Use as the Purpose of Creation

Swedenborg's cosmology is thoroughly teleological. The universe exists so that use may be performed; creation is the outward expression of divine love, and love, by its nature, seeks to benefit others. Every level of creation — mineral, vegetable, animal, human, angelic — performs uses to the levels above and below it. The mineral sustains the plant; the plant sustains the animal; the animal sustains the human; the human sustains the spiritual world. A being that performs no use to others is, in Swedenborg's terms, not alive in any meaningful sense.

For human beings specifically, the central use is the performance of charity toward the neighbour — providing for others' physical, moral, and spiritual needs as appropriate to one's station and capacity. An honest merchant who provides needed goods at a fair price is performing a use; a physician who heals honestly is performing a use; a ruler who governs justly is performing a use. The occupation does not matter; what matters is whether it is performed from a love of being useful or from a love of profit and reputation.

Swedenborg uses the concept of use to ground a social ethics that is notably this-worldly. Monasticism, which removes the person from the social body in which uses are performed, is, in his view, spiritually inferior to active engagement in the world. The saint is not the person who has renounced worldly occupation but the person who performs their worldly occupation from a love of use — who, as he puts it, has heaven in their work. The spiritual and the practical are not in tension; genuine charity is expressed through practical usefulness, and genuine usefulness, performed from love, is charity.

The concept of use is elaborated throughout True Christian Religion in its treatment of charity. Swedenborg's emphasis on practical use as the form of genuine charity had a significant influence on American Swedenborgian social reformers in the nineteenth century and contributed to the tradition of progressive social Christianity.