"To see a world in a grain of sand / And heaven in a wild flower / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour" wrote William Blake (1757-1827) in his 'Auguries of Innocence'. Blake came by such a sense of the dual possibilities of existence honestly, for he was influenced in part by a famous Swedish scientist, philosopher, mystic, and linguist: one Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772).

In his book The True Christian Religion, Swedenborg writes that there "are two worlds, a spiritual world where angels and spirits are, and a natural world where men are." Insights of this kind influenced writers like Emerson, Goethe, Henry James Sr., and Dostoevsky. But this is not the simple dualism of the material versus the spiritual. Rather, for Swedenborg, explains today's columnist Tamar Frankiel in her review of Martin Lamm's Emanuel Swedenborg: The Development of His Thought, the

"division between a spiritual soul and a material body was not satisfactory. Swedenborg's critique, Lamm explains, was that 'by proclaiming the soul to be spiritual, the philosophers have succeeded neither in explaining its relationship with the body-the Cartesian hypothesis on the intermediate role of the 'animal spirits' being in his eyes no more than provisional-nor in understanding its existence in the midst of a finite universe....[T]o postulate the unknowable nature of the soul and to make of it something occult and entirely removed from the senses is the shortest way to atheism and materialism.' As a solution to this problem, Swedenborg proposed that the soul had spatial extension while remaining immaterial. God was different from the soul in having no finite attributes (not even spatiality);
spiritual and physical worlds had begun when God had directly created an initial space-point from which all else emanated."

Is this solution a satisfactory one? Read on to explore the ramifications.

Today's columnist, Tamar Frankiel, teaches modern Christian and Jewish studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Christianity: A Way of Salvation (Harper, 1985) and other books and articles on religion in the modern West, as well as four books on Jewish spirituality: The Gift of Kabbalah (Jewish Lights, 2001); The Voice of Sarah (Harper, 1990; Biblio, 1995); and Minding the Temple of the Soul and Entering the Temple of Dreams, co-authored with Judy Greenfeld (Jewish Lights, 1997, 2000). She is also the author of the following Metanexus columns: A Review of Robert Pollack's The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith (Metanexus:Views 2002.01.23.), Prayer and Consciousness: A Jewish View (Metanexus:Views 2000.05.08), and A Review of The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience (Metanexus:Views 2002.09.25.).

--Stacey E. Ake

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Subject: A Review of Emanuel Swedenborg--The Development of His Thought From: Tamar Frankiel Email: <tfrankiel@hotmail.com>

Martin Lamm. Emanuel Swedenborg: The Development of His Thought. Translated by Tomas Spiers and Anders Hallengren. West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 2000. xxx + 354 pp.

In 1915 Martin Lamm, distinguished historian of literature and member of the Swedish Academy, published in Swedish this exhaustive treatment of the evolution of Swedenborg's philosophical and religious thought. Not until now has an English translation been available, thanks to the efforts of Tomas Spiers, former executive secretary of the Swedenborg Foundation, and Anders Hallengren, professor of comparative literature at Stockholm University. Not only is Lamm's work a thorough and extraordinarily helpful guide to Swedenborg's ideas, it also highlights issues that are still of relevance to science and religion today.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) is often regarded as founder of a marginal esoteric system, an early modern eccentric with latter-day, almost "new-age" followers (the "Church of the New Jerusalem"). In his own time, however, he was far more than that. Growing up in a religious but also an intellectual atmosphere-his father was a professor of theology at Uppsala-he soon became interested in the most modern currents of thought. His great opportunity came in 1710, when he was allowed to go to England in the heat of the scientific revolution. There, he attended lectures by Newton and conversed with Halley and other distinguished scholars in the fields of mathematics, mechanics (physics), and astronomy. With a fertile mind, he began to develop ideas of his own, ranging from possible new inventions to philosophical analyses.

As we know, this was also a time when the conflict between traditional religion and the new sciences had become acute. As Lamm points out, "the theologians who had hardly had time to reconcile Christianity and Cartesianism suddenly found themselves faced by new scientific facts whose consequences appeared to lead to materialism and atheism" (28). They busied themselves with attempts to reconcile new scientific findings with the biblical text and with belief in God and the immortal soul. In this atmosphere, a young thinker had much grist for his mill.

Philosophically, empiricism seemed to be on the verge of triumph, but as Locke and many others argued, human reason also provided a basis for knowledge of eternal truths. For Swedenborg, the search for the right conception of those truths became his life's passion. At this stage Swedenborg clearly recognized the problems raised by the materialism on the one hand and dualism on the other. The division between a spiritual soul and a material body was not satisfactory. Swedenborg's critique, Lamm explains, was that

"by proclaiming the soul to be spiritual, the philosophers have succeeded neither in explaining its relationship with the body-the Cartesian hypothesis on the intermediate role of the 'animal spirits' being in his eyes no more than provisional-nor in understanding its existence in the midst of a finite universe....[T]o postulate the unknowable nature of the soul and to make of it something occult and entirely removed from the senses is the shortest way to atheism and materialism." (41)

As a solution to this problem, Swedenborg proposed that the soul had spatial extension while remaining immaterial. God was different from the soul in having no finite attributes (not even spatiality); spiritual and physical worlds had begun when God had directly created an initial space-point from which all else emanated.

Yet the great preoccupation of Swedenborg was the presence of error in human knowledge. Even the best scientific practices and the most correct reasoning sometimes resulted in error, and later scholars had to correct earlier ones. Empiricism was thus certainly flawed in practice even if it were not attached to the error of materialism. What he wanted to know is whether there might be a way to attain to true knowledge. If, as he certainly believed, man was created in the Divine image, that knowledge must have been possible to Adam and Eve before the Fall. Although in his early works, including the important Principia (1734), Swedenborg does not suggest a possibility of attaining to that knowledge, his profound interest in this question foreshadows later developments.

As Swedenborg's work progressed, he was more and more influenced by the organic philosophy of nature that was emerging in the study of nature, especially medicine and human physiology. Here, in reaction against mechanical explanations, teleological conceptions were coming back into play. Certain biological facts seemed inexplicable without teleology of some sort, and many thinkers invoked the idea of a nonmaterial "form" that guided animal development. This problem has also been resurrected in our time, even after all the explanations provided by developmental biology and biochemistry. As Rupert Sheldrake has pointed out in The Presence of the Past, some idea of "form," whether Platonic idealism or genetic "program," seems unavoidable in understanding development. In this way too, the controversies of Swedenborg's time find modern echoes.

While all these philosophical challenges swirled in Swedenborg's mind, it appears that in 1736 he had one or more important experiences that would change his direction and guide his work over the next ten years and more. Lamm observes that the sources do not allow clear identification of what happened, but the experience seems to have involved a loss of consciousness and a recurrence of an unusual "respiratory suspension." Since infancy, Swedenborg had experienced dramatic changes in breathing, such that externally he barely took in air at all, sometimes for as long as an hour. He called it "internal breathing," and explained it as a spiritual breathing which continued after death, unlike our ordinary, natural ("external")
breathing. Now, this experience was accompanied by an experience of ecstatic bliss and fiery light, which Swedenborg took as confirmation.

"When...a born thinker succeeds, after prolonged reasoning, in discovering a truth, he feels a sensation of vivifying light, a sort of cheering confirmatory flash that lights the sphere of his mind, a kind of secret radiation (occulta radiatio) that, in some way, brightens the sacred temple of the brain. By these signs, he recognizes the existence of a kind of rational instinct that tells him that the soul has been summoned into a kind of more intimate communion and has returned at that moment into the golden age of its original integrity (Economy of the Animal Kingdom I, para.19)." (66)

With subsequent experiences, Swedenborg believed he had found a criterion of truth, and this in turn would lead to an increased interest in mysticism. As Lamm points out, mystical ideas were rife in Swedenborg's world, and the possible influences on him too diverse to state with certainty. But now Swedenborg would become an original mystic. His method involved "prolonged reasoning," with extraordinary intellectual concentration. As he himself recognized, this could sometimes lead to jumbled thoughts or circularity-or it could lead to clarity and the experience of the light.

Several interrelated developments began at this point. One was the doctrine that most scholars have regarded as Swedenborg's unique contribution (and what made him a heretic in traditional Christian circles), namely the idea of correspondences. "Every natural thing is the representation of a spiritual thing, and this, in turn, is the representation of a divine thing." (95) As Lamm notes, such views clearly derive from Neoplatonic and Kabbalistic influences. Swedenborg emphasized, more than most, that discovering the secret correspondences (known to the ancients) was the most important project of knowledge. He would later claim that the correspondences between the physical and spiritual worlds extended to minute details.

In contrast to many earlier thinkers, Swedenborg insisted that all explorations of correspondences must be done in rational, logical ways, without resort to esoteric formulae, magic, or occultism. In the process, Swedenborg developed a kind of proto-psychology, for he understood physical and mental diseases as having spiritual correspondences as well. He even undertook an analysis of various kind of hallucinatory states. Lamm argues that, at this period, he remained uncertain how to interpret his own visions and vivid dreams; only later did he fill out his doctrine of correspondences to allow them to be conveyers of truth.

In addition to the correspondence doctrine, Swedenborg developed a fully teleological philosophy. According to this idea, although humans appear to have free will, in truth our will acts according to a higher principle-the end or goal of our love. Whatever we love pulls us forward. If we love material things, we will be drawn into their net. If we love God, we will be drawn to the greatest possible fulfillment of our potential. Lamm quotes a striking passage from Swedenborg on this point:

"Didst thou not observe lately the cock-dove up above the tops of our trees and how violently he beat the air with is wings? He beheld his consort dove and the nest which contained her young. This was the reason for his swift flight. It seemed to him that he himself vibrated his wings and chose the shortest way home, but in reality his loves, his fledged young and his mistress excited his mind and his mind moved his wings....[O]ur loves, whatever their number, hold the reins and excite and govern our minds; by them we are drawn and them we follow; and inasmuch as we follow we seem to act, because we vibrate the wings of our mind accordingly, and used the winged feet of our body. . . . We suppose the decisions to be our own. Love is, as it were, the charioteer who holds the reins." (176)

Lamm, however, regards this development rather negatively, as reflecting a "feeling of impotence" related to Swedenborg's religious crisis. Other writers, including James Lawrence in an introduction to this volume, question such an interpretation. Most interesting is that this psycho-spiritual teleology became the basis of his theology, using the principle of will to explain the relationship between the soul, the world, and God. At the same time, it was clear to Swedenborg that our feeling of having free will in ordinary life was false. True spiritual freedom, he concluded, was gained only with great effort, only when we recognize that we are citizens of a larger spiritual world which is constantly interacting with our soul.

Swedenborg's ideas about this world emerged as his mystical states of consciousness grew in importance, including dreams, waking visions, and auditions. He began to write about an infinity of spirits, ranging from angels to evil spirits, that affect and communicate with human beings. This development, beginning around 1745, has been regarded by many writers as signifying an increasingly disordered mind. Lamm rejects such a notion. Rather, he sees the visions as becoming, for Swedenborg, concretized extensions of ideas that he had expounded already in his works, notably The Economy of the Animal Kingdom which had been published in several parts in the mid-1740s. Swedenborg had long argued that the soul is a powerful reality; now he argued that this soul is a member of a spiritual community. While most of the time we are unaware of the angelic (or demonic) company around us because we are immersed in physical sensations or, in the case of spiritual experiences, blinded by their light or intense bliss, this unawareness is not inevitable. Humans can learn to communicate in the spiritual realms. This, Swedenborg believed, was what had happened to him. Just as his "internal breathing" was the mode of spiritual sustenance, so "inner sight" had developed so that he could now perceive the spirit beings (223). Thus despite their strange content, the visions are of a piece with the philosophy and theology developed over many years.

The visions increased Swedenborg's confidence that he had the clues to understanding the source of humanity's difficulties and their resolution. Swedenborg took on a public mission and turned to biblical exegesis, including eschatology. For Swedenborg, the Bible was a true revelation, but its meanings had been difficult to understand. Indeed, he thought there may have been a prior, clearer revelation, but the Bible was now the best humans had to work with, for the holy Word, in his view, linked humans to the Creator. The wisdom to understand it had now been given, via the angels, to Swedenborg. It became his mission to unfold this wisdom to others.

This task occupied him for the last twenty years of his life; he published eighteen theological works between 1749 and 1771. Most were published anonymously and outside of Sweden, where there was no freedom of the press. Although his views clearly went against Christian doctrine on such important subjects as the Trinity and atonement for sins, he was never brought before a church tribunal (some of his followers were). Swedenborg had no concern about his departure from tradition. His decades of thorough analytical work and his disciplines of intellectual concentration led him to believe he had established a new certainty, beyond the uncertainties of science. The revelation of this wisdom would, in turn, give rise to a new era.

In several chapters on the latter years of Swedenborg's work, Lamm goes into detail, both in explaining the principles of theological exegesis and in connecting those ideas to other sources. The only complaint that the modern scholar can register is that Lamm's explanations of Swedenborg's hallucinations appear somewhat outdated. Lamm must be given credit, however, for pointing out that Swedenborg was frequently able to analyze his own states of mind, and that Swedenborg did not claim that the spirit world was a totally objective reality (214). Rather, the system Swedenborg was expounding required that the spirit world be included as another part of reality, neither objective in a physical sense nor "merely" mental. Thus Lamm attempts the difficult task of articulating how Swedenborg was trying to go beyond conventional religion and philosophy.

This book is certainly a treasure for the historian of early modern thought, as well as for anyone trying to understand the intricacies of Swedenborg himself. But it also should provoke us to explore once again the issues that Swedenborg cared about, indeed cared so much that he left science behind: the alternatives to unacceptable philosophies of materialism and dualism; the reality of the soul; the purpose of human life individually and collectively; and the question whether we have any access to truth beyond the chatter we exchange daily about our physical experience. Whether or not one believes in visions, dreams, and revelations, Swedenborg's struggle should remind us that our worldviews are still inadequate to the deeper reality in which we live and breathe.

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Published   2003.01.10