Marriage as the Conjugial Metaphysic of the Divine
By the Rev. Dr. James F. Lawrence -- Sunday, February 8, 1998

Letter From Your Editor, February 1998

Bible Reading

The Lord God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."

Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air, and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.

So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame. (Genesis 2:19-25)

Reading from Swedenborg

Here is what the essential difference between masculinity and femininity consists in: The innermost thing in masculinity is love, and its covering is wisdom--in other words, love enfolded in wisdom. The innermost thing in femininity is this masculine wisdom, and its covering is love. But this love is a feminine love, and the Lord gives it to a wife through the channel of her husband's wisdom. The other love is a masculine love, and is a love of becoming wise. The Lord gives it to a husband according to his acceptance of wisdom. This is why masculinity is wisdom that belongs to love, while femininity is a love of this wisdom. So from creation, a love of joining together as one is implanted in each. (Marital Love #32)

Sermon

If one were given a volume entitled Conjugial Love, told that it was written in the 1700's by an unmarried scientist turned theologian who was eighty years old at the time, one might be skeptical that it would contain much worth considering. Add the caveat that it was banned in Boston and perhaps interest would grow!

Swedenborg always brings a depth of understanding to the human situation--and he does write extensively on marriage. Swedenborg declares that in the dynamics of the marriage relationship there is the consummate illustration of a design that runs through the whole of creation. We are most accustomed to thinking about marriage in the narrower confines of its family, legal, and biological aspects. Swedenborg comes to it from a larger view of the nature of the divine itself, and how that imprint is on every aspect of creation, culminating in the human psyche--becoming manifest from the innermost aspects of the human person outward to the behavioral expressions of human life. The depth of spiritual meaning he found in marriage conditioned the meaning of its sexual or natural aspects, so he felt no need to repress or gloss over those aspects. It was his frankness in matters of sexual expression that got his book banned in Boston for a time.

As in the popular twentieth century psychology of Carl Jung, Swedenborg sees male and female attributes in each person of either sex. It is a challenge in our day and age to talk about such things as intrinsic differences between the genders. All the great writers on comparative literature and the great traditions of spirituality, from modern-day titans such as Mircea Eliade, Fritschof Schuon, and Joseph Campbell to leading lights of history such as Blake, Emerson, and Swedenborg, have found inspiration in the marvelous and perennial creative interplay between the male and female archetypes. But due to abuses and distortions, and at times an immature and ignorant lack of respect, our ability even to broach the subject in our present culture has been seriously impaired. Yet Swedenborg has so much to say that is of great value--when considered from a higher view--that I would like to share a little of the Swedenborgian conjugial principle, which is of such immediate relevance to us all.

In speaking of male and female archetypal values, Swedenborg stays cleanly within the classical tradition. In her softer, rounder, and more nurturing form, the female embodies the loving, caring, supportive aspects of creation. The male embodies the active, building, making, creating aspect. The male has a female side as an inner responsive quality, and the female carries the male attributes within.

What the male unconsciously seeks in the creative interplay of his inner conjugiality, he finds readily in the outward aspects of his beloved female; she realizes readily in him the male attributes she is instinctively drawn to from her inner masculine base. Since every person comes complete with both female and male aspects in their psyche--just as the divine is fully both--we all share some universals. Yet each of us embodies a uniqueness, not only in the particularity of our own mix, but also in the unique expressions of male and female qualities that give individual textures to our personalities.

In the Swedenborgian view, each of us is complete in this sense. We have a creative interplay within between the ancient forces of yin and yang. The attraction of that play is so strong that it seeks a more vivid outer expression in a relationship with another person. The attraction arises from the possibilities of wholeness and fulfillment that are sensed as a potential from the particular inner conjugialities of each partner. This dynamic is completely universal, no matter whether the outer relationship is same-sex or different-sex; the attraction arises from a sense of excitement in the potential of a greater wholeness through the uniting of their inner conjugialities.

Basically, with both Swedenborg and Jung, the energy of the yin-yang attraction is so incredibly potent for a very good reason: it is the design mechanism that makes everything go. God makes the conjugial principle so dynamic precisely so that it will effect enormous uses, not only in the human sphere, but throughout the created order. In the human sphere, the conjugial relationship draws into outer expression powerful reservoirs of the inner personality that are as yet but latent. The yin-yang, relational arrangement provides a natural avenue for personal growth and completion. Each can realize new dimensions within through the outer and more conscious expression of inner potentialities, triggered by a sense of uniting with the other. The union, when it truly takes place and becomes a spiritual reality, is both between the two and within each partner.

Real marriage, in an inner sense, is the union of the creating and sustaining aspects of God. This is a basic arrangement for getting things done. From the soft, warm, loving, and sustaining will of God (the divine female, if you will) issues the outer differentiation of truths and forms (the divine male) to effect uses of all kinds. God's love--the fundamental essence of creation--seeks to realize itself through expression in truths, forms, and uses. Truth seeks to find and unite with its heart, life, and warmth in the love of good. Love and good find their meaning only through purposeful expression, which manifests through the conduit of truth. When united, they create a use that becomes their blissful home or embodiment.

Some of the warmth and impressiveness of Swedenborg's discussion on marriage comes through in quick, powerful insights. Swedenborg says the meaning of the Biblical image of Eve being made from the rib of Adam was once revealed to him. The man's rib that curves around his heart represents the firm substantiality of his heart's desire. His inner feminine is the source of this firm heart's desire, and the outward expression comes in the uniting with the female. This is a picture of the inner conjugial structure that is created into the order of all human personalities, male and female. One can read the correspondence of this ancient myth as taking place either between two people or within one person.

Yet Swedenborg affirms that relationships between two people can be exceedingly fruitful in promoting a greater wholeness in each of the partners. In a famous vision in Conjugial Love, Swedenborg reports on what he has personally seen of marriages in heaven--where the uses of marriage become even more exalted, profound, and far-reaching than on earth. He was once shown a married pair of celestial angels; but it was a while before he could perceive that they were two separate persons, because they seemed one. The intense radiance of their glance and appearance was almost holy. And so the ultimate oneness of marriage was casually illustrated.

The urge for the male and female aspects of the Divine to unite runs through all creation--not only the animal kingdom, but also the plant and mineral kingdoms. Seen from a high theological plane, the uniting urge brings with it the thrill of completion and wholeness because it is the design feature that actually effects uses.

In human marriage the seeking, creative interaction between the two aspects--and their union--is productive in an unusually high fashion. Marriage not only produces children and propagates the species, but creates a miniature corporation, with a division of duties that is highly efficient and therefore productive. In the mineral kingdom, to go to the other extreme of the created order, a chunk of limestone also manifests the conjugial principle. Limestone has an inner essence, a feeling tone to it, that is its female aspect. That essence seeks to bring forth a particular quality of goodness out of the divine. For it to exist and perform its use, it must take a certain form. That shaping form is called its outer truth, and is its male aspect from the divine. Essence and form, goodness and truth, love and wisdom--these are the eternal and fabulously fertile yin-yang expressions of God in the majestic unfolding of created life.

The Lord brought forth this principle even in the Holy Supper, which contains two elements, one feminine: the warm, soft, and nurturing bread; one masculine: the clarifying wine. How interesting that this sacrament is called "communion"; through the correspondences of its holy elements, we bring our inner conjugialities into the channel of higher communion with the divine conjugiality.

All this and more is found in the book that was banned in Boston. Marriage can be so much more than a mere cultural institution. From his profound spiritual excursions guided by the Lord, Swedenborg sets marriage in the largest possible context--one that throws light on all its lesser aspects. Seen in this light, marriage is understood truly as a radiantly universal metaphysic of the divine.

Jim Lawrence is Dean of the Swedenborgian House of Studies at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. (Updated 7/2002)