A Living Tradition of the Americas
Emanuel Swedenborg was, until his fifty-sixth year, one of the most accomplished scientists and engineers in Europe. He had published works on metallurgy, anatomy, cosmology, and the philosophical foundations of natural science. He had designed a flying machine, a submarine, and an ear trumpet. He sat in the Swedish House of Nobles. He was a respected figure in the European scientific establishment of the early eighteenth century — respected, that is, until he began telling people that he had been granted the ability to travel, in full waking consciousness, through the spiritual world, and that he conversed regularly with angels and with the spirits of the dead.
From 1745 until his death in 1772, Swedenborg produced a torrent of theological writing — approximately twenty-five volumes — describing what he had seen and learned in the spiritual world. The spiritual world, he reported, is not a distant place but a present reality, interpenetrating the material world at every point. Heaven is not a reward and Hell is not a punishment; they are states of being that correspond to the dominant love of the soul. Every natural thing — every plant, stone, animal, season, color, number — corresponds to a spiritual reality, and the Bible, properly understood, is a continuous allegory in which every verse has an inner, spiritual meaning concealed beneath the literal text. God is not three persons but one divine being — the Lord Jesus Christ — in whom the divine love, wisdom, and activity are united as the soul, mind, and body are united in a human being.
The churches that formed after his death — the General Church of the New Jerusalem, the Swedenborgian Church of North America, and smaller bodies — have always been tiny: perhaps 50,000 members worldwide at their peak. But Swedenborg's influence has been wildly, absurdly disproportionate to any institutional measure. He shaped Blake's visionary art, Emerson's Transcendentalism, Balzac's mystical novels, Baudelaire's theory of correspondences, the Fox sisters' Spiritualism, the New Thought movement's theology of mind-over-matter, and the entire intellectual architecture of what would become, a century and a half later, the New Age. He is the invisible grandfather of American metaphysical religion. This profile traces Swedenborg's life, his theological system, the churches that formed in his wake, and his extraordinary cultural afterlife.
I. The Life — Two Phases
Emanuel Swedenborg's life divides so cleanly in half that it reads like a parable.
The first phase (1688–1744): the scientist. Swedenborg was born on January 29, 1688, in Stockholm, the son of Jesper Swedberg, a prominent Lutheran bishop and professor of theology at Uppsala University. (The family was ennobled in 1719, changing the name from Swedberg to Swedenborg.) He studied at Uppsala, traveled extensively in Europe, and returned to Sweden to serve as an assessor on the Board of Mines — a position he held for over thirty years. His scientific output was prodigious: works on iron and copper smelting, the anatomy of the brain, the movement of the planets, the nature of the soul's interaction with the body. His three-volume Opera Philosophica et Mineralia (1734) was a major contribution to metallurgical science. His unpublished anatomical works anticipated by a century several discoveries later attributed to others.
He was, in short, one of the foremost scientific intellects of early eighteenth-century Europe: rigorous, empirical, systematic, and relentlessly productive.
The second phase (1745–1772): the seer. In 1743–1744, Swedenborg experienced a series of visionary episodes — recorded in a private journal later published as the Journal of Dreams — in which he underwent intense spiritual struggles, visions of Christ, and what he interpreted as a call to a new vocation. By 1745, he understood his commission: he had been granted the ability to perceive the spiritual world in full waking consciousness, and his task was to report what he saw and to explain the inner, spiritual meaning of the Bible.
Over the following twenty-seven years, he produced approximately twenty-five volumes of theological writing: Arcana Coelestia ("Heavenly Secrets," 1749–1756, eight volumes, a verse-by-verse spiritual interpretation of Genesis and Exodus), Heaven and Hell (1758, his most widely read work), Divine Love and Wisdom (1763), Divine Providence (1764), Conjugial Love (1768), True Christian Religion (1771), and numerous other works. He published these at his own expense, in Latin, distributed them to libraries and universities across Europe, and never sought to found a church or attract followers.
He died in London on March 29, 1772, at age eighty-four. According to the testimony of his landlord's servant, he predicted the day and hour of his death with calm certainty.
II. The Theology
Swedenborg's theological system is vast, internally consistent, and unlike any other Christian theology produced before or since. Its central propositions:
God is one. There is no Trinity of three divine persons. God is one being — the Lord Jesus Christ — in whom the divine love (the Father), the divine wisdom (the Son), and the divine activity (the Holy Spirit) are united as the soul, the mind, and the body are united in a human person. The traditional Trinitarian formula, Swedenborg argued, had introduced a form of tritheism that obscured the essential unity of God.
The spiritual world is real and present. The spiritual world is not a distant heaven or a post-mortem destination. It is a present reality, coextensive with the material world, perceived by those whose spiritual sight is opened. It has landscapes, cities, gardens, libraries, communities, and inhabitants — but all of these are expressions of spiritual states rather than material substances. The spiritual world is structured by love: beings are grouped according to the dominant love of their soul, and their environment reflects that love.
Heaven and Hell are states of being, not rewards or punishments. After death, every person enters the spiritual world and undergoes a process of self-revelation in which their true character — the dominant love that governs their life — becomes apparent. Those whose dominant love is love of God and the neighbor enter heaven; those whose dominant love is love of self and the world enter hell. No one is sent to hell by God; each person gravitates to the spiritual community that corresponds to their own nature. Heaven is the experience of living according to love; hell is the experience of living according to selfishness. Both are eternal.
Correspondences. This is Swedenborg's most original and influential concept. Every natural thing corresponds to a spiritual reality. The sun corresponds to divine love; light corresponds to divine truth; water corresponds to truth in its natural form; a garden corresponds to the intelligence of the mind; a horse corresponds to the understanding. These correspondences are not arbitrary symbols but structural relationships: the natural world is caused by the spiritual world, and every natural phenomenon is the material expression of a spiritual cause. The Bible, read through the science of correspondences, reveals an inner meaning — the spiritual sense — that speaks not of historical events but of the soul's journey toward God.
The Second Coming has already occurred. Swedenborg taught that the Second Coming of Christ was not a future physical event but a spiritual event that occurred in 1757 — a Last Judgment in the spiritual world, followed by the opening of the internal sense of the Word (the Bible) and the establishment of a "New Church" in the hearts and minds of those who received the new understanding. This claim — that the Second Coming is a mental, interpretive event rather than a physical one — was revolutionary and remains the most distinctive element of Swedenborgian eschatology.
Marriage love. Swedenborg devoted an entire volume — Conjugial Love (1768) — to the theology of marriage. He taught that marriage between one man and one woman is the most fundamental human relationship, that it corresponds to the union of love and wisdom in God, and that true marriages continue in the spiritual world after death. The love between married partners, properly cultivated, grows deeper in the afterlife. This teaching was remarkable for its era in its insistence on the spiritual equality of women and men and in its frank, positive treatment of sexuality as a dimension of spiritual love.
III. The Churches
Swedenborg himself did not found a church. He published his writings, distributed them, and continued to attend his local Lutheran church until his death. The organisation of Swedenborg's readers into churches occurred after his death, through a process of gradual crystallisation.
The General Conference of the New Church (1789) — the first organised Swedenborgian body, established in London by a group of readers who had been meeting since 1783. The "New Church" (Swedenborg's term for the spiritual dispensation inaugurated by the 1757 judgment) became the institutional name for the organised Swedenborgian movement.
The General Convention of the New Jerusalem in the USA (1817) — the American Swedenborgian church, now called the Swedenborgian Church of North America. Its early membership was concentrated in the northeastern United States, where Swedenborg's writings had circulated among intellectuals, Universalists, and reform-minded Christians since the 1780s. The Swedenborgian Church of North America remains active, with approximately 1,500–2,000 members in thirty-odd congregations.
The General Church of the New Jerusalem (1897) — a more doctrinally conservative body, headquartered in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, that treats Swedenborg's theological writings as divinely inspired and authoritative in the same sense as the Bible. The General Church maintains the Bryn Athyn Cathedral (a remarkable Gothic/Romanesque cathedral completed in 1919), the Academy of the New Church (secondary schools and a college), and the Glencairn Museum (a museum of religious art and history). Membership is estimated at approximately 5,000–6,000 worldwide.
The Lord's New Church Which Is Nova Hierosolyma — a smaller body that regards Swedenborg's writings as the literal Word of God in the same sense as the Old and New Testaments.
Total worldwide Swedenborgian church membership is estimated at approximately 25,000–50,000 — a tiny number by any institutional standard.
IV. The Cultural Afterlife — Influence Without Institution
The gap between Swedenborg's institutional following and his cultural influence is among the widest in the history of religion. A partial inventory:
William Blake (1757–1827) read Swedenborg intensely, attended the first General Conference of the New Church in 1789, and then spent the rest of his career arguing with Swedenborg — particularly in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790), which is simultaneously a parody of Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell and a tribute to its visionary ambition. Blake's entire cosmology — his insistence that the spiritual world is more real than the material, his doctrine of correspondences, his rejection of orthodox Trinitarianism — is saturated with Swedenborgian ideas, even (especially) where he disagrees.
Ralph Waldo Emerson devoted a chapter to Swedenborg in Representative Men (1850), calling him "the Mystic" — one of the six archetypes of human greatness. Emerson's concept of the Over-Soul, his insistence on the correspondence between nature and spirit, and his rejection of institutional religion in favor of direct spiritual perception all show Swedenborgian influence, mediated through the New England intellectual culture in which Swedenborgian societies were well established.
The New Thought movement — the American metaphysical tradition from which Unity, Religious Science, and the modern self-help industry descend — drew directly on Swedenborg. Warren Felt Evans, the first New Thought author, was a Swedenborgian minister. The New Thought proposition that the mind shapes reality, that spiritual causes produce material effects, and that the universe is structured by correspondence between inner states and outer conditions is Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences applied therapeutically.
American Spiritualism — the movement of the Fox sisters (1848) and their successors — drew on Swedenborg's report that communication with the spirits of the dead was possible and that the spiritual world was populated by recognisable human individuals in communities structured by love. Andrew Jackson Davis, the "Poughkeepsie Seer" who was the most prominent Spiritualist medium of the 1840s–50s, explicitly cited Swedenborg as his predecessor.
Honoré de Balzac wrote Séraphîta (1834) and Louis Lambert (1832), two novels directly informed by Swedenborgian cosmology. Charles Baudelaire developed his theory of "correspondences" (Correspondances, 1857) from Swedenborg's doctrine, transforming it into the foundational aesthetic principle of French Symbolism. W.B. Yeats, August Strindberg, Jorge Luis Borges, Czesław Miłosz — the list of writers and artists who drew on Swedenborg extends across two centuries and half a dozen national literatures.
Helen Keller was a devout Swedenborgian who wrote My Religion (1927, later republished as Light in My Darkness) to explain how Swedenborg's theology had given meaning to her experience of blindness and deafness. "I acknowledge my profound indebtedness to Emanuel Swedenborg for a richer interpretation of the Bible, a deeper understanding of the meaning of Christianity, and a precious sense of the Divine Presence in the world."
Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman, 1774–1845) — the American folk hero who planted apple orchards across the Ohio frontier — was a committed Swedenborgian who distributed Swedenborg's writings alongside apple seeds. His famous eccentricity and his passionate concern for both nature and spirit were expressions of Swedenborgian piety.
V. Current State
The Swedenborgian churches remain small, scholarly, and institutionally modest. The Swedenborgian Church of North America (liberal) and the General Church of the New Jerusalem (conservative) continue to operate congregations, schools, and publishing programs. The Swedenborg Foundation, based in West Chester, Pennsylvania, publishes modern translations of Swedenborg's works (the New Century Edition) and produces educational materials, podcasts, and an active YouTube channel that has brought Swedenborg's ideas to a new audience.
Swedenborg's theology continues to resonate in unexpected places. His influence on near-death experience research (his descriptions of the afterlife correspond remarkably to the accounts of modern NDE researchers), on holistic health (his insistence on the correspondence between spiritual states and physical conditions), and on environmental spirituality (his teaching that the natural world is a continuous expression of divine love and wisdom) gives his three-hundred-year-old writings a contemporary relevance that surprises scholars and practitioners alike.
The paradox of Swedenborgianism is the paradox of an idea so successful that it no longer needs its institutional container. Swedenborg's central insights — that the spiritual world is real, that it corresponds to the natural world, that God is love, that heaven and hell are states of being, that the Bible has an inner meaning, that marriage love survives death — have been so thoroughly absorbed into the Western spiritual imagination that they feel like common sense rather than the distinctive teaching of a single eighteenth-century Swedish scientist who started talking to angels.
Colophon
Swedenborgianism is the religious tradition founded on the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the Swedish scientist and mystic. The churches bearing his name are small; his cultural influence is enormous. This profile draws on the scholarship of Ernst Benz (Emanuel Swedenborg: Visionary Savant in the Age of Reason, 2002), Wouter Hanegraaff (Swedenborg, Oetinger, Kant, 2007), Devin Zuber (A Language of Things, 2020), and the Swedenborg Foundation's published translations and historical materials.
Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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