Anlage Publishing

Emanuel Swedenborg

"There are three heavens, entirely distinct from each other,an inmost or third, a middle or second, and an outmost or first."

Emanuel Swedenborg trained and worked as a scientist and engineer for the first part of his life. He wrote on subjects of metallurgy, navigation, mathematics, anatomy and physiology until, at the ripe age of 56, he experienced a profound transformation.

On awakening, I had before me Jesus crucified and his cross. The spiritual came upon me with all its heavenly, almost ecstatic life, and I was ascending so high and permitted to go higher that, had I proceeded, I would have been dissolved by this veritable life of joy. It then appeared to me in the spirit that I had gone too far; that in my thought I had embraced Christ on the cross, when I kissed his feet and that I then removed myself thence, falling upon my knees and praying before him crucified .

After his transformation, Swedenborg became the theologian who set in motion the principles that guide the Swedenborgian Church today. He claimed to have had astonishing and instructive experiences of the spiritual world and the inner meanings of the Bible. Writing a century and a half after Galileo's discovery, Swedenborg repeats these old arguments in the first chapter of his Earths in the Universe (or Other Planets, as it will be called in the New Century Edition).

...I have been allowed to be with angels and to talk with them person to person. I have also been allowed to see what is in heaven and what is in hell... Now I am being allowed therefore to describe what I have heard and seen, in the hopes of shedding light where there is ignorance and dispelling skepticism. – Heaven and Hell

Some considered him insane and Immanuel Kant in his “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer” gave a scathing critique of Swedenborg saying that the work went irresponsibly outside the bounds of reason.

Since angels have no notion of time, they have a different concept of eternity than we earthly people do. By “eternity”, angels perceive an infinite state not an infinite time.

Shortly after Swedenborg's death in 1772 the evidence for the old optimism about life elsewhere began to fade. Telescopes were continually being improved, and scientists began to design whole new technologies for observing the planets. Eventually, space probes took close-up pictures and made technical observations of the planets. Three more planets, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, were added beyond the six that Swedenborg knew. As the new science progressed, each planet and moon looked less and less able to support anything as complex as a human being.

Is there any way to understand the disagreement between Swedenborg's views of life on our other planets and the findings of a sophisticated modern science? In fact, there is. Swedenborg is often interpreted as regarding angels as merely ourselves on a higher plane. This becomes a critical distinction and he does the same kind of thing in Divine Providence and Divine Love and Wisdom where he refers to scientific observations of things in nature that also reflect images of heaven. In these ways the work was valuable, a compelling argument for the spiritual purpose of the universe, but it had to stop short of doctrine.