# Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO
Stockholm Shocked
WAS Swedenborg a northern Plato?
Up to about 1760, when he was seventy-two years old, the great majority of his fellow-countrymen would certainly never have thought of him in any such terms. They knew him chiefly as a great authority on metals and mines. Sweden's vital mining industry had been much benefited by his being a member of the Board of Mines. As a member of the Parliament, or Diet, he had submitted some of the most useful memorials on such nonmystical subjects as liquor control, rolling mills for domestic pig iron, and, from time to time, strenuous pleas for a sound national currency. Indeed, in this very year 1760, he submitted a long memorial on finance which was so clear and pertinent that he was soon asked to be a member of a Secret Commission on Exchange.
Yet, early in 1760, shocking rumors were heard in Stockholm about Emanuel Swedenborg.
It is not generally recognized, but the intellect can be as voluptuously scandalized as Mrs. Grundy, depending on the standing of intellect at that period of time. In the eighteenth century its standing was probably the highest it has ever been, hence the town was really upset.
The town—this meant as usual a fraction of its educated elite—was, like the rest of Europe at this time, more French than anything else. To be French meant, briefly, that one was saved from superstition by faith in Monsieur de Voltaire. By his writings about the new scientific discoveries, especially those of Sir Isaac Newton, he had demonstrated with the sure weapon of mathematics that the universe was indeed, as had been suspected, a mechanical affair. Science could and did fully interpret nature. What was natural was scientific and vice versa. What was "supernatural" did not exist except in the imagination of the multitudinous illiterate who were used by a power-loving Church for its own dark ends.
​Swedenborg was known to be as keenly active mentally as he had ever been, so sensible people found it hard to believe the absurd gossip.
Baron Tilas, a mineralogist of note and Swedenborg's successor on the Board of Mines, said just that: "Nor would I have lent credence to all this stuff, if I hadn't heard it from Count Tessin's own mouth," he wrote to a mineralogist friend.$^1$
And Count Tessin had it from the man himself. Baron Tilas assured his friend that the town was in a state bordering on alarm about it, partly because of the suddenness of the disclosure. "Not a breath was heard, then it spread surprisingly fast. It is Swedenborg, who has intercourse with the dead whenever he chooses, and who can inquire after his former departed friends when it pleases him, whether they are in heaven or in hell or hover about in a third, nondescript place."
Count Tessin, Tilas wrote, had been told of a mutual departed friend, who was taking a walk in his other-world garden when Swedenborg came to ask him for some architectural drawing. Much more sensational news was that the late Swedish Queen had remarried in the world beyond and was said to be happy.
"I am all in a flutter," Baron Tilas continued, "before having a talk with him and learning whom my late wife has married. I should hate it if she has become a sultaness!"
But the oddest thing about Swedenborg was "that all this he reports without a screw seeming to be loose in the clock-work in other respects."
Tilas could hardly wait to peer into the clock-work for himself, and he assured his friend that he wished they might go together, only in that case Tilas would have to try to keep the latter from laughing.
Within a week the Baron's curiosity had been to a certain extent satisfied; he had visited Swedenborg and frankly asked him about the current rumors. Tilas wrote to his friend about it with a slightly modified laugh. "Many consider him crazy, but I desire to scan the matter more thoroughly before expressing myself upon it."
Other people of consequence were also visiting Swedenborg; their carriages waited for hours outside his house while the owners talked, listened, and considered.$^2$ Now it became known that ​Swedenborg for many years had been publishing strange theological works abroad and anonymously. Only a few friends at home got copies. Baron Tilas could not remember all the names, but they dealt with Heaven and Hell and the New Jerusalem and one was about the Last Judgment.
"Just hear this surprising news, the Last Judgment has already taken place in 1757, and he talks about it as familiarly as if he had been the Secretary there and taken down the minutes. Since that time the Judgment Board is constantly in session and parties are judged as soon as they arrive."
Startling and amusing as these crotchets were in a great man, Tilas begged his friend not to let the matter become generally known, although he admitted that thousands now knew about it in Stockholm. Son of the Voltairean century as the Baron was, perhaps he thought it better, as he said, "to move carefully in the matter," when dealing with the Last Judgment.
Perhaps also he had been affected by this private talk with the dignified old man, straight and spare, with the direct gaze and the "smiling blue eyes," so that he wanted to shield him against his own indiscretions, his laying bare so unreservedly of thoughts which could earn him only a pitying verdict in the world.
Even Count Tessin had succumbed to Swedenborg's charm. He went to see him, as he said himself, "from mere curiosity for making the acquaintance of a singular man," but though he came away grateful that his own faith and reason were still sound, he admitted that he found the man "by no means obstinate, too sensitive or self-sufficient, but friendly, courteous and open-hearted; he has good judgment both about the times and the people, explains everything for the best, and seems to be a philanthropist who spends his life in contentment, delighting himself in his fantasies for which perhaps no medicine can be given." $^3$
These fantasies, especially the one regarding new, congenial mates in the other world, kept spreading and Stockholmers asked themselves in much perplexity how they were to interpret this man whom they had known as a scientist and a practical man.
Perhaps it was all symbolical and poetic. There was a well-vouched-for story of a little girl who came along to see Swedenborg with her parents and who no doubt appalled them by a question ​she put to "Uncle" Swedenborg. (This is still the delightful way in which nice little Swedish children address a man, as they adopt a woman by calling her "aunt.")
Her question, of a certainty reflecting overheard talk at home, was that she did wish he would show her a "spirit or an angel."
He laughed and said he would. Taking her into a garden pavilion, he pulled a curtain away from a long mirror.
"There!" he said, "you see an angel!"
Count A. J. von Höpken had known Swedenborg for forty years, but not as these casual and curious acquaintances. Höpken, as has been mentioned, held a position in the Swedish Government which would correspond to that of Prime Minister today. He was a subtle and distinguished man, and would have been "modern" in any age. He was characterized later by a Swedish historian as "learned, admirable in writing and speaking, cautious, farseeing, a skeptic in thought and character . . ." $^4$
In 1772, soon after Swedenborg's death at eighty-four, Höpken received a letter from a Danish general, asking him for an account of Swedenborg's system as well as of the character of the man. The Count was privately, as he said, much amused and surprised and nonplussed that "the honest old gentleman Swedenborg has spoken so favorably about me in various places that he has even made me his apostle after his death," $^5$ but he answered the general in a serious, if characteristically cautious, vein.
First he begged him to believe that although his oflice had often made it his duty to give his opinion and counsel in delicate and difficult matters, he did not recollect that anything so delicate had ever before been submitted to his judgment as that which was here proposed to him.
All he could say was that he had for two-and-forty years known the late Assessor Swedenborg and had for some time daily frequented his company. He assured the General that much as his life had brought him into contact with all types of characters he did not recollect having known any man like Swedenborg.
He was "always contented, never fretful nor morose. . . . He was a true philosopher and lived like one; he labored diligently and lived frugally without sordidness; he travelled continually and his ​travels cost him no more than if he had lived at home. He was gifted with a most happy genius and a fitness for every science, which made him shine in all those he embraced. He was, without contradiction, the most learned man in my country."
Höpken then praised Swedenborg as a Latin, Greek, and Hebrew scholar, as a mathematician, as a mechanical genius able to solve practical problems such as transporting large ships over rocks, as a mineralogist, and as a physiologist whose discoveries in anatomy had been singular.
"I imagine this science and his meditations on the effects of the soul upon our curiously constructed body did by degrees lead him from the material to the spiritual. He possessed a sound judgment upon all occasions; he saw everything clearly and expressed himself well on every subject. The most solid memorials on finance, and the best penned, at the Diet of 1761, were presented by him. In one of these he refuted a large work in quarto on the same subject, quoted all the corresponding passages of it, and all this in less than one sheet."
But what about the spiritual matters, which were the only ones that fervently interested the Danish general?
Here the Count shied away. He said he had no criterion for distinguishing the genuine from the false in such matters. He did admit that he had once taken Swedenborg rather seriously to task for mixing into his beautiful writings those accounts of things he professed to have heard and seen in the spiritual world concerning the states of men after death, "of which ignorance makes a jest and derision."
But Swedenborg had answered him "that he was too old to sport with spiritual things, and too much concerned for his eternal happiness to yield to such foolish notions, assuring me on his hopes of salvation that imagination produced in him none of his revelations, which were true, and from what he had heard and seen." $^6$
Count Höpken, while still deploring such excursions from common sense, wrote later somewhat wistfully to a friend about how he had advised the King that if a Swedish colony were really to be founded in the New World of America, His Majesty could do no better than to establish Swedenborg's form of religion in it, because:
​"It properly places the worship of God in useful functions, and it causes least fear of death, as this religion regards death as merely a transition from one state to another, from a worse to a better situation; nay, upon his principles, I look upon death as being of hardly greater moment than drinking a glass of water." $^7$
The news of Swedenborg's clairvoyance, or "dabbling in the occult" as it might now be called, which had so shocked Baron Tilas and others, was no news, however, to the inner court circle to which Count Höpken belonged. Without trying to explain it, he was himself later to bear witness to the fact that Swedenborg had, in some strange way, carried out a commission which the Queen jestingly had given him.
She was the intrepidly intellectual sister of Frederick the Great of Prussia. At a court reception she had asked Swedenborg to look up her brother, the Prince Royal of Prussia, in the other world and remember her to him. Then she forgot about it, but soon afterward Swedenborg again appeared and, Höpken declared, "not only greeted her from her brother but also gave her his apologies for not having answered her last letter; he wished to do so now through Swedenborg, which he accordingly did. The Queen was greatly overcome, and said 'No one except God knows this secret.'"
Then there was the story of how Swedenborg had helped out the widow of the Dutch ambassador by finding out from the late diplomat where he had put a receipt for money which the widow would otherwise have been nearly ruined in having to pay again.
Or how he had seen and described a big fire in Stockholm while he was in Gothenburg and could not even have known that there was a fire. Many witnesses attested all these and similar stories, and many others scoffed at them and presented "natural" explanations.$^8$
Whether such apparent wonders were believed or not did not much interest Swedenborg himself. While always courteous to candidates for amazement, he usually put them off. He was not including a belief in miracles as one of the pieces necessary in the right kind of world-picture. Nor did he try to proselytize. In fact, when a friend asked him how many he had succeeded in persuading of the truth of his doctrines, he said, after reflection that he ​thought he had about fifty in this world and about the same number in the other.$^9$
Curious evidence, this, not only of spiritual humility but of a kind of essential sanity. The victim of the Messianic delusion never hesitates to claim the whole of the other world; he considers himself the custodian of the whole truth, even if stiff-necked people will not bow to him in this world.
Of course Swedenborg believed that the picture he had fitted together was the right one, but not because he personally would thereby be aggrandized.
With all his stubborn energy he had searched through many sciences, countries, dreams, and visions, caring only for an account of human existence—past, present, and future—which not only would fit his personal religious experience but would have the system and the clarity of science.
This was partly a need of his nature. And partly it was because he was born into one of the most fantastic corners of medieval irrationality that had survived in eighteenth-century Sweden—his father's house.