Swedenborg, EMANUEL, was born in Stockholm, January 29, 1688, and died in London, March 29, 1772. His father was Jesper Svedberg, subsequently Bishop of Skara. Swedenborg's lifetime divides itself into two distinct periods; the first, ending with his fifty-fifth year, was given to business, science, and philosophy; the second, of nearly thirty years, was devoted to theology and spiritual communion. Swedenborg was educated at Upsala, and subsequently travelled for four years in England, Holland, France, and Germany.
On his return to Sweden he was appointed by Charles XII, an assessor in the College of Mines, and rendered some service to that monarch at the siege of Frederikshall as military engineer. The family was ennobled in 1719, and the name changed from Svedberg to Swedenborg. Swedenborg is sometimes styled Count or Baron, but erroneously; he was neither, though he had a seat in the Swedish House of Nobles as the head of his family. His mind at this time was busy with mechanical and economical projects. He published short treatises on algebra, giving the first account in Swedish of the differential and integral calculus; on a mode of finding the longitude at sea by the moon; on decimal money and measures; on the motion and position of the earth and planets; on the depth of the sea, and greater force of the tides in the ancient world; on docks, sluices, and salt-works; and on chemistry as atomic geometry. In 1724 he was offered the professorship of mathematics at Upsala, which he declined from a dislike of non-practical science. Abandoning desultory studies, he devoted himself for ten years to the duties of his assessorship and to a systematic study of the methods of mining and smelting at home and abroad, and to the construction of a theory of the origin of creation. The result appeared at Leipsic, at the expense of the Duke of Brunswick, in 1734, in three massive folios, beautifully illustrated, entitled Opera Philosophica et Mineralia. The second and third volumes describe the best methods employed in the manufacture of iron, copper, and brass. The first volume, entitled Principia, or the First Principles of Natural Things, being new Attempts towards a Philosophical Explanation of the Elementary World, is an elaborate deduction of matter from 'points of pure motion produced immediately from the Infinite.' This was followed in the same year by Philosophical Argument on the Infinite, and the Final Cause of Creation; and on the Mechanism of the Operation of Soul and Body, carrying the doctrine of the Principia into higher regions, and resolving the soul into points of motion, the soul being treated as one in substance with the sun. Dissatisfied with his conclusions, he determined to track the soul to its inmost recesses in the body. His studies in human anatomy and physiology with this end in view were embodied in his Economy of the Animal Kingdom (2 vols. 1741) and his Animal Kingdom (3 vols. unfinished, 1744-45).
At this point his course as a natural philosopher was arrested, and he entered on his career as spiritual seer. The particulars of the transition are recorded in his diary for 1743-44, and comprise a variety of curious dreams and strange communings; he now professed to enjoy free access to the spiritual world. He resigned his assessorship in 1747, that he might devote himself to the office to which the Lord had called him. In 1749 he made his first public utterance in his new character in the issue in London of the Heavenly Arcana (1749-56, 8 vols. 4to.). His life henceforward was spent chiefly between Stockholm, London, and Amsterdam, in writing and printing a variety of works in exposition of his experience and doctrines. There is little in any of these which is not to be found in outline at least in the Heavenly Arcana, and a note of its contents may serve, therefore, as a general description of the whole. With many digressions, the Heavenly Arcana is a revelation of the internal or spiritual sense of Genesis and Exodus. The early chapters of Genesis are a fragment of an older Word, preserved at this day in Tartary, and are an allegorical and not a literal history. Adam signifies the Most Ancient Church, and the Flood its dissolution; Noah, the Ancient
Church, which falling into idolatry was superseded by the Jewish. The spiritual sense pervades the Scriptures, which are the genuine Word of God, as the soul does the body. The exceptions are Ruth, the Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles. These books have an edifying natural sense like other good productions of human authors, but, inasmuch as they do not possess the internal sense, they are not held to be inspired. The Scriptures are read in heaven in their spiritual sense, but, as that sense treats exclusively of God and man as a spiritual being, it is void of every reference to earthly scenes, persons, and events. By reason of its symbolism of the inward sense, the letter of Scripture is holy in every jot and tittle, and has been preserved in immaculate perfection since the hour of its Divine dictation. The Jewish dispensation having reached its period, God appeared in Jesus Christ; He assumed human nature in its humblest condition in the Virgin, wrought it into conformity with Himself, 'glorified and made it Divine.' The effluence from the Lord's Divine humanity is the Holy Spirit. In a sense the reverse of Socinian, Swedenborg was a Unitarian; he saw God in the Saviour; and regarded Him as the sole object of worship. The church initiated by the Divine Advent came to an end in the 18th century, and Swedenborg witnessed the Last Judgment effected in the year 1757 in the World of Spirits. Then commenced a new dispensation, signified by the New Jerusalem in the Revelation, of which Swedenborg was the precursor, and his writings contain the doctrine. To the objection, that the doctrine is strange and novel, he replied that mankind were not prepared for its reception before that time, and that the early Christians were too simple to understand it.
One object of his mission was the revival of the lost science of correspondences—the science of sciences in the most ancient times. The law of correspondence is universal; the natural world is the outbirth of the spiritual world, and the spiritual world of the invisible mental world. Unseen evil is manifested in things hurtful and ugly, unseen good in things useful and beautiful. Man is a summary of nature; nature is man in diffusion; all things, therefore, in nature—fire, air, earth, and water—every beast, bird, fish, insect, and reptile—every tree, herb, fruit, and flower—represent and express unseen things in the mind of man. The Scriptures are written according to correspondences, and by aid of the science their mysteries are unlocked. By it, too, the constitution of heaven and hell is revealed. There are three heavens, consisting of three orders of angels; the first distinguished for love, the second for wisdom, and the last for obedience. All angels have lived on earth; none were created such. They are men and women in every respect; they marry and live in societies in cities and countries just as in the world, but in happiness and glory ineffable. All in whom love to God and man is the ruling principle go to heaven at death. Between heaven and hell a perfect equilibrium is maintained. As there are three heavens so there are three hells, and every angelic society has an infernal opposite. Hell, as a whole, is called the Devil and Satan; there is no individual bearing that name. All in whom self-love is the ruling motive go to hell. There is no resurrection of the earthly body. Every one passes to his final lot at death, some making a short sojourn in an intermediate state, designated the World of Spirits, where the good are cured of their superficial infirmities and intellectual errors, and where the evil are stripped of all their pretences to good. Swedenborg's other notable works (all first published in Latin) are Heaven and Hell, The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine, Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom, Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Providence, The Apocalypse Revealed, and The Delights of Wisdom concerning Conjugal Love; his whole translated theological works numbering forty volumes of a good size.
Swedenborg professed to enjoy acquaintance with many departed celebrities, and some of his verdicts on character reverse the estimates of history. Nor was his intercourse confined to spirits from earth, but extended to souls from the moon and the planets. For these visions, experienced whilst sitting in his chamber, he had this explanation: although in the spiritual world there are appearances of space, there is nothing of the objective reality which here divides London from Melbourne. If one spirit desires to see another, the desire instantly brings them together. A good man is, as to his mind, in heaven, and an evil man in hell; and supposing the spiritual sight of either were opened—i.e. if the eyes of the spiritual body, which transfuse and animate the material ones, were disengaged from their fleshly vesture—he would see his spiritual companions and the country where he would abide after death.
The grand and distinctive principle of Swedenborgian theology, next to the doctrine of the Divine Humanity, is the doctrine of life. God alone lives. Creation is dead—man is dead; and their apparent life is from the Divine presence. God is everywhere the same. It fallaciously appears as if He were different in one man and in another. The difference is in the recipients; by one He is not received in the same degree as another. A man more adequately manifests God than a tree; that is the only distinction. The life of devils is God's presence perverted in disorderly forms. 'All things, and each of them to the very uttermost, exist and subsist instantly from God. If the connection of anything with Him were broken for a moment it would instantly vanish; for existence is perpetual subsistence, and preservation is perpetual creation.' By this law of life is explained man's self-consciousness, freedom, and personality—notions communicated from God to man.
Swedenborg made no attempt to establish a sect. When he proclaimed the Christian Church at an end, his expectation was that a new church would be raised up among the Gentiles; but towards the close of his life he spent his energies in attacking orthodox theology, Catholic and Protestant, as if bent on the conversion of Christian lands, but especially of northern Europe. All his works were written in Latin, and received small measure of attention from his contemporaries. Swedenborg was shrewd in worldly affairs, affable in society, and discessed politics and finance in the Swedish Diet like a man of the world, and that for nearly a score of years after he began to write and publish his theological works. He was never married. His diet was chiefly but not wholly vegetarian.
The Swedenborgians, or, as they designate themselves in their corporate capacity, 'The New Church signified by the New Jerusalem in the Revelation,' were first organised as a distinct denomination in 1788 by Robert Hindmarsh (1759–1835), a printer in Clerkenwell, who became one of the first ministers of the body. The Swedenborgians accepted Swedenborg's voluminous theological writings as containing a revelation from heaven. The body has grown steadily but not quickly. The number of its registered members in Britain in 1891 was 6239, divided into 75 congregations, chiefly in the large towns and in Lancashire; five are in Scotland, one in Wales, but none in Ireland. Their General Conference holds £66,431 invested on behalf of various missionary and church uses. There have always been a number of receivers of the doctrines of Swedenborg among the clergy of the Church of England. The first translator of the Heavenly Arcana and many of the other theological writings of Swedenborg was the Rev. John Clowes (1743-1831), rector of St John's, Manchester, for sixty-two years, who both in the pulpit and in his numerous publications made no secret of his faith. From the first those who accepted Swedenborg's teachings have been divided into separatists and non-separatists. In the United States the Swedenborgians have 104 societies and 5803 members, chiefly in the northern states; the largest congregation is in Boston. In France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, and Russia there are Swedenborgians, but they are so few and scattered that there are but eight congregations in these countries which meet for divine worship every Sunday. There is a Swedenborg Society, established in 1810, for printing and publishing Swedenborg's works, with a house in London, and an income of about £600 a year. They have a National Missionary Institution and eight local missionary committees, a training college for their ministry, and an orphanage.
See the biographies of Swedenborg by W. White (Lond. 1867), by J. J. Garth Wilkinson (1886), and Documents concerning the Life and Character of Swedenborg, by Professor R. L. Tafel (3 vols. 1875-77).