him, which was to make of the scientific inquirer the supernaturalist prophet. Neither by geometrical, nor physical, nor metaphysical principles had he succeeded in reaching and grasping the infinite and the spiritual, or in elucidating their relation to man and man's organism, though he had caught glimpses of facts and methods which he thought only required confirmation and development. Late in life he wrote to Oetinger that “he was introduced by the Lord first into the natural sciences, and thus prepared, and, indeed, from the year 1710 to 1744, when heaven was opened to him.” This latter great event is described by him as “the opening of his spiritual sight,” “the manifestation of the Lord to him in person,” “his introduction into the spiritual world.” Before his illumination he had been instructed by dreams, and enjoyed extraordinary visions, and heard mysterious conversations. According to his own account, the Lord filled him with His spirit to teach the doctrines of the New Church by the word from Himself; He commissioned him to do this work, opened the sight of his spirit, and so let him into the spiritual world, permitting him to see the heavens and the hells, and to converse with angels and spirits for years; but he never received anything relating to the doctrines of the church from any angel but from the Lord alone while he was reading the word (True Christian Religion, No. 779). He elsewhere speaks of his office as principally an opening of the spiritual sense of the word. His friend Robsahm reports, from Swedenborg's own account to him, the circumstances of the first extraordinary revelation of the Lord, when He appeared to him and said, “I am God the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer of the world. I have chosen thee to unfold the spiritual sense of the Holy Scripture. I will Myself dictate to thee what thou shalt write.” From that time he gave up all worldly learning, and laboured solely to expound spiritual things. But it was some time before he became quite at home in the spiritual world. In the year 1747 he resigned his post of assessor of the college of mines that he might devote himself to his higher vocation, requesting only to be allowed to receive as a pension the half of his salary. He took up afresh his study of Hebrew, and began his voluminous works on the interpretation of the Scriptures. The principal of these is the Arcana Cœlestia in eight quarto volumes, which he printed in London between 1749 and 1756, professing to have derived the whole of it by direct illumination from the Almighty Himself, and not from any spirit or angel. His later work De Cœlo et de Inferno (London, 1758) consists of extracts and portions of the Arcana. His MS. work Apocalypsis Explicata, expounding the doctrines of the New Church, was prepared in 1757-59. In 1763 appeared his Sapientia Angelica de Divino Amore et de Divina Sapientia, containing the most philosophical brief account of the principles of the New Church. The long list of his subsequent writings will be found in the works mentioned below. His life from 1747 was spent alternately in Sweden, Holland, and London, in the composition of his works and their publication, till his death, which took place in London, March 29, 1772.
He was a man who won the respect, confidence, and love of all who came into contact with him. Though people might disbelieve in his visions, they feared to ridicule them in his presence. His manner of life was simple in the extreme; his diet consisted chiefly of bread and milk and large quantities of coffee. He paid no attention to the distinction of day and night, and sometimes lay for days together in a trance, while his servants were often disturbed at night by hearing what he called his conflicts with evil spirits. But his intercourse with spirits was often perfectly calm, in broad daylight, and with all his faculties awake. Three extraordinary instances are produced by his friends and followers in proof of his seership and admission into the unseen world. But there exists no account at first hand of the exact facts, and Swedenborg's own reference to one of these instances admits of another explanation than the supernatural one. The philosopher Kant was struck by them in 1763, but in 1765, after further inquiries, concluded that two of them had “no other foundation than common report (gemeine Sage).” See Kehrbach's edition of Kant's Träume eines Geistersehers (Leipsic, 1880).
Swedenborg's theosophic system is most briefly and comprehensively presented in his Divine Love and Divine Wisdom. The point of view from which God must be regarded is that of His being the Divine Man. His esse is infinite love; His manifestation, form, or body is infinite wisdom. Divine love is the self-subsisting life of the universe. From God emanates a divine sphere, which appears in the spiritual world as a sun, and from this spiritual sun again proceeds the sun of the natural world. The spiritual sun is the source of love and intelligence, or life, and the natural sun the source of nature, or the receptacles of life; the first is alive, the second dead. The two worlds of nature and spirit are perfectly distinct, but they are intimately related by analogous substances, laws, and forces. Each has its atmospheres, waters, and earths, but in the one they are natural and in the other spiritual. In God there are three infinite and uncreated “degrees” of being, and in man and all things corresponding three degrees, finite and created. They are love, wisdom, use; or end, cause, and effect. The final ends of all things are in the Divine Mind, the causes of all things in the spiritual world, and their effects in the natural world. By a love of each degree man comes into conjunction with them and the worlds of nature, spirit, and God. The end of creation is that man may have this conjunction and become the image of his Creator and creation. In man are two receptacles for God,—the will for divine love and the understanding for divine wisdom,—that love and wisdom flowing into both so that they become human. Before the fall this influx was free and unhindered, and the conjunction of man with God and the creation complete, but from that time the connexion was interrupted and God had to interpose by successive dispensations. At last the power and influence of the spirits of darkness, with whom man associates himself by his sin, became so great that the existence of the human race was threatened, and Jehovah was necessitated to descend into nature to restore the connexion between Himself and man. He could not come in His unveiled Divinity, for the “hells” would have then perished, whom he did not seek to destroy but only to subjugate. Another purpose of Jehovah's incarnation was the manifestation of His divine love more fully than ever before. Swedenborg wholly rejects the orthodox doctrine of atonement; and the unity of God, as opposed to his idea of the trinity of the church, is an essential feature of his teaching. Another distinctive feature is that Jehovah did not go back to heaven without leaving behind Him a visible representative of Himself in the word of the Scripture. This word is an eternal incarnation, with its threefold sense—natural, spiritual, celestial. And Swedenborg is the divinely commissioned expounder of this threefold sense of the word, and so the founder of the New Church, the paraclete of the last dispensation. That he might perceive and understand the spiritual and the celestial senses of the word he enjoyed immediate revelation from the Lord, was admitted into the angelic world, and had committed to him the key of “correspondences” with which to unlock the divine treasures of wisdom. Swedeuborg claimed also to have learnt by his admission into the spiritual world the true states of men in the next life, the scenery and occupations of heaven and hell, the true doctrine of Providence, the origin of evil, the sanctity and perpetuity of marriage, and to have been a witness of the “last judgment,” or the second coming of the Lord, which took place in the year 1757. It was then that the New Church, or the New Jerusalem, was inaugurated, and Swedenborg claimed to be the divinely appointed prophet and teacher of its doctrines, and maintained that his revelations excel all that preceded them.
Swedenborgianism.—Swedenborgianism, as professed by Swedenborg's followers, is based on the belief of Swedenborg's claims to have witnessed the last judgment, or the second advent of the Lord, with the inauguration of the New Church through the new system of doctrine promulgated by him and derived from the Scriptures, into the true sense of which he was the first to be introduced. The doctrines of the New Church are those of the internal sense of the word as revealed to Swedenborg, who received them into his understanding and published them through the press and not as a preacher. They are briefly—(1) that the Lord Jesus Christ is the only God, that in Him there is the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the Father being His infinite divine nature or soul, the Son His glorified human nature or divine body, and the Holy Spirit the life proceeding from His divine humanity for the salvation of man; (2) that the Father in His eternal humanity descended as the Lord Jesus Christ to the earth, assuming fallen human nature, that in it he might conquer hell and deliver mankind from its influence; (3) that the Sacred Scriptures are the true word of God, accommodated to the understanding of angels and men, and constituting the perpetual medium between heaven and the church, the law of correspondence having been revealed by the Lord to Swedenborg as the key for their interpretation; (4) that man is not saved by faith alone but by a life according to the word, the summary of which is the decalogue; (5) that heaven is made up of those who
