SWEDENBORG (SVENDBERG), EMANUEL. - Protestant theosophist and founder of the sect of the "Swedenborgians" or "Church of the New Jerusalem," b. in Stockholm on 29 Jan. 1688, d. in London on 29 March 1772. The son of a Lutheran bishop, formerly rector of the University of Uppsala, he was dominated from childhood by faith in the reality of the supernatural, which soon translated into a psychic hypertension.
He studied philosophy and sciences in his homeland, and perfected his education in London, in Holland, France, and Germany. In London the naturalistic theosophical aspiration combined with an enthusiasm for mechanics. In 1716, having returned to his homeland, he was appointed assessor to the Royal College of Mines, an office he held for 30 years. In an initial phase S. showed predominantly philosophical-naturalistic tendencies and wrote: Principia rerum naturalium (1734); Oeconomia regni animalis (1720-41); Clavis hieroglyphica naturalium et spiritualium (1748), where he professes an emanatistic evolutionism, called by the author the "doctrine of series and degrees," under the influence of Renaissance naturalism, especially of 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 relations between soul and body, in polemic with the Cartesian philosophers: Regnum animale (1744-45). In these last writings, however, more properly theological-mystical interests, entirely S.'s own, interfere. According to the "diary of dreams" that he began to draft from 1743, S. starts from a supposed "vision" of Jesus Christ, had in London after Easter of 1744; and he reveals the 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, as later that of Redemption, 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" of 1746 initiated a series of increasingly frequent hallucinations, bringing a radical change in his life: having left the post of assessor of mines, he withdrew in solitude to Horrigata, where he spent the rest of his life in ascetic discipline, without however renouncing travels to England and Holland.
He intensified the effort, also with psycho-physical procedures (and inner respiration and) to enter into contact with supersensible beings, to draw from them light on the hidden meaning of the Holy Scriptures, to which he applied himself with ever greater intensity. His biblical exegesis in fact stands under the influence of Philo and of Origen: seeking the twofold meaning "spiritual" (that is, psycho-cosmological) and "celestial" (that is, psycho-theological). On this exegesis (in reality on his visions of the future life) his theosophical system is founded, elaborated in close connection with the idea of a new ecclesiastical community on the Pietist model; and it is set out in the works Arcana coelestia (London 1747-48), an allegorical interpretation of the I and II books of the Pentateuch on the basis of the Neoplatonic theory of correspondences; in De coelo et inferno (ibid. 1748) and in more systematic form in Vera christiana religio (Amsterdam 1771), held to be the official text of the church founded by him. S. denies the Trinitarian dogma and considers Christ, in a Sabellian manner, as the only God who came to earth in an apparent body. He likewise rejects the dogma of Redemption, the Lutheran doctrine of justification and predestination in the traditional sense, as irreconcilable with the principle that man must achieve moral good through his personal effort. He retains the sacraments of Baptism and the Supper, the first as an initiation to rebirth, the second (which he interprets in the Calvinist manner) as a means of entering heaven. Alongside the state of glory in heaven and that of eternal punishment in hell, S. admits an intermediate condition of purification; he denies, however, the resurrection of the flesh.
The official Swedish Lutheran Church condemned his principles both for their content and for the claim to base their assertions on the Bible, interpreted arbitrarily and with reference to personal illuminations. Despite this condemnation and the ironic contestation made of it by the most authoritative philosophers of the time (e.g., Kant against S. wrote the work Dreams of a Spirit-Seer [1766]), S.'s writings spread rapidly because of their esoteric fascination, because of the nourishment they gave toward the end of the 18th century to the Romantic proclivity for the supersensible pervading the visible world: they were moreover in line with the Nordic-Germanic naturalistic mysticism of a Böhme, always suggestive. Thus is explained the influence they had also on Goethe and Herder; thus is explained also how, wherever spiritualism, occultism, theosophy have appeared, the personal combination of naturalistic doctrines with Christian motifs offered by S. has found resonance. S.'s Church, which claims to constitute the millennial kingdom of the saints, of which the Apocalypse speaks (ch. 21), calling itself "the new Jerusalem," still counts hundreds of communities, and is active in Adventist and millenarian propaganda in Switzerland, Germany (Württemberg), England, Sweden, the United States of America, even though it counts only 20,000 adherents.
Bibliography10 works
Mario Bendiscioli