EsoteriaA library of sacred & hidden knowledge
Liber IX · Gnosticism

Liber IX · Gnosticism · Chapter IV: Christian Theosophy

Emanuel Swedenborg: Scientist, Visionary and Seer of Heaven

Emanuel Swedenborg's life: the Swedish mining scientist whose visions of 1744–45 led to accounts of heaven, hell, spirits and the inner sense of Scripture.

8 min read 1,824 words Updated

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a Swedish natural scientist, mining official and member of the Swedish House of Nobles who, after a religious crisis in 1743–45, devoted the last 27 years of his life to describing heaven, hell and the world of spirits and to unfolding what he called the inner, spiritual sense of the Bible. He claimed to have been called by the Lord in London in 1745 and to converse daily with angels and spirits. His Latin works inspired the Swedenborgian New Church and left deep marks on Romanticism, Spiritualism, New Thought and modern Theosophy.

Early Life and Scientific Career§

Swedenborg was born in Stockholm on 29 January 1688, the son of Jesper Swedberg, a Lutheran court chaplain who later became bishop of Skara and who was himself unusually open to the reality of angels and spiritual experience. When the family was ennobled in 1719 the name became Swedenborg. Emanuel studied at Uppsala and then spent several years abroad, chiefly in England, Holland and France, where he absorbed the new mathematics and natural philosophy of Newton's generation.

On his return he edited Daedalus Hyperboreus (1716–18), Sweden's first scientific journal, worked with the engineer Christopher Polhem and was appointed by Charles XII as an extraordinary assessor of the Royal Board of Mines, a post he held for some thirty years. His Opera philosophica et mineralia (1734) combined a theory of the origin of the cosmos from mathematical points with practical treatises on iron and copper. In the following decade he turned to anatomy and physiology, especially the brain and the blood, in works such as The Economy of the Animal Kingdom (1740–41). His explicit aim was to find the seat and nature of the soul by following the body inward, and historians of science credit him with some perceptive early observations on the functions of the cerebral cortex.

The Crisis of 1743–1745 and the Spiritual Call§

The search for the soul ended in an inner upheaval. From 1743 to 1744 Swedenborg kept a private diary of dreams, now known as the Journal of Dreams, which records intense temptations, feelings of unworthiness, erotic and religious dream imagery and, at Easter 1744 in Holland, an overwhelming experience of the presence of Christ. The diary was not intended for publication and was only printed in the nineteenth century, but it shows a man re-reading his own ambitions in the light of grace.

The decisive event, by Swedenborg's own later account as reported by his acquaintance Carl Robsahm, took place in London in April 1745. After dining at an inn, he saw a figure who told him not to eat so much; that night the same figure appeared again, identified himself as the Lord, and told Swedenborg that he had been chosen to explain the spiritual meaning of Scripture to humanity, and that he would be shown what to write. From then on, Swedenborg said, his spiritual sight was opened so that he could be present among spirits and angels while remaining fully conscious in the natural world.

He began studying Hebrew and Greek afresh, compiled a huge private index to the Bible and kept a spiritual diary of his experiences. In 1747 he resigned from the Board of Mines on a pension, so that he could devote himself to what he regarded as his true office.

How scholars read the call§

Historians do not need to decide whether Swedenborg truly saw angels in order to study him. Some biographers emphasise continuity: his visionary system reuses the hierarchies, degrees and "influx" of his scientific philosophy. Others have proposed psychological explanations, from creative mystical states to episodes of illness, while noting that contemporaries found him lucid, courteous and practical to the end of his life. Ernst Benz and Wouter Hanegraaff, among others, place him within a long tradition of Christian visionary and theosophical writing that includes Jacob Boehme, while stressing that he presented his revelations as rational and verifiable rather than ecstatic.

The Theological Writings, 1749–1771§

Swedenborg's religious works were written in Latin, printed at his own expense, mostly in London and Amsterdam, and at first published anonymously. The first and largest was Arcana Coelestia (1749–56), an eight-volume commentary on Genesis and Exodus discussed in our article on Arcana Coelestia and the doctrine of correspondences. In 1758 he issued five shorter books, including Heaven and Hell, The New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine and The Last Judgment, in which he claimed that a spiritual Last Judgment had taken place in the world of spirits in 1757, opening a new era for the church.

Later works treat God, creation and providence (Divine Love and Wisdom, 1763; Divine Providence, 1764), the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse Revealed, 1766), marriage and love in heaven (Conjugial Love, 1768) and, finally, a systematic theology, True Christian Religion (1771). His identification of the promised "new Jerusalem" of Revelation 21 with a new spiritual dispensation gave his later followers their name.

Heaven, Hell and the World of Spirits§

The best known of Swedenborg's teachings concern the afterlife. In Heaven and Hell he describes death as a waking into a "world of spirits", an intermediate state in which each person's inmost loves gradually come to the surface. No one is sent to hell by an arbitrary sentence; the spirit freely gravitates to the community whose love matches its own ruling love. Heaven is formed of countless societies, arranged according to the quality of love and wisdom, and in its entirety it has the form of a human being, which he called the Grand Man (Maximus Homo).

The heavenly life he describes is active rather than restful: angels work, teach, marry and serve. The Lord appears in heaven as a sun, whose heat is love and whose light is wisdom. Swedenborg also taught that God is one person, not three, and that the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is a trinity of essence, human form and activity within Jesus Christ. Faith alone, he argued, cannot save: charity, expressed in useful service, is the life of faith. These positions put him sharply at odds with Lutheran orthodoxy, and in 1768–70 a heresy case was brought in Gothenburg against two clergymen who had promoted his teachings.

Unlike later Spiritualism, Swedenborg warned against seeking contact with spirits, which he regarded as dangerous for anyone not specially prepared. He also rejected reincarnation: in his account each person lives one earthly life and then continues to develop in the spiritual world.

Stories of Clairvoyance and Kant's Dreams of a Spirit-Seer§

Several anecdotes circulated during Swedenborg's lifetime. The most famous claims that in July 1759, at a dinner in Gothenburg, he described the progress of a great fire then raging in Stockholm, some 400 kilometres away, which later reports confirmed. Others concerned a lost receipt found through a message from a dead husband and a secret confided to the Queen of Sweden. These stories reached the young Immanuel Kant, who made inquiries and in 1766 published Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, an ironic essay that used Swedenborg to test the limits of metaphysics. Kant's verdict was mixed: he mocked the visions yet admitted he could not simply dismiss the reports.

Swedenborg died in London on 29 March 1772, reportedly having predicted the date. He was buried in the Swedish church in London, and in 1908 his remains were moved to Uppsala Cathedral.

The New Church and Swedenborg's Influence§

Swedenborg never founded a congregation, but in 1787 readers in London led by Robert Hindmarsh began to organise a separate New Church, which held its first public services in 1788. Other readers, notably the Anglican clergyman John Clowes in Manchester, preferred to spread his ideas within existing churches. New Church bodies were established in Britain, the United States and elsewhere, and the Swedenborg Society in London (1810) and later the Swedenborg Foundation in New York published translations that are still in print.

His cultural reach was much wider than his church. William Blake attended the first General Conference of the New Church in 1789 before turning on Swedenborg in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Balzac wrote the Swedenborgian novel Séraphîta (1834), Baudelaire's sonnet "Correspondances" echoes his central idea, and Ralph Waldo Emerson chose him as the representative mystic in Representative Men (1850). In America, Swedenborgian ideas mingled with mesmerism, fed the trance philosophy of Andrew Jackson Davis and helped shape the New Thought movement. Blavatsky's Theosophy cited him with respect but criticised the Christian frame of his visions. In the twentieth century the Japanese Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki translated four of his works into Japanese and wrote a short study of him, and Helen Keller described her Swedenborgian faith in My Religion (1927).

Frequently asked questions§

What did Emanuel Swedenborg claim to see?§

He claimed that from 1745 his spiritual sight was opened so that he could visit heaven, hell and an intermediate world of spirits while awake, and converse with angels and with people who had died. He presented these experiences as the basis for explaining the inner sense of the Bible.

Was Swedenborg a real scientist?§

Yes. Before his religious turn he was a mining engineer and official of Sweden's Board of Mines and published substantial works on metallurgy, cosmology, anatomy and the brain. Some of his physiological ideas are still noted by historians of neuroscience as perceptive for their time.

Did Swedenborg found the Swedenborgian Church?§

No. He published his books and corresponded with readers but formed no congregation. The New Church was organised in London from 1787, fifteen years after his death, and several Swedenborgian denominations exist today.

Did Swedenborg believe in reincarnation?§

No. He taught that each human being lives a single earthly life, after which the person continues as a spirit and settles in heaven or hell according to his or her ruling love. This distinguishes him from Theosophy and much later esoteric thought.

Sources and further reading§