(If you're into science, this could have definite appeal. ...)
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This work describes how male and female minds and spirits are designed to interlock, creating a whole that is truly human. Some modern readers struggle with its being written from a male perspective, but one can see through the 18th-century language to embrace a vision of eternal marriage as the source of all joy in heaven.
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This 12-volume work offers a phrase-by-phrase analysis of the symbolic spiritual meaning of Genesis and Exodus. It's a large undertaking, but if you want to understand the Old Testament, it is a treasure trove.
The White Horse Mentioned in the Apocalypse Chapter 19 With Particulars Respecting The Word and Its Spiritual or Internal Sense Extracted from the Arcana Coeslestia
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The White Horse Mentioned in the Apocalypse Chapter 19. With Particulars Respecting The Word and Its Spiritual or Internal Sense Extracted from the Arcana Coeslestia.
Emanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish scientist, Christian mystic, philosopher, and theologian who wrote voluminously in interpreting the Scriptures as the immediate word of God. Soon after his death, devoted followers created Swedenborgian societies dedicated to the study of his thought. These societies formed the nucleus of the Church of the New Jerusalem, or New Church, also called the Swedenborgians.
Background
The third one amongst the nine children of Jesper and Sarah Behm Swedberg, Emanuel Swedberg was born on January 29, 1688. At the tender age of 8, he lost both his mother and elder brother Albert, in an epidemic. His father got remarried, to a wealthy widow Sarah Bergia. After Sarah's death, in 1720, Swedberg inherited half of her estate, Starbo and a modest fortune. From the age of eleven to twenty-one, he studied mechanics, geography, astronomy, and mathematics, at the University of Uppsala.
Education
At the age of eleven Emanuel entered the University of Uppsala, where his father was a professor. Although Jesper left the university to become bishop of Skara a few years later, Emanuel remained at Uppsala, completing his studies in 1709. As was customary for wealthy young Swedish men of his time, he then journeyed abroad to expand on what he had learned. His first stop was England—a worldwide center of learning and a major maritime power—where he studied the observational techniques of royal astronomer John Flamsteed (1646–1719) and traveled in the same intellectual circles as luminaries like Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) and Edmund Halley (1656–1742). Emanuel also studied geology, botany, zoology, and the mechanical sciences under a number of scholars, inventors, and mechanics, later continuing those studies in Amsterdam and Paris.
Emanuel Swedberg returned to his homeland, Sweden, in 1715 and for the next two decades, devoted himself completely to natural science and engineering projects. After a year, in a meeting with King Charles XII of Sweden, he proposed the idea of an observatory in northern Sweden, which was rejected. However, he was appointed as an assessor-extraordinary on the Swedish Board of Mines (Bergskollegium), in Stockholm.
In the next two years of his life (1716-1718), Emanuel published a scientific periodical titled 'Daedalus Hyperboreus'. The periodical held record of mechanical and mathematical inventions and discoveries. In this journal, he also mentioned about a flying machine, which he had earlier referred to in his letter to Eric. Around this time, Emanuel was also enobled, along with his siblings, by Queen Ulrika Eleonora and their surname changed to Swedenborg. Emanuel's scientific inventions include a dry dock of new design, a machine for working salt springs and a system for moving large boats overland.
In the field of biology, Swedenborg stressed on the importance of cerebral cortex. Apart from these, he drew feasible sketches of futuristic machines, including an airplane, a submarine, a steam engine, an air gun and a slow-combustion stove. Emanuel Swedenborg was offered the position of a professor in mathematics at Uppsala University, in 1724. However, he declined the offer, because he dealt with geometry, chemistry and metallurgy mainly, not maths.
With time, Swedenborg's interests wavered. He switched to spiritual matters, resolute to find a theory that would explain how 'matter' relates to 'spirit'. This invention led him to discover the structure of matter and the process of creation itself. In his book, Principia, he outlined his philosophical methods, which included his experience, geometry and the power of reason. He, thus, presented his cosmology, which included the first presentation of the Nebular hypothesis.
In 1735, Swedenborg's released the book 'Opera philosophica et mineralis', which reflected his effort to conjoin philosophy and metallurgy. The work also earned him international fame and repute. Later in the year, he wrote the small manuscript 'de Infinito' basically defining the relation between finite and infinite and also between soul and body. In the 1730s, Swedenborg also studied anatomy and physiology. In 1743, he urged a leave of absence to go abroad.
The aim behind Swedenborg's leave was to collect material on 'Regnum animale' (The Animal Kingdom, or Kingdom of Life), to explain the soul from an anatomical point of view. On this travel expedition, Swedenborgexperienced many different dreams and visions, some greatly pleasurable, others highly disturbing. These experiences were recorded in his Journal of Dreams, which reflected the battle between the love for his own self and the love for God.
While proceeding further into the subject 'Regnum animale', Swedenborg felt like dropping his current project and writing a new book, this one about the worship of God. He acted according to his wishes and started working on the book 'De cultu et amore Dei', or The Worship and Love of God. Though the book had still not been completed, Emanuel Swedenborg still got it published, in London, in June 1745.
To complete his half done task 'De cultu et amore Dei', Swedenborg relieved himself from the post of Assessor of the Board of Mines and took up the study of Hebrew. He, then, started working on the spiritual interpretation of the Bible, with the goal of interpreting the spiritual meaning of every verse. For the next decade, he devoted his time and study to this task. Abbreviated as Arcana Cœlestia or Heavenly Secrets, the work became the magnum opus or the basis of his further theological works.
Emanuel Swedenborg spent the last quarter of his life in Stockholm, Holland, and London. During this phase, he published 14 works of spiritual nature. He also made a lot of friends around this time. In 1770, Swedenborg traveled to Amsterdam, to complete the publication of his last work, 'Vera Christiana Religio', one of his most famous contributions. In 1771, after suffering from a stroke, he became partially paralyzed and was restricted to bed. Though he was getting better, Swedenborg left for the heaven abode on March 29, 1772. He was buried in Swedish Church, in Shadwell, London
Achievements
Swedenborg never acted as a preacher but rather relied totally on the effect of his huge Latin volumes. The first Swedenborgian societies appeared in the 1780s, and the first independent congregation, the origin of the various Church of the New Jerusalem organizations, was founded in London by the end of that decade. Swedenborg’s influence was by no means restricted to his immediate disciples. His visions and religious ideas have been a source of inspiration for a number of prominent writers, including Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Butler Yeats, and August Strindberg. His theological writings have been translated into many languages, and there is a constant flow of new editions.
(A compact overview of the teachings of Second Coming.)
1758
Religion
Swedenborg's years of anatomical research were concluded by a painful religious crisis from which there survives a unique document. It is usually called the Journal of Dreams (1743–44) and was obviously meant to be a journal of his new travels beginning in July 1743, but the rather trivial notices were suddenly interrupted. There follows instead a list of various dreams recalled from earlier years and a detailed report on his spiritual experiences, mostly at night, from March to October 1744. Some of the dreams were of a grossly sexual character and caused many pious readers quite a shock when the journal was published in 1859. But the feelings of guilt Swedenborg evidently experienced at this time were not concentrated on his sexual impulses but rather on his intellectual pride, his burning ambition to be recognized as a great man of science. On April 7, 1744, he had his first vision of Christ, which gave him a temporary rest from the temptations of his own pride and the evil spirits he believed to be around him. A definite call to abandon worldly learning occurred in April 1745, Swedenborg told his friends in his later years. The call apparently came in the form of a waking vision of the Lord. Swedenborg thereafter left his remaining works in the natural sciences unfinished.
Views
For the remainder of his long career, Swedenborg devoted his enormous energy to interpreting the Bible and to relating what he had seen and heard in the world of spirits and angels. From 1749 to 1771 he wrote some 30 volumes, all of them in Latin and the major part anonymously. Among these were Arcana Coelestia, 8 vol. (1749–56; Heavenly Arcana) and Apocalypsis Explicata, 4 vol. (1785–89; Apocalypse Explained), which contain his commentaries on the internal spiritual meaning of Genesis and Exodus and on the Book of Revelation, respectively. De Coelo et ejus Mirabilibus et de Inferno (1758; On Heaven and Its Wonders and on Hell) is perhaps his best-known theological work. He gave an admirably clear summary of his theological thinking in his last work, the Vera Christiana Religio (1771; True Christian Religion), which was written when he was 83.
Swedenborg asserted that his entry into the field of theological study was in response to a divine vision and call; that his spiritual senses were opened so that he might be in the spiritual world as consciously as in the material world; and that the long series of exegetical and theological works that he wrote constituted a revelation from God for a new age of truth and reason in religion. Furthermore, he held that this new revelation of God was what was meant by the Second Coming. Because of his otherworldly experiences, Swedenborg has often been regarded either as a spiritualist “medium” or as a mystic, but in his dry, matter-of-fact accounts of the spiritual world and in his acutely reasoned theology he actually retains his lifelong attitude of the scientific and philosophic investigator.
Swedenborg consistently maintained that the infinite, indivisible power and life within all creation is God. In his theology he asserts the absolute unity of God in both essence (essentia) and being (esse). The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit represent a trinity of essential qualities in God; love, wisdom, and activity. This divine trinity is reproduced in human beings in the form of the trinity of soul, body, and mind. Swedenborg accepted that all creation has its origin in the divine love and wisdom and asserted that all created things are forms and effects of specific aspects of that love and wisdom and thus “correspond,” on the material plane, to spiritual realities. This true order of creation, however, has been disturbed by man’s misuse of his free will. He has diverted his love from God to his own ego, and thus evil has come into the world.
In order to redeem and save mankind, the divine being of God had to come into the world in the material, tangible form of a human being—i.e., Jesus Christ. Christ’s soul partook of the divine being itself, but in order that there might be an intimate contact of God with fallen mankind, Jesus assumed from Mary a body and a human nature comprising all the planes of human life. During the course of his life on earth, Jesus resisted every possible temptation and lived to their divine fullness the truths of the Word of God; in so doing he laid aside all the human qualities he had received from Mary, and his nature was revealed as the divine embodiment of the divine soul. Redemption, for Swedenborg, consisted in mankind being re-created in God’s image through the vehicle of Christ’s glorification. It was through the example of Christ’s victory over all temptation and all evil that men could achieve a similar harmonious unification between their spiritual and their material aspects. Swedenborg rejected the tripersonalism of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity (i.e., the one God revealed in the Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). To him the Trinity was in one Person, the Father being the originating divine being itself, the Son the human embodiment of that divine soul, and the Holy Spirit the outflowing activity of Jesus, or the “Divine Human.”
Swedenborg also rejected the orthodox conceptions of redemption. To him the redemption of mankind represented a deliverance from the domination of evil. The hells, which are the communities of the spirits of evil men in the spiritual world, were aspiring to force themselves upon men’s minds, destroying their freedom to discern between truth and falsity and therefore between good and evil. By admitting into himself the evil spirits’ temptations and by his complete resistance to them, Jesus broke their power; and the inflowing of the divine being into the human plane thus perfected interposed an eternal and infinitely powerful barrier between the hells and mankind. Human beings are thus saved from the forcible imposition of the hells upon themselves and are thus free to know and obey the truth. Man’s salvation depends on his acceptance of and response to divine truth.
In his massive exegetical and theological volumes, Swedenborg attempted to interpret the Scriptures in the light of the “correspondence” between the spiritual and the material planes. He viewed references in the Bible to mundane historical matters as symbolically communicated spiritual truths, the key to which he tried to find through detailed and voluminous commentaries and interpretations.
Quotations:
Man knows that love is, but not what it is.
Divine Love and Wisdom #1
Homo qui scit omnia bona et omnia vera, quotcunque sciri possunt, et non fugit mala, nihil scit
A person who knows all that is good and all that is true — as much as can be known — but does not resist evils, knows nothing.
Apocalypse Explained #1180
All religion relates to life, and the life of religion is to do good.
The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Concerning Life #1
A life of kindness is the primary meaning of divine worship.
New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine #124
All in heaven take joy in sharing their delights and blessings with others.
Heaven and Hell #399
There is one God, in whom there is the Divine Trinity, and he is the Lord Jesus Christ. This can be briefly illustrated in the following way: It is a certain and established truth that God is one, and his essence cannot be divided; and also that there is a Trinity. Since God is One, and his essence cannot be divided, it follows that God is one Person. And since he is one Person, the Trinity is in that Person. It is clear that this Person is the Lord Jesus Christ from the fact that he was conceived from God the Father (Luke 1:34, 35), and thus as to his soul and life itself he is God. Therefore, as he himself said, "he and the Father are one." (John 10:30).
Brief Exposition #44
Since the Bible is a divine revelation, every single part of it is divine. Anything that comes from the divine could be no other way. Everything that comes from the divine goes down through the heavens all the way to people on earth. In heaven it is adapted to the wisdom of the angels there, and on earth it is adapted to the understanding of the people there. So the Bible has an inner, spiritual meaning for angels and an outer, material-level meaning for people on earth. That is why our connection to heaven happens through the Bible.
The New Jerusalem #252
Some people believe it is hard to lead the heaven-bound life that is called "spiritual" because they have heard that we need to renounce the world and give up the desires attributed to the body and the flesh and "live spiritually." All they understand by this is spurning worldly interests, especially concerns for money and prestige, going around in constant devout meditation about God, salvation, and eternal life, devoting their lives to prayer, and reading the Word and religious literature. They think this is renouncing the world and living for the spirit and not for the flesh. However, the actual case is quite different, as I have learned from an abundance of experience and conversation with angels. In fact, people who renounce the world and live for the spirit in this fashion take on a mournful life for themselves, a life that is not open to heavenly joy, since our life does remain with us [after death]. No, if we would accept heaven's life, we need by all means to live in the world and to participate in its duties and affairs. In this way, we accept a spiritual life by means of our moral and civic life; and there is no other way a spiritual life can be formed within us, no other way our spirits can be prepared for heaven. This is because living an inner life and not an outer life at the same time is like living in a house that has no foundation, that gradually either settles or develops gaping cracks or totters until it collapses.
Heaven and Hell #528
When someone's body can no longer perform its functions in the natural world in response to the thoughts and affections of its spirit (which it derives from the spiritual world), then we say that the individual has died. This happens when the lungs' breathing and the heart's systolic motion have ceased. The person, though, has not died at all. We are only separated from the physical nature that was useful to us in the world. The essential person is actually still alive. I say that the essential person is still alive because we are not people because of our bodies but because of our spirits. After all, it is the spirit within us that thinks, and thought and affection together make us the people we are. We can see, then, that when we die we simply move from one world into another. This is why in the inner meaning of the Bible, "death" means resurrection and a continuation of life.
Heaven and Hell #445
Arcana Coelestia (1749 - 1756)[edit]
"Heavenly Secrets" Full text online
Angels never attack, as infernal spirits do. Angels only ward off and defend.
#1683
Angels from the Lord lead and protect us every moment and every moment of every moment.
#5992
Personality
Swedenborg was characterized by his contemporaries as a "kind and warm-hearted man", "amiable in his meeting with the public", speaking "easily and naturally of his spiritual experiences", with pleasant and interesting conversation.
Quotes from others about the person
The real importance of Swedenborg lies in the doctrines he taught, which are the reverse of the gloom and hell-fire of other breakaway sects. He rejects the notion that Jesus died on the cross to atone for the sin of Adam, declaring that God is neither vindictive nor petty-minded, and that since he is God, he doesn't need atonement. It is remarkable that this common-sense view had never struck earlier theologians. God is Divine Goodness, and Jesus is Divine Wisdom, and Goodness has to be approached through Wisdom. Whatever one thinks about the extraordinary claims of its founder, it must be acknowledged that there is something very beautiful and healthy about the Swedenborgian religion. Its founder may have not been a great occultist, but he was a great man.
Colin Wilson in The Occult, p. 280 (1971)
Connections
Swedenborg himself remained a bachelor all his life.
After the death of King Charles XII (1718), Queen Ulrika Eleonora ennobled, or dignified, Swedberg and his siblings, from Swedberg to Swedenborg, to honor the services of their father.
