From that point onwards, Swedenborg was a prophet. He gave up all his official positions in order to live for and by his revelations. In his books he writes (at incredible length) about his supernatural experiences as dictated to him by spirits.
What most surprises the modern reader about his visions is the easy, natural, phlegmatic way he moves among scenes of the other world. As he records the location of the heavenly cities, the variety of their citizens and their manner of living, and explains their various theological preoccupations and other related questions, we almost feel as if we are reading a Baedeker. According to his writings, he had travelled much where few mortals had gone before, and on these journeys had made the acquaintance of a great many angels and devils, together with spirits belonging to an intermediate group who “live between heaven and hell”. These and many other things he discussed with Martin Luther. Luther, having arrived in the other world, moved first into much the same sort of house as he had occupied back home in Eisleben, and here he would sit on a throne and declaim his sermons. But in 1757, when his period of transformation in the spirit world had been completed, the house was taken from him, and shortly afterwards, under the influence of Swedenborg and others, he renounced those of his ideas that differed from those of the author. Swedenborg also met the philosopher Melanchton, who spent long periods at his heavenly desk writing, just as he had on earth, that good works did not matter, only faith. But when the new heaven was built, in 1757, he too corrected his original ideas. He now resides in the south-eastern region of heaven, and when he goes for a stroll his footsteps produce the clang of someone treading in iron shoes across a stone pavement.
Swedenborg also discovered that in the other world the Dutch generally did rather well. They ran flourishing businesses that were highly profitable because they were working for the sake of it and not for money. They could be easily identified by the affluence displayed by the way they lived. The Jews, on the other hand, did the dirty jobs, huddled amid stench and squalor; otherwise their main occupation was buying and selling precious stones, and a few of them became extremely rich. From time to time robed angels dressed as Christian converts would seek them out to try and win their souls, but with little success. The English, given their love of independence, of the instinctual life, and of freedom of thought, did relatively well up there. The Germans did much worse, since they “live in separate little states under local despots and, unlike the English and Dutch, enjoy no freedom of speech, spoken or written — and where those freedoms are shackled, so too is thought”.
Incidentally, the other world has none of the eternal, impassable borders of Dante’s vision. According to Swedenborg, it is simply a state of mind: people are sent to hell or raised up to heaven not by God but by their own mentality, and when they change their spiritual condition they are moved from one place to another accordingly. So how could it be that the denizens of hell, on discovering that their beliefs have been misguided, and that they have been sent there because of their spiritual state, do not instantly change their ways and thus claim their ticket to eternal salvation? The answer, according to Swedenborg, is that hell is not especially unpleasant. Everyone there is comfortable in his or her own way: the inhabitants rather like the revolting smell and feel thoroughly at home. They do occasionally visit heaven, but find it all rather alarming and disconcertingly unfamiliar, and cannot wait to get back to the comforts of the Other Place.
In all this deep philosophising it is the matter-of-factness and surprisingly narrow range of his theological interests that make Swedenborg the belated child of earlier centuries. He has been the subject of some remarkable comparisons, for example with the sort of man whose desires fail to keep pace with the growth in his understanding, like the lecher who hides a whore in his cellar, goes upstairs and has a perfectly sensible conversation with his wife and guests on the subject of virginity, then returns downstairs to give free rein to his passions. But despite these comparisons, Swedenborg’s style is in the end somewhat arid and coldly rationalistic. In a strange way what he says rings true, but he lacks a soaring imagination. It could be that he was a great visionary, but a poor poet. He was certainly not Dante. Perhaps he did genuinely see the other world with the eye of the soul, but his vision is much less compelling than that of the great Florentine, who found himself lost ‘at the mid-point of our life’s journey’ in imagination only.
And perhaps that is the secret of his power. Swedenborg is the petty-bourgeois of the supernatural. He stands in the same relation to Dante as the ‘blood brotherhood’ of the Freemasons does to the Leopard People of West Africa. It would have been no use talking to him about such grandiose matters as the Rose of Heaven or the Worm at the Heart of the World. For him the whole business is really quite simple if approached in a common-sense way. Such is his manner whenever he talks about souls. His souls — this point he cannot stress sufficiently — are no different from the living. They possess everything that humans do; they eat and drink, and live married lives. It is just that they do all this on a spiritual plane, though their spirit status should not be overemphasised. Souls are still human. The secret of Swedenborg’s power is that he reduces the spirit world to an everyday level, thus popularising it. Not everyone can pick his or her way through the grim tercets of Dante’s vision: not everyone can breathe the alarming air of the world of magic. But with the aid of Swedenborg’s guide to the other world we can journey in confidence through the mysteries of heaven and hell, as on a trip to the heavenly Jerusalem organised by Thomas Cook. And of course Swedenborg is the seer whom Cagliostro put to such brilliant use as fodder for his ignorant and simple-minded followers. For his purposes, the great mystics would have been of no use at all. Not one word of the teachings of Jalaluddin Rumi or Meister Eckhart would have been comprehensible either to him or to his disciples.
But we have not dwelt on Swedenborg at such length simply because it was from him that Cagliostro took everything that is intelligible in his theories, as he expounded them; rather it is because we feel that it is precisely through them that we come closest to the essence of the age, to the prevailing mentality and mood that both make it comprehensible and reveal the necklace trial as its most characteristic, dramatic and indeed symbolic event.
The second half of the eighteenth century is described in literary histories as the pre-romantic age. That is to say, it is the period that saw the birth and flowering of the ideas and general sensibility that came to dominate the first half of the following century, the romantic age proper. At this point these developments stood in relation to full-blown romanticism as the child does to the young adult and mature man. The people of the late eighteenth century found themselves living in an old civilisation, one that was approaching its end, a social order that was over-ripe in significant ways, but one whose notions of the world were naive and somewhat childlike. Childlike, and idyllic. No other generation lived at such a distance from tragedy. Beneath their powdered elegance, the earlier decades, those of Louis XV and the rococo, harboured a genuine sense of the tragedy of life, but with the accession of Louis XVI all that seemed to have melted away. People felt that they were standing on the threshold of a new golden age. The leading thinkers of the entire period all stood for optimism. Under Louis XV that optimism had remained a mere triumph of philosophy. Now it became a sense of life. The pre-romantics lived in expectation of some sort of miracle — a miracle that would make everything beautiful and happy, while leaving everything exactly as it had always been.