Christianity · Christian mysticism · Protestantism

Emanuel Swedenborg

1688 – 1772Historically documented person

Swedish scientist, engineer and visionary (1688–1772). An assessor of the Board of Mines, ennobled in 1719, he wrote on metallurgy, cosmology (Principia, 1734) and the anatomy of the brain (Oeconomia regni animalis, Regnum animale) before a spiritual crisis between 1743 and 1745. From then on he claimed to converse with angels and spirits, and published in Latin a vast theology: Arcana Coelestia, Heaven and Hell, Angelic Wisdom, Conjugial Love and The True Christian Religion. Kant satirised him; Blake, Balzac, Emerson and Borges read him with passion.

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works: 38works
editions: 60editions
quotes: 7quotes
videos: 12videos
images: 8images

Retrato de Emanuel Swedenborg a los setenta y cinco años · Public domain

In their words

«I am aware that many who read the following pages and the Memorable Relations annexed to the chapters, will believe that they are fictions of the imagination; but I solemnly declare they are not fictions, but were truly done and seen; and that I saw them, not in any state of the mind asleep, but in a state of perfect wakefulness.»

De amore conjugiali (1768), n. 1, trad. inglesa de 1850 (reimpr. 1892). Se cita por la traducción inglesa de dominio público; original latino no cotejado.

To begin, one work

The Principia (The First Principles of Natural Things)

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Their central idea

Correspondences: The doctrine of correspondences is the key to the whole of Swedenborg's theological work.

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Biography

5 min read

The bishop's son

Emanuel Swedberg was born in Stockholm on 29 January 1688 (by the Swedish calendar of the time), the third child of Jesper Swedberg, court chaplain and later Bishop of Skara, and of Sara Behm, daughter of a family enriched by mining. His father was a Lutheran of ardent piety, suspected of Pietism, convinced that angels take part in daily life; his mother died when the boy was eight. Between 1699 and 1709 he studied at Uppsala, where he lived in the house of his brother-in-law Erik Benzelius, the university librarian, and graduated with a dissertation on the maxims of Seneca and Publilius Syrus.

In 1710 he left for England. For five years he travelled through London, Oxford, Holland, Paris and northern Germany; he read Newton, visited the astronomer Flamsteed, learned to grind lenses and bind books, and wrote to Benzelius letters full of projects: a submarine, a flying machine, a method for finding longitude at sea. He returned in 1715 determined to be a man of science useful to his country.

The assessor of mines

In 1716 he published Daedalus Hyperboreus, the first Swedish scientific journal, and Charles XII appointed him extraordinary assessor of the Board of Mines, the body that administered the kingdom's chief wealth. He worked with the engineer Christopher Polhem and in 1718 took part in hauling warships overland for the siege of Fredriksten. In 1719 Queen Ulrika Eleonora ennobled the family, which took the name Swedenborg, and Emanuel took a seat in the House of Nobles, where he spoke on currency, mining and trade. In 1724 he declined the chair of mathematics at Uppsala; he stammered and never spoke in public.

For twenty years he wrote on chemistry, metallurgy, geology and cosmology. The three volumes of the Opera philosophica et mineralia (Leipzig, 1734) won him European fame for their treatises on iron and copper; the first, the Principia, proposed a mechanical cosmology that included a nebular hypothesis on the origin of the solar system. That same year he published De infinito, his first attempt to explain the relation between soul and body. Searching for the seat of the soul he turned to anatomy: the Oeconomia regni animalis (1740–1741) and the Regnum animale (1744–1745) contain insights into the cerebral cortex, the localisation of functions and the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid that neurology would confirm only much later.

The crisis of 1743–1745

In 1743 he travelled to Holland to print the Regnum animale. Over the following months he kept a journal of dreams, discovered in the Royal Library in the nineteenth century, which records with unprecedented frankness temptations, terrors, desires and visions; on Easter night 1744, in Delft, he noted that he had seen Christ himself. In April 1745, as he later told his friends, in a London inn a figure spoke to him at the end of a meal and that same night presented himself as the Lord and charged him with explaining the spiritual sense of Scripture. Swedenborg abandoned anatomy, studied Hebrew and in 1747 resigned his post at the Board of Mines on half pay.

The heavenly arcana

Between 1749 and 1756 he published in London, anonymously and in Latin, the eight volumes of Arcana Coelestia, a verse-by-verse commentary on Genesis and Exodus according to their inner sense, interwoven with accounts of what he said he saw and heard in the spiritual world. In 1758 there followed, also in London, Heaven and Hell, The Last Judgment (where he asserted that the judgment had taken place in the world of spirits in 1757), The White Horse, Earths in the Universe and The New Jerusalem. Then came the four doctrines (1763), Angelic Wisdom concerning Divine Love and Wisdom (1763), Angelic Wisdom concerning Divine Providence (1764), Apocalypse Revealed (1766), Conjugial Love (1768) and The True Christian Religion (Amsterdam, 1771). His theology rejects a Trinity of persons and justification by faith alone, places salvation in charity and uses, and reads the whole natural world as a 'correspondence' of the spiritual.

What is singular about these books is not only the doctrine but the tone. Swedenborg describes heaven and hell with the sobriety of a mining report: the whole of heaven has human form, the 'Grand Man'; angels live in societies grouped by affinity of love; between death and final destiny stretches a 'world of spirits' where each person ends up being what he loves. No one is sent to hell: those go who prefer it. The Lord is a single divine person, Jesus Christ, in whom Father, Son and Spirit are as soul, body and activity. The life that leads to heaven, he insists, is not that of the ascetic who flees the world but that of one who performs his office with justice and charity.

The seer of Stockholm

From 1759 his name became associated with episodes of clairvoyance: the Stockholm fire he is said to have described from Gothenburg, a secret revealed to Queen Louisa Ulrika, a lost receipt found on the indication of a dead man. Kant took an interest in them, ordered the Arcana and in 1766 published, anonymously, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, a satire against Swedenborg that is also a critique of metaphysics. Meanwhile Swedenborg remained a methodical, kindly and austere aristocrat who tended his garden on Hornsgatan, spent long periods in London and Amsterdam and published at his own expense. Between 1768 and 1771 two of his followers were tried for heresy in Gothenburg, and the consistory debated the orthodoxy of his books.

London, 1772

In December 1771, in London, he suffered a stroke that left him partly paralysed. According to the maid of the house where he lodged in Clerkenwell, he had foretold the day of his death. To the Swedish pastor Arvid Ferelius, who gave him communion, he affirmed that everything he had written was true. He died on 29 March 1772 and was buried in the Swedish church in London; in 1908 his remains were moved to Uppsala Cathedral. He founded no church: the reading circles that gave rise to the Church of the New Jerusalem formed in England fifteen years after his death. His influence reached Blake, Balzac, Emerson, Baudelaire, Strindberg, Yeats, Helen Keller and Borges, and in 2005 UNESCO entered his manuscripts in the Memory of the World register.

Sources: Bergquist, Lars. Swedenborg's Secret: The Meaning and Significance of the Word of God, the Life of the Angels, and Service to God. A Biography. Londres: Swedenborg Society, 2005 (orig. sueco: Swedenborgs hemlighet, Estocolmo: Natur och Kultur, 1999). · Lachman, Gary. Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. Nueva York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2012. · Tafel, Rudolph Leonhard (ed.). Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg. 2 vols. en 3. Londres: Swedenborg Society, 1875–1877 (incluye las memorias de Carl Robsahm, las declaraciones de Arvid Ferelius y de la familia Shearsmith y la carta de Kant a Charlotte von Knobloch). · Sigstedt, Cyriel Odhner. The Swedenborg Epic: The Life and Works of Emanuel Swedenborg. Nueva York: Bookman Associates, 1952. · Kant, Immanuel. Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik. Königsberg: Kanter, 1766 (Project Gutenberg n.º 36076).

Timeline

A life, year by year

Each point is a documented event. Click to read it, with its source and degree of certainty.

16881709173017511772

January 29, 1688age 0Estocolmo

Birth

Born in Stockholm, third child of Jesper Swedberg and Sara Behm. The date follows the Swedish calendar of the time.

DocumentedBergquist, Lars. Swedenborg's Secret: The Meaning and Significance of the Word of God, the Life of the Angels, and Service to God. A Biography. Londres: Swedenborg Society, 2005 (orig. sueco: Swedenborgs hemlighet, Estocolmo: Natur och Kultur, 1999).

After their death

c. 1787The New Church is born
1908Transfer to Uppsala
2005Memory of the World

January 29, 1688 · age 0
Birth
Born in Stockholm, third child of Jesper Swedberg and Sara Behm. The date follows the Swedish calendar of the time.
Documented
1699 – 1709 · age 11
Studies at Uppsala
He enters Uppsala University and lives with his brother-in-law Erik Benzelius. He graduates in 1709 with a dissertation on maxims of Seneca and Publilius Syrus.
Documented
1710 – 1715 · age 22
Grand tour
Five years in England, Holland, France and Germany: he reads Newton, visits Flamsteed, learns mechanical crafts and designs inventions.
Documented
1716 · age 28
Daedalus Hyperboreus and the Board of Mines
He publishes the first Swedish scientific journal and Charles XII appoints him extraordinary assessor of the Board of Mines.
Documented
1719 · age 31
Ennoblement
Queen Ulrika Eleonora ennobles Bishop Swedberg's children, who take the name Swedenborg; he takes a seat in the House of Nobles.
Documented
1734 · age 46
Opera philosophica et mineralia
He publishes in Leipzig his three volumes of natural philosophy and metallurgy, including the Principia, and the treatise De infinito.
Documented
1740 – 1741 · age 52
Oeconomia regni animalis
His great work of anatomy and physiology, searching for the seat of the soul, appears in Amsterdam (1740–1741). He joins the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Documented
April 1744 · age 56
The Delft vision
In his journal of dreams he notes that on Easter night (6–7 April) he saw Christ. The journal covers 1743 to 1744.
Documented
April 1745 · age 57
The London call
As he later told Carl Robsahm, in April, after a meal at a London inn, the Lord appeared to him and charged him with explaining the spiritual sense of Scripture.
Probable
1747 · age 59
Resignation from the Board of Mines
He leaves his post on half pay to devote himself to the study of Scripture; he learns Hebrew.
Documented
1749 – 1756 · age 61
Arcana Coelestia
He begins publishing in London, anonymously, the eight volumes of Arcana Coelestia (1749–1756).
Documented
1758 · age 70
Heaven and Hell and four other works
He publishes in London De caelo et inferno, De ultimo judicio, De equo albo, De telluribus and De nova Hierosolyma.
Documented
July 19, 1759 · age 71
The Stockholm fire
On 19 July a great fire destroys part of Stockholm. According to later accounts (Kant, 1763), Swedenborg described it in Gothenburg as it happened. The fire is documented; the vision is indirect testimony.
Disputed
August 10, 1763 · age 75
Kant's letter
Kant writes to Charlotte von Knobloch narrating the fire and other episodes and declaring that he wishes to meet Swedenborg. That year Swedenborg publishes the four doctrines and Angelic Wisdom concerning Divine Love.
Documented
1766 · age 78
Dreams of a Spirit-Seer
Kant anonymously publishes his satire against Swedenborg. Swedenborg publishes the Apocalypsis revelata in Amsterdam.
Documented
1768 – 1771 · age 80
The Gothenburg trial
A heresy trial opens in Gothenburg against his followers Gabriel Beyer and Johan Rosén, lasting until 1771. He publishes Conjugial Love.
Documented
1771 · age 83
The True Christian Religion
He publishes Vera christiana religio in Amsterdam, the synthesis of his theology. In December, in London, he suffers a stroke that leaves him partly paralysed.
Documented
March 29, 1772 · age 84
Death
He dies in London on 29 March at the house of Richard Shearsmith in Clerkenwell. He is buried in the Swedish church in Princes Square.
Documented
c. 1787
The New Church is born
In London, readers of his works organise the first groups of the Church of the New Jerusalem (1787–1789).
Documented
1908
Transfer to Uppsala
His remains are moved from London to Sweden and rest in Uppsala Cathedral.
Documented
2005
Memory of the World
UNESCO inscribes Swedenborg's manuscript collection, kept at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in the Memory of the World register.
Documented

Works

Essential works

The works without which their legacy cannot be understood.

Written work · 1734

The Principia (The First Principles of Natural Things)

Opera philosophica et mineralia, I: Principia rerum naturalium

The first volume of the Opera philosophica et mineralia: a mechanical cosmology that derives the universe from a 'natural point' and successive particles in spiral motion, and includes a nebular hypothesis on the formation of the solar system from the Sun, earlier than those of Kant and Laplace. It is the work that gave him standing as a natural philosopher in Europe.

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2 editions · amazon.com

Written work · 1749

Arcana Coelestia (Secrets of Heaven / Heavenly Arcana)

Arcana Coelestia, quae in Scriptura Sacra seu Verbo Domini sunt, detecta

His chief work: eight volumes published anonymously in London between 1749 and 1756 commenting verse by verse on Genesis and Exodus according to their 'inner sense', where sacred history is read as the process of man's regeneration and the Lord's glorification. Between chapters he inserts accounts of what he says he saw and heard in the other world. It is the foundation of all his later theology.

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3 editions · amazon.com

Written work · 1758

Heaven and Hell (Heaven and its Wonders and Hell)

De Caelo et ejus Mirabilibus, et de Inferno, ex Auditis et Visis

Swedenborg's most widely read book (London, 1758): a systematic description, 'from things heard and seen', of heaven, the world of spirits and hell. Heaven has human form and is ordered in societies according to loves; after death man keeps his form and memory and ends up being what he loves; no one is damned: each goes where his ruling love leads him. It influenced Blake, Balzac, Emerson and Borges.

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6 editions · amazon.com

Written work · 1771

The True Christian Religion (True Christianity)

Vera Christiana Religio, continens Universam Theologiam Novae Ecclesiae

His last book (Amsterdam, 1771) and the synthesis of his whole theology, addressed above all to Lutherans: the one God, the Lord as redeemer, Scripture, the Decalogue, faith, charity, free will, repentance, regeneration, imputation, baptism, the Supper, the consummation of the age and the second coming, understood as the revelation of the inner sense of the Word. It ends with the declaration that the Lord founded the new Church on 19 June 1770.

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3 editions · amazon.com

Complete works (38)

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Quotations

Quotations located in a specific work. Each carries its provenance and its level of confidence.

I am aware that many who read the following pages and the Memorable Relations annexed to the chapters, will believe that they are fictions of the imagination; but I solemnly declare they are not fictions, but were truly done and seen; and that I saw them, not in any state of the mind asleep, but in a state of perfect wakefulness.

VerifiedDe amore conjugiali (1768), n. 1, trad. inglesa de 1850 (reimpr. 1892). Se cita por la traducción inglesa de dominio público; original latino no cotejado.

1 / 7

Apocryphal quotes or disputed attributions (1)

«What a man loves is what he is.»
A popular formula that faithfully sums up the doctrine of the ruling love (Heaven and Hell, n. 479: 'man after death is his own love'), but is not a literal sentence of Swedenborg's.

Last words

Later account by witnesses

«As truly as you see me before your eyes, so true is everything that I have written; and I could have said more had it been permitted. When you enter eternity you will see everything, and then you and I shall have much to talk about.»

These are not, strictly speaking, his last words, but the last solemn declaration attributed to him: it was reported by the pastor of the Swedish church in London, Arvid Ferelius, who visited him in his last days and gave him communion, in a letter written years later and published by Tafel. The maid of the house, Elizabeth Reynolds, stated that Swedenborg had foretold the date of his death and died peacefully on the afternoon of 29 March 1772 after asking the time. Given in translation; Ferelius's original has not been checked.

Source: Tafel, Rudolph Leonhard (ed.). Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg. 2 vols. en 3. Londres: Swedenborg Society, 1875–1877 (incluye las memorias de Carl Robsahm, las declaraciones de Arvid Ferelius y de la familia Shearsmith y la carta de Kant a Charlotte von Knobloch).

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What their work answers

Twelve great human questions and what their texts allow us to answer, with references. We never put words in their mouth.

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?
God is one, is a Man, and is the Lord Jesus Christ
A personal GodStated explicitly
Swedenborg affirms a personal God to the utmost: in Angelic Wisdom concerning Divine Love he declares that in all the heavens there is no other idea of God than that of a Man, and in Heaven and Hell, that heaven as a whole reflects a single man because it proceeds from the Divine Human. God is in himself divine love and divine wisdom, life itself, from which all things receive life. But he rejects a Trinity of three Persons: in True Christian Religion he teaches that the Trinity —Father, Son and Spirit— is in one Person, the Lord Jesus Christ, as soul, body and activity are in one man. The Absolute is, for him, a single God, human in form and infinite in essence.
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Who am I? Is there a true self?
Man is his love: his will is his life
A created, immortal soulStated explicitly
Emanuel Swedenborg, who before his visionary turn sought the soul in the anatomy of the brain, afterwards defines it by love. For him, the human being has no life of its own: it is a receptacle of the life that proceeds from the Lord, and what makes it who it is is its ruling love, which forms its will and understanding. Heaven and Hell sums it up: man after death is his own love or his own will. The soul is immortal and, at death, awakens in the spiritual world with its spiritual body, its memory and its character. The true self is what one truly loves, which death reveals without changing it.
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Why do we suffer?
Evil springs from love of self and the world, and hell is chosen
Separation from GodStated explicitly
For Emanuel Swedenborg, moral suffering stems from two loves he calls infernal: love of self and love of the world, opposed to love of the Lord and of the neighbour. Heaven and Hell maintains that the Lord casts no one into hell: it is the spirit who, through its ruling love, is drawn toward those who share its evil, and there finds the torment that evil produces. In Angelic Wisdom concerning Divine Providence he explains that providence permits evils so as not to violate human freedom, without which no one could be regenerated. Pain arises from turning away from divine order, and regeneration is the way back.
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What happens after death?
Man rises at death and remains who he was
Eternal life and resurrectionStated explicitly
Emanuel Swedenborg describes what he claims to have seen in the spiritual world. In Heaven and Hell, death is merely the passage from one world to another: the human being rises immediately, not in earthly flesh but in a spiritual body, keeps his memory and senses, and at first hardly knows he has died. He passes through an intermediate world of spirits, where he sheds what is external until his ruling love appears; according to it, he goes freely to heaven or hell, where he remains for ever. That is why he rejects the expectation of a bodily resurrection at the end of time.
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How is liberation or salvation attained?
It is not so hard to live the life that leads to heaven
Through virtue and harmonyStated explicitly
Emanuel Swedenborg explicitly rejects salvation by faith alone, which he regards as the great error of the Reformation. For him, salvation is regeneration and consists in living according to the commandments: Doctrine of Life teaches that all religion is life and that this life consists in shunning evils as sins against God, whereupon the Lord can bring in good. It does not require withdrawal from the world: Heaven and Hell maintains that it is not so hard as people think to live the life that leads to heaven, and that it is lived in work, trade and civil life, acting with justice and sincerity. Faith without charity does not save; charity is doing good to others.
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Is a teacher necessary?
He ignores the human teacher and points to the Word, read through the Lord
Did not address it
Emanuel Swedenborg does not deal with the figure of the spiritual teacher or the direction of souls. His approach is different: he claims that the Lord opened his spiritual sight to reveal the inner sense of the Word, and presents his works as the doctrine of the New Jerusalem, not as personal teaching. He insists that each person should read the Word and understand it rationally: in True Christian Religion he proclaims that it is now permitted to enter with the understanding into the mysteries of faith. He founded no Church and gathered no disciples; the New Church was organised after his death. His silence on the human guide is consistent with that trust in the Word and in enlightened reason.
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Is the world real?
The whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world
Planes of existenceStated explicitly
Emanuel Swedenborg describes a tiered reality. There is a natural world, the one known to the senses and to science —which he himself cultivated for decades—, and a spiritual world, with the world of spirits, the heavens and the hells, in which every human being lives after death. Between them governs the law of correspondences: in Heaven and Hell he states that the whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world, not only as a whole but in each of its parts. The heavens themselves are ordered in three degrees, celestial, spiritual and natural, through which the Lord's life descends. The visible world is real, but it is the last of the planes and an effect of the higher ones.
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What is love?
Love is man's very life, and God is Love itself
Love of God and neighbourStated explicitly
Angelic Wisdom concerning Divine Love opens with an observation: man knows that love exists, but does not know what it is. Swedenborg answers that love is the human being's very life, the warmth that animates him, and that its source is God, who is Love itself and Wisdom itself. He distinguishes four loves: two heavenly, love of the Lord and love of the neighbour or charity, and two infernal, love of self and love of the world. Charity consists in doing good to the neighbour for the love of good, above all by faithfully fulfilling one's own office. In Conjugial Love he sees in the union of spouses the image of the union of love and wisdom.
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Are we free, or is everything determined?
Providence wills that man act freely according to reason
Real free willStated explicitly
Angelic Wisdom concerning Divine Providence lays down as a law that the human being must act from freedom according to reason. Swedenborg calls those two faculties liberty and rationality, and regards them as gifts of the Lord that are never withdrawn, not even in hell. Providence governs everything, even the smallest things, but in hidden fashion, so as to force no one: were the human being to see providence, or be compelled by miracles, he would cease to be free and could not be regenerated. That is why evils are permitted. Swedenborg rejects predestination to hell: all are born for heaven, and each chooses according to his love.
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Why meditate or pray?
True worship is a life of use and charity
Ritual and self-cultivationInferred from their doctrine
Emanuel Swedenborg develops no meditation techniques. For him, outward worship —prayer, sermon, sacraments— is good and necessary, but it has value only if it proceeds from inward worship, which is love and charity. Religion is life, he repeats in the Doctrine of Life, and true worship consists in doing good, faithfully fulfilling one's office and shunning evils as sins. Heaven and Hell describes angels who hold services in temples and hear sermons, but their essential worship is the life of use. Prayer, properly speaking, is conversation with the Lord, who grants what is asked when it coincides with the good.
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Can reason know the ultimate?
Now it is permitted to enter the mysteries of faith with the understanding
Scripture and reasoningStated explicitly
Emanuel Swedenborg was a first-rate scientist before his visionary turn, and never renounced reason. His principal source is the Word, Scripture, which according to him has an inner spiritual sense, decipherable through the science of correspondences; the Arcana Coelestia thus comment on Genesis and Exodus verse by verse. Against the blind faith of the Churches, which commanded belief without understanding, True Christian Religion proclaims that now it is permitted to enter with the understanding into the mysteries of faith. Reason enlightened by the Lord interprets Scripture; what is not understood cannot truly be believed.
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Withdraw from the world or transform it?
Heaven is won by a useful life in the world, not by fleeing it
Engage with the worldStated explicitly
Emanuel Swedenborg was an assessor of Sweden's Board of Mines, a member of the Diet and author of memoranda on economics and currency, and his doctrine reflects that public life. In Heaven and Hell he states that the life leading to heaven is not a life withdrawn from the world, but a life in the world: whoever carries out his office, trade or post with justice and sincerity, for the love of good, prepares himself for heaven. He relates that those who renounced the world to live in piety alone, secluded and sorrowful, do not reach heaven as easily as they thought, because angelic life consists of uses, that is, useful services to others. Charity is the active life of the good.
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Affinities & tensions

Affinities and tensions

Calculated question by question from their positions. The reason for each agreement or clash, on click.

Thinks most like

Thinks most unlike

Anecdotes and stories

Disputed1759

The Stockholm fire

What is documented: on Thursday 19 July 1759 a great fire destroyed several hundred houses in southern Stockholm. What is related: according to the most widespread version, that day, at about six in the evening, Swedenborg, just back from England, was dining in Gothenburg, some four hundred kilometres away, at the house of the merchant William Castel; he went out, came back pale and announced that a fire had broken out in Stockholm, was spreading fast and had reached a friend's house; at about eight he said with relief that it had stopped three doors from his own. The provincial governor is said to have wanted to hear him. Two days later the couriers from Stockholm arrived and, still according to the account, confirmed every detail. The version that made it famous is Kant's, in a letter of 1763 to Charlotte von Knobloch, based on second-hand information. No written testimony from the guests of that evening survives, and the biographer Lars Bergquist has pointed out discrepancies in the dates of Swedenborg's return. The fire is a fact; the vision is indirect testimony.

Origin of the story: Kant's letter to Charlotte von Knobloch (10 August 1763) and accounts collected by Tafel (Documents, 1875–1877); critical discussion of dates in Bergquist (1999/2005).

Source: Kant, Immanuel. Carta a Charlotte von Knobloch, 10 de agosto de 1763. En Kant's gesammelte Schriften (Akademie-Ausgabe), vol. X: Briefwechsel I, Berlín, 1900 (a menudo fechada erróneamente en 1758); trad. inglesa en Tafel, Documents, vol. I.

Disputed1761

The queen's secret

In 1761 Queen Louisa Ulrika of Sweden, sister of Frederick the Great, received Swedenborg at court and, half in jest, asked him to ask her late brother Augustus William of Prussia about something only she knew. Days later Swedenborg returned and whispered in her ear, and the queen, according to those present, turned pale and said that no mortal could have known it. Kant included the story in his 1763 letter, and there are several versions, among them those of Count Höpken and of the banker Carl Robsahm, which do not agree in their details; none reveals what was said. The queen herself, according to some later sources, played the episode down.

Origin of the story: Versions collected by Tafel (Documents) and Kant's 1763 letter; Bergquist (pp. 314–315) stresses that the diversity of accounts makes it impossible to establish the facts.

Disputedc. 1761

Madame de Marteville's receipt

The widow of the Dutch envoy in Stockholm, Louis de Marteville, was dunned by a goldsmith for a silver service her husband had already paid for; she could not find the receipt. She went to Swedenborg and asked him to inquire of the dead man. According to the account, a few days later the envoy showed her in a dream, or showed Swedenborg in the spiritual world, a secret compartment in a desk where the receipt turned up with other papers. Kant tells the story in his 1763 letter, and there are some ten different versions; two are considered more reliable: that of Robsahm, who heard it from Swedenborg himself, and that of a pastor who asked the widow by letter fifteen years later.

Origin of the story: Kant's letter (1763); memoirs of Carl Robsahm and a pastor's letter to the widow, in Tafel (Documents); critical assessment in Bergquist (p. 316).

Testimony1745

'Do not eat so much'

In April 1745 Swedenborg was dining alone in a private room at a London inn. At the end of the meal, he told his friend Carl Robsahm years later, his sight grew dim, he saw the floor covered with reptiles and in a corner a man who said to him in a voice that terrified him: 'Do not eat so much.' He went home frightened. That night the same man appeared to him in a dream, said that he was the Lord, creator and redeemer of the world, that he had chosen him to explain to men the spiritual sense of Scripture, and that he himself would dictate to him what he should write. That night, he says, his eyes were opened to the world of spirits, heaven and hell. The account, which the Swedenborgian tradition regards as the beginning of his mission, comes from Robsahm's memoirs, written after Swedenborg's death.

Origin of the story: Memoirs of Carl Robsahm (Anteckningar om Swedenborg), written after 1772 and published in English translation by Tafel (Documents, vol. I).

Documented1763–1766

Kant buys the Arcana

Around 1763 the young lecturer Immanuel Kant heard of the Swedish seer's wonders, asked an English friend, the merchant Joseph Green, to look into their truth and wrote to Charlotte von Knobloch a letter in which he seemed inclined to believe them and regretted not having met Swedenborg. He ordered the eight volumes of the Arcana Coelestia, an expensive work: he himself would say that he spared his readers the seven pounds sterling it cost. Three years later, in 1766, he published anonymously Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics, in which he calls Swedenborg 'the arch-spirit-seer among all spirit-seers' and 'the arch-fantast among all fantasts', and describes the Arcana as 'eight quarto volumes full of nonsense'; yet in the same work he already traces the limits of knowledge that he would develop in the Critique of Pure Reason. Moses Mendelssohn detected in the book an ambiguous irony that left it in doubt whether it meant to ridicule metaphysics or to make visionaries credible.

Origin of the story: Kant's letter to Charlotte von Knobloch (1763), Träume eines Geistersehers (1766) and Kant's letter to Mendelssohn (8 April 1766).

Source: Kant, Immanuel. Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik. Königsberg: Kanter, 1766 (Project Gutenberg n.º 36076).

Documented1744

The night at Delft

The journal of dreams that Swedenborg kept in 1743–1744 was meant for no one: it surfaced in the Royal Library in Stockholm more than eighty years after his death. In it he notes without reticence erotic dreams, anxieties, tremors, 'states' of light and sensations of vertigo, and interprets them with the minuteness of a scientist observing himself. On the night of 6–7 April 1744, in Delft, he describes a violent trembling, falling on his face and the sense that a hand was clasping his; afterwards, he says, he saw Christ himself face to face, who asked him whether he had a certificate of health. It is the most direct document of the crisis that turned the anatomist into a theologian, and the only one of his writings in which he appears vulnerable.

Origin of the story: Swedenborg, Drömboken, entries of April 1744 (ed. Klemming, 1859); the text is autograph, the interpretation of the experience is his.

Source: Swedenborg, Emanuel. Swedenborgs drömmar 1744 (Drömboken). Ed. G. E. Klemming. Estocolmo, 1859. Trad. inglesa: Swedenborg's Journal of Dreams, ed. William Ross Woofenden, Nueva York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1977.

Teachings

The notions that structure their thought, explained in context.

Correspondencescorrespondencias

The doctrine of correspondences is the key to the whole of Swedenborg's theological work. Everything natural exists from the spiritual as an effect from its cause, and so each thing in the visible world 'corresponds' to a reality of the spiritual world: the sun to divine love, light to wisdom, water to truth, stone to truth in its most external form, the heart to the will and the lungs to the understanding. It is not an allegory invented by the reader but a real relation of cause and effect. From this follows his exegetical method: Scripture is written entirely in correspondences, so that beneath the letter of each verse there is a spiritual and a celestial sense, which the Arcana Coelestia and the Apocalypse Revealed unfold one by one. The idea, which he first formulated in the Regnum animale (1744) and the Clavis hieroglyphica, has Neoplatonic and Hermetic roots and passed to Baudelaire, who gave the name to a sonnet in Les Fleurs du mal.

Regnum animale, Clavis hieroglyphica, Arcana Coelestia, Heaven and Hell (nn. 87–115).

Source: Swedenborg, Emanuel. Heaven and its Wonders and Hell. Trad. John C. Ager. Nueva York: Swedenborg Foundation (Project Gutenberg n.º 17368).

The Grand Man (Maximus Homo)maximus-homo

For Swedenborg the whole of heaven, taken as a whole, has human form: it is the 'Grand Man'. Each angelic society occupies in it the place of an organ or function (some belong to the region of the heart, others to the eyes, the brain or the skin) and together they form a single figure before the Lord. The reason is that the Lord himself is the divine Man, and everything that proceeds from him tends to human form. From this derives the idea, set out in Angelic Wisdom, that in all the heavens God is thought of only as a Man. The concept unites the anatomy of his scientific period (in the Arcana he devotes hundreds of numbers to the correspondence of each organ with a heavenly society) and the theology of his maturity, and has been read as one of the boldest formulations of Western mystical anthropomorphism.

Heaven and Hell, nn. 59–86; Arcana Coelestia, nn. 3624–3649 ff.; Angelic Wisdom concerning Divine Love, n. 11.

Source: Swedenborg, Emanuel. Heaven and its Wonders and Hell. Trad. John C. Ager. Nueva York: Swedenborg Foundation (Project Gutenberg n.º 17368).

World of spirits and ruling lovemundo-de-los-espiritus

Between heaven and hell Swedenborg places a 'world of spirits' which all reach immediately after death, with their spiritual body, senses and memory. There they pass through successive states in which externals are stripped away and what each person is within, his 'ruling love', appears. No one is judged from outside: each spirit makes his own way towards the society whose love resembles his, so that hell is chosen by those who prefer the love of self and of the world. Man, he says, after death is his own love or his own will. The doctrine, set out in Heaven and Hell, replaces the image of a tribunal with that of a revelation of one's own nature, and explains its enormous influence on otherworld literature and modern spirituality.

Heaven and Hell, nn. 421–535; Arcana Coelestia, memorable relations.

Source: Swedenborg, Emanuel. Heaven and its Wonders and Hell. Trad. John C. Ager. Nueva York: Swedenborg Foundation (Project Gutenberg n.º 17368).

One God, the Lord (the Trinity in one person)dios-hombre

Swedenborg rejects the doctrine of three divine persons, which he attributes to the Council of Nicaea and the Athanasian Creed, and holds that God is one in essence and in person: the Lord Jesus Christ. In him the Trinity exists as soul, body and action exist in man: the Father is the divine itself, the Son is the divine human which the Lord glorified by overcoming temptations, and the Holy Spirit is the proceeding divine. The incarnation was not the sending of a second person but the coming of God himself in human form to restore the equilibrium between heaven and hell. This Christology, set out in the Doctrine of the Lord and The True Christian Religion, is what separates him most sharply from the Churches of his time and what provoked the Gothenburg trial.

Doctrine of the Lord (1763); True Christian Religion (1771), ch. 1–3.

Source: Swedenborg, Emanuel. The True Christian Religion; containing the Universal Theology of the New Church. Nueva York: American Swedenborg Printing and Publishing Society, 1886.

Charity, uses and freedomcaridad-y-usos

Against justification by faith alone, Swedenborg affirms that faith separated from charity does not save: all religion is of life, and the life of religion is to do good. Charity is not so much almsgiving as 'use': performing one's office faithfully, justly and competently, for in that way one serves the neighbour, the country and the Church. The way is to shun evils as sins against God, following the Decalogue, and in that struggle man must act in freedom and according to reason: providence never compels, not even through miracles, because what is imposed is not made one's own. Hence his insistence that the life that leads to heaven is not the ascetic's but the honest citizen's. This active moralism, far from the mysticism of renunciation, partly explains his appeal to enlightened Protestant readers.

Doctrine of Life (1763); Divine Providence (1764); Heaven and Hell, nn. 528–535; True Christian Religion.

Source: Swedenborg, Emanuel. Heaven and its Wonders and Hell. Trad. John C. Ager. Nueva York: Swedenborg Foundation (Project Gutenberg n.º 17368).

The Last Judgment of 1757 and the New Churchjuicio-final-y-nueva-iglesia

Swedenborg asserted that the last judgment foretold in Revelation would not consist in the destruction of the visible world, but had taken place in the world of spirits in 1757, and that he had witnessed it. The Christian Church, by separating faith from charity and dividing God into three persons, had reached its 'consummation', and the spirits that had accumulated with an appearance of piety were judged and set in order. After that judgment the Lord made his second coming, not in person but through the revelation of the inner sense of the Word, and founded a 'new Church', the New Jerusalem of Revelation. Swedenborg organised no community; it was his readers who, from 1787, created the Church of the New Jerusalem in England, which later spread to the United States and other countries.

The Last Judgment (1758); Continuation (1763); True Christian Religion, ch. 14.

Source: Lachman, Gary. Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. Nueva York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2012.

Videos

Recordings, interviews and documentaries. Videos play from YouTube; they are not hosted here.

Splendors of the Spirit: Swedenborg's Quest for Insight (Biographical Documentary)
Documentary· EN· 2006· 59 min
Swedenborg FoundationOfficial channel
Who Was Swedenborg?
Documentary· EN· 8 min
Swedenborg FoundationOfficial channel
Heaven, Hell and Other Places | a documentary about Emanuel Swedenborg
Documentary· EN· 33 min
Swedenborg HouseOfficial channel
The Other Side of Life - Swedenborg Foundation
Documentary· EN· 28 min
Swedenborg FoundationOfficial channel
What is Swedenborgianism?
Lecture· EN· 3 min
Harvard UniversityOfficial channel
Swedenborg 101: The Basic Nature of Everything - Swedenborg and Life
Lecture· EN· 90 min
Off The Left EyeOfficial channel
The Life and Ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg with Gary Lachman
Interview· EN· 57 min
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove
Why Metaphysics had to be Destroyed to Save It - Kant & Mysticism
Analysis· EN· 43 min
ESOTERICA
Dreams of a Spirit-Seer by Immanuel Kant read by Peter Tucker | Full Audio Book
Third-party recording· EN· 126 min
LibriVox AudiobooksOfficial channel
Swedenborg An Example of Difficulties in Entering Spiritual Worlds - Rudolf Steiner
Lecture· EN· 35 min
Rudolf Steiner Press AudioOfficial channel
Emanuel Swedenborg's Spiritual Experiences and the NDE Connection
Lecture· EN· 92 min
IANDS
Emanuel Swedenborg: A most unusual mystic
Analysis· EN· 51 min
The Christian Mysticism Podcast

Gallery

Images with verified licences. Each keeps its authorship and attribution.

Manuscripts

Manuscript witnesses and ancient texts, with their custodian and conditions of access.

LA · Latina (cursiva del siglo XVIII) · c. 1710–1771
Colección de manuscritos de Emanuel Swedenborg
Surviving witness
Borradores y copias en limpio de obras científicas y teológicas, diarios e índices; incluye el manuscrito de los Arcana Coelestia
Custodian
Real Academia Sueca de Ciencias (Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien), Estocolmo

Manuscripts →

Connections

Influences, discipleships and affinities. Documented relations are distinguished from similarities identified by analysis.

Ideas akin to
Jakob Böhme
Two Protestant visionaries who described the spiritual worlds and a correspondence between the visible and the invisible; the Pietist Oetinger compared them in the eighteenth century. Swedenborg acknowledged no debt to Böhme, and his Latin, systematic language is very different from the shoemaker's torrential German.
Similarity identified by analysis
Influenced
Helena Blavatsky
Blavatsky quotes him frequently in Isis Unveiled (1877), where she regards him as a genuine seer though limited by his Christian theology, and adopts his language of correspondences. An acknowledged affinity, not discipleship.
Documented relation
Influenced
Carl Gustav Jung
Jung read Swedenborg as a student, cited him in his Zofingia lectures (1896–1899) and in his memoirs recalls reading several volumes; the Stockholm fire episode served him as an example of synchronicity.
Documented relation
Influenced
Vladimir Solovyov
In London in 1875 Solovyov read Swedenborg alongside Böhme, the Gnostics and the Kabbalah, readings that fed his early sophiology.
Documented relation
Ideas akin to
Plotinus
The historian Martin Lamm (1915) argued that Swedenborg's theology develops Neoplatonic ideas (emanation, degrees, correspondence between levels of reality) already present in his scientific period; Swedenborg did not regard himself as a disciple of Plotinus.
Similarity identified by analysis
Disagreed with
Rudolf Steiner
Steiner devoted several lectures to him in which he acknowledges his clairvoyance but judges it distorted by the concepts of his scientific training, as an example of the difficulties of entering the spiritual worlds.
Documented relation

Linked from other profiles

Sources

Bibliography and catalogues consulted for this profile.

Wikidata, Q185832 «Emanuel Swedenborg» (P31=Q5; 88 enlaces entre wikis; P569 1688-01-29; P570 1772-03-29; P20 Londres).
Bergquist, Lars. Swedenborg's Secret: The Meaning and Significance of the Word of God, the Life of the Angels, and Service to God. A Biography. Londres: Swedenborg Society, 2005 (orig. sueco: Swedenborgs hemlighet, Estocolmo: Natur och Kultur, 1999).
Lachman, Gary. Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. Nueva York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2012.
Tafel, Rudolph Leonhard (ed.). Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg. 2 vols. en 3. Londres: Swedenborg Society, 1875–1877 (incluye las memorias de Carl Robsahm, las declaraciones de Arvid Ferelius y de la familia Shearsmith y la carta de Kant a Charlotte von Knobloch).
Sigstedt, Cyriel Odhner. The Swedenborg Epic: The Life and Works of Emanuel Swedenborg. Nueva York: Bookman Associates, 1952.
Kant, Immanuel. Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik. Königsberg: Kanter, 1766 (Project Gutenberg n.º 36076).
Kant, Immanuel. Carta a Charlotte von Knobloch, 10 de agosto de 1763. En Kant's gesammelte Schriften (Akademie-Ausgabe), vol. X: Briefwechsel I, Berlín, 1900 (a menudo fechada erróneamente en 1758); trad. inglesa en Tafel, Documents, vol. I.
Swedenborg, Emanuel. Heaven and its Wonders and Hell. Trad. John C. Ager. Nueva York: Swedenborg Foundation (Project Gutenberg n.º 17368).
Swedenborg, Emanuel. Swedenborgs drömmar 1744 (Drömboken). Ed. G. E. Klemming. Estocolmo, 1859. Trad. inglesa: Swedenborg's Journal of Dreams, ed. William Ross Woofenden, Nueva York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1977.
Swedenborg, Emanuel. The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love. Trad. inglesa de 1850, reimpr. 1892 (Project Gutenberg n.º 11248).
Swedenborg, Emanuel. The True Christian Religion; containing the Universal Theology of the New Church. Nueva York: American Swedenborg Printing and Publishing Society, 1886.
Swedenborg, Emanuel. Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom. Trad. John C. Ager. Nueva York: Swedenborg Foundation (Project Gutenberg n.º 16627).
Hyde, James. A Bibliography of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg, Original and Translated. Londres: Swedenborg Society, 1906.
Jonsson, Inge. Emanuel Swedenborg. Trad. Catherine Djurklou. Nueva York: Twayne (Twayne's World Authors Series), 1971.
Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffé. Nueva York: Pantheon, 1963 (cap. «Student Years»: lectura de Swedenborg); y The Zofingia Lectures (1896–1899), Collected Works, suppl. vol. A. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983; y «Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle» (1952), Collected Works 8, donde cita la visión del incendio de Estocolmo.
Blavatsky, H. P. Isis Unveiled. 2 vols. Nueva York: J. W. Bouton, 1877 (pasajes sobre Swedenborg y las correspondencias).
Borges, Jorge Luis. «Emanuel Swedenborg», conferencia en la Universidad de Belgrano (1978). En Borges oral. Buenos Aires: Emecé/Editorial de Belgrano, 1979.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. «Swedenborg; or, the Mystic». En Representative Men: Seven Lectures. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1850 (Project Gutenberg n.º 6312).
UNESCO, Memory of the World Register: «The Emanuel Swedenborg Collection» (Suecia, inscrita en 2005), conservada en la Real Academia Sueca de Ciencias.
Open Library (Internet Archive): registros consultados por autor, título e ISBN para las ediciones listadas.
Wikimedia Commons: metadatos de licencia (extmetadata) de cada fichero, leídos por la API imageinfo el 2026-10-25.
Swedenborg Foundation (West Chester, Pensilvania): New Century Edition y Portable New Century Edition de las obras teológicas.
Swedenborg Society (Londres), editorial y biblioteca de Swedenborg House.
Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch (ed. y trad.). Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Benz, Ernst. Emanuel Swedenborg: Visionary Savant in the Age of Reason. Trad. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2002 (orig. alemán, Múnich, 1948).
Gross, Charles G. «Emanuel Swedenborg: A Neuroscientist before His Time». En Brain, Vision, Memory: Tales in the History of Neuroscience. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press, 1998, pp. 119–135.
Steiner, Rudolf. «Swedenborg: An Example of Difficulties in Entering Spiritual Worlds», conferencia (lectura en audio publicada por Rudolf Steiner Press).

Rights holder: Dominio público (Swedenborg murió en 1772). Las traducciones del siglo XIX son de dominio público; las modernas (New Century Edition de la Swedenborg Foundation, Swedenborg Society, Siruela) pertenecen a sus editores y traductores.
Official site: swedenborg.com/

Pending confirmation

What this profile has not yet been able to settle. We would rather say so than fill it in.

Cotejar las citas con el original latino (De caelo et inferno, Sapientia angelica, De amore conjugiali): hoy se dan en las traducciones inglesas de dominio público.
Arcana Coelestia: localizar un texto completo y limpio (latín de 1749–1756 o traducción inglesa del siglo XIX) con todos los volúmenes; en Internet Archive aparecen series incompletas.
Las cuatro doctrinas de 1763 comparten volumen en las ediciones antiguas (Four Leading Doctrines, 1892): buscar una URL propia para cada una antes de registrarlas en la sala de lectura.
Verificar las fechas de muerte de William F. Wunsch y de James R. Rendell e Isaiah Tansley para levantar la cautela sobre Divine Providence y los Principia.
Ediciones en español: solo se ha localizado con ISBN Del cielo y del infierno (Siruela, 2003; traductor por confirmar). Confirmar el contenido de El habitante de dos mundos (Trotta, 2000) y Arquitectura del cielo (Adriana Hidalgo, 2004), probablemente antologías, y la traducción española de 1912 de la Sociedad Americana Swedenborg.
Vídeos: no se han encontrado vídeos en español ni en sueco de canales solventes; los doce registrados están en inglés.
Precisar el año exacto del traslado de sus restos a Upsala (1908, según The Gist of Swedenborg, 1920; otras fuentes dan 1910–1913 para la inauguración del sarcófago).
Fijar la fecha y el destinatario de la carta de Arvid Ferelius sobre los últimos días de Swedenborg.
Programas de afiliación: ninguno verificado; lista vacía.

Researched on 2026-10-25

Biography

The bishop's son

The assessor of mines

The crisis of 1743–1745

The heavenly arcana

The seer of Stockholm

London, 1772

A life, year by year

Birth

Essential works

The Principia (The First Principles of Natural Things)

Arcana Coelestia (Secrets of Heaven / Heavenly Arcana)

Heaven and Hell (Heaven and its Wonders and Hell)

The True Christian Religion (True Christianity)

Complete works (38)

What their work answers

Affinities and tensions

Thinks most like

Thinks most unlike

Anecdotes and stories

The Stockholm fire

The queen's secret

Madame de Marteville's receipt

'Do not eat so much'

Kant buys the Arcana

The night at Delft

Teachings

Videos

Gallery

Manuscripts

Colección de manuscritos de Emanuel Swedenborg

Connections

Sources