Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772)

Key dates

The son of the Bishop of Skara

Emanuel Swedberg is born on 29 January 1688 in Stockholm, third child of Jesper Swedberg (1653-1735), then chaplain of the Swedish royal court and professor of theology, who would become in 1702 the Lutheran bishop of Skara^[24]. His mother, Sara Behm, dies when Emanuel is only eight years old; his father remarries shortly afterwards to Sara Bergia^[25]. The family moves to Uppsala when Jesper Swedberg is appointed professor of theology there, before soon becoming rector of the university^[26]. The young Emanuel thus grows up in a clerical, learned and pious milieu: his father, a rigorous Lutheran but himself drawn to Pietist mysticism and convinced he conversed with angels, leaves a lasting imprint on his son's religious sensibility^[27].

Uppsala and the librarian brother-in-law

Swedenborg enrolls at the University of Uppsala as early as 1699, at eleven — a precocity which, according to biographers, owes less to exceptional giftedness than to the customs of the time, when the university provided teaching partly corresponding to modern secondary education^[28]. From 1703 to 1709, he lives in the house of Erik Benzelius the Younger, husband of his half-sister Anna and future Archbishop of Uppsala, who then heads the university library and introduces him to the most recent European scientific correspondence — Newton, Flamsteed, the Dutch Cartesians^[29]. In 1709, he defends a Latin dissertation on moral maxims by Seneca and Publilius Syrus, a classical exercise closing his university course^[30].

The scientific Grand Tour (1710-1715)

In 1710, Swedenborg undertakes the traditional Grand Tour of young European scholars: Holland, France, Germany, and above all England, where he spends nearly four years^[31]. There he frequents Newtonian circles, learns several manual trades (bookbinding, copper engraving, watchmaking) and very early develops bold engineering projects — including a sketch of a flying machine and submarine plans, which remained at the drawing stage^[32]. This English stay seals a taste for British culture that never leaves him: it is in London that he undergoes his mystical crisis in 1745, and it is in London that he dies in 1772.

Royal assessor and recognized scholar

Back in Sweden, Swedenborg meets at Lund King Charles XII, a keen lover of science, who has him appointed in 1716 extraordinary assessor to the Royal College of Mines (Bergskollegium), the body in charge of supervising the Swedish mining industry, then one of the pillars of the kingdom's economy^[33]. He serves there, with interruptions, until his resignation in 1747. Between 1716 and 1718, he publishes and writes single-handedly the first Swedish scientific periodical, the Daedalus Hyperboreus, devoted to mechanical and mathematical inventions^[34]. In 1719, the Swedberg family is ennobled by Queen Ulrika Eleonora in recognition of the services rendered to the crown by Bishop Jesper Swedberg; in accordance with Swedish ennoblement custom, the family name then changes from Swedberg to Swedenborg, and Emanuel sits from that date in the noble chamber of the Diet of the realm^[35].

A considerable scientific oeuvre

Far from being a second-rank official, Swedenborg produces during this period a dense scientific oeuvre recognized by his peers. In 1721, he publishes in Amsterdam his Prodromus Principiorum Rerum Naturalium ("Prodrome of the Principles of Natural Things"), a cosmological sketch in which he proposes a theory of the formation of the solar system by aggregation from a primitive nebula — anticipating, more than half a century before Kant and Laplace, the so-called "nebular" hypothesis^[36]. In 1734, he publishes in Leipzig and Dresden his most ambitious scientific work, the Opera Philosophica et Mineralia ("Philosophical and Mineralogical Works") in three volumes, which combine a general cosmological and physical theory (Principia Rerum Naturalium) with technical treatises on iron and copper informed by his experience at the College of Mines^[37]. In 1724 he declines the chair of mathematics offered to him at Uppsala, preferring to keep his freedom of research outside the university framework^[38]. In the 1740s, even before his mystical crisis, he turns to the anatomy and physiology of the brain, publishing in 1744-1745 his Regnum Animale ("The Animal Kingdom"), in which some historians of science credit him with an early intuition of the cerebral localization of functions and the role of the cortex — works that remained largely unknown to his contemporaries for want of sufficient circulation^[39].

An irony of history: the 1734 “Principia” placed on the Index in 1738

A fact long unknown even to well-informed readers of Swedenborg: it is his strictly scientific work, and not his later theological writings, that first earns his name a place on the Catholic Index librorum prohibitorum. According to the list of authors and works placed on the Index kept in the Roman catalogues, the 1734 Principia Rerum Naturalium is condemned as early as 1738^[40] — seven years before Swedenborg undergoes his mystical crisis and eleven years before he publishes the first theological volume of the Arcana Caelestia (1749). The Roman censure very likely targeted the mechanist cosmology and the nebular theory of the formation of the universe set out in that work, judged incompatible with the then-received reading of the Creation narrative — a pattern comparable to that of other 17th-18th century scholars whose cosmological hypotheses, rather than their religious opinions, drew the censure of the Index. Only from the 1760s-1780s, once his theological work had spread across continental Europe, do Swedenborg's religious writings in turn attract critical attention — and, among the Swedish Protestants themselves, the charge of heresy (cf. infra, § "The judgment of the Swedish Lutheran Church").

The Dream Diary

From 1743, while on leave from the Board of Mines for a research trip to the Continent, Swedenborg kept a private diary in Swedish, known since its rediscovery in the 19th century as the Dream Diary (Drömboken), in which he recorded, night after night, dreams increasingly filled with spiritual anguish, visions of Christ, and scenes he interpreted as divine warnings against his own intellectual pride^[41]. This document, unpublished during his lifetime and recovered only in 1859 in the archives of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, shows a man gripped by a deep psychological and spiritual crisis, oscillating between exaltation and terror, yet determined to see in it the preparation for a mission^[42].

The London Vision, April 1745

The decisive episode occurred in London in the spring of 1745. According to the account Swedenborg later gave to his correspondents, as he was dining alone in an inn, darkness fell upon the room, and then a man appeared to him, seated in a corner, who said to him in a stern tone: "Eat not so much!" The man vanished; Swedenborg, frightened, returned home. The following night, the same man appeared to him again, this time surrounded by a dazzling light, and revealed himself to be the Lord God himself, Creator and Redeemer of the world: he announced that he had chosen him to unveil to men the spiritual meaning of Scripture, and that he himself would henceforth dictate to him what he was to write^[43]. It is this moment that the Swedenborgian tradition regards as the true beginning of his mission as a "seer" (Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, the title he would adopt on the title pages of his later works)^[44].

From that date onward, Swedenborg claimed to permanently enjoy a dual state of consciousness: he continued to live normally in the natural world while simultaneously, and at will, having access to the spiritual world — conversing with angels, the spirits of the departed, and demons, visiting the various regions of heaven and hell, witnessing events occurring on other planets which he said were inhabited^[45]. This continuous experience, which he said he lived daily for twenty-seven years until his death, constitutes the very substance of his theological writings: in his mind, these were not doctrinal speculations but a record of direct observation.

The Major Theological Works

Between 1747, the year of his resignation from the Board of Mines on half pension, and his death in 1772, Swedenborg published in Latin — almost always in London or Amsterdam, and most often with no author's name on the title page — some thirty theological works. The following table presents the principal ones, with their original Latin title, standard translation, and date of first publication.

These works were written at a sustained pace, often at night, and Swedenborg had them printed at his own expense before distributing them free of charge to the bishops, universities, and libraries of Europe he deemed likely to welcome them^[47].

The "Last Judgment" of 1757

One of Swedenborg's most characteristic claims concerns the fulfilment of the Last Judgment announced in Revelation. In De Ultimo Judicio (1758), he sets out that this judgment, far from being a future cosmic event affecting the earth, already took place in the spiritual world, over a period of several months during the year 1757^[48]. According to his account, an accumulation of false spirits and religious hypocrites had, over the centuries, cluttered the "world of spirits" (the intermediate state between heaven and hell where, in his view, souls dwell after death before their final destination) to the point of threatening the balance between good and evil; this imbalance is said to have been resolved by a vast operation of spiritual sorting, invisible to men, of which Swedenborg claims to have been an eyewitness from his state of dual consciousness^[49]. This radically realized, non-futurist rereading of Christian eschatology — the Last Judgment is no longer to come; it has already happened, elsewhere, invisibly — is one of the points on which Swedenborgian theology departs most sharply from the common Christian profession of faith, Catholic as well as Protestant.

The Reported Cases of Clairvoyance

Three episodes, reported by contemporary witnesses and then widely circulated across Europe, helped build Swedenborg's extraordinary reputation during his lifetime.

The Stockholm Fire (19 July 1759)

The great fire that ravaged the Södermalm district of Stockholm on 19 July 1759^[50] gave rise to the most famous of the clairvoyance stories attributed to Swedenborg. According to the account Immanuel Kant gives in his letter to Charlotte von Knobloch (1763) — an account which itself dates the scene to "toward the end of September 1759" — Swedenborg, returning from England, landed at Gothenburg, some 400 kilometres from Stockholm. Invited to dine at the home of a merchant of that city, he suddenly went out, around six in the evening, looking very pale, and announced that a violent fire had just broken out in Stockholm, in the Södermalm district. In the course of the evening, he gave several updates on the progress and then the extinction of the fire:

"Around six o'clock, Mr Swedenborg went out and returned to the company quite pale and alarmed. He said that a dangerous fire had just broken out in Stockholm […] Thank God, he said, the fire is extinguished — at the third door from my house!" — As reported by Immanuel Kant, letter to Charlotte von Knobloch, 1763, published as an appendix to Träume eines Geistersehers ("Dreams of a Spirit-Seer"), 1766^[51]

According to Kant's account, the news was confirmed two or three days later by official couriers arriving from Stockholm, in terms matching what Swedenborg had announced^[52]. The distance between the two cities — several days' journey by road in the 18th century — makes any ordinary transmission of the information in real time impossible from a natural point of view; it is precisely this paradox that captured Kant's attention.

The Widow Marteville's Secret

A second episode, likewise reported by Kant in the same letter, concerns Mrs de Marteville (spelled Herteville in Kant's text), widow of the Dutch ambassador to Stockholm. Pressed by a silversmith to pay for a silver service which, according to her, her late husband had already settled, she asked Swedenborg to contact her husband's spirit in order to find the missing receipt. A few days later, Swedenborg told her of the existence of a secret drawer:

"On pulling out the left-hand drawer, a board would be found which had to be removed, revealing a secret compartment containing his private Dutch correspondence, together with the receipt sought." — As reported by Immanuel Kant, letter to Charlotte von Knobloch, 1763^[53]

The compartment and the receipt are said to have indeed been found at the place indicated, settling the dispute in the widow's favour^[54].

Kant Investigates: "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer" (1766)

Intrigued by these stories circulating throughout northern Germany, the young philosopher Immanuel Kant, then a Privatdozent at Königsberg and not yet the author of the Critique of Pure Reason, conducted his own investigation by correspondence — writing to Swedenborg himself among others, and tasking an English friend with investigating on the spot, in Stockholm and then in Gothenburg^[55] — before publishing anonymously, in 1766, a short essay with an ironic title: Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik ("Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics")^[56]. In it, Kant adopts a deliberately ambivalent posture, refusing both blunt rejection and credulous assent:

"If he is to be believed, he is the arch-spirit-seer among all spirit-seers; he is certainly, on that account, the arch-dreamer among all dreamers as well." — Immanuel Kant, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics, Part II, chap. 1, 1766, trans. E. F. Goerwitz (English ed. 1900)^[57]

The very title of the work — holding up the "dreams" of the Swedish seer as a mirror to the "dreams" of the dogmatic metaphysics of his time — reveals Kant's true project: to use Swedenborg, a figure deemed safe to attack, as a foil for ridiculing more broadly the claims of rationalist metaphysics to know, by speculative reason alone, a supersensible world^[58]. Kant concludes his investigation with a cautious empirical scepticism: the reported anecdotes, he says, belong to "common rumour" (gemeines Gerücht), which no rigorous demonstration can establish with certainty, while acknowledging that he found no reason to suspect Swedenborg's own good faith or ordinary sanity^[59].

The Judgment of the Swedish Lutheran Church

Contrary to popular belief, Swedenborg was never condemned during his lifetime by the Catholic Church — to which he never belonged, having been born and died a Lutheran — but by his own Church of origin. In 1769, the Gothenburg consistory opened heresy proceedings against Swedenborg's theological writings, then being disseminated in Sweden by two clergymen, Gabriel Beyer and Johan Rosén; the charges included Socinianism (denial of the substantial divinity of Christ in classical Trinitarian terms)^[60]. A royal ordinance then prohibited the teaching of his doctrine in the kingdom, though Swedenborg himself, elderly and protected by his noble rank, was never personally troubled^[61].

The Final Years and Death in London (1772)

In December 1771, Swedenborg, then aged 83, arrived in London to supervise the printing of his True Christian Religion; there he suffered a stroke on 24 December 1771^[62]. He partially recovered but declined in the following weeks. According to the testimony of the Swedish pastor in London, Arvid Ferelius, who attended him in his final days, Swedenborg maintained to the end, calmly, the truth of everything he had written, even when Ferelius invited him to consider that he might have been mistaken^[63]. He died on 29 March 1772, aged 84, and was first buried in the Swedish church in London; his remains were transferred in 1908 to Uppsala Cathedral, by decision of the Swedish government, which thus acknowledged, two centuries later, the historical importance of the man — though this official translation in no way amounted to ecclesial recognition of any kind^[64].

Swedenborg presents the whole of his theology not as a personal construction but as a faithful transcription of what he claims to have directly observed in the spiritual world. Four pillars structure his entire system.

The doctrine of correspondences

The fundamental hermeneutical principle of Swedenborg's entire work is the doctrine of correspondences: every reality of the natural world — an object, an animal, a gesture, a number — has an exact and systematic equivalent in the spiritual world, so that the biblical text, read literally, conceals an entirely spiritual "internal sense" which Swedenborg claims to decode verse by verse in the eight volumes of the Arcana Caelestia^[65]. Thus, in his system, the natural sun corresponds to divine love, water to spiritual truth, earthly marriage to the union of love and wisdom in the regenerated soul^[66]. This key to interpretation, which he claims to have received directly from angels rather than worked out by reasoning, enables him to offer a continuous exegesis of Genesis, Exodus and Revelation that is radically alien to any philological, historical or patristic method.

A Trinity contained in a single Person

The doctrinally most consequential point of Swedenborg's teaching is his treatment of the Trinity. In his final summa, the Vera Christiana Religio, Swedenborg devotes a whole chapter — entitled De Trino Divino — to setting out his thesis:

"There is a Divine Trinity, which is Father, Son and Holy Spirit." — Emanuel Swedenborg, Vera Christiana Religio, § 164^[67]

So far, the formula remains consistent with common Christian vocabulary. But Swedenborg immediately clarifies the meaning he gives to these three terms: not three distinct Persons each subsisting from all eternity, but three constitutive elements of one and the same Person, that of Christ:

"These three are the three essentials of the one God, and they make one, as the soul, body, and operation make one in a person." — Emanuel Swedenborg, Vera Christiana Religio, §§ 166-169^[68]

From this he draws the formula that sums up his entire Christology:

"Thus God became Man and Man became God in one Person." — Emanuel Swedenborg, Vera Christiana Religio, chap. II, "The Lord the Redeemer"^[69]

For Swedenborg, the "Father" denotes the invisible and infinite Divine Being; the "Son" is not a distinct Person begotten from all eternity, but the Human assumed by this one God in time, at the incarnation; the "Holy Spirit" is finally only the process or operation by which this God-Man acts in the world^[70]. Swedenborg goes so far as to describe classical Trinitarian doctrine as a "Trinity of Gods", which he attributes not to the Apostles but to the Council of Nicaea and its later developments, accused of having introduced a disguised form of tritheism into Christianity^[71].

Heaven, hell and the afterlife

According to Swedenborg, the soul retains after death a complete human form and first enters an intermediate state, the world of spirits, where it is gradually brought to reveal its true nature — good or evil — until it freely joins the heavenly or infernal society that exactly corresponds to the ruling love it cultivated during its earthly life^[72]. Heaven is therefore not, in his system, an extrinsic reward granted by divine decree, nor hell a punishment imposed from without: each is the natural and freely chosen prolongation of everyone's loves — angels are happy in heaven because there they find the usefulness and altruism they loved on earth; demons are unhappy in hell, yet still prefer that state to the for them unbearable presence of divine love^[73]. In Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell (1758), Swedenborg describes at length the social structure of heaven, organized into "societies" according to the degrees and types of love, and claims to have personally conversed there with angels identified as former inhabitants of the earth, but also — a point that struck many of his contemporaries — with spirits from other planets of the solar system which he says he visited in spirit^[74].

Conjugial love

In De Amore Conjugiali (1768), Swedenborg develops a doctrine of marriage that extends his vision of the afterlife: true conjugial union, founded on love and not on mere social convenience, continues and is fulfilled in eternity, to the point that two spouses fully united in this love become, in his phrase, "one angel" in heaven^[75]. This doctrine, which strongly values the bodily union as a legitimate and sanctifying expression of heavenly conjugial love, provoked in its time accusations of license — accusations which modern defenders of Swedenborg judge excessive, since the work insists just as much on fidelity, continence outside marriage and the spiritual degradation attached to adultery^[76].

Ignispedia cannot accept Swedenborgian doctrine as a legitimate variant of the Christian faith: on several foundational points, it stands in direct opposition to the deposit of Catholic faith as defined irreformably by the Church. Recognizing Swedenborg's literary power, subjective sincerity, and considerable cultural influence does not prevent these oppositions from being named clearly.

A modalist Christology, already condemned by the early Church

Swedenborg's central thesis — a Trinity of "three essentials" contained within a single Person, rather than three distinct Persons each subsisting from all eternity in the one divine substance — is not a theological novelty of the eighteenth century. Under a new vocabulary, it reproduces the logical structure of modalism (or Sabellianism, named after the Roman theologian Sabellius), already identified and condemned by the Church in the third century: Pope Saint Dionysius of Rome, in a synodal letter of 262 addressed to his namesake Dionysius of Alexandria, explicitly rejects both any doctrine that "divides the august Unity into three separate divinities, somehow foreign to one another," and any doctrine that "annihilates the divinity of the Son" by seeing in him only a mere mode or successive manifestation of the Father^[77]. The Catholic Trinitarian dogma, formulated at the Council of Nicaea (325) and clarified at Constantinople (381), professes one single divine nature subsisting in three really distinct Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — each fully God, without confusion or separation: "there are not three gods, but one God," and yet "the Son is not the Father, the Father is not the Son," as the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches in summarizing this founding dogma^[78]. By reducing the Son and the Spirit to "elements" or "operations" internal to a single Person, Swedenborg erases precisely the real distinction of the Persons that the Church judged indispensable to the very truth of biblical Revelation — a Father who sends, a Son who is sent and who prays to that Father as a "Thou" distinct from himself, a Spirit who proceeds from both.

The following table situates the Swedenborgian position in relation to Catholic dogma and its closest historical ancestor.

The denial of Christ's vicarious Redemption

Consistent with his Christology, Swedenborg's soteriology likewise departs from Catholic teaching on Redemption. Swedenborg explicitly rejects the idea that Christ, on the cross, offered his life as a sacrifice of satisfaction for the sins of men — seeing in it only a literalist reading unworthy, in his view, of divine goodness^[80]. For Swedenborg, Christ's work consists instead in having, through his incarnation and his personal spiritual combat against the infernal powers, subjugated and repelled the hells that threatened to engulf the spiritual freedom of the human race, thereby making possible once again, for each person, the path of inner regeneration^[81]. While the emphasis on Christ's spiritual combat against evil is not in itself foreign to Christian tradition — the Greek Fathers readily speak of Christus Victor — the explicit denial of any satisfactory and sacrificial dimension of the cross contradicts constant biblical and magisterial teaching, from the Pauline formulas ("Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the Scriptures," 1 Corinthians 15:3) to the Catechism, which teaches that Christ "gave himself for our sins" and that his death "repairs, restores, rehabilitates, and frees sinful humanity" precisely as a sacrifice offered out of love^[82].

The problem of private prophetic authority substituted for the Magisterium

Beyond particular doctrinal contents, it is the very structure of the Swedenborgian claim that poses a problem from the Catholic point of view. Swedenborg does not present his writings as one fallible theological contribution among others, open to debate, but as a direct and continuous revelation, received daily for twenty-seven years through personal access to the spiritual world, intended to correct the whole of the received Christian tradition since Nicaea^[83]. The Catholic Church teaches, on the contrary, that public Revelation closed with the death of the last Apostle, and that any later spiritual experience, however sincere in the one who lives it, can only have the value of a private revelation, subordinate to Scripture, Tradition, and the discernment of the Magisterium, never substituted for them: "there will be no further public revelation to be expected before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ," recalls the Catechism, which specifies that a private revelation "cannot improve or complete Christ's definitive Revelation," its role being only "to help live it more fully," never to correct it or to found a new doctrine replacing it^[84]. Yet Swedenborg asks no ecclesial authority to verify or receive his visions: he publishes them directly, without mandate and without approval, making himself the sole judge of their authenticity — a posture that no mystic recognized by the Catholic Church, from Teresa of Avila to Faustina Kowalska, ever adopted, all of them having on the contrary always submitted their experiences to the discernment of confessors and competent authorities.

Placing on the Index and the magisterial position

As indicated above, the first work of Swedenborg placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum, in 1738, is a strictly scientific work — the Principia Rerum Naturalium — and not a theological text^[85]. No specific doctrinal decree expressly devoted to Swedenborgian theology has been identified in the acts of the Holy Office or of the Congregation of the Index for the eighteenth or nineteenth century despite the research conducted for this article — the circulation of Swedenborg's theological writings in Catholic Europe having remained, historically, marginal compared with their reception in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian Protestant worlds. This specific documentary silence must not, however, be interpreted as doctrinal tolerance: Swedenborgian positions on the Trinity, Redemption, and the authority of private revelation fall unambiguously under the condemnation of the dogmatic teaching already established by the Councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, as well as under the constant doctrine of the Catechism recalled above — with no need for a specific decree naming Swedenborg by name to establish this doctrinal incompatibility.

The foundation of the New Jerusalem Church (1787)

Swedenborg himself never founded any organised religious community; he died, formally, a Lutheran, without ever having left the Swedish State Church^[86]. It was fifteen years after his death, on 7 May 1787 in London, that a group of English readers gathered around the printer Robert Hindmarsh organised the first congregation of what would become the Church of the New Jerusalem (New Jerusalem Church, also called the "New Church")^[87]. The movement spread rapidly: an American Swedenborgian church was founded in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1817^[88], and the American missionary pedlar John Chapman, better known under the legendary nickname "Johnny Appleseed", became one of the most colourful propagators of the doctrine in the American Western territories at the turn of the nineteenth century^[89]. The Swedenborg Society, founded in London in 1810, has since devoted itself to the translation and critical dissemination of the complete works, outside any strict denominational framework^[90].

Spread and numbers

The Swedenborgian movement remains, on a worldwide scale, modest in size compared with the great Christian denominations: at the beginning of the twentieth century, the English Church counted only slightly more than 6,600 enrolled members spread across some seventy local societies, while the principal American denomination claimed about 8,500^[91]. These membership figures, which remained modest over the long term, contrast sharply with the breadth of the intellectual and literary influence Swedenborg exerted far beyond the ranks of his organised followers.

A considerable cultural influence

Swedenborg's imprint on the Western culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries extends far beyond the circle of the New Church. The English poet and engraver William Blake annotated his personal copies of Swedenborg's works at length and drew inspiration from them, while also distancing himself sharply from them, for his own mythopoetic system^[92]. In France, Honoré de Balzac built his novel Séraphîta (1833–1835), part of the Livre mystique of La Comédie humaine, directly on the Swedenborgian doctrine of correspondences and angelic androgyny, even devoting a biographical chapter to Swedenborg himself; Swedenborgian theories also appear among the reading matter of the hero of his novel Louis Lambert (1832)^[93]. Charles Baudelaire, an assiduous reader of Swedenborg, built the eponymous sonnet of Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) on the doctrine of correspondences, opening with the famous lines: "La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles"^[94]. Across the Atlantic, Ralph Waldo Emerson devoted a whole chapter of his Representative Men (1850) to Swedenborg, ranking him, not without critical reservations, among the exemplary "mystic" minds of humanity alongside Plato and Shakespeare^[95]. In the twentieth century, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges — who devoted a poem and a preface to him — continued to cite Swedenborg as a major reference in the literary and symbolic exploration of the unconscious and the inner world^[96]. The philosopher Emmanuel Kant, as seen above, indirectly owes him one of his most widely read essays for the general public, although he himself kept a prudent critical distance.

• This article extends the mention of Swedenborg in the broader panorama of Esotericism, where he appears alongside Jakob Böhme among the "Baroque theosophers".
• On another scholar of the Grand Siècle rejected by the religious milieu of his birth, whose work likewise raises, for other reasons, the question of the relationship between reason, Scripture and revelation, see Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677).
• On the Silesian theosopher with whom Swedenborg is often associated in the history of Christian esoteric currents, see Jakob Böhme (1575–1624).