In the eighteenth century, the century of the Enlightenment, a Swedish scientist respected for his studies in mineralogy and anatomy suddenly changed direction. Emanuel Swedenborg declared that he had been given the ability to visit the spiritual world and to converse with angels and spirits. He devoted the rest of his life to describing what he said he had seen. His angelology is one of the most original of the modern age, and his influence on European culture has been profound.
The scientist who turned to heaven
Before the turning point, Swedenborg was a man of science: he worked at the Swedish Board of Mines and wrote on metallurgy, cosmology and the physiology of the brain. Around the mid-1740s he went through a spiritual crisis, recorded in a journal of dreams, and from then on he devoted himself to interpreting the Scriptures and describing the afterlife.
His best-known work is Heaven and Hell, published in Latin in London in 1758, whose full title specifies that it concerns things «heard and seen».
Angels were human beings
Swedenborg's most surprising thesis concerns the origin of the angels. According to him, there are no angels created as a separate species before humanity. All the angels of heaven and all the devils of hell were once human beings who lived on earth or on other worlds.
This idea breaks with the whole earlier theological tradition, which sharply distinguished angelic from human nature. For Swedenborg the angel is the human being come to spiritual fullness.
The world of spirits
After death, according to Swedenborg, a person does not enter heaven or hell immediately. He arrives in an intermediate place, the world of spirits, where his true nature gradually emerges. Appearances fall away, and what remains is the «ruling love», the deep orientation of the will.
It is this love, and not an external judgement, that decides the destination. Swedenborg insists on one point: God casts no one into hell. Evil spirits go there of their own accord, because there they find what they love, while the light of heaven would be unbearable to them.
The three heavens
Swedenborg's heaven is not a single dwelling but is organised in three levels, distinguished by the degree of inner openness of the angels who live in them.
| Heaven | Name | Character of the angels |
|---|---|---|
| Third, the inmost | celestial | they live in love for the Lord and perceive the good directly |
| Second | spiritual | they live in love for the neighbour and in the understanding of truth |
| First, the outermost | natural | they live the good in a simpler way, tied to obedience |
Each heaven is in turn divided into countless societies, groups of angels alike in character. Angels live in houses and communities, marry, work and teach. Swedenborg's heaven is a world full of activity, not a place of motionless rest.
Heaven in human form
One of Swedenborg's most powerful images is that of heaven as a «Grand Man». Heaven as a whole has human form, and each society corresponds to a part of the body: some to the heart, others to the lungs, others to the eyes. This image expresses the idea that heaven is a living organism in which each part has a function for the whole.
The doctrine of correspondences
Underlying everything is the doctrine of correspondences: every thing in the natural world corresponds to a spiritual reality. The sun corresponds to divine love, light to truth, warmth to goodness. The Scriptures themselves, according to Swedenborg, have an inner sense that is revealed through these correspondences.
In this vision angels do not know time and space as we do. What for us is distance is for them a difference of inner state; what for us is time is for them a change of condition.
The legacy
Swedenborg's work provoked very different reactions:
- Kant devoted a critical essay to him, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, questioning the possibility of knowing the spiritual world;
- William Blake read him closely, first with enthusiasm and then polemically, answering him with The Marriage of Heaven and Hell;
- Balzac drew on him for the novel Séraphîta;
- Baudelaire found in the doctrine of correspondences an idea that recurs in his famous poem Correspondances.
After his death some readers founded religious communities inspired by his writings, often called the New Church.
What he teaches today
The Studio Esoterico Cornelio regards Swedenborg as a valuable witness in the history of angelology, to be read as a symbolic vision rather than a literal map. Some themes deserve reflection:
- the idea that the soul's destination arises from its ruling love;
- heaven as an active community, not a static state;
- the natural world as a language of inner realities;
- the continuity between present life and spiritual growth.
In short
- Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist, described the spiritual world in Heaven and Hell, published in 1758.
- For him all angels and devils were once human beings.
- After death the soul passes through the world of spirits, and its ruling love decides its destination.
- Heaven is divided into three levels and countless societies, and as a whole it has human form.
- The doctrine of correspondences influenced authors such as Blake, Balzac and Baudelaire.
