Swedenborgianism: Emanuel Swedenborg's Spiritual Church

Emanuel Swedenborg: Scientist Turned Seer

Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Stockholm on January 29, 1688, the son of Jesper Swedenborg, a Lutheran bishop, theologian, and sometime professor of theology at Uppsala University. The family was prosperous and intellectually active: Jesper was interested in the mystical dimensions of Lutheran piety, and the household was one where theological questions were taken seriously alongside practical ones.

Emanuel showed exceptional intellectual gifts from an early age. He studied at Uppsala University, travelled extensively in England and continental Europe, and by his mid-30s had established himself as one of Sweden's leading natural philosophers. His scientific achievements were substantial by any measure. He made important contributions to mining engineering and metallurgy (his treatise "De Ferro" on iron and steel was a standard technical reference), proposed a nebular theory of the solar system's formation decades before Kant and Laplace (in "Principia Rerum Naturalium," 1734), anticipated some aspects of atomic theory, made detailed anatomical studies of the brain and nervous system that were ahead of his time, and designed what he called a "flying machine" based on principles that prefigured later understanding of aerodynamics.

He also held significant administrative positions: he served as Assessor Extraordinary to the Royal College of Mines for decades, overseeing Sweden's mining industry. This was not a decorative appointment; he was a working assessor who contributed genuinely to Swedish industrial policy at a time when mining was central to the national economy.

By the late 1730s and early 1740s, Swedenborg's intellectual interests had shifted dramatically toward questions of the soul and its relationship to the body. His "Oeconomia Regni Animalis" (Economy of the Animal Kingdom, 1740-1741) and "Regnum Animale" (The Animal Kingdom, 1744-1745) were attempts to locate the soul within the body through anatomy, particularly through the study of the brain and nervous system. These works belong to the tradition of rational soul-philosophy that sought to understand the immaterial through the material. They are also the works immediately preceding his visionary transformation, and in retrospect they represent his final attempt to reach spiritual knowledge through natural science before concluding that direct spiritual perception was required.

The Visionary Crisis of 1743-1745

Swedenborg kept a detailed dream diary, the "Journal of Dreams" (Drombok), beginning in 1743 and continuing through 1745. It was not intended for publication and was not published until 1859, nearly a century after his death. It provides the most direct window into the psychological and spiritual experiences that transformed the natural philosopher into the visionary theologian.

The diary records a series of increasingly intense dreams, hypnagogic visions, physical sensations (trembling, a sense of heat and wind), encounters with figures he interpreted as angels and spirits, and moments of visionary clarity in which he believed he was being granted access to the spiritual world. The tone is strikingly unguarded: he records not only the spiritually impressive material but also the disturbing, the sexual, and the simply confused. This honesty makes the diary an unusually credible human document, whatever one's views on its content.

The crisis reached a decisive moment in April 1745, when Swedenborg reported a vision of Jesus Christ in which he was told that God had chosen him to reveal the spiritual meaning of the Word (the Bible) to humanity. From that point, his scientific work ceased entirely. For the remaining 27 years of his life, he devoted himself to theological writing and to what he described as daily contact with spirits and angels in the spiritual world, which he claimed he could enter and leave at will while remaining fully conscious.

The standard modern psychiatric diagnosis offered for Swedenborg's experiences varies: some see a manic episode (his productivity and sense of divine mission are consistent with this reading), others a temporal lobe seizure disorder (his experiences include features common in temporal lobe epilepsy), and others a genuine mystical opening of the kind described across world traditions. The Swedish philosopher and theologian Inge Jonsson, in "Swedenborg's Dream Diary" (1994), provides the most careful scholarly treatment of the transformation, arguing that the correct framework is neither purely psychiatric nor purely theological but involves a genuine reorganisation of consciousness that produced both authentic spiritual experience and some distortion.

The Doctrine of Correspondences

Swedenborg's most philosophically significant contribution is the doctrine of correspondences, developed systematically in "Arcana Coelestia" (Heavenly Secrets, 1749-1756), his eight-volume verse-by-verse commentary on Genesis and Exodus. The doctrine holds that every natural thing corresponds to a spiritual reality, and that the relationship between the natural and spiritual worlds is systematic, readable, and grounded in the structure of creation itself.

This is not a novel idea: the principle of correspondence is central to Neoplatonism (the physical world as the shadow of the ideal), to the Hermetic tradition ("as above, so below"), and to medieval Christian typology (reading the Hebrew scriptures as prefiguring the New Testament). Swedenborg's contribution is the unprecedented scope and detail with which he applied the principle to biblical exegesis, producing the most extensive allegorical reading of the Bible in the Western Christian tradition.

For Swedenborg, each element of the natural world, from the minerals of the earth to the kingdoms of animals and plants, to celestial bodies, corresponds to specific qualities in the spiritual world. Gold corresponds to celestial goodness; silver to spiritual truth; precious stones to the components of faith. Animals correspond to human passions and qualities: the lamb to innocence, the eagle to intellect elevated above earthly concerns, the serpent to sensory cunning. Every plant, every natural phenomenon, every human social structure has its spiritual correspondence.

Applied to biblical interpretation, this means that the entire text of Genesis and Exodus (and later the rest of the Old and New Testaments) is a multilayered document in which the literal narrative is the outer husk and the correspondence is the inner meaning. Adam and Eve are not historical figures; they represent the state of the earliest humanity, when human beings were in conscious contact with the spiritual world. The fall is not a historical event; it is the process by which this conscious contact was gradually lost as humanity turned increasingly toward sensory and self-centred experience.

The intellectual audacity of this project is considerable. Swedenborg was not offering symbolic or analogical readings as possibilities; he was claiming to know, from direct spiritual perception, what each passage of Scripture meant in its inner sense. The certainty of this claim is what made him both compelling and, ultimately, limited in the eyes of critics like Blake.

Heaven and Hell: What Swedenborg Reported

"De Caelo et Eius Mirabilibus et de Inferno" (Heaven and Hell, 1758) is Swedenborg's most accessible and widely read theological work. Written in clear, relatively direct Latin (as opposed to the dense symbolic commentary of Arcana Coelestia), it presents his claimed observations of the afterlife in a systematic, descriptive format that has appealed to readers across religious boundaries.

Swedenborg's heaven is emphatically not the traditional Christian heaven of God on a throne surrounded by worshipping angels. It is a world that closely resembles the natural world in its outward appearance: there are landscapes, buildings, gardens, communities, and daily activity. Angels are not a separate species of created being but the souls of formerly human individuals who have, after death, found their way to the celestial or spiritual regions of the spiritual world based on the character they developed during earthly life.

The most distinctive feature of Swedenborg's heaven is its organisation as the Grand Human (Maximus Homo): an immense human form composed of all the heavenly communities, each community corresponding to a specific organ or function of the body. The angels of the cerebrum correspond to understanding; the angels of the heart to love; the angels of the lungs to faith; and so on. This is not a metaphor for Swedenborg: heaven literally takes the form of a human being at the largest scale of its organisation.

The process of dying, in Swedenborg's account, is gradual and in many cases barely noticeable. The soul enters the spiritual world still experiencing itself as essentially the same person, with the same memories, affections, and character it had in earthly life. This is followed by an intermediate period (the World of Spirits) during which external habits and self-presentations are gradually stripped away, leaving only the genuine inner character. Then the soul gravitates naturally toward the part of heaven or hell that corresponds to its dominant love: what a person loves most deeply determines their eternal home.

Hell, for Swedenborg, is not a punishment imposed from outside by divine judgment. It is the natural environment of souls whose dominant love is self-love or love of the world to the exclusion of love of God and neighbour. Hell suits them because it corresponds to their character; its torments are the torments of their own desires frustrating themselves in mutual conflict.

The Theological Works

Swedenborg's theological output between 1749 and 1771 is staggering in volume and systematic ambition. The major works include:

Arcana Coelestia (Heavenly Secrets, 1749-1756): Eight volumes of verse-by-verse commentary on Genesis and Exodus, containing the first systematic presentation of the doctrine of correspondences. The most voluminous and demanding of the theological works.

Heaven and Hell (1758): Described above. The most accessible entry point to Swedenborg's spiritual world descriptions.

Divine Providence (1764): Swedenborg's most careful treatment of how divine providence operates in a world that contains genuine human freedom. He argues that God works through human freedom rather than overriding it, and that the entire spiritual world is arranged to facilitate the maximum possible development of each soul's genuine character.

Conjugial Love (1768): Swedenborg's treatment of marriage as a spiritual institution. He argues that true marriage (what he calls "conjugial love") is the union of two souls who are complementary in their inner character, and that this union is eternal, continuing in heaven. The work contains both his most rapturous passages and some of his most controversial ideas about gender and sexuality.

True Christian Religion (1771): Swedenborg's final synthesis, completed when he was 83, summarising his entire theological system. He wrote it as the founding document of the New Church that he expected to emerge after his death.

The New Jerusalem Church

Swedenborg did not found a church during his lifetime and did not encourage his readers to leave existing churches. He saw himself as revealing the inner spiritual meaning of Christianity, not creating a new denomination. The organised Swedenborgian movement was founded by others after his death in 1772.

The New Jerusalem Church (also called the New Church) was formally organised in London in 1787 by a group of Swedenborg's English readers who had concluded that a new organised church was necessary to preserve and propagate his teachings. The founding figures included Robert Hindmarsh, a printer, and James Glen, a former planter. The movement grew rapidly in Britain and then in America, where the first New Church society was established in Baltimore in 1792.

The movement subsequently divided, primarily over questions of governance and the degree of authority granted to Swedenborg's writings. The General Convention of the New Jerusalem (liberal, established in the USA in 1817) holds that Swedenborg's writings are divinely inspired but allows for a broader approach to their interpretation. The General Church of the New Jerusalem (more conservative, established in 1890) holds that Swedenborg's theological writings are the Lord's Second Coming in literary form and are the authoritative Word for the current epoch.

Both branches exist today with congregations in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Total membership is small by mainstream Christian standards (estimated at 25,000-35,000 worldwide), but the movement's cultural influence has far exceeded its institutional size.

Blake and Swedenborg: Admiration to Revolt

William Blake's relationship with Swedenborg's thought is one of the most significant intellectual engagements in the history of Western spirituality and one of the most instructive examples of how a thinker's influence can operate through opposition as much as through agreement.

Blake was introduced to Swedenborg's writings in the mid-1780s and initially responded with enthusiasm. In 1789 he and his wife Catherine attended the founding conference of the New Jerusalem Church in London and signed the membership register. Blake's marginal annotations to Swedenborg's "Heaven and Hell" and "Divine Love and Divine Wisdom," dating from around this period, are largely approving, often enthusiastic.

The reversal came quickly and completely. By 1790-1793, Blake was writing "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," a satirical prose poem that directly targets Swedenborg's system while articulating Blake's own contrasting vision. The title is itself a challenge: Swedenborg had carefully maintained the separation of heaven and hell as the locations of good and evil; Blake insists that this separation is the fundamental error of conventional morality and organised religion.

Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," embedded in the Marriage, are partly a parody and partly a serious counter-theology: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." "Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity." "The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." "Exuberance is beauty." These are direct challenges to the orderly, hierarchical, morality-centred universe of Swedenborg's heaven.

Blake's specific criticisms of Swedenborg are threefold. First, Swedenborg mistakes his own spiritual visions for objective facts about the spiritual world, failing to recognise that all spiritual perception is mediated by the visionary's own imagination and character. Second, Swedenborg's God is ultimately a repressive, moralistic figure who values obedience over creativity and experience. Third, Swedenborg fails to recognise the redemptive energy in what he calls evil and devil: the drive toward excess, the desire that refuses to be contained, is for Blake the source of genuine creative life, not a force to be suppressed.

The philosopher Kathleen Raine, in "Blake and the New Age" (1979), argues that Blake's quarrel with Swedenborg was genuinely productive: the clash between Swedenborg's systematic rationalism (even in spiritual matters) and Blake's visionary exuberance defined much of Blake's mature mythology. Swedenborg was, in this sense, one of Blake's most important creative antagonists.

Emerson, Thoreau, and American Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson's relationship with Swedenborg was more sustained and more complex than his famous ambivalence would suggest. Emerson devoted one of the six "Representative Men" (1850) portraits to Swedenborg, calling him "one of the colossal men of history," "the mastodon of the earth," and "the last Father of the Church." These are not the words of someone who merely found Swedenborg mildly interesting.

Emerson's "Nature" (1836), the founding document of American Transcendentalism, draws heavily on the doctrine of correspondences without acknowledging the debt explicitly. The central Emersonian idea that nature is a symbol of the spirit, that the physical world is an emblem of the inner world, that every natural fact corresponds to a spiritual fact, is Swedenborgian to its core. Emerson had read Swedenborg carefully by the early 1830s and incorporated the correspondence doctrine into the foundations of his philosophy.

His critique of Swedenborg, stated most clearly in the "Representative Men" essay, focuses on the literalism that Blake also identified. Swedenborg takes his visions as photographic records of actual spiritual geography rather than as symbols that translate spiritual realities into imagery the human mind can receive. This literalism produces a certain mechanical quality in Swedenborg's universe: it is ordered, hierarchical, and ultimately a reflection of the spiritual laws Swedenborg had discovered, rather than the living, self-surprising reality that Emerson sought.

Henry David Thoreau was less directly engaged with Swedenborg than Emerson, but his practice of reading nature as a spiritual text, of finding in the details of the natural world around Walden Pond the signatures of something beyond it, is continuous with the Swedenborgian correspondence tradition.

Baudelaire and Literary Symbolism

Swedenborg's influence on French literary Symbolism was mediated primarily through his sonnet "Correspondances" (1857), the second poem in "Les Fleurs du Mal." Baudelaire had encountered Swedenborg's doctrine through Balzac, who used correspondence themes extensively in novels such as "Seraphita" (1835), a work set in Swedenborg's spiritual universe.

The "Correspondances" sonnet describes nature as "a temple where living pillars sometimes give voice to confused words" and where "Man passes through forests of symbols that watch him with familiar glances." It then describes the "deep and shadowy unity" in which perfumes, colours, and sounds correspond to each other: "There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh, gentle as oboes, and green as meadows, and others, corrupt, rich and triumphant." This synaesthetic correspondence between senses, and the larger correspondence between the natural and spiritual worlds, is directly Swedenborgian in concept if not in source citation.

Baudelaire's sonnet became the founding text of French Symbolism: the idea that the poet's task is to discover and express the hidden correspondences between the natural world and the spiritual world through the medium of sensory imagery. Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme, and the entire Symbolist tradition that followed built on this Swedenborgian foundation.

Helen Keller's Swedenborgian Faith

Helen Keller (1880-1968), who became deaf and blind at 19 months following an illness, discovered Swedenborg's writings in her teens through Phillips Brooks, an Episcopalian bishop who was a family friend and who had been influenced by Swedenborg. She learned to read Swedenborg in Braille and later in his original Latin.

Keller's "My Religion" (1927) is one of the most eloquent personal testimonies to the power of Swedenborg's ideas as a lived spiritual framework. Writing as someone for whom the physical world was accessible only through touch and smell and the vibrations of sound she could feel but not hear, Keller found in Swedenborg's doctrine of the inner sense a philosophical grounding for her experience. If the spiritual world is the real world of which the physical is the correspondence, then her inability to access the physical world through normal sensory channels was not simply loss. She had, in a sense, been freed from some of the distractions that prevent most people from attending to the inner sense.

Keller wrote: "I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light but who see nothing in wood, sea, or sky, nothing in the city streets, nothing in books. It were far better to sail forever in the night of blindness with sense and feeling and mind, than to be thus content with the mere act of seeing."