Emanuel Swedenborg

Works

• 1734The Principles of Natural Things (Principia)

  First volume of his Opera philosophica et mineralia: a mechanical cosmology in the manner of Descartes that derives matter from a point set in motion and lets the planets form from the matter of the sun.

• 1749Heavenly Secrets (Arcana Coelestia)

  Eight-volume commentary on Genesis and Exodus, published anonymously in London 1749–56: it unfolds an inner, spiritual sense of Scripture through correspondences, interspersed with reports of what he says he saw and heard in the spirit world.

Position

Swedenborg is on the map for two reasons that belong together in the history of philosophy. As a natural philosopher he worked in the tradition of Descartes and Leibniz: the Principia (1734) derives matter from mathematical points set in motion and lets the planets form from the matter of the sun, and his anatomical works looked for the seat of the soul in the brain. After 1745 he turned to theology. He taught that the visible world corresponds, item by item, to a spiritual world that flows into it, that Scripture has an inner sense speaking of the regeneration of the soul, and that heaven and hell are not places assigned from outside but states that human beings form through what they love. In “De commercio animae et corporis” (1769) he rejected both pre-established harmony and physical influx in favour of a spiritual influx. Kant read the Arcana Coelestia and answered with “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer” (1766), which uses the spirit-seer to question the claims of speculative metaphysics itself; Emerson portrayed him in “Representative Men” (1850) as the type of the mystic. After his death his followers founded the New Church. Whether his visions should be read as religious experience, as a continuation of his natural philosophy or in psychological terms has long been debated; the map records his reception, not a judgement on these claims. His place in the school of rationalism refers to his early natural philosophy. His theological works also contain passages on Jews and on Africans that are set out under “Context & critique”.

Life & context

Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Stockholm on 29 January 1688 (Old Style; 8 February in the Gregorian calendar), the son of Jesper Swedberg, later bishop of Skara; the family was ennobled in 1719 and took the name Swedenborg. He studied at Uppsala and from 1710 to 1715 travelled in England, the Netherlands, France and Germany, studying mathematics, mechanics and astronomy. From 1716 he served on the Swedish Board of Mines for three decades, and he sat in the House of Nobles of the Swedish Diet. He published works on mineralogy and metallurgy, on cosmology (Opera philosophica et mineralia, 1734) and on the anatomy of the brain and the seat of the soul (Oeconomia regni animalis, 1740–41). In 1744–45 he went through a religious crisis, recorded in his dream diary, after which he said he had been called to reveal the inner meaning of Scripture. He resigned from the Board in 1747 and published his theological works, at first anonymously, mostly in London and Amsterdam. He died in London on 29 March 1772.

Further main works

• Opera philosophica et mineralia (3 vols., 1734; vol. 1: Principia rerum naturalium)
• Oeconomia regni animalis (1740–41)
• Arcana Coelestia (8 vols., 1749–56)
• De Caelo et ejus Mirabilibus et de Inferno (Heaven and Hell, 1758)
• De commercio animae et corporis (1769)
• Vera Christiana Religio (1771)