Freedom ≠ Fairness

          The idea that every person has spiritual freedom is one of the major tenons of New Church doctrine. As it is explained in Arcana Coelestia number 2976, “Since no one can be reformed unless he is in freedom, freedom is never therefore taken away from a person...For it is an eternal law that everyone should be interiorly in freedom.” In order that a person may fulfill God’s goal in creation, that is to be conjoined with Him, they must have spiritual freedom in order that they may freely reciprocate the Lord’s love. It’s clear then that everyone must have spiritual freedom, but what does this really mean?

          At first, the question seems to have a fairly straightforward answer: each person is able to choose what they do with their spiritual life. Spiritual freedom appears to be the ability to choose whether or not to follow the Lord, whether to confirm good or evil and to what degree, and therefore to choose a place in heaven or hell. This definition of spiritual freedom allows the Swedenborgian ideas of judgement and of a merciful God to fit together into a cohesive system. If everyone is able to choose their spiritual destination, then it makes sense for them stay there eternally, and for God not to be responsible for any less than perfect outcomes. However, looking in the writings or even at the world around us, there seem to be situations where this is not the case.

          One example of how people appear to be limited in spiritual freedom is that some people are born into situations in which they have limited access to truth. According to the Heavenly Doctrines, “man is regenerated by the truths of faith, and by a life according to them.” (HD 186) In order to open the higher levels of the mind, a person must recognize evil in their life by means of truth, and then repent from that evil. The process of regeneration, then, is dependent on access to truth. This would seem to imply that people who have less access to truth have less ability to be regenerated, and therefore less ability to choose a place in higher heavens than people with access to large amounts of truth.

On the surface, that doesn’t seem like a big deal. After all, everyone’s access to truth is limited to some degree. However, some of Swedenborg’s accounts show just how dangerous being born into a lack of truth can be. For example, in Heaven and Hell 527, Swedenborg describes the fate of some people whose faith had taught them that heaven was only gained by divine mercy, or that they could learn truth and repent after death. These people had not lived good lives on Earth, and therefore they were destined for a life in hell. However, at least to some extent these people lived the way they did because of the erroneous ideas given to them by their religion. When they found out that what they had believed about the afterlife was false, they wanted to change or be changed, but could not.

Of course, it’s easy to say that if those people had wanted to, they would have lived good lives despite the falsities they were taught, and this is true. However that view too much downplays the incredible difficulty and confusion those people would have had to overcome. After all, repenting is difficult enough for people given all the truths of the New Church, the primary message of which is to repent. How much harder, then, would it have been for those people, whose entire doctrine revolved around the idea that people can do nothing for their salvation?

For those people, was accepting the teachings of their church dangerous? Their only good options seem to have been either to accept the teachings of the church out of simple obedience, or to reject the teachings of the church and try to construct their own system of belief based on their reading of the Word, if they were even able to read it. Both of these options seem to be fairly direct paths to a place in the natural heaven.

 Moreover, some statements in the Writings suggest that being born into the wrong era can affect a person’s spiritual destination. In True Christian Religion number 501, Swedenborg addresses the reason why miracles used to occur, but no longer do. He says that

“The reason why miracles do not take place at the present time as they did formerly is that they compel and take away free will in spiritual matters, turning a person from a spiritual man into a natural one. Everyone in the Christian world since the Lord's coming has been able to become spiritual… and the ability to undergo this would be destroyed, if he were brought to believe by means of miracles.”

The clear implication of this statement is that before Christ, it was not true that everyone was able to become spiritual. If miracles take away spiritual freedom, but they were allowed to happen, that suggests that the people before Christ must have already lacked the spiritual freedom that miracles take away, otherwise the Lord would not have allowed them.

 Swedenborg goes on to say that “before the Lord's coming miracles were wrought because the men of the church were then natural men, to whom spiritual things... could not be disclosed.” (TCR 501) This seems to confirm that yes, the freedom of those who lived before Christ was limited. The reasoning given for this limitation is that if spiritual matters were disclosed to these people, they would have profaned them. This, however, suggests one of two things. One possibility is that every person alive at that time would have profaned spiritual things --  a condition that must have been provided for by the Lord, that somehow the people who would choose to profane spiritual things were born at that time. The other possibility is that some people’s ability to receive spiritual things was sacrificed in order that the people around them who would profane spiritual things would not have the opportunity to. Either way, it’s clear that the freedom of people living before Christ was limited to the natural.

Another seeming exception to the rule of spiritual freedom is people who die early, but not as children. In the doctrines, Repentance appears to be a progressive process. As a person shuns various evils, they successively open levels of their mind, and their state after death is determined by which levels of the mind have been opened on Earth. As it is described in Heaven and Hell number 279, “These gifts [good and truth] are granted by the Lord as we advance in age.” We are lead through various stages until finally we recognize that all good comes from the Lord. The number goes on to say that “No one can accept heaven without this belief and this perception.” What then is the fate of those whose time to accomplish this process is cut short? If a person only lives a short time after becoming rational, how could they possibly be able to open the higher levels of their mind that most people work their whole life open? Are they then also in a sense limited to the natural heaven?

How is it that the people in each of these scenarios are in spiritual freedom when their ability to repent and regenerate is so limited? On one hand there is the idea that each person’s life is governed by divine providence in ways that no one can know. It is not outside the realm of possibility that the Lord foresees the life a person would live, and then causes them to be born into a spiritual era or a body or circumstance that fits. This idea is pleasant in that it means that no one would have any less spiritual freedom than they would have utilized anyway, but it is also very dangerous.

 If we accepted this theory as the truth, it would open the door to the fact that if a person had a disease that would cause them to die young, we would be able to assume that they were only going to be natural people, as well as other unpleasant and unhelpful ideas. Assuming we know the nature of divine providence is always dangerous. It is especially dangerous if our conclusions drawn from this knowledge have the potential to lead us to think we know the spiritual lives of others. While it’s nice to think that the Lord has foreseen and planned everything in this way, we are not told in the writings that the Lord does this, so we should be cautious about incorporating it into our view of the Lord’s system. Ultimately we ought not to base our thoughts on truths that we theorize are true, but aren't stated.

How else then can these cases be explained? If it’s assumed that freedom is the ability to do whatever you want, then someone who, simply by the circumstance of his or her birth is only able to become natural, is not free. Since we know that it is an eternal law that everyone must be free, we have to consider the possibility that spiritual freedom is not what we had assumed it to be. Perhaps it is not simply the ability to live as well or as badly as we want. Perhaps all that is necessarily entailed by spiritual freedom is the ability to choose good or evil at any given moment. If this is true, it resolves the question of how the groups described above are in freedom, but it also does away with the idea that freedom is in any way predicated on fairness. If spiritual freedom is only the choice between heaven and hell, and not necessarily what degree of either, a person can be free even if his or her options are not as full as someone else’s.

If spiritual freedom does not imply spiritual fairness, it allows the idea that everyone is in freedom to work together with the idea that the highest level some people are able to achieve is the natural. However, it is difficult not to wonder whether this definition of freedom is in conflict with another, even more important New Church idea -- a loving God. How could it possibly be in God’s order that some people are able to become celestial angels, while others, potentially through no fault of their own, are only able to be natural? How could a loving God create a system in which some people can only experience a fraction of the eternal happiness that others are able to achieve? Could it be that the Lord’s system is not a system founded on fairness?

Arcana Coelestia 4167 provides an interesting view on fairness, saying “The more internal conscience is the place where good and truth in the genuine sense reside… But the more external base is the more external conscience, and this is where that which is just and fair... resides.” This passage shows that fairness is not as high a virtue as we tend to regard it, but rather that it is a more external expression of genuine good. Perhaps God’s system for our regeneration and salvation is concerned with higher principles than fairness. For instance, the writings actually talk about the existence of not one freedom but two opposite freedoms. There is heavenly freedom -- the freedom to think and will good -- and infernal freedom -- the freedom to think and will evil. (DP 43) If heavenly and infernal freedom mirror each other, maybe it was in divine mercy to limit people’s freedom to the natural, so that they would be spared eternity in deeper hells.

People in the General Church often view going to the natural heaven as unfavorably. Although it’s true that everyone can aspire to be even better, the existence of higher heavens ought not to negate the fact that the natural heaven is still a wonderful place. The heart may be the most important organ, but the body needs the skin to be able to live. In that sense, the skin and the heart are equally vital. So too is the role of natural angels vital to the life of heaven. Without people in the natural heaven, God’s order would not work. Life in the natural heaven is far from a bad outcome. After all, people in the natural heaven still enjoy a life of use and of willing conjunction with the Lord. Ultimately the natural heaven still means happiness to eternity, and there is no question as to whether or not that is in keeping with divine mercy.

The nature of spiritual freedom is a difficult subject to pin down, but it’s important that we put our thoughts about it into perspective. We know that there is a God. We know that he wants the best for each of us. We know that he knows how to accomplish this better than we do. We know, therefore, that whatever His system is for human freedom must be the best, most merciful system possible. Maybe we are like children expecting fairness, when God, like a parent, has the whole picture and is concerned with more important ends. We do know that at the very least, we have the freedom to choose whether or not to follow God. This, then, is what we ought to focus on: Am I choosing God in this moment? In practicing this, we can use our spiritual freedom, to whatever degree we have it, to its highest potential.