Swedenborgianism
Also known as: New Church teachings
Emanuel Swedenborg's framework of correspondences between spiritual and natural worlds; influential on Blake, Emerson, James, and Borges.
Swedenborgianism is the theological system articulated by Swedish polymath Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) in his substantial body of theological writings produced from 1745 onward, after Swedenborg's reported visionary opening in April 1745 in London. Prior to his theological turn, Swedenborg was a prominent natural philosopher, mining engineer, and Royal Swedish Board of Mines assessor whose scientific work (Principia 1734, Animal Kingdom 1744-45) anticipated several 19th-century developments. From 1745 until his death, Swedenborg claimed to have received daily spiritual communications and visions of heaven, hell, and the spiritual world, producing approximately thirty volumes of theological writings in Latin including Arcana Coelestia (1749-1756, eight volumes), Heaven and Hell (1758), Divine Love and Wisdom (1763), Divine Providence (1764), and True Christian Religion (1771). The General Convention of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian Church, established formally in London 1787) and successor denominations including the General Church of the New Jerusalem preserve the tradition. Swedenborgian thought substantially influenced William Blake, Honoré de Balzac, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James Sr., Daisetz Suzuki, Helen Keller, and Jorge Luis Borges.
Core components
- Direct experiential claim: Swedenborg's reported daily communications with the spiritual world from 1745 to 1772
- Doctrine of correspondences: every aspect of physical reality corresponds to and expresses spiritual reality, with Swedenborg reporting detailed correspondence tables in his theological works
- Heaven and hell as states of consciousness: heaven is the state of love-toward-others, hell is the state of self-love
- the soul after death continues in the state it has chosen during life
- Three heavens and three hells: hierarchical structure with celestial, spiritual, and natural levels
- Marriage as eternal: distinctive Swedenborgian doctrine of conjugial love continuing in heaven
- Last Judgment as completed: Swedenborg reported that the Last Judgment occurred in 1757 in the spiritual world, ending the previous Christian dispensation and inaugurating the New Church
- Reinterpretation of Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three aspects of Jesus Christ rather than three persons
- Internal sense of Scripture: claim that biblical text contains layered spiritual meaning beyond literal reading, recovered through correspondence framework
- Substantial Latin theological corpus (approximately 30 volumes in modern editions)
- New Church (Swedenborgian denomination): General Convention (Boston / Newton MA), General Church (Bryn Athyn PA), Lord's New Church (Yurrebilla)
Primary use case
Theological framework for Swedenborgian Christian denominations: General Convention of the New Jerusalem (approximately 30 congregations in North America), General Church of the New Jerusalem (centered on Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania), Lord's New Church, with smaller international Swedenborgian communities in UK, Africa, Asia; intellectual reference and historical foundation for extensive 19th-century literary and philosophical reception including William Blake (substantial creative engagement, particularly in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), Honoré de Balzac (Séraphita and the Études Philosophiques), Ralph Waldo Emerson (Representative Men 1850 includes Swedenborg as one of six representative figures), Henry James Sr. (Substance and Shadow 1863 substantially Swedenborgian); subject of substantial academic scholarship in religious studies, literary studies, and Western-esotericism scholarship; continuing institutional life through Swedenborg Society (London 1810), Swedenborg Foundation (New York 1849), and the various denominational organizations; intellectual influence on Henri Corbin's Iranian-Islamic spiritual-imagination scholarship and Daisetz Suzuki's substantial engagement with Swedenborg's thought.
Common criticisms
- The visionary claim foundational to Swedenborg's theological corpus has been the central focus of critical engagement since Immanuel Kant's Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Träume eines Geistersehers, 1766), in which Kant — initially intrigued by Swedenborg's reports — produced a substantial philosophical critique characterizing Swedenborg's claimed spirit-perception as confused metaphysics, while also undertaking serious investigation of specific Swedenborg claims (notably the Stockholm fire vision)
- subsequent critical engagement with Swedenborg's biographical claims (including the Stockholm fire vision and the Queen Lovisa Ulrika 'secret message' incident) has produced mixed assessments — Kant himself treated some specific incidents as substantively documented while rejecting Swedenborg's broader metaphysical framework
- the relationship between Swedenborg's substantial earlier scientific work (Principia, the Animal Kingdom, his anatomical-physiological writings that anticipated several 19th-century developments) and his post-1745 theological writings has been the subject of ongoing scholarly debate — Inge Jonsson's substantial scholarship (Swedenborgs skapelsedrama De cultu et amore Dei 1961) treats the relationship as substantive intellectual continuity while other scholars view the 1745 opening as substantive break
- intra-tradition disputes between Swedenborgian denominations (particularly the 1890 split between General Convention and General Church over biblical interpretation, the role of conjugial love doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority) reflect substantial intra-tradition disagreement
- the doctrine that the Last Judgment was completed in 1757 raises substantial interpretive questions about contemporary Christian-tradition relationship that Swedenborgians and non-Swedenborgians address differently
- the small size of Swedenborgian denominations (substantially less than 100,000 members globally) reflects limited popular reception relative to the substantial 19th-century literary and philosophical influence
- Swedenborg's Latin scholarly prose style and the substantial volume of his theological corpus produces accessibility difficulties that have limited broader engagement
- the Christian-tradition framing with substantively distinct theological content (no Trinitarian persons, no substitutionary atonement, completed Last Judgment, eternal marriage) produces ongoing intra-Christian engagement with whether Swedenborgianism is best understood as Christian denomination or post-Christian synthesis.