January 27, 2018 • 19 mins
Today we're visiting an episode from past hosts Katie and Sarah. When the philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg sought mechanical explanations for nature, he found himself struggling with his faith as he searched for evidence of the human soul.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, Happy Saturday listeners. January is going to be the
three anniversary of the birth of Emmanuel Swedenborg, so we
thought we'd revisit the episode on him from our archive.
So there are some challenges that can come along with
trying to do a podcast about a person who either
established a religion that people still follow today or whose
(00:23):
work informed and influenced to religion that people still follow today.
Uh and Katie and Sarah worked with these challenges by
inviting a guest onto the show, so at the end
there are some clips from an interview they conducted with
Lisa Oz, who was raised as the Swedenborgian. Past host.
Katie and Sarah released this episode in and they make
(00:44):
reference to their Medici Super series, and we're gonna link
to that series, which includes other Medici related topics as
well from this episode's page on our website for folks
who are interested. So let's go. Welcome to Stuff you
missed in History Class from hot works dot com. Hello,
(01:12):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm
Sarah Downy and we have been spending an awful lot
of time in Italy lately because of our Medici Super
series so today we thought we'd move a little further
north to Sweden, and our subject for today is going
to be Emmanuel Swedenborg, who was famously called by the
philosopher D. T. Suzuki the Buddha of the North, and
(01:36):
he was a mechanical genius who began his whole body
of work by looking for mechanical explanations for nature, so
a mechanical explanation for the physical world. And from there
he began to study the soul as it related to
the human body. And he was quite advanced for his
(01:56):
time as far as science goes. He had anatomical theories
that weren't proven until the late nineteenth century. And we're
talking about a seventeenth century guy. Yeah, But what makes
him truly interesting is that while in the midst of
all these studies about the soul, he has a crisis
of faith and abandons his scientific pursuits altogether, and he
spends the rest of his life trying to explicate the scriptures,
(02:20):
and his followers end up founding a church in his name.
So this is our our subject for today, so let's
go back to his roots. He was born January twenty nine,
six eighty eight, in Stockholm as Emmanuel Swedburgh. His father,
Jasper was a Swedish clergyman at court chaplain and also
a professor of theology who later became the Bishop of Skara,
(02:42):
and their family was ennobled, which is my current favorite
word in seventeen nineteen, and that's when they took the
name sweden Borg and the young Emmanuel studied philosophy at
the University of Uppsala and spent five years abroad he
was This becomes a common theme in his life, going
a odd and uh learning lots of new things. But
(03:04):
for this first trip he becomes interested in mathematics and
natural sciences and pursues study in England and Holland, France
and Germany, learning mechanical skills. Even when he's in England,
he moves in um Newton's circles. And he was a
bit of a da Vinci esque genius. He's a real
mechanical hot shot. He thought up new ways to make docs,
(03:26):
had some vague ideas about submarines in the airplane, which
Sarah mentioned. It was a good thing he didn't stick
to this. If you remember our bungled flight attempts episodes,
it was a high point for bungle flight attempts, and
he even had some ideas about a machine gun. But
when he returns to Sweden in seventeen fifteen, he starts
to publish the Dadalus Hyperboreous, which is Sweden's first scientific journal,
(03:49):
and there he's able to write about mechanical inventions and discoveries,
and all of his work in the mechanical sciences really
starts to impress King Charles the twelfth, who makes him
an assistant to one of the biggest names in Swedish
mechanical science at the time, and he gets a position
at the Royal Board of Minds and he later becomes
(04:09):
an assessor there. But this is his day job, so
imagine through almost all of the writings we're gonna be
talking about later in the podcast, this is what he's
doing for most of his time working at the Minds
improving the country's mining industry, and mining was a huge
pursuit in Sweden at the time. So he goes home
from his day of mining science and works on the
(04:32):
other sciences and philosophy, everything from cosmology and corpuscular philosophy
to math and human sensory perceptions. He does the first
work on algebra in the Swedish language, lots of stuff
on chemistry and physics, and he's a bit of a
jack of all trades. He even spends some of his
time composing poems in Latin, so he apparently did more
(04:52):
in his downtime than I do. We're going to catch
up with him at his second major trip abroad. So
a few years after he's in No Bold, in seventeen nineteen,
he goes abroad again and he publishes some works on
natural philosophy and chemistry. But then he doesn't write much
for about ten years, and it's clear that when he
starts again in seventeen thirty three he's been reading a
(05:15):
lot and thinking a lot. He goes on his third
European tour and just goes crazy with the publishing. And
this is when he switches from thinking about inventions and
starts thinking about the mechanical ways to explain nature that
we've mentioned before. He publishes philosophical and logical works. The
first folio is called Principle of Natural Things, and in
(05:37):
this work he comes pretty close to things that modern
science comes up with much later. For instance, he has
a theory that is very close to what we know
about the atom with a nucleus and electrons, and also
an idea that's very close to the Conte Laplace nebular
theory that the suns and planets form a common nebulas
(05:58):
so a man ahead of his time. But then his
course of study changes again and he starts to switch
towards studying the soul as related to the body. He
goes home in seventeen thirty four, and his father dies
in seventeen thirty five, and he takes a leave of
absence from his assessor job at the Minds and starts
to travel again. This time he goes to France and
(06:19):
Italy and Holland and he writes the Economy Regney an Amale's,
which is translated as the Economy of the Animal Kingdom,
and returns to Stockholm. Although I read one thing that
was interesting, that's not the best translation for that title.
It's kind of misleading. He means the kingdom of the
animal or soul when he says Regney an Amali, not
(06:41):
the animal kingdom, which is what he might think when
you first read that. Um So another translation you could
kind of think of as the biological bases of the soul, right,
the less literal translation, and this work draws Swedenborg closer
to the study of the body. He studies human anatomy
(07:02):
and physiology, but he's also beginning to think about the
study of the soul, specifically trying to prove the immortality
of the soul to the senses themselves. According to Encyclopedia Britannica,
and he has a really excellent understanding of the cerebral
cortex is role, it's sensory, motor, and cognitive functions. Um,
(07:23):
most people thought it didn't really have a purpose. It
was just kind of a leftover. Even cortex means rind,
so people really thought it was the brain rind, which
gives you an idea of of the common thought at
the time. He realizes this is something important and it's
where he's going to start in his search for the soul.
(07:43):
He also considered the pituitary gland to be the crown
of the brain, which is a pretty revolutionary thought for
the time. And he figured all of this out by
basically reading and studying the work of other scientists. He
didn't report much on his own experiments, um, but he
didn't just read their analysis of their own work. He
(08:05):
looked at their experiments and looked at all of the
stuff that they found and drew his own conclusions. And
that's how he was able to come up with these
ideas that were, um so different from what everybody else
was thinking at the time. And you might think that
these ideas would be very exciting to the medical and
scientific community, but you would be wrong. His anatomical studies
(08:26):
weren't given much heed, and according to an article by
Charles G. Gross in The Neuroscientist, this is because these
little nuggets of scientific brilliance were embedded in these huge
books he wrote about the soul, and you know, by
the point they were available, he had the reputation of
a mystic, so you might be less inclined to listen. Yeah. Well,
(08:49):
and also he's not a professor. He's not working with
people who are going to read and review his work.
Um there, there wouldn't be a strong reason for a
contemporary scientists to even read what he was writing. By
the time that all these works kind of really came
(09:13):
out there in the late nineteenth century, scholars started looking
at these ideas, especially these ideas about the brain, and realizing,
oh my gosh, we just figured this stuff out. Recently
and he had he had ideas for this back in
the seventeen hundreds, but after the economy he got to
work on more studies of anatomy and the soul. But Um,
(09:34):
these things were brought to a halt by a religious crisis.
So he started a new travel journal in July of
seventeen forty three. It's basic, you know, kind of banal,
everyday kind of entries, and then suddenly it turns into
this dream journal that's known as the Journal of Dreams Um,
(09:55):
detailing recall dreams and nighttime spiritual experiences from March to
October seventeen forty four, and some of these are surprisingly
most pornographic and embarrassed later more prudish Victorian readers. In
April seventh, seventeen forty four, he has this first vision
(10:16):
of Christ, which makes him feel a little better about
the temptation of intellectual pride, which was just getting him down,
I guess. And by April seventeen forty five he had
received a definitive call to abandon worldly learning. Um. So
that's the end of his work in the natural sciences.
So that brings us to his theological work, which is
(10:38):
a bit dense. Basically God called him, according to him,
to explain the spiritual meaning of Scripture. So Swedenborg started
writing about angels, Paradise and the Last Judgment as well
as the New Jerusalem. He was kind of like an
old school prophet, is what Sarah and I compared him to.
(10:59):
And from then on he he gets into Bible interpretation
and relating the world of spirits and angels, and he
writes thirty volumes in Latin. Most of his works are anonymous,
and he does them from seventeen forty nine to seventeen
seventy one UM. His best known theological work is on
Heaven and Its Wonders and on Hell, and his final
(11:19):
work is True Christian Religion Um. But he says he's
gotten into this, you know, new vocation because of a
divine vision and call, and Encyclopedia Britannica again says that
his spiritual senses were opened so that he might be
in the spiritual world as consciously as in the material world.
(11:40):
And the thirty volumes he really writes them as God's revelations.
He wanted to enter um a new age of truth
and reason to religion, and he thought that these new
revelations of his that he was putting down were the
second Coming, and anything that's as broad as a religion
(12:00):
is difficult to get a grasp on and and distill
into something as short as a podcast. So we thought
it would be a good idea to talk with someone
who's well versed in the Swedenborgian religion, and so we
talked to Lisa Oz, who was raised as a Swedenborgian
and introduced her husband, doctor Oz, to the religion as well.
(12:21):
And we wanted to start by better understanding Swedenborg's epiphany
since clearly this was the defining experience in his life.
So that's where we started. Hello, I am Lisa Oz,
author of us Transforming Ourselves and the relationships that matter most.
From my understanding of his epiphany, it seemed like it
was something overnight, but it was a while in coming
(12:44):
in terms of the preparation for this what we as
Swedenborgians UM like to see as a spiritual opening of
his of his of his eyes, opening of spiritual eyes,
and being able to see into the spiritual dimension. He
had studied. Um obviously studied religion very UM closely from
(13:06):
very very early age, and UM also practiced breathing techniques
he had started journaling his dreams um of the year
before his spiritual awakening. UM, So it wasn't that it
was just out of the blue. One day he was
a scientist and the next day he was at theologian.
He had wrote written extensively on religion and philosophy and
(13:30):
tried to find a connection to the spiritual in the
human brain. He was looking for the seat of the soul.
So there was a lot of preparation leading up to
his epiphany. And UM, what I find particularly entertaining for
me was that the first, um, the first communication he
had with the spiritual world directly was someone telling him
(13:53):
not to eat so much, which I think is really
relevant in my own life. Lisa went on to explain
and that this epiphany didn't stifle sweden Worg's traditional life.
He still carried out his duties as a member of
the aristocracy, Mr ennobled Man, and he didn't become a
recluse as you might imagine a mystic. Would you know,
(14:14):
when I think of a mystic, I usually think of
someone who's kind of hidden away from the world, say
at a convent, yeah, or a dude living in a cave.
But he wasn't a recluse. Um. He was a mystic, however,
and since the definition of mystic can be a bit
of a controversial one when talking about sweden Worg, we
are we asked a sweden Borgian to explain what she
(14:37):
thought he was mystical. Um. I think that mystical experience
is one where you have a direct experience of the Numenus.
And that was exactly what sweden Worg was describing. It
was for most of us who do not have mystical experiences,
we have to take it on someone else's word that
(14:58):
this other realm makes sense. So Emmanuel Swedenborg spent the
rest of his life working on uh these theological writings,
and he dies in London in seventeen seventy two, but
despite never preaching, he stuck solely to writing, mostly in Latin.
(15:23):
The first sweden Borgian Society start popping up in the
seventeen eighties, and the Church of the New Jerusalem is
founded in London later in that decade. And one of
the most interesting things about this guy is how his
ideas inspired writers like ball Back, Beaudelaire, Emerson Yates, the Brownings,
Blake Coleridge, Henry James Sr. The philosopher, even Helen Keller.
(15:48):
We're not talking about some obscure historical figure. He was
actually a very influential person. And that led us to
question ourselves as to why we had never heard of
this man and didn't know who he was. So we
asked Lisa a little bit about how he's influenced contemporary thought. Yeah,
(16:10):
and she's that some of the impact of Swedenborg on
contemporary spiritual thought is indirect, and it comes through all
of those writers that we can be reading almost a
distilled version of his ideas in some of their works. Um.
But while he was influential in indirect ways, we were
also curious about why his church doesn't have a bigger
(16:32):
presence today. I think mostly there's not a large sweden
Worn in church today because there's no impetus to to
convert or proselytize, because we just don't care. It doesn't
matter if people are other religions. As long as they're
living a life of love and compassion and connection and relationship,
(16:52):
that's great. And so I think that there's not that
movement to spread the church. The other thing is that
sweden Work's writings are not easy there. It is thousands
and thousands of pages. I think it's thirtiesome volumes of
very dent translated from the latin um heavy material. And
it's not the kind of thing you can just pick
(17:12):
up and say, wow, this makes sense. And if you're
looking for a good place to start with some of
Swedenborg's works, because again it is dense. We tried to
read some of it and had a difficult time. Lisa
told us her favorite of his many works was Arcana Celestia,
and you know, he does write like a scientist. It's
it's dry and it's to the point. But he also
(17:34):
sees some of Scripture as I guess we'd say, parables
for your spiritual journey. She also gave us a word
to the wise about Swedenborg. He's a man of his time,
and for example, his views towards women wouldn't seem particularly enlightened,
and certainly not as enlightened as the rest of his
scientific work. Um, but you know, just to consider his
(17:58):
historical context when reading his works, and we were saying,
it's just so interesting. It's always interesting to see someone
who's so fully engaged in both science and religion. It
was equal interest in both, although it's also interesting that
he felt he couldn't do them at the same time, because,
after all, he did drop science as an ego driven pursuit,
(18:21):
at least for him. But it's also so interesting that
science he couldn't drop it completely. He may have stopped
his scientific writings, but science is clearly influencing his theological
work right. It reminded me of a book I was reading,
John Horgan's Rational Mysticism, which tries to impose a sort
of rational scientific framework on top of the idea of mysticism,
(18:45):
which is guess something that Sweden work also did. Thank
you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or Facebook U r L or something
similar during the course of the show, that may be
obsolete now. So here is our current contact information. We
(19:08):
are at history Podcasts, at how stuff Works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History all over
social media. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Isn't how stuff Works dot
Com
Hey, Happy Saturday listeners. January is going to be the
three anniversary of the birth of Emmanuel Swedenborg, so we
thought we'd revisit the episode on him from our archive.
So there are some challenges that can come along with
trying to do a podcast about a person who either
established a religion that people still follow today or whose
(00:23):
work informed and influenced to religion that people still follow today.
Uh and Katie and Sarah worked with these challenges by
inviting a guest onto the show, so at the end
there are some clips from an interview they conducted with
Lisa Oz, who was raised as the Swedenborgian. Past host.
Katie and Sarah released this episode in and they make
(00:44):
reference to their Medici Super series, and we're gonna link
to that series, which includes other Medici related topics as
well from this episode's page on our website for folks
who are interested. So let's go. Welcome to Stuff you
missed in History Class from hot works dot com. Hello,
(01:12):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm
Sarah Downy and we have been spending an awful lot
of time in Italy lately because of our Medici Super
series so today we thought we'd move a little further
north to Sweden, and our subject for today is going
to be Emmanuel Swedenborg, who was famously called by the
philosopher D. T. Suzuki the Buddha of the North, and
(01:36):
he was a mechanical genius who began his whole body
of work by looking for mechanical explanations for nature, so
a mechanical explanation for the physical world. And from there
he began to study the soul as it related to
the human body. And he was quite advanced for his
(01:56):
time as far as science goes. He had anatomical theories
that weren't proven until the late nineteenth century. And we're
talking about a seventeenth century guy. Yeah, But what makes
him truly interesting is that while in the midst of
all these studies about the soul, he has a crisis
of faith and abandons his scientific pursuits altogether, and he
spends the rest of his life trying to explicate the scriptures,
(02:20):
and his followers end up founding a church in his name.
So this is our our subject for today, so let's
go back to his roots. He was born January twenty nine,
six eighty eight, in Stockholm as Emmanuel Swedburgh. His father,
Jasper was a Swedish clergyman at court chaplain and also
a professor of theology who later became the Bishop of Skara,
(02:42):
and their family was ennobled, which is my current favorite
word in seventeen nineteen, and that's when they took the
name sweden Borg and the young Emmanuel studied philosophy at
the University of Uppsala and spent five years abroad he
was This becomes a common theme in his life, going
a odd and uh learning lots of new things. But
(03:04):
for this first trip he becomes interested in mathematics and
natural sciences and pursues study in England and Holland, France
and Germany, learning mechanical skills. Even when he's in England,
he moves in um Newton's circles. And he was a
bit of a da Vinci esque genius. He's a real
mechanical hot shot. He thought up new ways to make docs,
(03:26):
had some vague ideas about submarines in the airplane, which
Sarah mentioned. It was a good thing he didn't stick
to this. If you remember our bungled flight attempts episodes,
it was a high point for bungle flight attempts, and
he even had some ideas about a machine gun. But
when he returns to Sweden in seventeen fifteen, he starts
to publish the Dadalus Hyperboreous, which is Sweden's first scientific journal,
(03:49):
and there he's able to write about mechanical inventions and discoveries,
and all of his work in the mechanical sciences really
starts to impress King Charles the twelfth, who makes him
an assistant to one of the biggest names in Swedish
mechanical science at the time, and he gets a position
at the Royal Board of Minds and he later becomes
(04:09):
an assessor there. But this is his day job, so
imagine through almost all of the writings we're gonna be
talking about later in the podcast, this is what he's
doing for most of his time working at the Minds
improving the country's mining industry, and mining was a huge
pursuit in Sweden at the time. So he goes home
from his day of mining science and works on the
(04:32):
other sciences and philosophy, everything from cosmology and corpuscular philosophy
to math and human sensory perceptions. He does the first
work on algebra in the Swedish language, lots of stuff
on chemistry and physics, and he's a bit of a
jack of all trades. He even spends some of his
time composing poems in Latin, so he apparently did more
(04:52):
in his downtime than I do. We're going to catch
up with him at his second major trip abroad. So
a few years after he's in No Bold, in seventeen nineteen,
he goes abroad again and he publishes some works on
natural philosophy and chemistry. But then he doesn't write much
for about ten years, and it's clear that when he
starts again in seventeen thirty three he's been reading a
(05:15):
lot and thinking a lot. He goes on his third
European tour and just goes crazy with the publishing. And
this is when he switches from thinking about inventions and
starts thinking about the mechanical ways to explain nature that
we've mentioned before. He publishes philosophical and logical works. The
first folio is called Principle of Natural Things, and in
(05:37):
this work he comes pretty close to things that modern
science comes up with much later. For instance, he has
a theory that is very close to what we know
about the atom with a nucleus and electrons, and also
an idea that's very close to the Conte Laplace nebular
theory that the suns and planets form a common nebulas
(05:58):
so a man ahead of his time. But then his
course of study changes again and he starts to switch
towards studying the soul as related to the body. He
goes home in seventeen thirty four, and his father dies
in seventeen thirty five, and he takes a leave of
absence from his assessor job at the Minds and starts
to travel again. This time he goes to France and
(06:19):
Italy and Holland and he writes the Economy Regney an Amale's,
which is translated as the Economy of the Animal Kingdom,
and returns to Stockholm. Although I read one thing that
was interesting, that's not the best translation for that title.
It's kind of misleading. He means the kingdom of the
animal or soul when he says Regney an Amali, not
(06:41):
the animal kingdom, which is what he might think when
you first read that. Um So another translation you could
kind of think of as the biological bases of the soul, right,
the less literal translation, and this work draws Swedenborg closer
to the study of the body. He studies human anatomy
(07:02):
and physiology, but he's also beginning to think about the
study of the soul, specifically trying to prove the immortality
of the soul to the senses themselves. According to Encyclopedia Britannica,
and he has a really excellent understanding of the cerebral
cortex is role, it's sensory, motor, and cognitive functions. Um,
(07:23):
most people thought it didn't really have a purpose. It
was just kind of a leftover. Even cortex means rind,
so people really thought it was the brain rind, which
gives you an idea of of the common thought at
the time. He realizes this is something important and it's
where he's going to start in his search for the soul.
(07:43):
He also considered the pituitary gland to be the crown
of the brain, which is a pretty revolutionary thought for
the time. And he figured all of this out by
basically reading and studying the work of other scientists. He
didn't report much on his own experiments, um, but he
didn't just read their analysis of their own work. He
(08:05):
looked at their experiments and looked at all of the
stuff that they found and drew his own conclusions. And
that's how he was able to come up with these
ideas that were, um so different from what everybody else
was thinking at the time. And you might think that
these ideas would be very exciting to the medical and
scientific community, but you would be wrong. His anatomical studies
(08:26):
weren't given much heed, and according to an article by
Charles G. Gross in The Neuroscientist, this is because these
little nuggets of scientific brilliance were embedded in these huge
books he wrote about the soul, and you know, by
the point they were available, he had the reputation of
a mystic, so you might be less inclined to listen. Yeah. Well,
(08:49):
and also he's not a professor. He's not working with
people who are going to read and review his work.
Um there, there wouldn't be a strong reason for a
contemporary scientists to even read what he was writing. By
the time that all these works kind of really came
(09:13):
out there in the late nineteenth century, scholars started looking
at these ideas, especially these ideas about the brain, and realizing,
oh my gosh, we just figured this stuff out. Recently
and he had he had ideas for this back in
the seventeen hundreds, but after the economy he got to
work on more studies of anatomy and the soul. But Um,
(09:34):
these things were brought to a halt by a religious crisis.
So he started a new travel journal in July of
seventeen forty three. It's basic, you know, kind of banal,
everyday kind of entries, and then suddenly it turns into
this dream journal that's known as the Journal of Dreams Um,
(09:55):
detailing recall dreams and nighttime spiritual experiences from March to
October seventeen forty four, and some of these are surprisingly
most pornographic and embarrassed later more prudish Victorian readers. In
April seventh, seventeen forty four, he has this first vision
(10:16):
of Christ, which makes him feel a little better about
the temptation of intellectual pride, which was just getting him down,
I guess. And by April seventeen forty five he had
received a definitive call to abandon worldly learning. Um. So
that's the end of his work in the natural sciences.
So that brings us to his theological work, which is
(10:38):
a bit dense. Basically God called him, according to him,
to explain the spiritual meaning of Scripture. So Swedenborg started
writing about angels, Paradise and the Last Judgment as well
as the New Jerusalem. He was kind of like an
old school prophet, is what Sarah and I compared him to.
(10:59):
And from then on he he gets into Bible interpretation
and relating the world of spirits and angels, and he
writes thirty volumes in Latin. Most of his works are anonymous,
and he does them from seventeen forty nine to seventeen
seventy one UM. His best known theological work is on
Heaven and Its Wonders and on Hell, and his final
(11:19):
work is True Christian Religion Um. But he says he's
gotten into this, you know, new vocation because of a
divine vision and call, and Encyclopedia Britannica again says that
his spiritual senses were opened so that he might be
in the spiritual world as consciously as in the material world.
(11:40):
And the thirty volumes he really writes them as God's revelations.
He wanted to enter um a new age of truth
and reason to religion, and he thought that these new
revelations of his that he was putting down were the
second Coming, and anything that's as broad as a religion
(12:00):
is difficult to get a grasp on and and distill
into something as short as a podcast. So we thought
it would be a good idea to talk with someone
who's well versed in the Swedenborgian religion, and so we
talked to Lisa Oz, who was raised as a Swedenborgian
and introduced her husband, doctor Oz, to the religion as well.
(12:21):
And we wanted to start by better understanding Swedenborg's epiphany
since clearly this was the defining experience in his life.
So that's where we started. Hello, I am Lisa Oz,
author of us Transforming Ourselves and the relationships that matter most.
From my understanding of his epiphany, it seemed like it
was something overnight, but it was a while in coming
(12:44):
in terms of the preparation for this what we as
Swedenborgians UM like to see as a spiritual opening of
his of his of his eyes, opening of spiritual eyes,
and being able to see into the spiritual dimension. He
had studied. Um obviously studied religion very UM closely from
(13:06):
very very early age, and UM also practiced breathing techniques
he had started journaling his dreams um of the year
before his spiritual awakening. UM, So it wasn't that it
was just out of the blue. One day he was
a scientist and the next day he was at theologian.
He had wrote written extensively on religion and philosophy and
(13:30):
tried to find a connection to the spiritual in the
human brain. He was looking for the seat of the soul.
So there was a lot of preparation leading up to
his epiphany. And UM, what I find particularly entertaining for
me was that the first, um, the first communication he
had with the spiritual world directly was someone telling him
(13:53):
not to eat so much, which I think is really
relevant in my own life. Lisa went on to explain
and that this epiphany didn't stifle sweden Worg's traditional life.
He still carried out his duties as a member of
the aristocracy, Mr ennobled Man, and he didn't become a
recluse as you might imagine a mystic. Would you know,
(14:14):
when I think of a mystic, I usually think of
someone who's kind of hidden away from the world, say
at a convent, yeah, or a dude living in a cave.
But he wasn't a recluse. Um. He was a mystic, however,
and since the definition of mystic can be a bit
of a controversial one when talking about sweden Worg, we
are we asked a sweden Borgian to explain what she
(14:37):
thought he was mystical. Um. I think that mystical experience
is one where you have a direct experience of the Numenus.
And that was exactly what sweden Worg was describing. It
was for most of us who do not have mystical experiences,
we have to take it on someone else's word that
(14:58):
this other realm makes sense. So Emmanuel Swedenborg spent the
rest of his life working on uh these theological writings,
and he dies in London in seventeen seventy two, but
despite never preaching, he stuck solely to writing, mostly in Latin.
(15:23):
The first sweden Borgian Society start popping up in the
seventeen eighties, and the Church of the New Jerusalem is
founded in London later in that decade. And one of
the most interesting things about this guy is how his
ideas inspired writers like ball Back, Beaudelaire, Emerson Yates, the Brownings,
Blake Coleridge, Henry James Sr. The philosopher, even Helen Keller.
(15:48):
We're not talking about some obscure historical figure. He was
actually a very influential person. And that led us to
question ourselves as to why we had never heard of
this man and didn't know who he was. So we
asked Lisa a little bit about how he's influenced contemporary thought. Yeah,
(16:10):
and she's that some of the impact of Swedenborg on
contemporary spiritual thought is indirect, and it comes through all
of those writers that we can be reading almost a
distilled version of his ideas in some of their works. Um.
But while he was influential in indirect ways, we were
also curious about why his church doesn't have a bigger
(16:32):
presence today. I think mostly there's not a large sweden
Worn in church today because there's no impetus to to
convert or proselytize, because we just don't care. It doesn't
matter if people are other religions. As long as they're
living a life of love and compassion and connection and relationship,
(16:52):
that's great. And so I think that there's not that
movement to spread the church. The other thing is that
sweden Work's writings are not easy there. It is thousands
and thousands of pages. I think it's thirtiesome volumes of
very dent translated from the latin um heavy material. And
it's not the kind of thing you can just pick
(17:12):
up and say, wow, this makes sense. And if you're
looking for a good place to start with some of
Swedenborg's works, because again it is dense. We tried to
read some of it and had a difficult time. Lisa
told us her favorite of his many works was Arcana Celestia,
and you know, he does write like a scientist. It's
it's dry and it's to the point. But he also
(17:34):
sees some of Scripture as I guess we'd say, parables
for your spiritual journey. She also gave us a word
to the wise about Swedenborg. He's a man of his time,
and for example, his views towards women wouldn't seem particularly enlightened,
and certainly not as enlightened as the rest of his
scientific work. Um, but you know, just to consider his
(17:58):
historical context when reading his works, and we were saying,
it's just so interesting. It's always interesting to see someone
who's so fully engaged in both science and religion. It
was equal interest in both, although it's also interesting that
he felt he couldn't do them at the same time, because,
after all, he did drop science as an ego driven pursuit,
(18:21):
at least for him. But it's also so interesting that
science he couldn't drop it completely. He may have stopped
his scientific writings, but science is clearly influencing his theological
work right. It reminded me of a book I was reading,
John Horgan's Rational Mysticism, which tries to impose a sort
of rational scientific framework on top of the idea of mysticism,
(18:45):
which is guess something that Sweden work also did. Thank
you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or Facebook U r L or something
similar during the course of the show, that may be
obsolete now. So here is our current contact information. We
(19:08):
are at history Podcasts, at how stuff Works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History all over
social media. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Isn't how stuff Works dot
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