Emanuel Swedenborg
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"I have often talked with angels on this subject, and they have invariably declared that in heaven they are unable to divide the Divine into three, because they know and perceive that the Divine is One and this One is in the Lord." --Heaven and Hell (1758) by Emanuel Swedenborg "At no time known to us, whether before or since the Christian era, has the series of trance-manifestations,--of supposed communications with a supernal world,--entirely ceased. Sometimes, as in the days of St. Theresa, such trance or ecstasy has been, one may say, the central or culminant fact in the Christian world. [...] In the midst of this long series [...] occurs the exceptional trance-history of Emmanuel Swedenborg."--Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (1903) by F. W. H. Myers |
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Emanuel Swedenborg (8 February [O.S. 29 January] 1688 – 29 March 1772) was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, Christian mystic. He claimed that the Lord had opened his eyes, so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell, and talk with angels, demons, and other spirits. For the remaining 28 years of his life, he wrote and published 18 theological works, of which the best known was Heaven and Hell (1758).
Swedenborg's theological writings have elicited a range of responses. Toward the end of Swedenborg's life, small reading groups formed in England and Sweden to study the truth they saw in his teachings and several writers were influenced by him, including William Blake, August Strindberg, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Baudelaire, Balzac, William Butler Yeats, Sheridan Le Fanu and Carl Jung. The theologian Henry James Sr. was also a follower of his teachings, as were Johnny Appleseed and Helen Keller.
