presence hence-
forth recovered, for so far as He is present, God speaks with
man; and His Presence implies freedom. The more the Lord is
present, the more people are free, that is, the more a person is in
the state of love, the more freely he acts.
130
Noah, then, may
leave the Ark; he has overcome the ordeal of the Flood. We have
been told that the celestial person is called the "Victorious."
Of necessity, we have been limited here to these few themes
illustrating the spiritual history of humanity, a recurrent history,
always present, since in the spiritual world the moments of time
are nothing other than successive internal states; a reversible
time, for it is not a homogeneous quantitative time, a time to
which some unit of external measurement would relate, subject
to the irreversible progression of numbers. What we have been
able to gather here, in relation to Swedenborg's immense work,
is not even a drop of water in relation to the ocean. Neverthe-
less, it has allowed us to penetrate sufficiently into what consti-
tutes the reality and the essence of a
spiritual event,
in order to
understand how the truth of this event controls all the ap-
proaches of spiritual hermeneutics, that is, the comprehension of
a sense that, as such, can absolutely not be
closed
and conse-
quently cannot be
enclosed
in the literal sense of a
history
hence-
forth "past and gone."
In this way we have approached somewhat more closely to
what constitutes the phenomenon of the Sacred Book, the Re-
vealed Book, and to what distinguishes it from every profane
book, namely, the exegesis that it imposes: to understand its
true
sense, a sense that, as it is
true,
is the
present
sense. It is here
that there is profound accord between the spiritual
hermeneutists of the Bible and the spiritual hermeneutists of the
Qur'an—the more easily because the Qur'an gathers much data
from the Bible, particularly about the history of Adam and the
history of Noah, themes to which our examination of spiritual
hermeneutics has limited itself, for the time being. This pro-
found accord in the quest for the true sense of the Sacred Book
arranges for us the modulation that will allow us to pass from
one subject to another. We do not have to search very far for
that transition. It is best indicated to us in the response given to
one of his acquaintances by the Fifth Imam of the Shi'ites,
Imam Mohammad al-Baqir (A.H. 57/A.D. 676-A.H. 115/
A.D. 733), who declared : "If the revelation of the Qur'an only
had meaning with regard to the person or group of people as a
result of whom one or another verse was revealed, then the en-
tire Qur'an would be dead today. No! The Sacred Book, the
Qur'an, is alive, it will never die; its verses will be fulfilled among
the people of the future, as they have been fulfilled among those
the systematic attitude which, by making the significance of the
Sacred Book
captive
to the date of its material composition, sti-
fles any potential for a significance that goes beyond that "past."
We will see that, on both sides, the mirage of these opinionated
so-called historical solutions is escaped by means of the
presence
of spiritual universes that symbolize with each other, by means
of a comparable architecture, and in relation to which what we
call history is a
hikayat,
a "history" that is a
mimesis.
Such will
be, in fact, the Shi'ite and Isma'ili vision of things.
II.
ISMA'ILI
GNOSIS
of the past."
131
This remark by the Imam admirably anticipates and defeats,
before the fact, the trap of what we call today
historicism,
that is,
1. Shi'ite and Isma'ili Hermeneutics
It is only possible here to mention allusively, in a few words,
what constitutes the essence of Shi'ism in general, both Twelve-
Imam Shi'ism and Seven-Imam Shi'ism or Isma'ilism; for more
details, the reader is referred to our previously published
works.
132
The Shi'ite religious phenomenon concerns us here in
the first place because it differs from Sunni Islam insofar as it
postulates, even as its foundation, spiritual hermeneutics of the
Sacred Book, the Qur'an. This exigency derives from a theologi-
cal and theosophers' conception that constitutes the originality
and the richness of Shi'ism, so that the question that was posed
early in Sunni Islam regarding the created or uncreated nature of
the Qur'an appeared ill posed in this context, because it was de-
prived of the metaphysical horizon that it presupposes. It is to
Shi'ism that Islamic thought is indebted for a prophetology and
a prophetic philosophy. This prophetology is characterized by
the fact that the mission of the prophet-messengers (simultane-
ously
Nabi
and
Rasul),
instructed to reveal a Sacred Book to
men, is inseparable from the
walayat,
that is, the spiritual quali-
fication of the Imams, successors to the Prophet, as "Friends of

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