Swedenborg

Emanuel Swedenborg is one of those authors who so touched me that I tried to read everything he ever wrote. There were several other authors along the way who had the same effect on me. My usual experience was that I couldn’t read all they wrote because it was just too much, and also because, sometimes, the authors’ core ideas became so familiar to me or were so limited that I no longer felt the excitement.

I think it is a characteristic of a “classic” that you can keep coming back to it over the course of your life, bringing new experiences to it, and thus finding new vistas in it. 

Much of what Swedenborg wrote is also classic for me. I am aware that many people have considered him to be a madman. But I keep going back to him over the years with new appreciation, just as someone might go back to the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes, whom many might also take to be a madman.

Swedenborg writes, among other things, about his experiences of entering into spirit form and going off to have discussions with angels and people who have died, often long ago, and with other beings in spirit form. He writes about these experiences in a very matter-of-fact way, simply, directly, profoundly, without the remotest trace of affect or pretense of any kind. He writes them down the way I might write to you about how I went to a café in downtown Dayton and had a discussion with a friend.

His accounts of these experiences are scattered through several places but one particularly good repository is his two-volume work, The True Christian Religion, first published in Latin in 1771. There are seventy-five accounts, which he calls “Memorable Relations,” in it with an annotated index to all of them at the end of volume two.

Emerson, one of his early admirers, said that few would read Swedenborg for long because of the lack of poetry in the writings, but I feel lots of poetry in Swedenborg. Just the “correspondences” he finds between the things of heaven and the things of earth seem excruciatingly poetic to me.




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