Swedenborg

Emanuel Swedenborg

Emanuel Swedenborg is one of the strangest and most extraordinary figures in the whole history of thought: a first-rank scientist of the European Enlightenment who, in his middle fifties, underwent a spiritual awakening, claimed that his inner senses had opened upon the spiritual world, and spent the rest of his long life describing heaven, hell, and the angels from what he insisted was firsthand experience. Easy to wave away as a visionary crank, he was in truth a profound and systematic thinker whose doctrine of correspondences and vision of the afterlife shaped Romanticism, Symbolism, and the Western religious imagination far beyond his fame.

The corpus and how the chat cites it. Swedenborg wrote in Latin, and this room reads two of his works in the old Swedenborg Foundation translations, public domain by way of Project Gutenberg: Heaven and Hell (1758), his most famous book, and Divine Love and Wisdom (1763), the core of his theology. Swedenborg divided his works into numbered sections, and the chat cites them. Expect citations of the form Heaven and Hell, section 89.

Life. Swedenborg was born in 1688 in Stockholm, and for the first half of his life he was a polymath of the Scientific Revolution: a gifted mathematician, engineer, anatomist, and cosmologist who proposed a nebular origin of the solar system before Kant and Laplace, did pioneering work on the function of the brain, and served for decades as an assessor on the Swedish Board of Mines. In the years around 1744 a series of dreams and visions transformed him utterly. He came to believe that he had been called by the Lord to unfold the spiritual sense of Scripture, and from then on he lived a quiet double life, a respected gentleman-scholar who also conversed, he said, daily with angels and spirits, and who poured the rest of his years into an enormous body of theological writing.

Where to begin. Start with Heaven and Hell for the vision of the afterlife, and Divine Love and Wisdom for the theology of God, creation, and use. Beyond them lie the vast Arcana Coelestia, his spiritual reading of Genesis and Exodus, and The True Christian Religion, the full statement of his doctrine.

The scientist and the seer. The decisive thing about Swedenborg is the union, in one mind, of the rigorous Enlightenment scientist and the visionary. He did not throw reason away for ecstasy; he brought the analytic, systematic, empirical temper of his scientific years to the reporting of the spiritual world, describing heaven and hell with the same patient method he had once brought to anatomy and to metallurgy. The result is unlike any other mystical literature, orderly and detailed and reasoned, almost matter-of-fact about the marvelous, and that is why even readers who cannot credit his claims have found his work hard to put down.

The doctrine of correspondences. His most influential teaching is that everything in the natural, physical world corresponds to something in the spiritual world, of which it is the outward effect and expression. The whole natural world, he writes, corresponds to the spiritual world, and not merely the natural world in general but every particular of it. Nature is therefore a theater of spiritual realities, a visible language of the invisible, and Scripture, beneath its literal sense, carries an inner spiritual sense to be read through these correspondences. This vision of a universe of symbols, in which every natural thing answers to a spiritual meaning, passed into Romanticism and gave the Symbolist poets their own doctrine of correspondences.

Heaven and hell as states of the soul. His account of the afterlife overturns the ordinary picture. Heaven and hell, Swedenborg insists, are not places of reward and punishment imposed from outside but states of the soul, the natural continuation and outward form of the loves a person cultivated while alive. We become, fully and openly, what we have inwardly loved: those who loved God and the neighbor enter heaven because heaven is simply the life of that love made manifest, and those ruled by the love of self and the world fall into hell because hell is the life of those loves laid bare. No one is cast down by an angry God; each enters the state he has made his own. Angels are not a separate creation but human beings who have lived well, so that heaven, he says, is from the human race, and the whole of it is governed by use, by usefulness and service, since to love truly is to be of use to others.

The theology of divine love and wisdom. Beneath the visions runs a reasoned theology. God, for Swedenborg, is Divine Love itself and Divine Wisdom itself, and creation is the outflowing of that love through that wisdom, with use as its end, a heaven of angels in whom the divine love can dwell and to whom it can give. Against the orthodoxy of his day he rejected a Trinity of three persons in favor of the one God, the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom love, wisdom, and active power form a single divine trinity; he rejected salvation by faith alone in favor of a life of charity and use; and he rejected predestination and substitutionary atonement in favor of human freedom and the reform of the inner life. His is a religion of love made real in usefulness.

The secret river of influence. Few thinkers so far outside official philosophy have watered so much of it. Kant devoted a whole book, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, half mocking and half fascinated, to wrestling with him; William Blake read and quarreled with him; Emerson made him one of his Representative Men, Swedenborg the Mystic; the Transcendentalists, Baudelaire and the French Symbolists whose correspondences are his, Coleridge, Balzac, Yeats, and Borges all drank from him; Henry James Sr. was a devoted Swedenborgian, and through him the teaching touched William and Henry James; and D. T. Suzuki translated him into Japanese and called him the Buddha of the North. A whole church arose to carry his doctrine.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Read now, Swedenborg is the great scientist-visionary, the systematizer of the spiritual world, and the author of the doctrine of correspondences that taught the West to read nature as a book of symbols. Whether or not one believes that he walked among the angels, his vision of a spiritual world interpenetrating the natural, of heaven and hell as the soul's own chosen loves, and of a God who is love itself has shaped religion, literature, and the imagination ever since. He drew on the Neoplatonic emanation of Plotinus and the Christian theosophy of Böhme; he so fascinated Kant that the critical philosopher wrote a book to exorcise him; Emerson enshrined him among the world's representative minds; his correspondences belong to the same esoteric stream as the Hermetic writings; and D. T. Suzuki carried him into the world of Zen. The river that runs from Swedenborg surfaces, again and again, wherever the West tries to read the spirit in the world.