Swedenborg and His Influence

Inbunden bok. Academy of the New Church Book. 1988. 492 sidor.

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Emanuel Swedenborg was born in 1688. By all accounts a genius, he recognized the importance of a stationary curved surface for a flying machine 200 years before the Wright brothers, and he unlocked the secrets of the unconscious 150 years before Freud. Taken together, these two discoveries epitomize a central theme of our culture - the conquest of space, in nature and in man. In this venture the Wright brothers and Freud are celebrated pioneers, while Swedenborg, who explored both realms, is virtually unknown. Perhaps this is because ultimately he was unwilling to restrict his search for knowledge to the limits set by the scientific method, and he became a spiritual pioneer in the later part of his life. Although a man of scientific insight and sensitivity, it is the record of this spiritual journey which has had a subtle and pervasive influence on a wide range of individuals who have helped to shape our culture.

Swedenborg's rational mysticism influenced philosophers such as Kant, Emerson and James; artists like Blake, Inness, Page, Anschutz, Pyle and Bergman; the scultpors Flaxman and Powers; poets of such note as Blake, Baudelaire, Yates and Frost; writers including Goethe, Coleridge, Balzac, Dostoyevsky and Borges; the playwright Strindberg; the psychologist Jung, the composer Yardumian; and the celebrated educator of the human spirit, Helen Keller. If there is a common element in the creativity of these individuals, it might be said to be a desire to capture the interplay between spirit and matter; and it was this interplay that was Swedenborg's primary focus.

The authors in this volume examine in detail not only Swedenborg's influence on such well-known people as James and Strindberg, but also his impact on Australian political history and German social reform, brought to light here for the first time. In the realm of religious thought, Swedenborg's anthropocentric vision of heaven is shown to displace earlier theocentric concepts, and in Swedenborg's theology is found a reconciliation between the eastern and western approaches to the paradox of appearance and reality.