SWEDENBORG (SVENDBERG), EMANUEL. - Protestant theosophist and founder of the sect of the "Swedenborgians" or "Church of the New Jerusalem," born in Stockholm on 29 January 1688, died in London on 29 March 1772. Son of a Lutheran bishop, already rector of the University of Uppsala, he was dominated from childhood by a belief in the reality of the supernatural, which soon translated into psychic hypertension.
He studied philosophy and the sciences in his homeland, and furthered his education in London, Holland, France, and Germany. In London, his naturalistic theosophical aspiration combined with enthusiasm for mechanics. In 1716, upon returning to his homeland, he was appointed assessor to the Royal College of Mines, a position he held for 30 years. In an initial phase, Swedenborg showed predominantly naturalistic-philosophical tendencies and wrote: *Principia rerum naturalium* (1734); *Oeconomia regni animalis* (1720-41); *Clavis hieroglyphica naturalium et spiritualium* (1748), in which he professes an emanationist evolutionism, termed by the author "doctrine of series and degrees," under the influence of Renaissance naturalism, especially Paracelsus; then an exemplarism in the forms of being between the divine, intellectual, and physical spheres, illustrated with a system of correspondences, of Neoplatonic and Cabalistic influence, with particular application to the relationship between soul and body, in polemic with Cartesian philosophers: *Regnum animale* (1744-45). In these later writings, however, more properly theological-mystical interests, entirely characteristic of Swedenborg, come into play. According to the "dream diary" he began to keep from 1743, Swedenborg claims a supposed "vision" of Jesus Christ, which he had in London after Easter 1744; and he reveals his new orientation in the work *De cultu et amore Dei* (1744), a mystical elaboration of Genesis, in which allegorical interpretation predominates: the process of creation, like that of Redemption later, is presented as the unfolding of psychic tendencies, of psychological dualisms, of mediations, and to this quality are reduced in symbolic translation the good angels, the evil angels, Christ. A second "vision" in 1746 initiated a series of hallucinations that became increasingly frequent, bringing a radical change in his life: he left his position at the College of Mines, retired into solitude at Hornsgata, where he spent the rest of his life in ascetic discipline, though without renouncing travels to England and Holland.
He intensified his efforts, even with psychosomatic procedures ("internal respiration"), to enter into contact with supersensible beings, to draw light on the hidden meaning of Holy Scripture, to which he devoted himself with ever greater intensity. His biblical exegesis is in fact under the influence of Philo and Origen: seeking the dual meaning "spiritual" (i.e., psycho-cosmological) and "celestial" (that is, psycho-theological). His theosophical system is founded on this exegesis (actually on his visions of the future life) and is elaborated in close connection with the idea of a new ecclesiastical community on the Pietist model; it is expounded in the works *Arcana coelestia* (London 1747-48), an allegorical interpretation of the first and second books of the Pentateuch based on the Neoplatonic theory of correspondences; in *De coelo et inferno* (ibid. 1748) and in a more systematic form in *Vera christiana religio* (Amsterdam 1771), considered the official text of the church he founded. Swedenborg denies the Trinitarian dogma and considers Christ, in a Sabellian manner, as the only God who came to earth in an apparent body. He also rejects the dogma of Redemption, the Lutheran doctrine of justification, and predestination in the traditional sense, as incompatible with the principle that man must achieve moral good through his personal effort. He retains the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, the former as an introduction to rebirth, the latter (which he interprets in a Calvinist manner) as a means of entering heaven. Alongside the state of glory in heaven and that of eternal punishment in hell, Swedenborg admits an intermediate condition of purification; however, he denies the resurrection of the flesh.
The official Swedish Lutheran Church condemned his principles both for their content and for the claim to base his assertions on the Bible, interpreted arbitrarily and with reference to personal illuminations. Despite this condemnation and the ironic criticism leveled against him by the most authoritative philosophers of the time (e.g., Kant, who wrote against Swedenborg in *Dreams of a Visionary* [1766]), Swedenborg's writings spread rapidly because of their esoteric fascination and because they nourished, toward the end of the 18th century, the Romantic propensity for the supersensible pervading the visible world; they were also in line with the Nordic-German naturalistic mysticism of a Böhme, always suggestive. Thus is explained the influence they had even on Goethe and Herder; it also explains how, wherever spiritualism, occultism, and theosophy have appeared, the personal combination of naturalistic doctrines with Christian motifs offered by Swedenborg has found resonance. The Church founded by Swedenborg, which claims to constitute the millennial kingdom of the saints spoken of in the Apocalypse (ch. 21), calling itself "the New Jerusalem," still has hundreds of communities and is active in adventist and millenarian propaganda in Switzerland, Germany (Württemberg), England, Sweden, and the United States of America, although it has only about 20,000 adherents.