Emanuel Swedenborg's
The Ruling Love and
The Principle of Correspondences
The ruling love
Swedenborg's concept of the ruling love
is his answer to the question, Who are you? His answer is: You are what
you love. The answer is not You are what you think you are, nor is it
You are what you eat, nor You are what you wear. It is, You are what
you love. But this will need a bit of explaining.
A personal story
I almost want to apologize for having to tell
you another personal story, but in some of these matters the only thing
a person has to go on is their own personal experience. That is particularly
true when it comes to understanding Swedenborg's concept of the ruling
love. So I have to tell you yet another story about a fishing trip.
One summer when I had come back to Eugene
from being away at college all winter a buddy and I took a float trip
in a drift boat down the McKenzie river, one of the premier fly fishing
streams in Oregon. He and I had made this trip many times together, but
this day was particularly beautiful. I clearly remember standing in the
bow of the boat that afternoon, casting a fly out onto a nice riffle and
hoping for a strike, thinking about how very much I enjoyed fly fishing.
Almost simultaneously I was also thinking about how much I enjoyed reading
and studying Philosophy. Then it occurred to me to wonder whether there
was any connection between my love of fly fishing and my love of Philosophy.
As soon as I asked the question the answer
immediately came to me: Of course there was a connection. I love both
Philosophy and fly fishing because they are both essentially the same
exact thing.
For those of you not familiar with it, fly
fishing is both a useful skill and a creative art form (much like Philosophy
is). I particularly like wet-fly fishing which entails laying a small
fly - ideally one that you've tied yourself - out on the water and then
letting it float just an inch or two beneath the surface. While it's floating
there just under the surface you watch it very closely in hopes that you'll
see the trout come flashing up from the deep and take it. That will all
happen in less than a second and you had better snap back on the line
just as the fish takes the fly or you will miss it. It all happens very
quickly. So essentially what happens with wet-fly fishing is that you
cast something of your own creation, something that is almost part of
you, out there on the water. It does not stay up on the surface but goes
beneath the surface in hopes of finding there something beautiful, alive
and nourishing. (I think trout are some of the most beautiful fish in
the world.) And if you are fortunate in your fishing, you can take home
your catch and share its beauty and nourishment with others.
Well, Philosophy means something very similar
to me. Not satisfied with staying only on the surfaces of things, Philosophy
watches very carefully beneath the surface of things, in hopes of finding
there something beautiful, true, alive and nourishing. And if you find
something valuable there, perhaps you will be able to take it and share
it with others.
Those thoughts came to me that day on the
river. Later in the day I wondered if there might also be a connection
between those two loves (fly fishing and Philosophy) and other loves I
also have. Drums, for example. I like drums, am moved by them, and love
to play them. Percussion instruments seem to appeal to me more than almost
any other instrument. Well, of course, I thought: drums are usually the
foundation of a piece of music, and may have even been the primitive origin
of human music-making. Even now, musical pieces often begin by first laying
down a foundation of rhythm and then slowly putting various melodies,
instruments and/or voice on top of that rhythm.
All of these loves (and others I've discovered
since then - e.g., love of gilnetting, a preference for deep relationships
rather than superficial relationships, a love of stone, love of the tactile
over the visual, etc) seem to have some similar themes in them. They all
seem to have something to do with going beneath the surface of things,
something to do with being drawn toward the deep foundations of things,
of looking for what's beautiful, alive and profoundly nourishing in the
depths, etc.
Now what would Swedenborg say about all these
loves? He would say that a person's loves are not just an accidental,
happenstance and random assortment of loves, but that all those particular
things a person loves are actually variations on a central theme (as I
tried to hint at in the paragraph above). The central theme, says Swedenborg,
is your Ruling Love, your central love, the very center of who you are.
You might picture your ruling love, your central
love, as a kind of hub at the center of your existence, and all the particular
loves you have are the spokes that radiate outward from, and have their
foundation in, that central hub. Swedenborg calls this "hub"
love your ruling love. The reason he called it that is because "ruling"
was a meaningful metaphor for him and his fellow countrymen. He lived
in a country governed by a monarchy (as were most European nations at
the time), and he thought of the king or queen as sitting in the center
of the kingdom and exerting their will (their wishes, loves) throughout
the rest of the country. However, they do not exert their will directly,
by themselves, on the people and institutions in their country but do
it instead through their officers, agents and lieutenants. These lieutenants
are the agents that actually express and carry out the ruler's will. In
a similar manner, says Swedenborg, your central love, the core of who
you are, resides at the center of your being and expresses itself, expresses
its will, in all your particular loves. So Swedenborg called it your ruling
love.
Monarchical rulers are not a very meaningful
part of our experience any more, of course, so the metaphor of a "ruling
love" does not really resonate with us. Central love, or hub love
might be a more meaningful metaphor for us. But in any case, the ruling
love (or whatever else we wish to call it) is the foundation of who we
are, it is who we are, and for this reason it would be worthwhile
to understand what it is.
A valuable journal exercise
There is a highly fruitful journal exercise
a person can do to help approach the question Who am I? This, of course,
is a question that the Greeks, at least, thought was absolutely central
to being human. Over the divine oracle at Delphi was inscribed "Gno
se auton" (Know thyself), and Socrates said that "The unexamined
life is not worth living." If you want to begin addressing this question
about who you are, one of the best first steps you could take would be
to start keeping a list of all the things you can think of that you love.
And by "love," in this context, is meant the things that you
are in some way drawn toward, the things that appeal to you, things that
you really like or like doing. That list for me, for example, would include
things I've already mentioned above as well as things like reading good
books, trying to get to the root of things, anything about the ocean,
our family, states like Oregon, Alaska and Montana, all kinds of stones,
oreo cookies, mountains etc etc. So you start this list with everything
you can think of that you love and then, for the next week or two, you
add to it every time you think of another thing you love. After you have
a list of maybe 50 or 100 loves, then you start looking for some common
themes among them to see if you can get some hint of what your central
"hub" love might be.
Swedenborg believes that you probably will
not be able to really express in words what your central love is because
it is too ultimately fundamental and multi-dimensional. But the way that
your central love does get expressed is in each of your particular loves.
Each of your particular loves is an articulation, an attempt to express,
what your central love is and, thus, an attempt to express who you really
are. Your loves are rich expressions of who you are, but only you will
probably be able to accurately see the inner connections among your particular
loves, and what it is about each of them that is so appealing.
The conclusion of such a journal exercise,
Swedenborg believes, would be some important insights into who you fundamentally
are.
The principle of correspondence
So what does Swedenborg say is the nature
of the relationship between your individual particular loves and your
central ruling love? Are your individual loves symbols of your
central ruling love? Are they expressions of your ruling love?
The word that Swedenborg uses to describe the relationship between the
individual loves and the ruling love is "correspondences." The
individual loves correspond to the ruling love. They are more than
symbols of it, they are manifestations of it.
Arthur Schopenhauer, in The World as Will
and Representation, saw all the individual items in the world (including
individual people) as so many various manifestations, or objectifications,
of Der Wille. He saw them all as various forms of "the will made
object." In a somewhat similar way, Swedenborg sees all your particular
loves as manifestations of your central love, i.e., as your central love
"made object." Your particular loves are not the exact same
thing as your central love, but they do correspond to it. The relationship
between your individual loves and your central love is one of correspondence.
They co-respond to each other.
This principle of correspondences is, according
to Swedenborg, more than just a description of the relationship between
a person's individual loves and their ruling love. Much more than that,
it is also the principle that describes the relationship between all the
different layers of being in the entire universe. The heavens, the hells,
the entire physical world, spirits, human beings, etc, and God at the
center of it all ("God is love"), all these layers are somehow
related to each other by the principle of correspondence. If God is, in
a sense, the ruling love at the center of all being, then everything that
exists, i.e., all being, is in some sense a manifestation, a correspondence,
of that fundamental central divine love. Or, as one neo-Platonic philosopher
expresses it,
Things here are signs;
they show therefore to the wise teachers
how the Supreme God is known.
- Plotinos, The Enneads
VI, IX, ii
The principle of correspondence, then, is
one of Swedenborg's absolutely central principles for understanding what
the universe actually is. This minimal outline here of what the principle
means can be filled out more completely in your reading of Heaven and
Hell, by looking at some of Swedenborg's other works, and perhaps
even by rummaging around a bit at the website of the
Swedenborg Foundation.