Swedish scientist and visionary theologian whose career split decisively in mid-life: a first career as one of the most prolific natural philosophers of the early Enlightenment, a second as a seer who claimed to have been granted permanent waking access to the spirit world and who wrote, in enormous Latin volumes, the minute geography of heaven, hell, and the life of angels. The son of a Lutheran bishop, educated at Uppsala, Swedenborg spent three decades as a mining engineer, assessor to the Swedish Board of Mines, and member of Parliament, publishing works on metallurgy, cosmology, brain anatomy, and the soul — and was, until about 1744, the sort of careful Cartesian-empiricist gentleman-scientist whom Linnaeus or Leibniz would have recognised at once.
Then, in April 1745, according to his own later account, he was visited in a London inn by Christ, who commissioned him to expound the spiritual sense of Scripture. He retired from science, learned Hebrew, and spent the remaining twenty-seven years of his life writing — entirely anonymously, at his own expense, and in Latin — some thirty volumes of Arcana Coelestia (Heavenly Secrets), an exegesis of Genesis and Exodus that reads the Bible throughout by the doctrine of correspondences: every natural thing is a symbol of a spiritual reality, and Scripture, properly read, is a code whose inner sense is always the history of the human soul's regeneration. The more accessible distillations — Heaven and Hell (1758), The True Christian Religion (1771), Divine Love and Wisdom — gave Europe an extraordinary travelogue: angels who live in communities organised by love rather than geography, hells constituted by their inhabitants' own refused selfhood, marriages that continue after death, a "spiritual sun" distinct from the natural one.
Swedenborg has had an odd, sustained afterlife out of all proportion to the eccentricity of the project. William Blake read him in the 1780s, first as a disciple and then (in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, c.1790) as a sharp satiric critic, but the basic Blakean idea that everything visible is a symbol of something eternal is unthinkable without him. Ralph Waldo Emerson devoted a long essay in Representative Men to "Swedenborg; or, the Mystic," treating him as one of six exemplary figures of humanity. Henry James Sr. became a serious Swedenborgian and raised William and Henry James in that atmosphere; the philosopher-psychologist William James returned to his father's Swedenborgianism in the religion sections of The Varieties of Religious Experience. Balzac, Baudelaire, Yeats, Borges, and Czesław Miłosz all read him attentively. The small New Church (or Church of the New Jerusalem), founded posthumously by his English followers, still exists.