Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic

Front matter

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG SCIENTIST AND MYSTIC

BY

SIGNE TOKSVIG

Chapter I

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG

CHAPTER ONE

Why Swedenborg

A MEMBER of one of America's great endowed institutions for scientific research was congratulated on belonging to this modern sanctuary, where he could work, free of material worry, together with men interested in the same subject. He took the congratulations with a shade of reserve, explaining that he sometimes wished he were working at a university where he could drop into a faculty club and talk over his subject and theirs with men from entirely different fields, and learn their points of view. By contact even with astronomy, geology, engineering, philosophy, psychology, he felt that his section of his own field—that of physiology—could be more usefully related to the rest of the world.

Emanuel Swedenborg was such a faculty club all by himself. It is hard to enumerate all the branches of knowledge with which he made himself familiar, as familiar as the resources of a couple of hundred years ago allowed.

But such "scholars" were not uncommon in the centuries before experimental science demanded monogamous attention in each minute parcel of every field, and, except for museum curiosity, there would be no reason for reading about Swedenborg if he had been only such a gorgeous compendium of untested theories. He was, however, in the words of a modern Swedish historian of biology, "one of the richest and most fertile geniuses known to history." 1

In 1910, at the International Swedenborg Congress 2 in London, it took nearly a whole faculty club of professors to cover the various facets of Swedenborg's learning and to hail the value of his scientific work. Similarly, in 1938, at the 250th anniversary of his birth, tributes were paid to him by scientists in various fields.

These witnesses, most of whom deplored his later preoccupation with religion, claimed that Swedenborg foresaw even "the lines of development of science." Svante Arrhenius, Nobel Prize winner, vouched for his cosmology which surmised the nebular hypothesis and the existence of galactic universes. Anatomists said that Swedenborg was the first to localize the psychological functions of the brain in the cortex, and that he based this discovery not on vague theorizing, but on clinical and pathological observations, as well as on ingenious synthesis of material provided by others.

He had studied under some of the great anatomists of his day, and he says himself that he based much of his work on that of others. For this he gave a subtle reason: "I found, when intently occupied in exploring the secrets of the human body, that as soon as I discovered anything which had not been discovered before, I began—seduced probably by self-love—to grow blind to the most acute lucubrations of the researches of others, and to originate the whole series of inductive arguments from my particular discovery alone . . . Nay, when I tried to form principles from these discoveries, I thought I could detect much to confirm their truth in various other phenomena, although in reality they were fairly susceptible of no construction of the kind. I therefore laid aside my instruments, and, restraining my desire for making observations, determined rather to rely on the researches of others than to trust to my own." 3

Then he painted this picture of the true men of science:

"The fictitious depresses them, the obscure pains them; but they are exhilarated by the truth, and in the presence of everything that is clear they too are clear and serene. When, after a long course of reasoning, they make a discovery of the truth, straightway there is a certain cheering light and joyful confirmatory brightness that plays around the sphere of their mind; and a kind of mysterious radiation—I know not whence it proceeds—that darts through some sacred temple in the brain." 4

From time to time in this twentieth century a bold speculation throws this "confirmatory brightness" into our world. Then it often happens that something which had hitherto been merely another dark patch in Swedenborg's writings turns out to shine with the same brightness, such as the theory of matter as force, and the relativity of space and time.

It has been said that in the eighteenth century "men turned from the attempt to apprehend the whole by reason and began to study the part by experience." No one was more enthusiastic about the beauty of experimental science than Swedenborg. Incredibly energetic, he experimented with such apparatus as was available—and it is worth remembering that not better brains but better technical equipment has produced modern discoveries—but for all his belief in studying the part by experience he did not want to throw the right to generalize overboard.

He said, in 1740, to the Swedish Academy of Science that "some of the learned of the present day seemed to have agreed to let thought rest, and to make experiments to appeal to the senses; yet they did so with the hope and intent that some day experience would be connected with theory; for experience deprived of an insight into the nature of things is knowledge without learning, and a foundation without a building to rest on it." 5

It was for the object of gaining insight into the nature of things that Swedenborg dug into astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, and psychology, not for the dubious joy of being an encyclopedia. He acted on the belief that insight not based on experience would be the building without any foundation. So for nearly two thirds of his life he went on working at this, the meticulous digging and bricklaying of science, fact by fact; but what he cared most for, the real motive behind it all, was the building.

That building was to be his answer to the questions: What are we, Why are we, and What is to become of us? Or, as he put it, If there is such a thing as the soul, how is it connected with the body, and does it survive bodily death?

Not a new question, nor even a respectable one from the point of view of the kind of science which rules out problems that cannot be given laboratory answers. Moreover in this sphere "purpose" and "motive" are suspect words, and most rightly so, unless they can be phrased as working hypotheses.

Worse than suspect, the "soul" has long been ruled out, though of late it has been creeping back quaintly as "psyche," even trying to recommune with the body in "psychosomatic," "psycho ," "psychokinetic," but making its most spectacular reappearance in psychoanalysis, where an aspect of it sometimes even dismisses itself as an "escape mechanism."

Swedenborg was only twenty-six when, in 1714, he noted down his intention to "find a method by which the wills and affections of men's minds can be conjectured by means of analysis."

He became an object of analysis himself, especially when a diary of his dreams at a certain period was found. Some modern psychoanalysts interpreted him, trying to account for the change in him from experimental scientist to the man who believed the experiments concluded in favor of the soul's existence. Freudians called his case one of an inverted Œdipus complex, and Jungians opted for a split personality.

But William James says of similar charges against those of great imagination: "In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution. Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and experiment, no matter what may be their author's neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions." 6

James goes on to say that such opinions must be tested by experience in relation to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true. By such tests Swedenborg in his later phase has as great treasure to bestow as many of those millionaires of the spirit we call mystics, even if one reads him strictly from an ethical point of view. And, apart from an interest in distinctions between good and evil—not an unnecessary interest at the present time, one would think—Swedenborg in his life and works can, if one takes a little trouble to understand him, open travel horizons for us far exceeding all others for beauty and strangeness.

F. W. H. Myers, the great pioneer in the tremulous science of psychical research, has said that "it was to Swedenborg first that the unseen world appeared before all things as a realm of law; a region not of mere emotional vagueness or stagnancy of adoration but of definite progress, according to the laws of cause and effect, resulting from structural laws of spiritual existence and intercourse." 7

Swedenborg's God is the God of a scientist. He is the essence not only of love but of wisdom, which is, or includes order. "God is Order," he has said. He knew nothing of Vedanta or Buddhist philosophy and Karma's inexorable law, but he stressed as fundamental that man is what he becomes through his deeds, and that those deeds trail their consequences with them, irrespective of "faith." In his insistence on intellectual order in spiritual things, he comes nearer to meeting a lack which people of the East have felt in Christian religions than any other Westerner. If the two aspects of humanity are to understand each other spiritually, it may be through the medium of a Swedenborg, brought up to date, as he would have wished to be, and winnowed of time-bound orthodoxies.

Look at him as you will—as a scientist, ethical teacher, religious philosopher, mystic, commuter to and from another world, bringing with him sober reports of talks with its inhabitants, as well as topographical descriptions, or as a poet who imagined that world so firmly that he believed in it—his life is surely what F. W. H. Myers said it was, "the strangest ever lived by mortal man."

There is, however, one red thread or green line in it which can be seen rather easily: the attempt to fit all he knew and all he experienced into a consistent world picture, one that should be based on law, physical and spiritual. Swedenborg's life is therefore also a kind of map, which shows the successes and failures of a man who refused to accept the prescribed solutions. He had pieces of his own which he wanted to fit in, even if he was not always aware that some of them might be fashioned out of his emotional needs rather than his scientific experience.

Three major factors had to be fitted together in whatever picture was to satisfy him. One was his scientific bent: to observe and to classify, to test theories by experience and then to systematize.

Another was the fact that though most men of his class and education were content to dismiss anything not securely of this world with a bit of lip-service, he could not do so. He felt he had to have religion in his world-picture, even including the Bible as divine revelation. This he managed by means of symbolic interpretation, thus, to his own satisfaction, fitting the Biblical and the scientific pieces together.

That he was able to do this was due to the third major factor of his experience, the nature of which was far from clear to him. In middle age he began to discover that most unusual events were taking place in his mind. Today people would call them either psychic or psychotic, according to their own bent, but he was convinced by the startling character of the events that they were inspired. For him, at any rate, they were the most important of his life.

He thought he knew the difference between what he called "phantasies" and objective perceptions; therefore the psychic part of his experience was real enough for him to make it a crucial part of his world-picture, so real that he used much the same methods to study and describe it as he had used in analyzing and classifying minerals and nerves. This helped neither probability nor readability, yet the result is still one which makes it a great adventure to try to fathom what went on in his mind.

Count A. J. von Höpken, the head of the Swedish Government, one of his shrewdest friends, said of Swedenborg's other-worldly books: "Few people have judiciously read his works, which everywhere sparkle with genius; if I meet with anything unusual or extraordinary and which might indicate a disordered understanding, I do not judge of it. We read Plato with admiration; but there is nothing to be read in his works which, if related by another person, might not be deemed extravagant, inconceivable and absurd." 8

Chapter II

CHAPTER TWO

Stockholm Shocked

WAS Swedenborg a northern Plato?

Up to about 1760, when he was seventy-two years old, the great majority of his fellow-countrymen would certainly never have thought of him in any such terms. They knew him chiefly as a great authority on metals and mines. Sweden's vital mining industry had been much benefited by his being a member of the Board of Mines. As a member of the Parliament, or Diet, he had submitted some of the most useful memorials on such nonmystical subjects as liquor control, rolling mills for domestic pig iron, and, from time to time, strenuous pleas for a sound national currency. Indeed, in this very year 1760, he submitted a long memorial on finance which was so clear and pertinent that he was soon asked to be a member of a Secret Commission on Exchange.

Yet, early in 1760, shocking rumors were heard in Stockholm about Emanuel Swedenborg.

It is not generally recognized, but the intellect can be as voluptuously scandalized as Mrs. Grundy, depending on the standing of intellect at that period of time. In the eighteenth century its standing was probably the highest it has ever been, hence the town was really upset.

The town—this meant as usual a fraction of its educated elite—was, like the rest of Europe at this time, more French than anything else. To be French meant, briefly, that one was saved from superstition by faith in Monsieur de Voltaire. By his writings about the new scientific discoveries, especially those of Sir Isaac Newton, he had demonstrated with the sure weapon of mathematics that the universe was indeed, as had been suspected, a mechanical affair. Science could and did fully interpret nature. What was natural was scientific and vice versa. What was "supernatural" did not exist except in the imagination of the multitudinous illiterate who were used by a power-loving Church for its own dark ends.

Swedenborg was known to be as keenly active mentally as he had ever been, so sensible people found it hard to believe the absurd gossip.

Baron Tilas, a mineralogist of note and Swedenborg's successor on the Board of Mines, said just that: "Nor would I have lent credence to all this stuff, if I hadn't heard it from Count Tessin's own mouth," he wrote to a mineralogist friend.1

And Count Tessin had it from the man himself. Baron Tilas assured his friend that the town was in a state bordering on alarm about it, partly because of the suddenness of the disclosure. "Not a breath was heard, then it spread surprisingly fast. It is Swedenborg, who has intercourse with the dead whenever he chooses, and who can inquire after his former departed friends when it pleases him, whether they are in heaven or in hell or hover about in a third, nondescript place."

Count Tessin, Tilas wrote, had been told of a mutual departed friend, who was taking a walk in his other-world garden when Swedenborg came to ask him for some architectural drawing. Much more sensational news was that the late Swedish Queen had remarried in the world beyond and was said to be happy.

"I am all in a flutter," Baron Tilas continued, "before having a talk with him and learning whom my late wife has married. I should hate it if she has become a sultaness!"

But the oddest thing about Swedenborg was "that all this he reports without a screw seeming to be loose in the clock-work in other respects."

Tilas could hardly wait to peer into the clock-work for himself, and he assured his friend that he wished they might go together, only in that case Tilas would have to try to keep the latter from laughing.

Within a week the Baron's curiosity had been to a certain extent satisfied; he had visited Swedenborg and frankly asked him about the current rumors. Tilas wrote to his friend about it with a slightly modified laugh. "Many consider him crazy, but I desire to scan the matter more thoroughly before expressing myself upon it."

Other people of consequence were also visiting Swedenborg; their carriages waited for hours outside his house while the owners talked, listened, and considered.2 Now it became known that Swedenborg for many years had been publishing strange theological works abroad and anonymously. Only a few friends at home got copies. Baron Tilas could not remember all the names, but they dealt with Heaven and Hell and the New Jerusalem and one was about the Last Judgment.

"Just hear this surprising news, the Last Judgment has already taken place in 1757, and he talks about it as familiarly as if he had been the Secretary there and taken down the minutes. Since that time the Judgment Board is constantly in session and parties are judged as soon as they arrive."

Startling and amusing as these crotchets were in a great man, Tilas begged his friend not to let the matter become generally known, although he admitted that thousands now knew about it in Stockholm. Son of the Voltairean century as the Baron was, perhaps he thought it better, as he said, "to move carefully in the matter," when dealing with the Last Judgment.

Perhaps also he had been affected by this private talk with the dignified old man, straight and spare, with the direct gaze and the "smiling blue eyes," so that he wanted to shield him against his own indiscretions, his laying bare so unreservedly of thoughts which could earn him only a pitying verdict in the world.

Even Count Tessin had succumbed to Swedenborg's charm. He went to see him, as he said himself, "from mere curiosity for making the acquaintance of a singular man," but though he came away grateful that his own faith and reason were still sound, he admitted that he found the man "by no means obstinate, too sensitive or self-sufficient, but friendly, courteous and open-hearted; he has good judgment both about the times and the people, explains everything for the best, and seems to be a philanthropist who spends his life in contentment, delighting himself in his fantasies for which perhaps no medicine can be given." 3

These fantasies, especially the one regarding new, congenial mates in the other world, kept spreading and Stockholmers asked themselves in much perplexity how they were to interpret this man whom they had known as a scientist and a practical man.

Perhaps it was all symbolical and poetic. There was a well-vouched-for story of a little girl who came along to see Swedenborg with her parents and who no doubt appalled them by a question she put to "Uncle" Swedenborg. (This is still the delightful way in which nice little Swedish children address a man, as they adopt a woman by calling her "aunt.")

Her question, of a certainty reflecting overheard talk at home, was that she did wish he would show her a "spirit or an angel."

He laughed and said he would. Taking her into a garden pavilion, he pulled a curtain away from a long mirror.

"There!" he said, "you see an angel!"

Count A. J. von Höpken had known Swedenborg for forty years, but not as these casual and curious acquaintances. Höpken, as has been mentioned, held a position in the Swedish Government which would correspond to that of Prime Minister today. He was a subtle and distinguished man, and would have been "modern" in any age. He was characterized later by a Swedish historian as "learned, admirable in writing and speaking, cautious, farseeing, a skeptic in thought and character . . ." 4

In 1772, soon after Swedenborg's death at eighty-four, Höpken received a letter from a Danish general, asking him for an account of Swedenborg's system as well as of the character of the man. The Count was privately, as he said, much amused and surprised and nonplussed that "the honest old gentleman Swedenborg has spoken so favorably about me in various places that he has even made me his apostle after his death," 5 but he answered the general in a serious, if characteristically cautious, vein.

First he begged him to believe that although his oflice had often made it his duty to give his opinion and counsel in delicate and difficult matters, he did not recollect that anything so delicate had ever before been submitted to his judgment as that which was here proposed to him.

All he could say was that he had for two-and-forty years known the late Assessor Swedenborg and had for some time daily frequented his company. He assured the General that much as his life had brought him into contact with all types of characters he did not recollect having known any man like Swedenborg.

He was "always contented, never fretful nor morose. . . . He was a true philosopher and lived like one; he labored diligently and lived frugally without sordidness; he travelled continually and his travels cost him no more than if he had lived at home. He was gifted with a most happy genius and a fitness for every science, which made him shine in all those he embraced. He was, without contradiction, the most learned man in my country."

Höpken then praised Swedenborg as a Latin, Greek, and Hebrew scholar, as a mathematician, as a mechanical genius able to solve practical problems such as transporting large ships over rocks, as a mineralogist, and as a physiologist whose discoveries in anatomy had been singular.

"I imagine this science and his meditations on the effects of the soul upon our curiously constructed body did by degrees lead him from the material to the spiritual. He possessed a sound judgment upon all occasions; he saw everything clearly and expressed himself well on every subject. The most solid memorials on finance, and the best penned, at the Diet of 1761, were presented by him. In one of these he refuted a large work in quarto on the same subject, quoted all the corresponding passages of it, and all this in less than one sheet."

But what about the spiritual matters, which were the only ones that fervently interested the Danish general?

Here the Count shied away. He said he had no criterion for distinguishing the genuine from the false in such matters. He did admit that he had once taken Swedenborg rather seriously to task for mixing into his beautiful writings those accounts of things he professed to have heard and seen in the spiritual world concerning the states of men after death, "of which ignorance makes a jest and derision."

But Swedenborg had answered him "that he was too old to sport with spiritual things, and too much concerned for his eternal happiness to yield to such foolish notions, assuring me on his hopes of salvation that imagination produced in him none of his revelations, which were true, and from what he had heard and seen." 6

Count Höpken, while still deploring such excursions from common sense, wrote later somewhat wistfully to a friend about how he had advised the King that if a Swedish colony were really to be founded in the New World of America, His Majesty could do no better than to establish Swedenborg's form of religion in it, because:

"It properly places the worship of God in useful functions, and it causes least fear of death, as this religion regards death as merely a transition from one state to another, from a worse to a better situation; nay, upon his principles, I look upon death as being of hardly greater moment than drinking a glass of water." 7

The news of Swedenborg's clairvoyance, or "dabbling in the occult" as it might now be called, which had so shocked Baron Tilas and others, was no news, however, to the inner court circle to which Count Höpken belonged. Without trying to explain it, he was himself later to bear witness to the fact that Swedenborg had, in some strange way, carried out a commission which the Queen jestingly had given him.

She was the intrepidly intellectual sister of Frederick the Great of Prussia. At a court reception she had asked Swedenborg to look up her brother, the Prince Royal of Prussia, in the other world and remember her to him. Then she forgot about it, but soon afterward Swedenborg again appeared and, Höpken declared, "not only greeted her from her brother but also gave her his apologies for not having answered her last letter; he wished to do so now through Swedenborg, which he accordingly did. The Queen was greatly overcome, and said 'No one except God knows this secret.'"

Then there was the story of how Swedenborg had helped out the widow of the Dutch ambassador by finding out from the late diplomat where he had put a receipt for money which the widow would otherwise have been nearly ruined in having to pay again.

Or how he had seen and described a big fire in Stockholm while he was in Gothenburg and could not even have known that there was a fire. Many witnesses attested all these and similar stories, and many others scoffed at them and presented "natural" explanations.8

Whether such apparent wonders were believed or not did not much interest Swedenborg himself. While always courteous to candidates for amazement, he usually put them off. He was not including a belief in miracles as one of the pieces necessary in the right kind of world-picture. Nor did he try to proselytize. In fact, when a friend asked him how many he had succeeded in persuading of the truth of his doctrines, he said, after reflection that he thought he had about fifty in this world and about the same number in the other.9

Curious evidence, this, not only of spiritual humility but of a kind of essential sanity. The victim of the Messianic delusion never hesitates to claim the whole of the other world; he considers himself the custodian of the whole truth, even if stiff-necked people will not bow to him in this world.

Of course Swedenborg believed that the picture he had fitted together was the right one, but not because he personally would thereby be aggrandized.

With all his stubborn energy he had searched through many sciences, countries, dreams, and visions, caring only for an account of human existence—past, present, and future—which not only would fit his personal religious experience but would have the system and the clarity of science.

This was partly a need of his nature. And partly it was because he was born into one of the most fantastic corners of medieval irrationality that had survived in eighteenth-century Sweden—his father's house.

Chapter III

CHAPTER THREE

Parent Extraordinary

IF ever a man rejoiced in himself and in all his works, that man was Swedenborg's father, Jesper Swedberg. (The family name was ennobled into Swedenborg later on.) Few, sparse, and dry are the direct autobiographical details left by his son Emanuel, and this may have been due to a revulsion from the high fermentation of his father's vanity. Much else in Emanuel's life undoubtedly was a reaction from his father, hence a long look has to be taken at this clergyman, especially at his piety. His life reminds one of "the enormous difference between piety and goodness" 1 noted by Pascal, and of a story told of Swedenborg in which he is reported to have said that very few clergymen could be saved. 2

To make sure he wouldn't be forgotten, Jesper Swedberg presented each of his children with his "Life," six copies written out by himself, 1,012 pages, folio size. 3 He dedicated it to his "children and posterity for needed instruction in how to pass well through this world." The library at Upsala University was also to have a copy so that the "less envious" might profit by it.

Why did he write his autobiography? Not, as the envious would say, to praise himself, but only because "no one knows me better than I do myself, especially since, by the Grace of God, I am very careful to see that self-love neither blinds nor seduces me." His descendants would thus have a good example to follow, he told them, since he could prove to them how wonderfully God had dealt with him.

God, so the bargain would seem to run, was to prosper Jesper Swedberg in every worldly way, and Jesper Swedberg was to give God the credit and to preach against worldly things.

So, at any rate, it worked out from the beginning with only stimulating opposition from the Devil. At seven Jesper was saved from drowning in a millrace. "And if I'm not mistaken I think Satan meant to drown me as he meant to drown Moses in his tender years or to kill me as he tried to kill Christ through Herod's cruel and inhuman slaughter of the infants of Bethlehem. Probably he didn't like it that even in my childhood I was fond of reading the Bible aloud to the people who came to pick hops and so on. My greatest joy was to preach to them. I sat up high, but fell down so that I was lame for some time; that too was his doing."

Jesper was destined to study theology. There is genuine feeling in his account of his early sufferings with drunken and stupid teachers and those who believed in hammering in learning "per posteriora," but once he was grown and his talent for dramatic preaching could be unfolded, his troubles were over.