Neurological Ailments Do Not Predestinate a Person to Hell

Katrina Hughes

A popular topic in the narrative of a person’s life is their “defining moments” or times where they can point out a change in their life, normally in the way that they think. Whether or not you believe in defining moments, there are points in a person’s life where the way they see the world is drastically changed. The last year for me has been a struggle and has powerfully changed the way I process life. After a series of bad times I was diagnosed with depression in May of this year. Fortunately, instead of making me feel worse about myself, I’ve used these experiences and this diagnosis to think a lot about who I am as a person, mentally and spiritually. I retook this class because I remembered how it made me evaluate my beliefs and how they may or may not coincide with those of the New Church, especially in regards to the afterlife and ultimate judgment. I do not consider myself a member of the New Church but I respect the religion and abide by many of the tenants in my own way. I retook this class from the perspective of trying to use the things I learned to help me understand my condition and according to the New Church if I, or other people suffering from neurological ailments, have an equal opportunity to be “good people” and go to heaven.

First I must define what a “good person” is. My understanding of an ultimate “good person” according to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg is someone who ends up in heaven. We learned about a lot of judgments and a lot of different types of people. But when a person dies, they figure out who they truly are, and lose the exterior shell that they inhabit on this earth. The good go to heaven and the bad go to hell. Swedenborg talks a lot about the importance of faith and charity (AC 6011). Faith is believing in the truths of the bible and in the goodness God and charity is good done onto your neighbor. Good people are those who have both faith and charity, but the importance is placed on charity and being good to the other people around you.

            Because I am comparing by beliefs and those of the New Church, I need to first outline what my beliefs are. I believe I have a soul, and I think that this soul is who I am and I believe it to have a certain personality that makes me unique from everyone else around me. My soul is what Swedenborg calls the “internal man.” (TCR 591) It is the part of me that exists after I die and leave this physical body, that Swedenborg calls the “external man” (AC 1584), on Earth when I go somewhere else. It is what defines me as a sentient human being. My soul is the part of me that has feelings. But from suffering from depression, I’ve found out that physical and chemical indispositions in my brain affect the way that I feel. So there must be something more than just my internal and just my external part. Who I am must be a combination of the two or maybe even of more. I also believe in an afterlife and heaven and hell.

According to Last Judgment (AC 9706) the perfect human is made in an image of heaven. But the natural body is often times not perfect. Everyone knows that people everyday are born with physical ailments of the body that drastically change the way that their parents envisioned them living their lives. These people’s lives are harder, but they still exist because their physical ailments are an outcome of nature and that mistakes happen in nature. It is not difficult for a DNA strand to not replicate correctly, resulting in an incorrect protein that leads to some larger ailment for a person. These imperfections are seen all the time and accepted as real and unfortunate. That’s why most public places have handicapped parking spaces and wheelchair accessible entrances and so much more. As a society we realize that it is not a person’s fault if he or she has physical ailments that they are born with or the ones that come from accidents. We do what we can to make their lives easier because we know how difficult life already is for them. Something that is much harder for our society to understand, however, is ailments of the mind. I think this is due to the fact that you can’t see a physical problem when someone is suffering from depression or schizophrenia, so you assume that their flaw is a flaw of the inner self and they chose to be that way. But going through the experiences I have for the last year, I have come to understand neurological ailments in a way I never did before. Just like deformities of the body, there are also deformities of the mind. Problems that these people didn’t bring on themselves and issues that they have that do not make or break who they are as a person. The perfect human mind is also supposed to be in the image of heaven, but it is often not the case. Nature creates mistakes and it’s against free will to have a God who oversees everything fixing or aborting the mistakes.

When thinking about whether or not people with mental disabilities will go to heaven it is crucial to find out what part of a person is important in the judgment process. As I said before, I believe that people are made up of at least two parts, maybe more. But the important parts are the natural physical body and the internal spiritual soul. Swedenborg sums up the unimportance of the exterior, or natural, in regards to judgment in Last Judgment n. 30 and in True Christian Religion n. 796

“It is the spiritual element in a person which is judged, not the natural; for this is not answerable to any blame or charge, because it has no life of its own, but is merely the tool and instrument by means of which the spiritual element acts.” (LJ 30)

“…if he draws only on the external man for what he puts on paper, and not on the internal at the same time; he writes then from compulsion, not from free choice, and it is blotted out automatically.” (TCR 796)

The internal, or spiritual part of a person is who they really are, what continues on after their physical body has died, deteriorated, and its elements returned to the Earth. Swedenborg speaks of how the natural part of a person is merely a tool that the spiritual part uses. But in the cases of neurological ailments, this tool is broken, in a more severe way than your body can be broken. There is a stronger connection between the physical mind and the spiritual soul than the physical body and the spiritual soul. The part of ourselves that we are most aware of is our physical selves (TCR 806) and when we need to use that to grow our spiritual selves, the state of our physical mind is important. It is as if a person was judged on their ability to learn to run, but had never heard of the concept before. It would be practically impossible for them to teach themselves. If all you use is your external self, however, then your actions are just a representation of the drives of an animal, and not from the free choice that humans alone have. This means that what you do is not important unless it comes from your spiritual internal self.

The idea of neurological ailments also made me think of addiction, which is in many cases a genetic disease, passed on to future generations by the past and struggled with, often failing, in hurting the lives of others around them. I would consider hurting others a sin and the people that hurt others to be bad people who would end up in hell. But what if your spiritual self can’t control it, even though it tries because it is held within this flawed natural body that evolution has created for it. I think Swedenborg tells us that the answer is that the spiritual body is not responsible for the sins that the natural body is completely in control of. If it is possible for your internal self to intervene and do good, and you chose not to, then that is a sin. But if you can’t intervene because of a physical mental ailment, then those sins are treated like the sins of children. You didn’t know any better and once you go to heaven, your flawed physical body will no longer be in the way and you can be the person you are supposed to be. This has difficult implications. There have been studies on the minds of psychopathic killers that show their brains don’t have the ability to show empathy or discern right from wrong. I believe that according to Swedenborg’s writings, a psychopathic murderer could be a good person and go to heaven. The bad things that they do might be completely attributed to their physical ailment and once they lose their physical bodies they are actually truly a new and much better person. According to Swedenborg everyone has hereditary evils passed down to him or her from their parents. This is the case here. Physical ailments are a combination of bad genetics and bad environment factors that make your physical body not in the image of heaven. Life for people with these ailments is more difficult, but not unjust. God allows for free will which in turn allows evolution and environmental challenges to make our external man imperfect. This is a part of life. Overcoming what you can, and losing what you cannot overcome when you die is what is important. Free will is a very important topic in Swedenborg’s writings (TCR 476). It would be against free will for God to make your body turn out in a way that is contradictory to evolution and nature but it would also be against free will to allow these ailments to predetermine whether a person will go to heaven or hell.

I’m not implying that there aren’t any bad people. But I am saying that people you think are bad might not be. Really, it is only God who can tell if a person is good or bad and that person learns for themselves when they die and see what they truly love. Just like there are seemingly good people who only do good for personal gain, there are also seemingly bad people who only act badly because they are unable to stop it. That is why you should always treat others with compassion and respect, because you never know what they are going through. They might not seem to be as good as a person as you, but have overcome a whole lot more than you have to get to where they are. It’s about the effort you put in.

Through the trials of the past year, I’ve come to understand much more about mental diseases than I did before. Actually going through the process opens your eyes to how much people can struggle everyday because of seemingly simple chemical imbalances in their brains or external factors that affect them in very real ways. Mental diseases really are a sickness, just like being born with a hole in your heart. But instead of a defect in the organs of your body, it’s a defect in the neurological processes of your mind and it changes who you are. So I’ve been struggling with finding out who I am, what makes up my soul and whether or not I believe that I have an equal opportunity to go to heaven. Because of this class I have come to the conclusion that although neurological impairments make life more difficult, they to not predestinate a person to hell. Or heaven for that matter. What matters is the effort that you put into working to be a better person and doing the best you can with the physical body you were born with to grow your spiritual self.