Ideas That Influence: An Examination of Beliefs in Judgment

Ideas That Influence: An Examination of Beliefs in Judgment

The question of whether or not there is life after death, and what form that life takes if it does exist, has been central to the human existence for many millennia.  There are as many variations on where we end up after death as there are cultures to pose the question.  The Christian community, in all its denominations, holds a fairly consistent view that after death we end up in either heaven or hell (or purgatory, in Catholic doctrine). What is much more debated about is how we end up in one of those places.  Some denominations believe that it is solely God’s whim, which we are powerless to affect, that sends us to heaven or hell (predestination); others claim it is only through faith in Jesus, without regard to any good or evil deeds we do, that we get into heaven (faith alone). The Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, however, tell us that we are judged by our dominant love- that is, it is our dominant, or strongest, love that decides where we end up permanently after death.  A person who in life had a good dominant love goes to heaven; a person who had an evil dominant love goes to hell, both by their own free choice. However, it is not always easy to figure out how this love is formed in us- how the different factors in our lives influence it.  One major factor to consider is that of our beliefs. Although the Writings indicate clearly enough that incorrect beliefs in themselves do not send a person to hell, what we believe is a large part of who we are. It stands to reason, then, that beliefs can influence our dominant love, and so have an indirect effect on how we are judged. Our beliefs strive to be in harmony with our dominant love, and so guide our love into agreeing with them, but if, at the time of judgment, there is still discord between the two, it is the belief and not the love that falls away.
The case can be made from the Writings that beliefs are simply an expression of our dominant love. True Christian Religion states, “[T]he will acts upon the understanding and makes it think, but the reverse does not happen” (657 [Chadwick]). At first read, this passage seems to suggest that we can only truly believe (a function of the understanding) in things that agree with our will, or our love, because what we believe is just the way we make known what we love.  However, another passage explains “that every man has these two, will and understanding, and that they are distinct from each other...is known from common perception” (DLW 361[Ager]).  This information implies just the opposite from the TCR passage, and is more forceful when it is understood that “common perception” is influx from heaven which allows us to see truths (CL 28 [Acton]). Though they seem very disparate, these two passages can be reconciled.  A metaphor that Swedenborg offers just a few numbers down in TCR is helpful: “Worship itself takes place in the will, and in the understanding which is a kind of church for it” (660 [Chadwick]). This image shows that the understanding is the framework for the will (like a church is the frame in which we worship), not simply its presentation.  This clarification does not negate the earlier TCR passage, because a framework is one way to give something form, and it also agrees with the DLW passage in that a framework and what it surrounds are two distinct things.  Just as the type of building we have affects the things we can do inside, the framework of beliefs our dominant love resides in affects how that love changes and how it manifests.  Following the same reasoning, our beliefs and our dominant love will strive to be in harmony with each other in order to make our framework of understanding suitable to the things our will wants to house inside it.
From connecting the passages above we see how our beliefs and our dominant love are related to each other, but not what kinds of beliefs influence our love.  Certainly the beliefs that have an effect on our dominant love are spiritual ones; our opinion on the best flavor of ice cream is not going to change where we end up in heaven.  Yet spiritual beliefs have a spectrum; some are central to us while others are things we accept without being deeply attached to.  Swedenborg addresses this spectrum through the concept of confirmation.  He writes that one who confirms a belief “adopts an assumption and then refuses to withdraw from it or to retract the smallest detail” and instead “he scrapes together and piles up confirmatory material wherever he can, doing so even from the Word” (AC 589 [Elliot]).  Swedenborg is referring specifically to false beliefs here, and in another place writes of how easy it is to confirm false beliefs, because people “cling to the assumptions they have adopted and of which they are persuaded, [and] they make everything favour and support them” (AC 570 [Elliot]).  Because a person puts so much effort into a belief that is confirmed, it becomes apparent that one’s dominant love must be involved in this process.  After all, if the belief and the love were not striving to be in harmony, then a person would not “cling” so desperately to the belief; it would simply fall away. Thus, confirmed beliefs are the type that are most likely influence where we end up after judgment, since it is our (dominant) love that does the clinging. Divine Providence supports this reasoning when it states, “Everything of which man has persuaded himself and which he has confirmed in himself remains with him as his own” (317 [Dick and Pulsford]). That confirmed beliefs remain with us enforces that they have consequences reaching to judgment, and so must be able to influence our dominant love.
Swedenborg also makes sure to acknowledge, however, that not all confirmed beliefs end up successfully influencing our dominant love.  He separates confirmation into two types: intellectual and voluntary.  Only beliefs that have both these kinds of confirmation have lasting effects on judgment, because “everything confirmed by both the will and the understanding remains to eternity, but not what has been confirmed only by the understanding” (DP 318 [Dick and Pulsford]).  This concept overlaps with that of false convictions. A conviction is defined as “a fixed or firm belief” (Dictionary.com), and so is another kind of belief that might influence our dominant love. In one of the spiritual experiences in True Christian Religion, Martin Luther adopts a “false conviction... which is a kind of incantation that wells up from self-love” and yet is eventually able to let go of it and accept true teachings (796 [Chadwick]).  A false conviction is a negative thing in the spiritual world, as can be seen from the fact that those who have them “flee from the light of heaven and take refuge in caves that appear at their openings to be densely dark, also in clefts of rocks, and there they hide themselves” (HH 488 [Ager]). Luther, however, does not end up in such a place. This description of the negative impact of a false conviction coupled with the evidence from the spiritual experience of Luther imply that, just as confirmation may only be intellectual, a false conviction may only be intellectual as well, and so not have a lasting effect on judgment (as it clearly did not for Luther). That such a conviction “wells up from self-love” shows us that the belief tries to be in harmony with our dominant love- as long as the false conviction (firm belief) persists, it pushes us to be in self-love, because both are negative. If our dominant love, however, is not self-love, there will be continuous discord between it and the false conviction, which is why false convictions, as in the case of Luther, can fade away without affecting our final judgment; they affect the judgment only if they sway our dominant love.
As the spiritual experience of Luther illustrates, just because our beliefs do not always end up successfully influencing our dominant love does not mean that they disappear instantly the moment we enter the spiritual world; otherwise, he would not have been able to have a nonpermanent false conviction while he was there. Just as beliefs which do influence our dominant love play their proper role in judgment (by helping lead us to either heaven or hell), beliefs which do not must fall away through the proper judgment process.  Swedenborg calls this process vastation, and describes it for us: “People who have confirmed themselves completely in false assumptions are reduced to a state of total ignorance...But after a specific time they are as it were created anew and endowed with truths of faith” (AC 1109 [Elliott]). The reason that vastation must remove the false beliefs before our (good) dominant love leads us to our place in heaven is in order that “the things of which [we] are firmly persuaded, originating in what is properly [our] own, may crumble... and also that [we] may receive the perception of good and truth” (AC 2694 [Elliot]).  This passage shows us that even when our beliefs do not ultimately harmonize with our dominant love, because throughout our life on earth they have tried to do so it still takes effort to make them fade away.  For this reason, it makes sense to examine our beliefs during our life, that we might see whether or not they are in harmony with our dominant love, and so, as far as we are able, avoid the eventual vastations that accompany beliefs that discord with our dominant love.
If we wish to work at ensuring that our beliefs and our dominant love harmonize properly, we need a place to begin.  We have many spiritual beliefs- which ones should we examine to see if they seem to be in harmony with what we want our dominant love to be? Swedenborg writes that the “particular details of doctrine... make no difference provided they have the same end in view” and that when they do they are simply “details that contribute to the general whole” (AC 1288 [Elliott]).  If that is the case, then we should look to our most general beliefs. It should be noted that the word “general” here is not necessarily used in the popular modern sense of “vague,” but rather to mean “baseline.” It is the starting-point beliefs, those that our other beliefs build upon, which we should make sure are in harmony with what we want our dominant love to be (and so ensure that they are not pushing our dominant love to be something we do not want). Later on in Arcana Coelestia, we are told that the Lord is “the most general and all-embracing whole, the source from which everything is held in place” (6115 [Elliot]).  In other words, it is our beliefs about the Lord which are the starting-point or baseline on which all our other beliefs build.  Therefore, it is what we believe about the Lord we should first try to harmonize with what we want our dominant love to be.  For example, if we want our dominant love to be doing charity to the neighbor, then we should examine what we believe about the Lord to see if it is consistent with that love.  If it is not, as has been demonstrated, it will inevitably try to pull our love away from charity toward the neighbor and into harmony with itself.  By examining our beliefs for their compatibility with our (desired) dominant love, we help avoid the struggle that occurs when the two do discord.    
Although in the end our dominant love is the thing that decides how we are judged, our spiritual beliefs are still important.  As a major factor in our lives and one that affects our decisions on how we will act every day, our beliefs can influence our dominant love away from being good.  False beliefs, though they do not affect where we go after death in and of themselves, will attempt to make our dominant love harmonize with them and so are potentially harmful. Conversely, true beliefs will try to make our dominant love align with them, and so are helpful in maintaining a good love when it might otherwise tend toward evil.  Even false beliefs that do not successfully sway our dominant love at first stick to us in the spiritual world and must be removed by vastations before our judgment is complete. For these reasons, we should not focus solely on “being good” and assume that we can simply wait until we reach the spiritual world to sort out true and false beliefs.  While it is a useful comfort to know that the safety net of instruction awaits us in judgment (if we have a good dominant love), we should work on harmonizing our beliefs with our (desired) dominant love now; we should be aware of our beliefs and how they relate to our dominant love.  If we neglect to unite our beliefs and dominant love while we are alive, we run the risk of subjecting our judgment after death to an unnecessary uncertainty.

Sources

The Writings
- e-swedenborg.com

Other
- dictionary.com