Emanuel Swedenborg: Scientist, Visionary, Heaven and Hell

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 to 1772) was a Swedish mining official, inventor and anatomist who, in his fifties, began to report visions and said he could visit heaven and hell and talk with angels and spirits. The books he wrote in the last three decades of his life, above all Heaven and Hell of 1758, gave rise to a church, drew a scathing reply from Immanuel Kant, and shaped writers from William Blake to Ralph Waldo Emerson. They also fed directly into American mental healing and the New Thought movement.

A Scientist First

Swedenborg was born Emanuel Swedberg in Stockholm on January 29, 1688. His father, Jesper Swedberg, became a professor of theology at Uppsala and Bishop of Skara, and held the unusual belief that angels and spirits were present in everyday life. After Uppsala he spent four years in London studying physics, mechanics and philosophy.

Back in Sweden, he met King Charles XII in 1716 and was appointed assessor-extraordinary on the Swedish Board of Mines, a post he held for about three decades. From 1716 to 1718 he published a scientific periodical, Daedalus Hyperboreus, which included his design for a flying machine. After the king's death the family was ennobled and the name changed to Swedenborg. In 1724 he turned down the chair of mathematics at Uppsala, citing among other things a stutter.

His three volume Opera Philosophica et Mineralia of 1735, with its chapters on smelting iron and copper, made his international reputation. In the 1730s he turned to anatomy and the brain, and some of his ideas, such as the role of the cerebral cortex and an early anticipation of the nerve cell, were later borne out. His aim was to find where the soul meets the body.

The Turn to Visions

In 1743 Swedenborg took leave to travel abroad and gather material for a work on the soul. By 1744, in the Netherlands, he was recording strange dreams in a travel journal, later found in the Royal Library in Stockholm and published in 1859 as the Journal of Dreams. In 1745, by his own account, a figure appeared to him in a London tavern, and that night told him in a dream that he was the Lord and had chosen Swedenborg to reveal the spiritual meaning of the Bible.

In 1747 he resigned from the Board of Mines on half pay and learned Hebrew again. The first result was Arcana Coelestia, eight Latin volumes published anonymously from 1749 to 1756, a verse by verse reading of the inner sense of Genesis and Exodus. Over his last 28 years he published 18 theological works. He claimed among other things that the Last Judgment had taken place in the spiritual world in 1757 and that he had witnessed it. He died in London on March 29, 1772, a date he is reported to have predicted. His remains now rest in Uppsala Cathedral.

Heaven and Hell

Heaven and Hell, published in Latin in 1758, is his best known book. In it, God is love itself, never angry, and casts no one into hell. After death each person wakes in an intermediate region Swedenborg called the World of Spirits, where pretense gradually falls away and the person's ruling love shows itself. People then go to heaven or hell because they are drawn to its way of life.

His heavens are busy places. Angels work, talk, read, worship and marry, and married love can continue after death. Readers interested in modern near-death experiences sometimes compare these reports with his, but his descriptions are a theology built on his own visions, not cases that anyone else can check.

The Doctrine of Correspondences

The idea at the center of his system is correspondence: everything in the natural world corresponds to something in the spiritual world, and through it to the divine. Light corresponds to wisdom, because wisdom enlightens the mind as light enlightens the eye. Warmth corresponds to love. In heaven, he said, an angel's clothes, house and surroundings change with the angel's inner state.

He applied the same key to scripture. He held that the Bible was written entirely in correspondences, so that even its plainest sentences carry an inner spiritual meaning, and that this is what makes it divine. Historians trace the roots of the idea to Neoplatonism and especially Plotinus. It resembles the Hermetic phrase "as above, so below," which modern books such as The Kybalion call the Principle of Correspondence, though Swedenborg built his version from Christian theology rather than the Hermetic texts.

Kant's Critique

Swedenborg's fame as a seer rested partly on stories. The best known says that in July 1759, while dining in Gothenburg, he described a fire raging in Stockholm, about 400 kilometers away, and announced when it stopped three doors from his house. There are several versions of this and of the other stories told about him.

The young Immanuel Kant was curious enough to make inquiries and to buy all eight volumes of Arcana Coelestia. In 1766 he published, anonymously, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, a satire that called Swedenborg's books "eight tomes of nonsense." The book was also aimed at Kant himself. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, Kant saw that Swedenborg's spirit world was an absurd extension of the kind of speculative metaphysics he had been doing, and he told Moses Mendelssohn that his own mind was "really in conflict on this issue." The problem, as Kant put it, was how a mind could be present in the material world at all.

The New Church and Its Readers

Swedenborg founded no church. Fifteen years after his death, on May 7, 1787, readers in England formally founded the New Church, and its first General Conference met at Great Eastcheap in London in April 1789. William Blake and his wife Catherine attended. Blake later grew critical: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written between 1790 and 1793, mocks Swedenborg's book in its very title. In the United States the General Convention of the New Church was organized in 1817, and John Chapman, the Johnny Appleseed of legend, spread its ideas as he planted orchards.

Emerson gave Swedenborg a chapter, "Swedenborg; or, the Mystic," in Representative Men in 1850, and historians count him as a strong influence on Transcendentalism. Henry James Sr. had a sudden attack of terror at his dinner table in Windsor, England, in May 1844, which he came to understand as a Swedenborgian "vastation," a stage of spiritual rebirth. He spent the rest of his life as a Swedenborgian writer, and his son William James grew up surrounded by those ideas.

From Swedenborg to New Thought

The link to American mental healing runs through Warren Felt Evans, a Methodist minister who joined the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in 1863 and was treated by Phineas Quimby. A contemporary account says his Swedenborgian faith helped him grasp Quimby's explanations quickly. His books, beginning with The Mental Cure in 1869, set out mental healing in print, and Swedenborg's teaching that every natural thing corresponds to a spiritual one gave it a ready framework: a disorder of the body could be read as the outward sign of an inner state.

Swedenborg also stands behind Spiritualism. Historians of that movement note that his reports of talking with spirits, together with the techniques of Franz Mesmer and mesmerism, gave Americans a model for seeking contact with the dead, even though Swedenborg himself warned against seeking spirits out. The American clairvoyant Andrew Jackson Davis combined the two in what he called the harmonial philosophy. Spiritualism in turn was the setting from which Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society emerged in 1875.

Weighing the Visionary

Critics have offered several explanations. The Swedish writer Martin Lamm argued in 1915 that Swedenborg's theology grew out of earlier thought, from his father to Plotinus, rather than revelation. Others have called him mentally ill. Against that, contemporaries described a kind, clear-headed man active in the Swedish parliament and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. None of his visions can be tested, and his reports of spirits from Mars and Venus show how far they sit from fact. Read him as a careful scientist who turned his method inward and produced one of the most detailed maps of the afterlife ever written, and as a major source for later spiritual science.

Sources and further reading

• Emanuel Swedenborg (Wikipedia)
• Swedenborgianism (Wikipedia)
• Heaven and Hell (Swedenborg book) (Wikipedia)