New Church Life May/June 2017 | Page 43

        reference, has been preserved in later editions. But people producing audio versions may understandably omit it, and of course readers presumably generally skip it. The second kind of indexlike material, the author’s footnotes, have often actually been omitted from later editions and translations, or in other cases moved to the back of the book. But I’m especially interested in the third kind of indexlike material, which perhaps reaches its peak in Swedenborg’s 1758 work New Jerusalem (The New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine). This published theological work has 23 chapters, most of which are followed by a block of indexlike text. In fact, the indexlike material constitutes some 69 percent of the text. The New Century Edition (NCE) has recently issued the Rev. Dr. George Dole’s fresh and wonderfully readable English translation of New Jerusalem, including all the indexlike material. (It is a cornerstone of our approach that we include everything in Swedenborg’s first edition.) I was shocked to find recently that this NCE version is the first time that indexlike material has been translated into English in 106 years! Since it fills the page and is separate from the main text, this material was presumably considered easier to remove than embedded cross-references. So it seems as though the larger such text is, the more inclined we are to get rid of it. For more evidence that this material has been seen as secondary, consider how Potts’ Concordance handles it. Although the Concordance takes great pains to represent Swedenborg’s doctrinal main text, when it comes to indexlike material, Potts merely summarizes it as “Refs. to Passages.” (i.e. N. 25. That all good and truth are from the Lord. Refs. To passages. 308.) Now all of this is understandable, if we consider this material to be a normal index. Because an index is by nature a mere humble servant, is it not? It’s a signpost, a pointer, a hyperlink, directing one to where the real action is. But is that all this was? Important to Swedenborg While this material may not be very important to us, I would argue that it was very important to Swedenborg. Both the activity of producing this material and the resulting product seem to have been of great significance to him. To lay this out I need to broaden the scope from his indexlike material to all his indexes. Before his spiritual eyes were opened, Swedenborg included indexes in some of his published works. These were brief and normal. In Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain vol. 1, for example, there is a seven-page index, or a rate of one page of index for every 55 pages of text, and the wording of the index simply reflects the wording of the main text. 223