It was April of 1745, London. At an inn, where he had a private room, he was eating ravenously after there’d been a delay in getting him his supper. Suddenly a dimness spread over the room; he saw the floor covered with toads, snakes, and other creepy-crawlies. When the darkness lifted, a man appeared, resplendent in imperial purple. “Don’t eat so much!” he bellowed menacingly before he disappeared and the room returned to normal. The professor got scared and rushed home. That very night, in his dreams, the stranger appeared to him again. He revealed himself to be God, the Creator and the Redeemer. He had chosen Swedenborg to explain to men the interior sense of the Sacred Scripture; He would dictate to him exactly what to write. “And that same night,” Swedenborg writes, “the eyes of my interior man were opened, and perfectly fitted to see into heaven, the world of spirits, and hell….From that day I renounced all worldly pursuits, in order to devote myself exclusively to spiritual things, as I had been commanded.”
Swedenborg began to write with inhuman speed (in Latin, with a quill) and to publish anonymously books about how the afterworld actually works. Twenty-five volumes followed, describing this new doctrine in exceedingly exhaustive and boring detail. The gist of it was that people had erred in interpreting the Word. They didn’t understand that the Word had become the world, the Word was the entire world, and everything we see around us—the sun, the moon, the stars, the clouds, the horses, the donkeys, the gold, the silver, the women—everything down to the tiniest detail of existence, every little thing, is an allegory, or, as Swedenborg called it, a “correspondence.” Thus, man misunderstood the words of the Apocalypse, which says that after the Day of Judgment the entire observable world will collapse, that new heavens and a new earth will emerge. How can that be? Can it really mean that our sky and the stars in it will vanish? rational Swedes and other skeptical Europeans would ask themselves. No, of course not, Swedenborg would reply, the skies and stars won’t disappear, for if you truly comprehend the spiritual meaning of the Word, then you’ll see that the Sun corresponds to the Lord in terms of love, and the moon in terms of faith; the stars correspond to knowledge of blessings and truth; the clouds represent the literal meaning of God’s Word, and glory represents its inner meaning. “The sign of the Son of man in the heavens” is the appearance of divine truth; “all the tribes of the earth that will mourn”—that’s everything that relates to truth and grace, or to faith and love; “God’s appearance in the heavens with power and glory”—His revelation and presence in the Word; etc., etc. (It all makes sense now, doesn’t it?)
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So, in this way, the purpose of the Day of Judgment is to create a new church, since the present one is finished, it is no good, it’s mired in hypocrisy—in other words, this is a spiritual Day of Judgment. Which, by the way, doesn’t preclude people from living the way they had been living; they do have freedom of choice.
But what is there beyond the grave? What’s there? Here’s what, according to Swedenborg: When a person dies, he doesn’t notice it at first, but just keeps on living as before, working from his office, riding in carriages, visiting friends. The only difference is that everything around him becomes brighter, his senses become keener. Then benevolent spirits pay him a visit (spirits, as it turns out, are simply underdeveloped angels), and they gently guide him to the realization that he’s no more. Dead. That he himself is in the realm of the spirits. At first he does not believe it. Then he looks around and—Why, yes, it’s true. And he keeps on living until he figures out, with the discreet aid of heavenly helpers, where to go from here.
Three kingdoms make up the afterworld: the heavens (which, in turn, are made up of three layers and a multitude of “societies”); the realm of the spirits; and the realm of the underworld (since hell is multifaceted and multitudinous). Where one goes is determined by a person’s spiritual merit, but it’s not so simple. For instance, sinners do not duly burn in flames, but instead rather enjoy the stench and the wretchedness that surrounds them; sinning made them happy in life and it makes them happy in the afterlife as well. The stench in hell is stupendous, but as everything is to be taken allegorically, this miasma is spiritual.
Correspondingly, the heavens are also constructed in a complex hierarchal manner. The angels, who are simply former people, are sorted by their ability to love God and to completely deny self-love—that is, to rid themselves of hubris, and not take credit for anything. They are further sorted by interests. The “celestial angels,” the heavenly elite, engage in exquisite intellectual discussions; the lower angels aren’t interested, nor able to participate, and should they happen to approach a VIP, so to speak, they would begin to feel suffocated by these discussions and find relief in returning to their accustomed level.
The realm of the spirits is situated between those of the heavens and the hells; its inhabitants, depending on how they stack up vis-à-vis God, grace, and divine truth, have a chance to migrate either up or down. But, once again, wherever they end up they don’t suffer, each one settling where their heart desires. The heavens are insufferable and stifling to sinners—sinners don’t require goodness, so they don’t envy it. Similarly, the saints aren’t jealous of those highest angels from the third-innermost layer of the heavens; supreme levels of love for God aren’t open to them, they are simply out of their reach.
The closer to God, the more interior the heavens are. First and foremost, to achieve the highest place in the celestial hierarchy, man must believe in divine nature, and believe that all goodness and truth come from it, all wisdom and comprehension; he must desire to be ruled by it. That’s when the aforementioned allegories, or correspondences, will show themselves in all their glory: a supreme angel and believer will feel himself to be living in a palace of indescribable beauty, walking among trees and flowers that are likewise indescribable. All of Swedenborg’s attempts at finding words to depict such flora resulted in jewelry clichés: “golden tree trunks,” “silver leaves”—you’d expect more from a professor of mineralogy, let alone from God.
The only condition for redemption is the voluntarily mandatory, so to speak, cooperation with God, for God compels no one. He only makes an offer. But if man refuses this offer, God will turn away from him. All the heavens together constitute one man. It’s clear now why the New Jerusalem is the New Heaven: obviously, feeble present-day humans are worthless, their faith is hypocritical, just for show while they wallow in sin. It’s time for a change.
In general, Swedenborg’s treatise is frightfully dull and righteous. Some life is breathed into it by certain not-so-incidental particulars of arrangements in the heavenly kingdom; for instance, the angels can marry, and not necessarily their earthly spouses, but lady friends who suit their tastes; love, however, exists only in matrimony and there’s no funny business. For what joy is there in realizing that your faithful wife is merely an allegory, just like your desk, or a palace sparkling with precious stones, or flower beds every color of the rainbow? As far as Protestantism goes, Swedenborg’s vision/treatise presents some heresy, but of the virtuous kind: Calvin, Luther, and Melanchthon all taught justification and salvation by faith alone (sola fide), but Swedenborg gently insists that, no, it’s not enough. You need good works, you need mercy. He was a lovely old man, kind and modest. In London, during the days of his nocturnal visions, he’d often order meat dishes sent up to his room, only to return them untouched. He would explain to the proprietor of the inn that these had been ordered for the spirits visiting him to chat. They didn’t eat anything, but they did inhale the pot roast aroma with great pleasure.
Out of modesty, and a fear of becoming famous, lest he find himself enjoying that fame, and thus becoming proud and arrogant, he initially published his works anonymously, as mentioned; but he was found out, and soon members of Swedish society started going on excursions to gawk at him. He had a house, and a garden with mirrors placed at the intersections of the paths in such
a way that you could see all the flowers of all the allées at once—how sweet! He also played the organ and gave his guests raisins as treats.
He was adored by the nobility and by the king. (Here one should probably note—just for purposes of edification—that in Sweden, the king and the nobles traditionally belonged to different parties. The king was supported by the peasantry, while the nobles restrained any absolutist impulses of his by means of the parliament.) They viewed Swedenborg as a harmless loon. This is noteworthy: Grandpa was a heretic, he’d lost his mind—imagined himself to be a prophet, conversed with spirits—and yet no one buried him alive, no one burned him at the stake, no one chased him barefoot and in chains north of the Arctic Circle. In a letter, one distinguished gentleman, writing to another, details the heretical eccentricities of the elderly professor: allegedly the apostles visit him, and angels move his quill as he writes. And he urges: Let’s stifle a smile, let’s not hurt the old man’s feelings. Whoa! “Stifle a smile”? Not “Let’s rip his nostrils and whip him”? Yet Swedenborg still accuses the Swedes of depravity! “As a nation, the Swedes are the worst of Europe, after the Italians and the Russians,” he writes.
We’re biased by the familiar imagery from the Middle East: we expect a prophet to be woolly haired and dusty footed, in torn rags and with no sense of humor; the rich and famous can expect only rudeness and threats from him. Emanuel Swedenborg, on the other hand, was pleasant to all, a respected member of society despite his prophetic peculiarities. For his scientific endeavors he received a title and the surname Swedenborg (his father’s name had been simply Swedberg). A rich man, he insisted, can enter God’s kingdom just as easily as a pauper; the most important thing is love for God, blah blah blah, you know the rest. A pagan can be better than a Christian. Africans are closer to God than civilized Europeans, being more simpleminded and kind. Unbaptized infants aren’t guilty of anything and so they will reach heaven with the right schooling. If ancient prophets subsisted on locusts and wild honey, occasionally afflicting themselves with hunger and thirst, our guy drank tea and supersweet coffee with pastries, and he loved almonds, raisins, and chocolate. After God had scared the bejeezus out of him at that London inn, he never again touched meat, but he did not deprive himself of sweets. For social outings, he favored a lavender-hued velvet jacket, paired with a vest of black silk and shoes with gold buckles. His face was pale, his mouth wide.
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All of the aforementioned eccentricities, excluding the sartorial, are of course well attested in the medical literature.
The hallucinatory form of paranoid schizophrenia results in delusions, in isolated auditory hallucinations such as hollers and cursing addressed to the patient with the subsequent development of full-blown auditory verbal hallucinosis with “running commentary.” “Sudden insight,” anxiety, fear, hearing voices—commanding or prohibiting….Patients begin reporting unusual abilities to read other people’s thoughts and to affect their well-being….Delusions of fantastical grandeur, typical of paraphrenia, emerge, their substance absurd: patients insist that they are extraordinary beings, tasked with extraordinary missions, that they can change the fate of others and of the universe; they may experience olfactory and gustatory hallucinations. The patient is convinced that he is in two places at once…
Reading Swedenborg’s biography as well as his own writings is akin to leafing through a psychiatry textbook. Visiting any Internet forum devoted to paranoid schizophrenia, one reads of the same feelings and experiences.
No pseudo-theories can convince me that these are my own thoughts. This was an intrusion from the outside, a possession. Call them whatever you want—demons, aliens, spirits. But I guarantee that this type of being flees from a strong concentration of grace. Two days ago I decided to get anointed, and I don’t know if this is the right medical term, but right away it was as if I fell into sleep paralysis that same night. Some scum must have grabbed me by the throat. But I’ve already gotten the hang of chasing them away in my sleep with prayer.
Swedenborg’s maidservant told this story: “One time, when I walked into his room, I noticed that his eyes were burning like a flame. I got scared and said:
“ ‘For God’s sake, what is the matter, why are you looking like that?’
“ ‘What’s so unusual about the way I’m looking?’
“I told him.
“ ‘I see, all right. Don’t be frightened. God has fashioned my eyes in such a way so the spirits can see everything that is happening in this world.’ ”
This was the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the police would beam electricity at patients; in the twentieth century, patients could feel themselves being irradiated with lasers; and now, in the twenty-first century, it’s the KGB or the CIA implanting chips in their heads for the purpose of using their eyes to scan secret documents as well as sending them lecherous thoughts and compelling them to shoplift. Swedenborg felt similar urges: he noted with regret that he felt a compulsion to steal whenever inside a shop, that there was no refuge from his lecherous thoughts about “the Sirens.”
All this would have been a local historical curiosity, or just another medical case, were it not for Swedenborg’s remarkable visions. Angels and spirits informed him of things he couldn’t otherwise have known; those incidents that could be verified are still inexplicable.
The most famous happened in 1759, during a merchant dinner party that Swedenborg attended in the company of several witnesses. It was in Göttborg, about two hundred and fifty miles from Stockholm. Swedenborg excused himself from the table and walked out into the garden, as he often did, to speak to his angel. He came back extremely agitated: “Ladies and gentlemen, there is a fire raging in Stockholm! It’s moving toward the port warehouses!” The merchants became alarmed: they all had property there, but they didn’t know what they could do, or whether they should even believe him. Throughout the evening, Swedenborg continued going into the garden, each time returning to announce the latest building engulfed by the fire, and which ones were still standing. Finally he returned in a calmer state: “Praise the Lord! The fire has been extinguished; it stopped three doors away from my house.”
When, two days later, messengers rode in from Stockholm, they confirmed everything: it was exactly as Swedenborg had described. This inexplicable knowledge caused quite a stir in Swedish society. There couldn’t have been any trickery here. Immanuel Kant, a contemporary of Swedenborg’s and his near-namesake, was rather intrigued and asked around about him.
Another surprise involved Madame de Marteville, widow of the Dutch ambassador to Sweden. Shortly before his passing, the ambassador ordered a large and expensive silver service. After the ambassador’s death, the goldsmith came to the widow and claimed that the bill had never been paid. The widow knew for sure that it had been settled, but she could not find the receipt. The swindler was demanding payment or the return of the silver set—forsooth, only the Italians and the Russians are worse than the Swedes!—and so Madame de Marteville came to Swedenborg with a plea: Since you can speak to the spirits, would you inquire of my deceased husband where the receipt might be?
After a few days, the medium informed the widow that he had spoken to her husband, who said he’d “take care of it personally.” A week later, the deceased appeared in the widow’s dreams and, by her account, said the following: “My child, I have heard of your troubles. Don’t fret, go to the bureau upstairs and pull out the top drawer. You will find the receipt behind it.” The widow woke up, ran to the dresser, and—miracle of miracles!—she found the receipt, as well as a hairpin set with diamonds, which she had also thought to be lost.
The third episode involved Queen Louisa Ulrika of Sweden. At a social gathering, she jokingly asked Swedenborg whether he had come across her brother, the Prussian prince, in the afterworld. No, he hadn’t. Well, if you do, tell him I said hi. A week later, Swe
denborg came to the queen as she was playing cards with her ladies-in-waiting and asked to speak to her privately. You may speak freely, the queen said; but the clairvoyant insisted that the matter was personal. So they repaired to an adjoining hall, a count by the name of Schwerin standing guard at the door and observing everything. Nobody knows exactly what message the deceased had conveyed to Swedenborg for the queen, but upon hearing it she “grew pale and exclaimed: Only he could have known that!” Schwerin immediately told anyone who would listen. This story was nothing to sneeze at, and, once again, it generated a lot of buzz in Swedish society, for the queen was already mistrusted and suspected of plotting for the benefit of Prussia. Specifically, while her brother was alive, she and he were believed to be exchanging letters hatching a plan to undermine the Swedish parliamentary system.
These three occurrences were well documented and confirmed, but there were countless other reports, varying in credibility, of Swedenborg’s clairvoyance. For instance, somebody claimed that during a dinner they shared, the seer suddenly shuddered and said: “At this moment in Russia, Peter III has just been strangled; mark the day and time, you will be reading about it in the papers!” It’s hard to know how reliable this account is, since nobody else confirmed it.
Another time, during a walk in the park, Swedenborg supposedly informed some count that the recently deceased Elizabeth Petrovna, Empress of Russia, had married the grandfather of this count in the afterworld, and that they were very happy together. How could you verify something like that? Notice, he only soothsaid about nobles, kings, tsars, and celebrities. Such was his quirk. He didn’t soothsay about just anyone.
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