Work · Rationalism
Heavenly 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.
Introduction
Swedenborg published the Arcana Coelestia anonymously in London in eight volumes between 1749 and 1756. It is a verse-by-verse commentary on Genesis and Exodus that unfolds an “internal sense” beneath the letter: the stories of creation, the flood and the patriarchs describe, through correspondences, the regeneration of the human being and the history of the church. Between the chapters he inserted accounts of what he said he had seen and heard in the world of spirits. Kant obtained the volumes and examined them in “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer” (1766), and the work became the foundation of the New Church, whose members still read it as revelation; for historians it is the main source for Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences.
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