Emanuel Swedenborg: Visionary Savant in the Age of Reason

516 Pages·2011·2.73 MB·English

by  Ernst Benz

Emanuel Swedenborg

VISIONARY SAVANT IN THE AGE OF REASON

BY

ERNST BENZ

Introduced and Translated by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

Swedenborg Foundation

West Chester, Pennsylvania
Translation and introduction ©2002 by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
This work was originally published as Emanuel Swedenborg: Naturforscher und Seher. Edited by
Friedemann Horn. Second edition. Zurich: Swedenborg Verlag, 1969. First publication 1948.

All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission from the publisher.

Swedenborg Studies is a scholarly series published by the Swedenborg Foundation. The primary purpose of
the series is to make materials available for understanding the life and thought of Emanuel Swedenborg
(1688–1772) and the impact his thought has had on others. The Foundation undertakes to publish original
studies and English translations of such studies and to republish primary sources that are otherwise difficult
to access. Proposals should be sent to: Senior Editor, Swedenborg Studies, Swedenborg Foundation, 320
North Church Street, West Chester, Pennsylvania 19380.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Benz, Ernst, 1907–1978

[Emanuel Swedenborg. English]

Emanuel Swedenborg : visionary savant in the age of reason / by Ernst Benz ; translated by Nicholas
Goodrick-Clarke.

p. cm.—(Swedenborg studies ; no. 14)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-87785-195-6

ISBN 978-0-877856-23-8(electronic)

1. Swedenborg, Emanuel, 1688–1772. I. Title. II. Series.

BX8748 .B3913 2002

289’.4’092—dc21

2002001156
Edited by Mary Lou Bertucci
Cover design by Karen Connor

Interior design by Sans Serif, Inc., Saline, MI
Set in Galliard by Sans Serif, Inc., Saline, Michigan
Printed in the United States of America.

www.swedenborg.com
Contents

Introduction by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

Part One: THE PATH TO SCIENCE

1. The Father’s House

2. Schooldays and University Years

3. Study Years in England

4. Encounter with Continental Science in Holland and France

5. Technical Inventions

6. Homecoming and Disappointment

7. Meeting with Charles XII

8. After the Death of Charles XII

9. The Assessor of Mines: Career and Research Travels

10. The Development of a Religious Worldview

11. The Development of a Scientific Worldview

12. Scientific and Intuitive Knowledge

Part Two: THE VOCATION
13. Visionary Experiences before the Vocational Vision

14. The Religious Crisis

15. The Vision of Vocation

16. The Development of Religious Self-Consciousness

17. The Consequences of Vocation

Part Three: THE VISIONARY

18. Swedenborg’s Private Life

19. Swedenborg’s Public Life

20. The Prelude to a New Work

21. Early Visionary Writings

22. Swedenborg’s Visions

23. The Heavenly Mirror

Part Four: THE DOCTRINE

24. The Doctrine of Correspondences

25. The Metaphysics of Life

26. The Doctrine of the Spiritual World
27. Marriages in Heaven

28. The Doctrine of the Planets and Their Inhabitants

29. Ideas on the History of Humankind

30. Critique of the Confessions

Part Five: SWEDENBORG AND THE CHURCH OF HIS TIME

31. The Visionary and the Church

32. Conflicts in London

33. Conflicts with the Swedish Church

Conclusion

Bibliography

Bibliography of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg

Index
Introduction

By any estimate, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) claims an exceptional place
in history, both as famous scientist and as visionary. Born at the end of a
troubled century, Swedenborg spans the crucial construction of the modern
worldview based on reason, science, and material progress. Before he was yet
twenty-five, the precocious Swedish genius had already worked alongside Sir
Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and other leading scientists in England, France,
and Holland. From 1680 to 1715, when Swedenborg first came to London and
Paris, the new sciences of astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology were
forged by such figures as Christian Huygens, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and
Hermann Boerhaave. Meanwhile, philosophers such as René Descartes and
Benedictus de Spinoza supplied a philosophy that was geometric, mechanistic,
and optimistic concerning the rational and beneficial order of the universe.
Between 1700 and 1740, European science rapidly developed a rational
understanding of nature to harness its powers for human purposes. This rapid
accumulation of scientific knowledge and its application in navigation,
engineering, and industry unleashed an unprecedented wave of economic growth
in Europe and laid the basis of European colonial expansion.

Swedenborg inhabited this mental world, working on a fast-revolving stage of
new discoveries, inventions, machines, and large engineering projects. He
traveled widely through Europe and published pioneering works in such diverse
fields as astronomy, physics, engineering, chemistry, geology, anatomy,
physiology, and psychology. At the same time, he played a prominent role in
Swedish public institutions concerned with mining, finance, and politics. These
worldly, rational interests totally absorbed Swedenborg. Until his fiftieth
birthday, he appeared uninterested in religion and hardly participated in
organized church worship. Then, at the peak of his powers, a renowned figure of
European science and member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences,
Swedenborg’s life changed forever in the spring of 1744.

While traveling through Holland during Easter week, Swedenborg underwent
an emotional crisis culminating in a nocturnal vision of Christ. He fell from his
bed, found himself resting on Jesus’ chest, and felt he had been divinely
commissioned to a special task. In the following months, Swedenborg sought
direction and focus for his new religious feeling. He kept a revealing dream
diary and wrote Worship and Love of God, an extraordinary blend of mythology
and science. Then, in the spring of 1745, while a resident in London, he had his
first vision of the spiritual world and its inhabitants. The Lord God appeared to
Swedenborg and told him his mission was to “explain to men the spiritual
meaning of Scripture.”

Henceforth, Swedenborg possessed the gift of vision into the spirit world and
received constant inspiration for his new vocation. In 1748, he began working on
Arcana Coelestia, a major eight-volume visionary work, which heralded a
stream of books devoted to theology and biblical exegesis, including Earths in
the Universe, The Last Judgment, New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine,
and his most famous book Heaven and Hell, all published in 1758. During the
1760s, he continued to publish substantial works, all based on an interpretation
of Scripture, which the angels explained to him through spirit vision in palaces
and parks, in lecture halls, colleges, and conferences among wonderful or
ominous landscapes. Swedenborg’s visionary faculty was unique. Rather than
raptures, mystical union, and ascent experiences common to the famous English,
German, and Spanish mystics from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century,
Swedenborg’s visions were always related to the meaning of Scripture, which
lends his writing an astonishing matter-of-factness. We read a prosaic yet
compelling record of encounters with spirits who offer detailed information
concerning God, heaven and earth, humankind’s purpose, the Last Judgment,
and the life to come. Never before had a Christian visionary written with the
intellectual training and achievements of a leading European scientist.

If Swedenborg had already won European renown as a scientist in several
fields, his new visionary career now made him notorious. If Swedenborg’s birth
dovetailed with the rise of modern European thought, his new spiritual vocation
seemed quite at odds with its climax in the Enlightenment. By mid-century, the
worship of nature and reason, so prominent in the thought of Voltaire, Rousseau,
and Kant signaled the advent of a secular post-religious era. Swedenborg
necessarily attracted controversy, and sides were quickly taken. In 1760,
Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–1782), the prominent German Pietist and
church prelate, defended Swedenborg’s work and invited him to Germany.
Meanwhile, Kant wrote a scathing and, by his later admission, unjust work,