Losing - And Choosing - Your Religion, Part II
Why Helen Keller Described Swedenborgianism as the "Light in My Darkness"
This is the second installment of an exploration of Swedenborgianism and two of its adherents, William Blake and Helen Keller. The first installment can be found here.
For this installment I relied heavily upon Dorothy Herrmann’s Helen Keller: A Life, and Helen Keller’s faith memoir, My Religion (reprinted as Light in my Darkness). I really can’t recommend Herrmann’s biography highly enough; it’s a completely engrossing story of a very fraught psychological relationship between Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan.
As a young woman, Helen Keller became a devout Swedenborgian and remained so the remainder of her life. In her spiritual memoir My Religion, she describes her conversion as a mysterious transformation, driven more by instinct than reason:
I cannot explain it any better than anyone else. I have many times tried to recall the feelings that led me to take Swedenborg’s interpretation of Christianity rather than my father’s Presbyterianism, but I can find no satisfactory answer. It was with me as it was with [the writer Joseph] Conrad, when an irresistible impulse urged him to go to sea. Like him, I took a “standing jump” out of my associations and traditions – and the rest is what I have grown to be.
I do not know whether I adopted the faith or the faith adopted me.
Keller’s depiction of her conversion – as with all her writing – is beautifully expressed. Yet an examination of her life, including her own words, reveals some very good, non-mysterious reasons as to why she took that “standing jump” into Swedenborgianism. And those same reasons reveal her surprising commonalities with William Blake, whom I discussed in my prior post.
So what attracted the most famous deaf-blind humanitarian and one of England’s most influential writer-artists to the same faith? Well, for starters:
A Taste for the Mystical
Swedenborg and William Blake were no strangers to visions – and as it turns out, neither was Helen Keller. In My Religion, she recounts the following episode from her girlhood as the beginning of her “spiritual awakening”:
I had been sitting quietly in the library for half an hour [reading a book in Braille]. I turned to my teacher, [Annie Sullivan], and said, “Such a strange thing has happened! I have been far away all this time, and I haven’t left the room.”
“What do you mean, Helen?” she asked, surprised.
“Why,” I cried, “I have been to Athens!”
Scarcely were the words out of my mouth when a bright, amazing realization seemed to catch my mind and set it ablaze. I perceived the realness of my soul and its sheer independence of all conditions of place and body. It was clear to me that it was because I was a spirit that I had so vividly “seen” and felt a place thousands of miles away. Space was nothing to the spirit! In that new consciousness shone the presence of God, who is a spirit everywhere at once, the Creator dwelling in all the universe simultaneously.
The fact that my small soul could reach out over continents and seas to Greece, despite a blind, deaf, and stumbling body, sent another exulting emotion rushing over me. I had broken through my limitations and found in the sense of touch an eye. I could read the thoughts of wise men and women – thoughts that had for ages survived their mortal life – and could possess them as part of myself.
If this were true, how much more could God, the uncircumscribed spirit, cancel the harms of nature – accident, pain, destruction – and reach out to his children!
Now, I suspect many of us would simply chalk up the foregoing “trip” as the product of the imagination. Still, this wasn’t the work of an ordinary mind; indeed, the lack of sight and hearing seems to have made Keller’s imaginings extraordinarily vivid and visceral, such that the dividing line between fact and fancy was blurred. As Keller’s biographer Dorothy Herrmann writes: “Possessing an uncanny ability to separate her consciousness from space and time, she was the first experimenter with what we call today ‘virtual reality’.”
As such, Keller – like Blake – was not at all off-put by Swedenborg’s claims to have met Christ and visited heaven and hell. And as for Swedenborg’s Christian detractors? Keller swiftly dismissed their super-rationalism: “Partial, occasional, even frequent and habitual glimpses of the spirit realm are recorded in every age and everywhere,” she wrote, including by Moses and St. John.
A Distaste for “Priestcraft”
Blake eschewed the trappings of institutional Christianity, and was especially angered when the Swedenborgian New Church began adopting rituals and practices. It undermined Swedenborg’s ideas that such formalities obscure God rather than revealing Him, and that the ability to experience God directly inheres in everyone – no priest or other gatekeepers required.
Likewise, Keller was just as adamant that experiencing the Divine should be a simple, fuss-free, and above all, individual affair. Rather than attending a Swedenborgian church, Herrmann notes: “Every Sunday, Helen celebrated her religion privately at her home, but even her closest friends did not know the nature of the service.” And Keller once admitted:
I confess I get rather exasperated with ministers who think there must be a special form to one’s prayers, one way of approaching God. My feeling is that all prayers should spring from the Lord’s prayer – after that I pray to God that I may act according to His law of life and to practice what I think and believe, not in words merely, but in acts. I really feel that there is a special bond between all earnest believers – Christians, Jews, Muslims – often I thank Him for permitting me to feel so close to Him.
Emancipation From Oppression – and in Keller’s Case, Physical Limitations
Blake’s politics skewed towards the then-radical, and he gave his views free reign in his work. In “The Little Black Boy”, for instance, he emphasizes the equality of the races before God, while his twin poems “The Chimney Sweeper” paint a disturbing portrait of child laborers exploited by capitalism, with a helping hand from institutionalized religion. No wonder, then, that Blake was drawn to the egalitarianism pervading Swedenborg’s philosophy. Swedenborgians were ardent abolitionists and viewed the goodness of one’s actions – as opposed to social class or rank – as determinative of whether you entered Heaven after death.
To my surprise, Helen Keller was likewise a political radical – in fact, she was far more of a fiery leftist than what your elementary school teacher led you to believe. Her views were influenced in part by John Albert Macy: the writer and literary critic married to Keller’s teacher, Annie Sullivan. Macy authored Socialism in America, which included a defense of the Industrial Workers of the World and led to his rejection by the Harvard Club. Helen, in turn, became a member of the Socialist Party by her early thirties, and an enthusiastic supporter of racial equality, women’s suffrage, and labor unions (fun fact: Keller donated money to and joined the Wobblies). She devoured Marxist works like The Communist Manifesto in Braille, and struck up friendships with noted anarchists and radicals, including Emma Goldman and Arturo Giovannitti.
In 1913, Keller even published a tract of her own, titled Out of the Dark, which detailed her admiration for socialism. As Dorothy Herrmann describes it:
This little book, which seems so innocuous today, practically destroyed her angelic image. No longer was she viewed by the public as a virginal young woman with a Braille book on her lap as she savored the sweet smell of a rose, but as a fierce revolutionary who kept a large red flag in her study and who marched in suffrage parades . . .
Curiously enough, Annie Sullivan did not share her husband’s or Keller’s politics; perhaps wisely, she viewed them as tarnishing Keller’s saintly reputation and thereby threatening the income she and Keller earned through articles, speaking engagements and the like. Nevertheless, Out of the Dark earned Keller enough notoriety as a socialist that her books were among those burned by students at the University of Berlin in 1933 as Goebbels looked on.
Like Blake, Keller’s concern for the oppressed played a role in her attraction to Swedenborgianism – most especially in her concern for the particular oppression suffered by the deaf-blind population. Swedenborgianism was Keller’s vehicle for experiencing God’s love, and via that love she knew herself to be on equal footing with the sighted and hearing. As Keller wrote to John Hintz, the family friend who introduced her to Swedenborgianism:
Swedenborgianism . . . best supplies my peculiar needs. It makes me feel as if I had been restored to equality with those who have all their faculties . . . I feel weary of groping along the darkened path that seems endless. At such times the desire for the freedom and the larger life of those around me is almost agonizing.
But when I remember the truths [of Swedenborg], I am strong again and full of joy. I am no longer deaf and blind; for with my spirit I see the glory of the all-perfect that lies beyond the physical sight and hear the triumphant song of love which transcends the tumult of this world. What appears to be my affliction is due to the obscurity, yea, the darkness, as Swedenborg says, occasioned by terrestrial things.
I cannot help laughing sometimes at the arrogance of those who think they alone possess the earth because they have eyes and ears. In reality, they see only shadows and know only in part. They little dream that the soul is the only reality, the life, the power which makes harmony out of discord, completeness out of incompleteness.
Indeed, in My Religion, Keller goes even further, suggesting that the deaf and the blind are particularly well-suited to conveying the reality of God’s love, as they are not hamstrung and misled by conventional sensory experiences – i.e., the “matter-clogged, mirage-filled” world:
The seeing are apt to conclude that the world of the blind – and especially the deaf-blind person – is quite unlike the sunlit, blooming world they know, that a handicapped person’s feelings and sensations are essentially different from their own, and that mental consciousness is fundamentally affected by infirmity. Sighted people blunder still further and imagine that the blind are shut out from all beauty of color, music, and shape. They need to be told over and over that the elements of beauty, order, form, and proportion are tangible to the blind, and that beauty and rhythm are the result of a spiritual law deeper than sense. . .
Swedenborg had a multitude of similar difficulties in conveying his impressions as a seer to the matter-clogged, mirage-filled senses of his generation. Who knows – perhaps the limitations of the blind who have eyes and the deaf who have ears may yet be a means of carrying God’s messages down into the darkest places of man’s ignorance and insensibility. Without wishing to be the least bit presumptuous, I hope I may have some skill to use my experience of life in the dark, as Swedenborg used his experience of the spiritual world so that he might elucidate the hidden meanings of the Old and New Testaments.
I sense in Keller’s words a profound yearning for egalitarianism with the hearing and sighted. Equally if not more so, I sense her profound sympathy for Swedenborg as someone who, like Keller, had to translate deeply personal, hidden experiences (his “visits” to the spiritual world) into language outsiders could comprehend. Perhaps Swedenborg was a compelling force in Keller’s life because, despite her blindness, she considered him a fellow “seer” and truth-teller.
The Whole Sex Thing
Blake found in Swedenborgianism a religion that celebrated “conjugial love.” And while I don’t think that frank, appreciative attitude towards sex was a big reason Keller turned to Swedenborgianism, I suspect it may have played a smaller role.
One of the beautiful revelations in Herrmann’s biography of Keller is how sensual the woman was. Popular media portrayed Keller as a saint, stripped sexless by her disabilities. In reality, Keller’s deaf-blindness did nothing to quell her attraction to men, which she experienced most powerfully through scent. As Keller put it:
Masculine exhalations are, as a rule, stronger, more vivid, more widely differentiated than those of women. In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all the things strong and beautiful and joyous and gives me a sense of physical happiness.
Yet despite this attraction, and due to then-prevalent stereotypes about the disabled, the most influential people in her life dissuaded Keller from believing she could have a romantic and sexual partner. As Herrmann describes:
Helen secretly yearned to fall in love and marry like her teacher. Ever since she was a child, she was more drawn to men than women, and by her own admission later in life, was possessed of a strong sex drive. But Annie [Sullivan] and especially [Keller’s] puritanical, guilt-ridden mother had succeeded in convincing her that a romance with anyone was strictly forbidden. Disabled persons must refrain from sex.
Not that the opportunity for sex didn’t present itself! An associate of John Albert Macy’s, Peter Fagan, fell in love with Keller and the pair struck up a clandestine romance that included, at the very least, kissing (a servant reported spying the couple lip-locked). Fagan proposed to Keller, they applied for a marriage license, and even made plans to elope. But their plot was foiled when Fagan showed up on the front porch to profess his love. Keller’s sister and brother-in-law confronted Fagan at gunpoint and sent him running, never to return to Keller again. Years later, as a middle-aged woman, Keller fondly recounted her relationship with Fagan:
The brief love will remain in my life, a little island of joy surrounded by dark waters. I am glad that I have had the experience of being loved and desired. The fault was not in the loving, but in the circumstances.
It’s understandable, then, that Keller drew strength from Swedenborg’s conception of the afterlife. As Herrmann notes, a Swedenborgian heaven was where Keller “would not only be able to see and hear, but also could marry and enjoy the ‘conjugial love’ that had been denied her in life” – without any of the shame or judgment her sexual impulses had been subjected to on earth.
By Whose Authority?: Where Keller and Blake Part Ways
As I described in the previous installment, Blake’s experience of God was so personal, so embedded in his own mystic visions and art, that I doubt he could have bent to anyone’s authority on religion – let alone Swedenborg’s. When it came to Divine matters, Blake was a Blake-ian, through and through.
Keller, on the other hand, had no trouble accepting Swedenborg’s authority. In fact, her status as a deaf-blind woman made her particularly amenable to it. Blake questioned Swedenborg’s version of heaven and hell on the basis that Swedenborg conversed with angels as opposed to demons; he compared Swedenborgianism with his own ideas on creativity, progress, and the imagination, and found it lacking. But Blake was able-bodied and independent, with the power to interact with and challenge the world on his own terms. In contrast, from a young age, Keller was deeply reliant upon others – above all, Annie Sullivan – to interpret and translate the sighted and hearing world for her. As such, she found Swedenborg’s accounts of the supernatural realm not-at-all polarizing, as they were no different than much of the information she had been fed her whole life: that is, external descriptions of a sensory world which she could not fully fathom on her own, but which she knew to exist.
A passage in My Religion expresses Keller’s “implicit faith” in Swedenborg best. Keller addresses the skepticism some may hold towards Swedenborg’s claim to have met and spoke to Christ, angels, etc.:
“But how can I accept such an audacious and extraordinary claim, contrary to everything I have observed?” someone again demands. It is true that when we read the works of other authors we have accepted rules and canons of criticism to guide us; but in the case of Swedenborg, we have almost none. From the very nature of such a case, we can know little or nothing about the psychological states through which he passed, except what he himself reports. His own testimony must convince us, if anything can.
That is nothing new to my experience. Daily I place implicit faith in my friends with their eyes and ears, and they tell me how often their senses deceive and lead them astray. Yet out of their evidence, I gather countless precious truths with which I build my world, and my soul is enabled to picture the beauty of the sky and listen to the songs of birds. All about me may be silence and darkness, yet within me, in the spirit, is music and brightness; and color flashes through all my thoughts. So out of Swedenborg’s evidence from beyond earth’s frontier, I construct a world that shall measure up to the high claims of my spirit when I quit this wonderful but imprisoning house of clay.
Indeed, Keller seems to have regarded her spiritual progress as a Swedenborgian Christian as akin to how, with Annie Sullivan’s help and intervention, she was able to progress from a non-verbal, non-comprehending state into active engagement with and service to the world. In this beautiful passage, you sense that worldly limitations – or at least what we perceive to be worldly limitations – are a surprising vehicle to the soul’s flourishing:
When [the newly blinded] first lose sight, they may think there is nothing left but heartache and despair. They feel shut out from all that is human . . . Objects once delightful seem to thrust out sharp edges as they grope their way about. Even those who love them act unwittingly as an irritant to their feelings because the blind feel they can no longer give other the support of their labor.
Then comes some wise teacher and friend to assure the handicapped that they can work with their hands and to a considerable degree train hearing to take the place of sight. Often the stricken do not believe it and, in despair, interpret it as mockery. Like those who are drowning, they strike blindly at anyone who tries to help. Nevertheless, the sufferers must be urged onward, and when the realization comes that they can once again connect with the world and fulfill the tasks of humanity, they find unfolding within them a being not dreamed of before. If they are wise, they discover at last that happiness has very little to do with outward circumstances, and they walk the darkened path with a firmer will than they ever felt in the light.
Likewise those who have been mentally blinded “in the gradual furnace of the world” can, and must, be pressed to look for new capabilities within themselves and work out new ways to happiness. They may even resent a faith that expects nobler things from them. They may say in effect, “I will be content if you take me for what I am – dull, or mean, or hard, or selfish.” But it is an affront to them and to the eternal dignity of humanity to acquiesce to this request.
There is much within us that even our nearest friends cannot know – more than we dare or care or are able to bare to them – more of feeling, more of power, more of character. How little we know ourselves! We need limitations and temptations to open our inner selves, dispel our ignorance, tear off our disguises, throw down old idols, and destroy false standards. Only by such rude awakenings can we be led to a place where we are less cramped, less hindered by the ever-insistent external world. Only then do we discover a new capacity and appreciation of goodness and beauty and truth.