Emanuel Swedenborg

Swedish scientist, philosopher, and theologian

• Born: January 29, 1688
• Birthplace: Stockholm, Sweden
• Died: March 29, 1772
• Place of death: London, England

Swedenborg was first a mechanical prodigy, then a scientist and philosopher, then an anatomist, and finally a theologian. His peers saw him as a genius in science and invention, but it was only much later that his anatomical studies were appreciated. His many contributions to Christian religious thought are still not widely known.

Early Life

When Emanuel Swedenborg (eh-MAH-nuh-wuhl SVAY-duhn-bawr), the third child of Jesper and Sara Swedberg, was born, his father was court chaplain in Stockholm and was later appointed bishop of Skara. In 1719, the family was ennobled and took the name Swedenborg. Very little is known of Swedenborg’s childhood. In 1699, he entered the University of Uppsala and ten years later read his graduation essay. Shortly afterward, he began extensive travels in England and on the Continent. Although there is no evidence that Swedenborg actually met Isaac Newton, he studied Newton’s works avidly. Swedenborg did work with both Edmond Halley and John Flamsteed.

Throughout his travels in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Bohemia, and Italy, Swedenborg searched insatiably for scientific knowledge, lodging when possible with scientists, craftsmen, and mathematicians. In 1714, he drafted papers on fourteen mechanical inventions, some of which he soon published in the Daedalus Hyperboreus, the first Swedish scientific journal, since recognized by the Society of Science of Uppsala as the first of its proceedings. He was appointed to the Swedish Board of Mines in 1716 and devised a number of mechanical devices to increase the efficiency of mining operations. In 1721, he published a Latin treatise on chemistry.

Life’s Work

The work that established Swedenborg’s reputation as a scientist of note was a massive three-volume set published in 1734. The two volumes on copper and iron smelting were translated into several languages and became standard reference works. Next, his attention turned to physiological studies, his avowed motivation being a search for the human soul. These studies, which include several large volumes, are significant not because they rival in any sense later research using far more refined equipment but because of the remarkably intelligent way in which Swedenborg analyzed and interpreted the phenomena he was able to observe. In 1901, when Max Neuburger noted certain anticipations of modern medical views made by Swedenborg, the University of Vienna ordered a complete set of Swedenborg’s treatises from the Royal Swedish Academy. These studies showed, 150 years before the work of any other scientist, that the motion of the brain was synchronous with respiration and not with the motion of the heart. His views on the physiological functions of the spinal cord agreed with recent research, and he anticipated much later studies on the functions of the ductless glands.

It is curious that Swedenborg, a man of such astonishing achievement in physics and biology, is almost completely ignored in the annals of science. One reason for his obscurity is that between 1749 and 1756 he published anonymously, in eight large volumes, a work titled Arcana coelestia quae in scriptura sacra seu verbo Domini sunt detecta (The Heavenly Arcana, 1951-1956). This monumental work signaled the beginning of Swedenborg’s work as a theologian. The last twenty-three years of his life were devoted to writing and publishing the works that identify him as a religious reformer and Bible interpreter.

Swedenborg’s biblical interpretations did not earn for him widespread recognition, because he used visions as the basis for his interpretations. In an autobiographical letter to his friend the Reverend Thomas Hartley, written in 1769, Swedenborg stated, “I have been called to a holy office by the Lord himself… , when he opened my sight into the spiritual world and enabled me to converse with spirits and angels.… From that time I began to print and publish the various arcana that were seen by me.…” To his contemporaries, influenced by the intellectual climate of the eighteenth century, with its materialistic conception of the universe, Swedenborg was an enigma, sacrificing a brilliant career as an esteemed scientist to pursue religious studies.

Swedenborg, nevertheless, continued his theological publications, publishing these works anonymously and distributing them at his own expense until the last three years of his life. In the first and largest of these, The Heavenly Arcana, Swedenborg does an intensive interpretation of the first two books of the Bible, Genesis and Exodus, claiming that these books, along with most of the text of the Bible, have an inner, spiritual sense. The story of Creation, for example, becomes a symbolic story of the birth or creation of spirituality in every human being. Once this spirituality is recognized, the Bible can be used as a personal psychological guide to life.

In addition to the detailed critique of Scriptural spiritual meaning, Swedenborg introduced between chapters lengthy articles on his otherworldly experiences, not only relating actual conditions he says he observed in Heaven, Hell, and an intermediate world of spirits but also chronicling his encounters with spirits he believed had previously lived on other inhabited planets.

The concept of the nature of God found in these writings is clearly Christian in intent and belief, but at the same time it deals constructively and logically with the concept of a trinity in God. According to this teaching, the being called God the Father in Scripture is a symbolic name for the essence or essential nature of God, a perfect merging of divine love and wisdom, corresponding to what has traditionally been called the soul in any human being. The Son of God, the Christ of the New Testament, is the earthly manifestation of the one God, corresponding to the human body through which the soul of every human being expresses itself. The enigmatic Holy Spirit is, on one hand, the operation or influence of God in creation and, on the other, the discernible nature or personality of God, corresponding to the nature or personality of any human being. These three areas of thought—the concept that there is a continuous and connected inner sense in the Word, that there is a real and knowable life after death, and that God is one in essence and in person, with three distinguishable aspects—are the primary distinctive beliefs of Swedenborgianism.

Immanuel Kant may have introduced the most enduring negative attitude toward the worth of studying Swedenborg. For reasons not clearly known, Kant published a strange work in 1766, Träume eines Geistersehers erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik (Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics, 1900), which ridiculed Swedenborg and his theological writings. Kant described Swedenborg’s magnum opus as eight volumes of sheer nonsense; because in his later years Kant became so influential on the Continent, this ridicule became a curse that led to Swedenborg’s being largely ignored by scholars for generations.

The charges made during his lifetime that Swedenborg was a writer of nonsense and the related charge that he was insane were completely insupportable. He was too well known for his scholarly, methodical, and highly respected scientific works to be dismissed in such cavalier fashion. The religious writings of Swedenborg were taken so seriously by his own people that in 1769 heresy charges were leveled against two of his prestigious disciples at Gothenburg, a sad affair that lasted two or three years before it was quietly dropped for lack of evidence.

Just before Swedenborg left for his last trip to London to publish Vera Christiana religio (1771; True Christian Religion, 1781), his final summary work, he met with King Adolf Frederick, who is reported to have said, “The consistories have kept silent on the subject of my letters and your writings. We may conclude, then, that they have not found anything reprehensible in them and that you have written in conformity with the truth.”

Significance

During his lifetime, Emanuel Swedenborg made no effort to found a new religious movement, contenting himself with publishing his works and distributing them at his own expense to leading clergymen and scholars. It was not until fifteen years after his death that the first movement to found a new church organization began in London among readers of his works. That modest beginning has led to the present numerically small but worldwide following of Swedenborgians, including both those who are members of a Swedenborgian church organization and those who are simply readers of Swedenborg’s works.

In particular, interest in Swedenborg has been kindled by an ongoing reassessment of eighteenth century thought. Rejecting the traditional, positivistic view of the Enlightenment, scholars in many disciplines have shown that the contrast between the rational and the irrational in the Age of Reason cannot be neatly demarcated. Swedenborg, scientist and visionary, is a significant case in point.

Bibliography

Benz, Ernst. Emanuel Swedenborg: Visionary Savant in the Age of Reason. Translated by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. West Chester, Pa.: Swedenborg Foundation, 2002. The first English translation of a book originally published in the 1950’s. A comprehensive biography, describing Swedenborg’s scientific achievements, the spiritual experience that altered his life, and his religious ideas. Benz compares Swedenborg to the medieval mystics and Hebrew prophets who were able to convey God’s revelations to the community.

Block, Marguerite B. The New Church in the New World: A Study of Swedenborgianism in America. Introduction and epilogue by Robert H. Kirven. New York: Swedenborg Publishing Association, 1984. With Kirven’s updating, this work, based on Block’s Ph.D. dissertation, is a thorough and reliable standard reference work.

Jonsson, Inge. Emanuel Swedenborg. Boston: Twayne, 1971. Only the first chapter of this work is, strictly speaking, a biography. The major part of the book focuses on the thought content of Swedenborg’s writings. The keenest assessment by the author is of Swedenborg’s scientific and philosophical works.

Lamm, Martin. Emanuel Swedenborg: The Development of His Thought. Translated by Tomas Spiers and Anders Hallengren. West Chester, Pa.: Swedenborg Foundation, 2000. The first English tradition of this humanistic interpretation of Swedenborg’s work, originally published in 1915. Lamm examines the philosophical and religious background of Swedenborg’s thought, describing his transformation from a scientist to a seer. Lamm argues that Swedenborg’s scientifc view of the world was not altered by religion; his spiritual revelations added to, and completed, his earlier ideas about the world.

Sigstedt, Cyriel O. The Swedenborg Epic: The Life and Works of Emanuel Swedenborg. New York: Bookman, 1952. Reprint. London: Swedenborg Society, 1981. A complete and thoroughly documented biography of Swedenborg. The reprint edition has an errata sheet correcting a number of minor errors.

Söderberg, Henry. Swedenborg’s 1714 Airplane: A Machine to Fly in the Air. Edited by George F. Dole. New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1988. The author, a retired vice president of Scandinavian Airlines, discovered Swedenborg’s invention while researching a book on the history of flight. He notes that a model of Swedenborg’s craft is the first sight that greets visitors to the Smithsonian’s room on early flight.

Woofenden, William Ross. Swedenborg Researcher’s Manual. Bryn Athyn, Pa.: Swedenborg Scientific Association, 1988. This work combines the first annotated bibliography of all Swedenborg’s works, an extensive annotated bibliography of collateral literature on Swedenborg’s thought, a glossary of special terms, summaries of key concepts, and a section giving locations and descriptions of major documentary collections of Swedenborgiana worldwide.