NEW CHURCH LIFE

VOL. LXVI  OCTOBER, 1946

THE MYSTERY OF THE HUMAN WILL

AN ADDRESS BY THE REV. HUGO Lj. ODHNER

At the Eighteenth General Assembly, June 17, 1946.

Everything in life proceeds from love, centers in love, turns about love. Life seems to have no other origin and no other goal. From cradle to grave, man seeks nothing but to satisfy the inner urges that fill his body and his soul. For all that, our consciousness is so preoccupied with our thoughts, our knowledge, sensations, and actions, that we seldom reflect upon the purposes and intentions which are concealed within them, or consider the truth that love is the life itself of man.

Actually, man does not possess life, except in appearance. Life, which is God, cannot create other “lives,” but only receptacles which can receive life according to their forms. Our first acknowledgment must be that we are but recipients, or receptions, of the life, which is felt in us as love. That in us which so receives life is called the Will. And what we receive in our Will, we feel as our own, our life, our self!

We speak with great assurance about our Will. But many philosophers, observing how changeable and fickle our mind is (when judged from its surface reactions), have come to the conclusion that what we have called the Will is simply the response of the body to the stimulus of new and old experiences,—a response conditioned by conscious memories or states of the brain cortex, and modified by the general tone of the bodily tissues. In fact, the fashion is to disclaim the existence of both “will” and “mind,” and to regard even the higher life of man as complicated reflexes of the body,—physiological processes that will cease with the body.

And to speak of the Will and the Understanding as “faculties” has become definitely obsolete. There is no faculty of thinking, nor any faculty of willing; any more (they say) than water has a faculty of raining or the air a faculty of blowing!  For to acknowledge the existence of special human faculties implies that there was a Creator who endowed men with a mental equipment by which His ends might be carried out. Perhaps they should be excused, when they look at the human Will as it manifests itself at this day, if they fail to see a Divine purpose in it.

Yet certain thinkers, in attempting to understand the mind of man, have stressed the emotional elements, the feelings and the instincts, as fundamental. Schopenhauer (whose life fell in the era of disillusionment which followed the Napoleonic wars) saw the whole universe, not as the work of a beneficent and wise Creator, but as emergence of a cosmic Will,—an infinite urge or desire which caused all finite things to hunger for wants that could never be gratified. Life, he felt, was evil and pain. From utter unconsciousness, the urge to live rose in higher creatures into a tragic sensibility of its own futile strivings. In man, this Will sought vainly to gain its ends through intelligence. But the Intellect, after blundering for ages amidst fantastic hopes fostered by the Will, led only to the conclusion that to circumvent the cosmic Will one must find release in deliberate race-extinction.

While Schopenhauer, a lonely egoist and cynic who enjoyed no affectional ties, thus voiced the inevitable logic of the unregenerate will of man which dwells among the morbid fantasies of self-pity, it remained for a kindred genius, Friedrich Nietzsche, to glorify the “will-to-power,” which, he said, would create a race of supermen who would be beyond good and evil, and thus above both moral laws and Divine commandments. And it remained for the strutting hordes of Nazi hoodlums to carry this crazy logic into effect without shame or disguise, deliberately prostituting intelligence and science into tools for callous self-aggrandizement.

There is nothing new or unique in this philosophy (or sophistry) of force. It is the natural defense of man’s hereditary Will. For this, the Writings show, is centered wholly around Self, in all of us; and it looks only to worldly ends, causing an utter denial of spiritual truths; and it scoffs at the uses of the Church, which alone builds for eternity.

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The Will is the receptacle of life. To understand its purpose, we must understand life. Our idea of life depends upon our concept of God.  Schopenhauer’s “God” was an impersonal, unconscious Will—striving blindly for infinite dominion, and devoid of both mercy and wisdom. Its purpose was fated to be defeated in a finite world. But God is not such.  Life, love, is not such. And before the fibres of the human heart were twisted into a tangle of selfish desires, man’s will was not insatiable, did not aspire for infinite power, but was content to taste the limited delights which were (and are) the rewards of finite uses.  Man’s will lost the ability to attain happiness only when men refused to receive the love and will of God, and when they sought to become “as gods, knowing good and evil.”

The Will must be regarded as a receptacle. In a broad sense, the whole of man constitutes this receptacle. “The will is the substance itself of man.” (A.C. 808)  For whatever in man is felt as not of his will, he promptly disowns—as if it were a stranger, a sojourner, an intruder, or even an enemy. Only that which is of his will is really he.

Here we are faced with the paradox that while the Will is “the entire man as to his form” in every particular, and while we should “beware” of the notion that the Will is something separate from the human form (D.L.W. 403), yet there is much in man which does not belong to his Will. The material body is not the man, for its sluggishness thwarts man’s will continually. Yet the body is such as is man’s ruling love, and thus it actually appears in the other life. (D.L.W. 369)  By the body is here meant the spiritual form which organizes the physical substances drawn in through the bloods. (D.L.W. 388, 370)  Yet the spirit and the physical body are equally organic. Both with men and with angels, the Will (with the understanding) is in its first beginnings in the cortical substances of their brains, and in its derivatives in the body.  (D.L.W. 403, 365—367) The Will is not anything purely abstract in either angels or men, but it is a substantial subject, formed for the reception of love. And since the inmost substances of the brain—present in the germ-plasm and in the nerve-fibres—are what form the heart and its arteries and all the bodily tissues and the organs of sense and motion, it is obvious that the Will is everywhere such as it is in its primes.  (D.L.W. 366)

But even in the spirit or mind of man we find resistance to the Will. The understanding is full of objections to what the Will proposes. And our sensual appetites often oppose the rational resolves of our mind. The doctrine is given that the Lord creates for man, not one, but two receptacles of life. One is the Will, the other is the Understanding; and the latter is quite distinct from the Will. Yet it is stated that the Will cannot act at all by itself, but only through the Understanding, or in conjunction with it. (D.L.W. 361)  The Will is born with a man. The Understanding is constructed from the sensations and knowledges which man later experiences. But it is built by the Will, in much the same way as the lungs are formed by the heart in fetal life.  Before birth the lungs, although separately formed, are under the dominance of the heart and the blood, so that they cannot act independently. Their function of breathing is held in abeyance, and consequently the embryo has no life of its own, no conscious sensation, no thought, no freedom of action, no will and no understanding of its own, thus no proper life.

It is the same with man’s mind or spirit. The understanding first arises simply as an expression of the connate instincts, which are present in the babe, not as his own will, but as a mute and slumbering yearning which seeks to become articulate and aware of itself in the imagery formed through sensory experience. Until the understanding is opened, there is no self-conscious life, nor has anything of the hereditary “will” become “man’s will.”

The Will which thus struggles to discover itself from the time of birth is variously described as corporeal, sensual, and natural, and (in our race) as utterly corrupt, destroyed, selfish and evil by hereditary bent. It is not worthy of the name “will,” for it is a mere conglomerate of lusts and appetites. It has in it nothing of good—nothing but self-love, the love to rule, love of preeminence, craving for sensual pleasure and the cupidity to possess all things.

It is hard to reconcile the familiar sight of a tender little cooing babe—symbol of innocence and peace—with the terrible picture which the Writings draw of the native will. No Schopenhauer could paint man’s will in darker hue. No psychoanalyst could describe in worse terms the furtive lusts of the libido,—the wounded self-esteem, the smoldering envies which he sees compacted in a repressed realm of ferocious primitive instincts and emotional stresses that wait to be released by the consent of the understanding, and which sometimes break loose like cruel beasts emerging from the dark jungle of the subconscious! Our impulse is to draw a kindly veil of forgetfulness over these horrors, which, if we gazed upon them long, would petrify us like Medusa’s head!

And this, indeed, is what a merciful Providence has done. For when the human will became perverted in the most ancient race, the Lord provided that the hereditary will should be separated and closed up, covered over and reserved, lest it should be excited, and should overwhelm the mind with irresistible floods of passion. (A.C. 641)  This was the salvation of the spiritual Church, and is signified by Noah’s retreat into the ark, the lowest mansion of which was shut up. If the hereditary will should be counted by the Lord as the man, no one could rise above the level of the brutes, no infant could ever be saved, and the purpose of creation would meet with defeat.

But from birth this connate will is miraculously restrained. Normally, man is not even aware of its raging lusts, except by their gradual admission as intentions of evil into the understanding; and this is permitted only in proportion as the understanding is equipped to analyze, to recognize, and to challenge these intentions.

The hereditary will is not man’s proper will. Hence it is said that man has nothing of will when he is born, but that both “his understanding and his will are formed by degrees from infancy.” (A.C. 10298)  And note that the understanding is here mentioned before the will! For that will for which man is held responsible is formed in the understanding.

The inherited will, so far as man is concerned, is really “involuntary.” The teaching is, that man’s proper will is formed in the understanding, which is seated in the cerebrum; and it becomes his “voluntary” because that to which man assents in his understanding is accepted voluntarily. But in the cerebellum, on the other hand, and in the nerve fibres which emanate from it and are connected with it, we find the organic bases for the Involuntary. This Involuntary, we are informed, is twofold. One part is man’s hereditary, which he has from his father and mother, and which gradually reveals itself as man grows up. But the other Involuntary “inflows through heaven from the Lord,” and secretly disposes and rules everything of man’s thought and will, if he suffers himself to be regenerated, and then manifests itself in adult age. (A.C. 36035) The cerebellum is thus an agency of willing, but of unconscious and instinctive willing. It rules the heart and the viscera, and controls many spontaneous functions which are “exempt from the will of man.” The cerebellum, as an unconscious tool of the Lord, continually acts to balance and restore the order in body and mind which the cerebrum (or man’s conscious will) has abused and distorted. (A.C. 4325, 9670, 9683)

(The subject of the cerebellar functions need considerable study in this connection. The Involuntary from the Lord should presumably be taken as seated in the interior degrees within the cerebellum, which are not perverted, but which constantly neutralize the heredity from the parents, and overrule the intentionally controlled behavior originating in the cerebral cortex. (A. 9683e)  Heredity—as an Involuntary derived from the parents—would then be seated in the natural degree of the cerebellum.  (T.C.R. 160 e; W. 432)  And it would consist in the order of the nerve fibres which, connecting with the cerebellar cortex, have confirmed the evil habits which parents have made their second nature.  (A. 8593)  Such fibres accompany the cerebral fibres and coordinate them.  (A. 4326) The influx of life is into the will or cerebellum, and from this it passes forward into the cerebrum where the understanding is.  (E. 61)  Modern neurologists recognize the cerebellum as a storehouse of immense reserves of nervous energy, but intimate that it institutes no behavior patterns on its own account.)

For the proper will of man is merely natural, and is turned away from the influx of heaven. The understanding is used by it to confirm the sensual affections which it accepts from the hereditary will.

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In the mercy of the Lord, there are many things in man that are not man’s at all. Man is given an inmost degree or Soul which receives the Divine influx immediately. He is furnished also with two interior degrees within his mind which are beyond his power to pervert; and through these the Lord can act, and in these an angelic mind can be prepared, if man consents. These two degrees—the Spiritual and the Celestial—are present throughout the whole man. But in the cerebrum they serve as the transparent media through which the light of heaven can inflow to give every man a faculty to think and to see truth in the light of truth, apart from the perverting influence of the hereditary will.

To this end it is provided that, in infancy, and at other times when the hereditary lusts are not aroused, there should be formed, by means of sense-experiences, certain states called “remains,”—states of delight impressed deeply in the profoundest recesses of the unformed understanding. Such states of delight are caused by the presence of angels who rejoice in the eternal uses which they prophetically vision in man’s gentler experiences; which the angels appropriate and interpret for man, and leave as a source of future good, and as a motive from which man can think sympathetically from affections that are not his own.

This is the beginning of the miracle which lifts every man above the brutes. It does not necessarily make man regenerate! But it makes it possible for everyone to become free and responsible, so that he can become rational and moral. By it, the understanding can do something apart from the native will; wherefore it can be said that, although the hereditary will is utterly ruined, the intellectual is preserved entire. (A. 10296, 4328) The understanding is free.

And it is because of this that man’s will itself often seems to be divided. For sometimes we are borne away by currents of passion which we can scarcely understand and find it hard to control; or we may act instinctively from some physical hunger or some social greed or from some imposed habit—as if from loves which we have not chosen, and of which, perhaps, we do not approve. The next moment our mood may change us into a different being, and we feel a warning sense of caution or conscience, or are lifted up by some high aspiration. What our real love is,—our will,—is hard to determine amidst the complex of our confused feelings. Where is this unified will which is said to be the whole man—a will moving calmly forward by orderly progressions towards a single goal?

In early life, this lack of interior unity is particularly observable. The youth cannot distinguish his own forming will from the emotional stirrings of his senses and his hereditary inclinations, or from the pressure of the will of others. Whatever he learns by experience or by training, he tends to assume as his own will, and by it he exercises self-control from prudence and judgment. He critically sifts the opinions of others, and compares their behavior with his own, adopting what he regards as respectable, honorable, and advantageous, and thus attains to a moral life. His will is being formed in the understanding. But not necessarily in the Rational. For—as has been observed in the world—imagination can prevail over will. Persuasion and suggestion, the force of example, and the influence of the sphere of others, unconsciously penetrate more deeply than instruction, to form one’s willing—for good or for ill.

The doctrine reads that “every man is both in evil and in good; nor can he live unless he is in both.” (D.P. 227) And in any of these conflicting states man usually feels as if he was acting from himself; as if what he was for the moment was he himself, his proprium or his “own.” This is the great illusion of human life, which is yet the necessary matrix in which man’s ruling love, his will, is formed. Man’s proper will takes more and more distinct shape in the understanding. But he does not regard his will as a receptacle, but as his life.  He may indeed recognize in himself certain hereditary traits; he may admit that much of what he learns in history, science, and doctrine, is not self-derived. Yet he glories in his own insight and discrimination, and takes merit for the skills which his second-hand knowledge and his native talents bestow; thus surrounding his whole mind with a defensive wall of conceit.

He feels increasingly that he has a will of his own,—a will quite distinct from the cravings of the flesh and the lusts which were never fully revealed to him, but which he proudly thinks that he holds well under control by sheer strength of character or “will-power.” His hereditary will enters into his consciousness, sometimes as sudden passions, and sometimes as definite intentions of evil. He makes these his own only when his understanding consents to them and holds them allowable, so that they form themselves into a purpose and become actual evils (A.C. 4563); then they add themselves to his will or his proprium. (A.C. 8910, 9009; S.D. 3178)  For what is received in freedom remains, and is imputed to man because he identifies it with himself. (A. E. 412: 19; C. L. 493, 527)  Falsities, on the other hand, become man’s own when they enter the will, not while they remain only in the understanding. (T.C.R. 255, 658)

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Man believes himself free when he thinks and acts from what he feels as his own love or will. Yet his feeling may be mistaken. He may be only persuaded that the love is his own. Therefore the Lord said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Man must choose his own love, and he cannot choose unless he sees truth which reveals the nature and origin of his rival affections.

It is really the understanding, the rational, which makes man a free man. For truths—especially the truths of innocence and the knowledges of faith—are vessels for good. These vessels are actuated by the life of spirits and angels whose sphere of ideas is felt by man as an affection or motivation, and thus as will; giving man the sense of freedom to love what is not his, or not as yet his, and to will what is contrary to his former will.

The doctrine shows that man’s understanding can be elevated into heavenly light, and by this can be purified of merely natural ideas, and become independent of the will of his proprium and of its falsities. In such states of illustration, the will may also follow the guidance and tutelage of the understanding, and be raised up into a purer heat, or into selfless, spiritual love.

This is, of course, spoken according to the appearance. The “involuntary” or hereditary will is not sublimated, nor is the self-conscious, proprial will refined and elevated. But man comes to feel as his the influx of life tempered by the angels who attend him. Actually, a new love and a new will arise in his understanding, and “truths become good,” become felt as a new motive, so that man wills them and does them. This new will is a new creation by the Lord (A.C. 3870); yet it is freely and rationally accepted by man as his. “By this new will the spiritual man is elevated by the Lord into heaven, evil still remaining in the will that is proper to him, which will is then miraculously separated. . . .“ (A.C. 5113)  Conscience rears a barrier separating the old will from the understanding. (A.C. 863 e)

In a sense, the new will is not even to be called a will. For the good which man does from it is of the Lord alone, not through the will, but through conscience. (A.C. 875)  It is limited by the truths which are received within the church, (A.C. 7233); into these the Lord instills charity. It begins as obedience, and develops into an affection of doing truth (A.C. 3870), so that man feels repugnance in acting against it, as if it was contrary to his freedom to do so.

The new will traces its rise to the remains of innocence which the Lord instills in childhood. (A.C. 1555)  These are withdrawn into the inmosts of the mind in proportion as the proprial will develops; but when conscience is being formed, they are again remitted into the natural mind, so far as external things are vastated by various experiences, (A.C. 1616; S.D. 4383e;  A.C. 19); and the remains are then appropriated and confirmed by the spiritual truths of doctrine; so that the formation of the new will is a continuous process, so far as man permits. Conscience becomes a new and heavenly “proprium,” acquired by free choice. (A.C. l9375) It is formed in the inmost conatus (endeavor) of man’s thought, especially in states of self-compulsion. Man feels freedom whenever he follows some love. But by choice or free decision he adopts a love as his own, by reception or appropriation.

The understanding stands in a measure outside of the man himself. It is an entrance gate, a mouth, the digestive tract and purificatory of the mind, containing many things not of man’s will; and it is moved by many alien affections. The Lord provides that “the will shall receive truths and thus goods from the understanding, only so fast as a man as of himself removes evils in the external man, and only so far as he can be kept in these truths and goods to the end of his life, lest evil be commixed with good.” (D.P. 232 - 233)

Throughout the life of regeneration, man fluctuates between good and evil, or between the new proprium and the old. There is a combat in his rational mind between the spiritual will and the proprial will. Something of the old proprium enters into the life of the angels also. Yet no man can serve two masters. Good and evil cannot dwell together in man’s interiors, that is, in the will itself, or in his inmost motive. In his interiors, after regeneration has commenced, there is no alternation of the states of good and evil, and thus no mixture. (D.P. 2967) The love of spiritual uses, once established, is constant (Div. Love, xviie), and will then govern in all decisions wherein the rational mind is free.  The inflowing life, instead of flowing through. undetermined into the sensual, and being received simply as corporeal pleasure, is caught up in the planes of conscience and “terminated” as good affections. (A.C. 5145)  Conscience thus gives a new quality to the whole man; for the interior qualifies the exterior. (Char. 21)  The natural mind is reconstructed by stages, being at first compelled into obedience, and later suffering that great reversal of state which is likened to the bending back of spirals into the opposite direction. (A.C. 5128; D.L.W. 263, 254)

By regeneration man is made new altogether.  For “angel or man is such as his love is; and this not only in his organic beginnings . . . in the brain, but also in the whole body.”  All things are so disposed as to receive heavenly love. “If you are willing to believe it, man is made a new man; not only is he given a new will and a new understanding, but also a new body for his spirit.” (A.C. 6872; Div. Wis. 4 e) Nay, the physical body is also secretly affected; man breathes differently, and his blood absorbs the kind of nutriment that corresponds to his life’s love. (D.L.W. 420, 423)  Through the new spiritual will, the Lord “reforms and regenerates the natural, and, by this as a means, the sensuals and the voluntary things of the body, thus the whole man.” (T. C. R. 533 e.)

Nevertheless, with man the previous forms are not blotted out, but only removed so as not to appear or interfere. (A.C. 6872; Div. Wis. 4 e)  The new will works slowly, like a leaven.  Each evil of proprium and of heredity must be exposed and shunned.  The love of self must be weakened and turned—such is the appearance—into a love of uses. (D.P. 233:5)  Sordid delights must be dislodged by mediate goods, and wholesome satisfactions must be substituted. Spiritual disaster awaits any man who, in his conceit, seeks a sudden conversion. (D.P. 233:6)  The first of man to be regenerated is his Rational. Much later, and more laboriously, the Natural; for the imagination has to be cleansed, if man is to receive the gifts of heaven without perverting them. (A.C. 3469, 7442)

The Sensual degree, at the present day, is so wholly destroyed as to its delights and reactions that it can be reborn with scarcely anyone. (A.C. 9726; S.D. 4629:8) Yet the knowledges of the corporeal memory can be reordered to serve genuine uses.

It is the sensuals of the hereditary will—the “involuntary” which has its principal seat in the cerebellum—that cannot be amended, but only rejected. A man’s paternal heredity will remain inscribed on him to eternity. (A.C. 1414, 1573, 719 e) Yet evils which are sought out by self-examination, and shunned, will not be handed on to the offspring. (A.C. 8550, 4317, 313; T. C. R. 5213; C. L. 202-205) In any case, this inherited will is “closed” to man’s consciousness, and is not imputed to him. (A.C. 8622, 9009) It causes man’s senses to respond with pleasure to evil suggestions, involuntarily. Yet it can be controlled, to serve man’s self-protective instinct as a useful watch-dog.

When it is said that the new will may lead to a regeneration even of “the sensual and voluntary things of the body,” we take this to refer to the control which the deliberate will, acting through the cerebrum, imposes upon the behavior of the body. (S.D. 1970) For, through man’s self-discipline, the cerebrum institutes habits which the fibres of the cerebellar nerve system are compelled to confirm and maintain. (T. C. R. 160 e)

Even with the prehistoric celestial race, conscious life, as it began to dawn with a free reception of heavenly light, was conducted in the cerebrum.  Man’s heredity, inseated in the cerebellum, was then good.  The men of the celestial church did not erect a proprial will which had to be disciplined and finally set aside.  From childhood their understanding was lifted up to meet the currents of spiritual heat which were received in their inherited will as a welcome influx of creative love from their Father in the heavens. Their Rational originated directly from this spontaneous conjunction of will and understanding, so that they could be said to be “born into all the Rational and all the Scientific.” (A.C. 1902, 2557. See Rational Psychology, no. 313, 9)

To us, our will,—our ambitions which are so likely to end in tragedy and disillusionment,—are of central importance. Much though we have learned of the inexorable laws and hidden powers of the natural universe, we have failed to understand the simple truth that the life which wells up within our will is not our own. The river of life proceeding from the throne of God is divided into many heads ere it reaches us—some pure in the unconscious deeps of the soul, some mediated by the angels into good affections, some perverted by evil spirits to stir the powerful tides of heredity. The springs of our life are controlled by influences beyond analysis, before they become sensible through our corporeal experiences, or are made intelligible through revealed truths.

But man’s life is a history of his free decisions, the organic result of his reception of these influxes. In a mysterious way these free decisions combine man’s past with his present into a Will which, at every juncture of his life, stands for the sum and substance of his personality.  Actual evils, which have been shunned, silenced and forgotten, can never be so expunged that they have not had a restricting and limiting effect upon the new will that is given him by the Lord’s mercy as his; but they remain as scar-tissue in the organism of his spirit. For, in our spiritual growth, every evil to which we consent closes an avenue of influx which can never be wholly reopened, although by repentance other ways can be sought.

Man’s will is but a vessel, built of borrowed stuff, and susceptible to borrowed states. Man has nothing of his own. (D.P. 308, 309) And only by regeneration, when he realizes that the influxes which cause his moods, his longings, his will, are not his, can he begin to become free, become something of his own (S.D. 2043, 2044),—a state which freely responds to all the complex elements that are represented in his make-up, a unique quality of reception which is freely determined by human choice, and which unifies his whole mind and body for a distinct purpose, a spiritual use which can be manifested in fullness only after death. The more fully an angel has surrendered his own will, and has sought a conjunction with the will of the Lord, the more distinctly does he feel the delight of his freedom, his responsibility, and his integrated individuality. (D.P. 43)

It is not that the angel is pure—or that there is any pure good or pure truth with him. But he has accepted the truth of innocence which was lost in the Garden of Eden, and which alone can lead man back to the tree of life in the City of God. The time of conflict and temptation is over.