Excerpted from the Introduction to A Thoughtful Soul: Reflections from Swedenborg, ed. and trans. by George F. Dole (Swedenborg Foundation, 1995).

To understand Emanuel Swedenborg's life as he lived it, we must try to move out of our retrospective view, to be aware of what was present, past, and future to him as his story progresses. In his later years, Swedenborg believed that everything before 1744-1745 was preparation for his mission as a revelator, but this view cannot be retrojected into the "preparation" itself. Perhaps insidiously, those who find his thought relevant to the twentieth century may forget that Swedenborg was addressing his own eighteenth-century readers and may neglect their own responsibility to distinguish the timeless from the timebound.

To provide a focus for this introduction, I would highlight, first of all, Swedenborg's extraordinary intellect and, second, his intense devotion to two causes--the religion of his upbringing and the science of his university education. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Lutheran orthodoxy and Cartesian science were parting company. This was a painful process, with clerics seeing the authority of the church undermined and scientists seeing the church as the primary obstacle to freedom of inquiry. It was a process that Swedenborg internalized.

In his own home, religion was the dominant theme. His father, Jesper Swedberg, was a Lutheran clergyman with a good deal of evangelical fire (Queen Ulrica Eleonora ennobled the Swedeberg family in 1719, changing the family name to "Swedenborg"). Eventually, Jesper would become a bishop, in and out of hot water with the church for his efforts to revise the hymnal along more pietistic and less orthodox lines. Theology was apparently standard conversational fare at the dinner table. It is also significant, however, that the family had substantial interests in the mining industry, mining being the mainstay of the Swedish economy. We may suspect that the family properties were a persistent minor theme.

Jesper was on the faculty at Uppsala University when his son matriculated there at the age of eleven (not all that unusual an event); but, shortly thereafter, he was made bishop of Skara and moved to his new charge. At this time, Emanuel moved in with his older sister and her new husband, Erik Benzelius, who felt himself to be at the forefront of the Cartesian revolution and who, as university librarian, was very much aware of the latest scientific publishing.

In one sense, it was a period of truce for science and religion. Charles XI had decreed just a decade earlier that science was not to make pronouncements on matters of doctrine and that the church was not to restrict scientific inquiry. It was perhaps only this rudimentary compartmentalization that enabled Swedenborg to pursue a scientific rather than a theological course of study without causing a serious rift with his father.

Swedenborg was graduated from Uppsala University in 1709, and the following year he set out on an extended trip abroad. At this time, England, France, and Germany were centers of scientific progress, but Sweden was relatively behind the times. In London, Swedenborg studied the work of Sir Isaac Newton, worked with the astronomer John Flamsteed, and investigated Robert Boyle's chemical experiments. Next, he traveled to the continent, making diplomatic contacts and focusing to some extent on mathematics. When he returned home, it was with a portfolio of mechanical inventions including a submarine, an airplane, and a stove, and with dreams of founding an observatory that would give Sweden a prominent place in the field of astronomy. In addition, on his trips abroad, he made a practice of lodging with artisans and picking up their skills, which came to include lens grinding, bookbinding, and cartography. Indeed, throughout his long life, even though he eventually settled into a comfortable house in Stockholm and enjoyed his garden, he spent a good deal of time abroad. In regard to his later publications, it was far easier for him to publish in Amsterdam and London, where the presses were not subject to ecclesiastical censorship, than in Stockholm. He wrote in Latin in order to reach out beyond the confines of Sweden, so language was no problem. He also published his larger scientific works in Dresden and Leipzig, both because of the superior quality of the presses there and because this gave his works access to the larger learned world of the continent.

Unfortunately, Swedenborg returned at a low point in Sweden's history. The charismatic Charles XII had made a spectacular attempt to extend the Swedish empire by conquest and had met disaster at the hands of Peter the Great. The cost of Charles' campaigns had been ruinous, and Sweden's economy was in a shambles. There was no realistic chance of Swedenborg's realizing his dream of an observatory. Ultimately, he found work as assistant to Sweden's foremost inventor, Christopher Polhelm, and became what we would now call a civil engineer.

With the support of the king, he then was appointed to a non-salaried position on the College of Mines--roughly the equivalent of the Department of the Interior. He toured the mining and smelting industries of Europe and published what turned out to be a definitive work on metallurgy. There were separate volumes on iron and copper, with an introductory volume laying philosophical foundations for physics and chemistry. This first volume, known most briefly as The Principia, included both a carefully worked out nebular hypothesis and a theory of matter as composed of patterned energy.

His life seemed pretty much on course at this point. He was profoundly disappointed to be still a bachelor after two courtships that had not worked out, but he was an accepted member of the government at the cabinet level with an international reputation in the field of metallurgy.

The next major turn of events in Swedenborg's life came shortly after his father's death when he began to use his spare time "in search of the soul." This was not an uncommon pursuit, but his approach was distinctive. Rather than theorize, he chose to undertake a very thorough study of human anatomy. If the body was indeed the kingdom of the soul, he reasoned, then that is surely where we should look. He spent time in dissection rooms in Paris but eventually decided to rely more on the published results of other researchers so that he might not be biased by his own first-hand discoveries.

The result of this study was two substantial volumes that included such substantial discoveries as the functions of the ductless glands and the localization of certain motor functions in the cortex of the brain. At the end, though, he had to rely more on doctrine than on the scalpel for his conclusions about the soul, and he regarded the whole massive work as having failed in its primary purpose. Characteristically, he decided that he simply had not been thorough enough and set out to do it right the second time. He now projected eleven volumes, of which he actually published two, with substantial parts of others left in draft.

He apparently began on this massive project in 1741, at the age of fifty-three. As he worked, he started to have experiences of "photism," mentally visible flashes of light or flame that, he came to realize, signalled his having arrived at some particularly significant insight. He began his "prologue" to the first volume of the new series by describing a kind of inborn rational instinct for the truth, an assertion potentially at odds with the strict empiricism he had previously insisted on.

Swedenborg was on the verge of an immense and traumatic change. As he proceeded with the project, the conviction grew that it simply was not going to succeed. He began at about this time to record his dreams and to speculate on the guidance they offered. In his record of these dreams, we see a man struggling with his intellectual pride, with his alienation from his feelings, and with his distance from his childhood faith. On Easter weekend of 1744, this crisis issued in a mystical Christ vision of uncommon power. After a year of further struggle, a second vision, again at Easter time, left him with the conviction that he had been called to a new career.

The event is worth sketching. The vision took place in a London inn where he was having dinner and began with the appearance of a shadowy figure in the corner who told him emphatically not to eat so much. Later that night, he was awakened by the same figure, who identified himself as the Lord Jesus Christ and informed him that he was being commissioned to disclose the inner, spiritual meaning of the Bible. After this, Swedenborg reported, heaven and hell were opened to him. From that time until the closing days of his life, Swedenborg had almost daily "waking visions" of the spiritual world, including extended conversations with angels and spirits.

Swedenborg took his commission seriously, reviewing his university Hebrew and Greek and drafting his own extensive index of Bible passages. He began writing a Bible commentary, posthumously published in nine volumes as The Word Explained, but left it incomplete. From 1749 to 1756, he published a multi-volume work known as Arcana Coelestia, whose full title might be translated "A Disclosure of the Heavenly Depths in Sacred Scripture or the Word of the Lord." This work proceeds verse by verse and often word by word through the books of Genesis and Exodus, interpreting the narrative as a kind of parable with levels of meaning dealing with the spiritual history of humanity, the issues and course of the individual's spiritual pilgrimage, and deepest of all, the story of the interaction between the divine and the human sides of Jesus.

While he had begun with the explicit intent of covering the whole Bible, he changed course after finishing his exegesis of Exodus and published, in 1758, five works of a very different nature. One was a very slender work, little more than a pamphlet, on the inhabitants of the planets. Another, The New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine, was a survey of the main points of his theology organized in brief discussions of its commonest terms. A third--perhaps the most startling--was a small work called The Last Judgment, in which he described having witnessed this event in the spiritual world. A fourth, again more booklet than book, made his case for the existence of deeper meaning in scripture; and the fifth, Heaven and Hell, presented the nature of the spiritual world as he had experienced it. It seems clear that he was trying to put his theology in the most accessible form possible; and, in fact, Heaven and Hell has been the most popular of his works.

On completion of these 1758 works, he returned to the task of Scripture commentary and drafted most of a commentary on the last book of the Bible, Revelation. Knowing now that he would not be writing separate works on much of the rest of Scripture, he did a great deal of gathering of related passages and sketching their interpretation. The resulting work, The Apocalypse Explained, was never finished and was published only after his death.

In 1763 and 1764, he published another cluster of separate works. Four of these were on specific theological topics: The Doctrine of the Lord, The Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, The Doctrine of Life, and The Doctrine of Faith. One was a kind of sequel to his little work The Last Judgment, and two were companion volumes entitled Divine Love and Wisdom and Divine Providence, respectively. Divine Love and Wisdom presented his metaphysics in its broadest and least sectarian form, while Divine Providence brought this "down to earth," in a sense, in an effort to reconcile his experience of the beauty of the divine nature with his experience of a world full of violence and injustice. He then returned to the book of Revelation and published a relatively concise commentary, The Apocalypse Revealed.

His next project was a departure from previous policies in another direction and resulted in his most controversial work, whose title has been variously translated as Marital Love, Conjugial Love, Marriage Love, Love in Marriage, and, most recently, Married Love. It is intriguing to see him talking about the inner differences between the sexes on the basis of his encounters with them in the spiritual world and also to see a combination of a highly idealistic view of marital fidelity and devotion on the one hand and a remarkably nonjudgmental attitude toward deviations from this ideal on the other.

The work on marriage was published in 1768, by which time Swedenborg was eighty years old. He was to publish just three more works. One was a booklet under the title The Intercourse between the Soul and the Body; one, a small and quite polemical critique of traditional Christian theology called A Brief Exposition of the Teaching of the New Church; and the third, the work that has been seen as his final summary, True Christian Religion.

It has been my own contention, though, that this final work is less a summary than an effort to demonstrate that this theology is truly Christian. Two of his earliest followers, both clergymen, had been accused of heresy, and the ecclesiastical inquiry had shifted focus from what these men themselves had written to the works of Swedenborg himself. Perhaps there was a bit of his father's evangelical fire left in the old man, for he entered into the fray with a will.

Swedenborg died in 1772 in London. His had been a life remarkable for its energy and productivity but even more remarkable for its evolution. In retrospect, he seems never to have rested content with his achievements or his understanding but always to have pressed deeper. Through years of experience that have caused later generations to question his sanity, he remained both gracious and grounded. He was socially accessible and "low key" and remained a very effective member of the Swedish Parliament to the end of his life.