Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 13

by Signe Toksvig

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Swedenborg's Sanity

S0 far there was little in Swedenborg's published works that would have been thought anything except slightly fanciful, but even so he seems to have been careful about their circulation at home, although they were in Latin. When he heard of someone who had read Of the Worship and Love of God, he offered to lend him one of the physiological works, because, he said, in it "the intellectual mind and soul are here and there treated of. The copies which I have of this work are freely at the service of those who possess understanding and are interested in such subjects." ¹

But he does not seem to have depended on anyone's understanding in regard to his double life among men and "spirits." In 1746, after a year's social experience with spirits, he noted privately that, "in company with other men, I spoke just as any other man, so that no one was able to distinguish me either from myself as I had been formerly, or from any other man; and, nevertheless, in the midst of company I sometimes spoke with spirits and with those who were around me; and perhaps they might have gathered something from this circumstance. However, I do not know whether anyone noticed anything from the fact that the internal senses were sometimes withdrawn from the external, though not in any such way that anyone could make a judgment from it; for at such times they could judge no other than that I was occupied with thoughts." ²

He added that the actual speech was not heard by anyone save himself and the spirits, although at times "the speech is as clear and distinct as the human voice, though not so high or with so rough a sound as when coming through one's lips. So much is this the case that sometimes even angels and spirits were afraid they would be heard by those who were present in the world."

Their fears seem to have been unfounded. If anyone had noticed anything it was at any rate not Swedenborg's colleagues in the Board of Mines, for they unanimously recommended him to the high position of Councilor of Mines when one of the two councilorships fell vacant in the spring of 1747.

Thirty years before, the Board of Mines had been very reluctant to accept the young engineer as one of their members; now he had arrived at the top. Above the two Councilors, there was only the President of the Board, and he had to be of hereditary nobility.

But Swedenborg wrote briefly to the King that, although he had been proposed for this office, he begged His Majesty not to appoint him. In fact, he applied for permission to be released from public office altogether, and this without the customary promotion in rank. All he asked for, on the ground of his often having spent his own money in mining researches abroad, was that he might be pensioned on half salary, because he had to go abroad again to finish some important work on which he was engaged.

The King of Sweden, with gracious words for the services Swedenborg had rendered the State and with earnest wishes that he might continue to do so, did nevertheless grant the suppliant's wishes.

In the minutes of the Board of Mines, it was duly recorded that Assessor Swedenborg had been released from his duties, and "all the members of the Royal College regretted losing so worthy a colleague." He was asked to remain until all his cases were finished, which he did.

On July 17, 1747, he took leave of his colleagues amidst thanks and good wishes; "they wished him a prosperous journey and a happy return, after which he left." ³

It is now two hundred years since Emanuel Swedenborg, at the age of fifty-nine, cut loose from his established existence as an important servant of the State and fully committed himself to strange voyages. As far as his world knew, he was only going to Amsterdam and London for his usual work with libraries and printing presses, but the question also has to be asked—Where was he going as to his mind?

In brutal brevity: Was Swedenborg insane?

As mentioned before, his own definition of insanity "from the medical point of view" was "acting contrary to accepted customs or obstinately defending one's own opinions against acknowledged truths."

From that point of view he was not insane.

There is, however, a story (circulated later by John Wesley, who did not care for competitors) that once in London (during his crisis period) Swedenborg behaved as if delirious in the house of his second Moravian landlord. It was recorded many years later by Mathesius, a Swedish clergyman, who was averse to Swedenborg, and there is testimony that the Moravian later retracted most of what he was alleged to have said, also that Swedenborg had left the house because the man meddled with his papers. The story of Swedenborg's fit of madness could have been told in revenge for Swedenborg's removal to lodge with the wigmaker Shearsmith.⁴

The truth probably is that although this, like Andersen's story of the feather blown up to five hens, had little foundation, yet there had at least been a feather. Perhaps under the double impact of a fever which he is reported to have had and his puzzling new "spirit" experiences, Swedenborg had appeared to be delirious at least once. A later reference in his diary shows he was aware that at one time his behavior could have been interpreted as insane (see page 247), but there is nothing in his previous or subsequent life that hints at any overt oddity of behavior, barring of course the considerable oddity which remains to be discussed—his claim to familiarity with "spirits." But as far as social behavior went, his polite correctness was often praised by people who knew him, as well as by casual acquaintances.

But he might have suffered from a subtler unbalance. His continued intellectual interests after 1745 (he wrote his clearest book at the age of eighty-two) would not prove to a psychoanalyst that his visions and his ideas were not the result of unresolved complexes. But from that point of view Luther, George Fox, John Wesley himself, and many other of mankind's religious teachers, both in the East and the West, would be considered unbalanced. They had "visions" and heard voices ordering them to do this or that, which they usually obeyed. As has been said before, it comes down to whether it is believed that such "projected" religious experience is always due to a neurosis.

Some of the psychoanalysts who believe this—religiously—have attempted to deal with Swedenborg in absentia mainly by the aid of excerpts from his so-ocalled dream diary and "spiritual" diary. They do not seem to have been well acquainted with his scientific work, nor do they seem to have studied history with a view to finding out whether Swedenborg could not at the time have held certain ideas without differing much from his contemporaries.

Nowadays certainly a man who claimed to communicate with spirits and to have received a divine commission to reinterpret the Bible might legitimately be committed for observation if that served any useful purpose. But, hard as it is to remember with the often so amazingly modern Swedenborg, he did live and these things did take place over two hundred years ago, when the mental climate was different.

What Professor C. D. Broad of Oxford in our day has called the "antecedent improbability" ⁵ that renders belief in even the best-attested psychic phenomena so hard, was then not so improbable, both for people in general and for Swedenborg in particular.

As for his specifically religious ideas, they were far from unrelated to those of his time and that immediately preceding it. Among the pietist Protestant sects, and especially with those who had a tinge of mysticism, there was a strong belief that the "visible church" had lost authority after the death of the last of the Apostles, and that a new, world-wide "invisible church" would come. This was particularly true of the "Collegiants" in Holland. One of their leaders, Cornheert, had pleaded for people to wait—wait "for the coming of new and divinely commissioned apostles, who would really reform apostate churches and unite all divided sects and gather the world in a true Church of Christ." He also wrote a great deal about the "Inner Word of God," and about symbols and ceremonies as nothing in themselves but as pointing to spiritual realities.

The same ideas were held by the so-called "Seekers" in England. Both Holland and England pullulated with books expressing such views.⁶ They often literally coincided with those of Swedenborg, as in the case of Castellio's. ( See page 151.)

Mitigating circumstances, however, do not prove sanity. In our day, Professor Martin Lamm of Stockholm has exonerated Swedenborg from insanity on the ground that his visions and voices were only pseudohallucinatory, and that only once or twice did he "place" them as outside of himself. In his brilliant book on the origin of Swedenborg's ideas⁷ Professor Lamm, in effect, says that Swedenborg was not insane; he was a poet with a vivid imagination.

Before Professor Lamm another champion of Swedenborg's sanity was Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the scholar (and incidentally soldier) who was called to be President Lincoln's and Secretary Stanton's adviser during the Civil War. Hitchcock wrote a clear and well—documented book,⁸ in which he noted the similarity of many of Swedenborg's ideas and expressions with those of the "hermeneutical" writers—the very ones whom Swedenborg once had stigmatized as "occult"—writers who in all ages out of the Kabbalah, nature mysticism, and various kinds of Neoplatonism had constructed "secret" systems, sometimes crudely "magical," sometimes of elevated religious philosophy, disguised from heresy-hunters by "occult" terms.

The General was right, but the similarity may have been due to the same sources having been tapped by Swedenborg and the hermeneutical writers. But Hitchcock concluded that Swedenborg had not meant what he said, except in the same symbolic sense that some of the hermeneutics meant their allegories. "It is also possible for me to talk with Luther," Hitchcock exclaimed in effect, "by reading his books!" And he thought that by saying he was "in the spirit" Swedenborg meant that he communicated with the living hermeneutical brethren, a secret and world-wide fraternity.

Hitchcock was well-intentioned but he was too rational. Swedenborg most assuredly meant it when he said he was in communication with the spirit world. His accounts of it, he asserted more than once, were based on "things heard, seen and felt."

But here also, it cannot be too often repeated, Swedenborg had spent many years in lessening the antecedent improbability of this, as far as he was concerned.

First, his extensive study of physics had, as we know, made him believe that matter was ultimately motion and hence essentially immaterial. He conceived of the universe as consisting of matter in diflerent states of energy (the Principia), and the "soul" as being of the same energy substance as that element or state which he called the "magnetic." Then his study of physiology, especially of the embryo, made him believe that the immaterial force which he called the soul directed the material atoms in forming the body. He decided that the place where the soul continued to influence the body and to cognize sensations was in the cortical cells of the brain. He regarded it as possible that other entities (spirits) or forces from the immaterial universe could influence the cortical cells (neurons) and induce "sensations" besides the force of a man's own soul.

All his further studies of psychology and physiology led him to feel certain that the external senses of the body were merely the mechanical reporters or carriers of stimuli which did not become conscious sensations until they became "known" by the "internal senses" which he regarded as belonging to the subtle body of the immaterial soul, the governor of the material body. He thought that the soul with its "internal senses" (or psychic properties) could exist separately from the material body, and that hence it could survive apparent death. Swedenborg believed he had proved this, not by either accepting or receiving "revelation," but by means of all the scientific knowledge his time afforded, plus his own power of synthesis, of putting things together.

What he did not claim to have any idea of, before April, 1745, was under what form man would survive. This, he said, would be a case of the caterpillar trying to guess the appearance of the butterfly.⁹ But even earlier, in 1741, he was sure that space and time as we know them would not obtain in the world of the dematerialized; he even then supposed that there thought could be directly communicated.

From the convictions Swedenborg had arrived at there was no antecedent improbability in his being aware of discarnate spirits, especially as he now felt he could use his "internal senses" at will. He need not have considered and did not consider himself insane because of this. Of nothing was he more stubbornly certain than that he did have communication with the souls of the dead.

A Swedish scholar is reported to have said that either Swedenborg was insane, which he was not; or Swedenborg was dishonest, which he was not; but if he were neither we should have to change all our ideas.

That scholar seems to have forgotten psychoanalysts. But they have not neglected Swedenborg.

If the object of the present study were to try to account in full for the remote origin of Swedenborg's visionary life, it might be necessary to give a thorough presentation of psychoanalytical opinion on the matter; but that is not the object.

William James, in dealing with the tendency to class the religious impulse as pathological, says that two kinds of inquiry are often confused. One is, How did it [anything] come about, what is its origin? The other is, What is its significance or value, now that it is here? ¹⁰

Both lines of inquiry are surely necessary, but it is chiefly with the latter aspect that the present study attempts to deal. What were Swedenborg's ideas, after he had turned his gaze from the material to the immaterial, and what interest and meaning can they have in themselves for us?

This does not mean that any study of Swedenborg can fail to profit by the discoveries of the ways in which the unconscious functions, made by students of the mind from Flournoy,¹¹ Myers,¹² and Freud on. Such tricks as projection, identification, etc., were played also by Swedenborg's unconscious mind, one might say visibly.

But, apart from the religious side of his experience, the question why his particular unconscious behaved as it did—that is, the question as to the origins of the alleged "complexes," is too occult for the lay person, especially after two hundred years have passed. Yet it may be of interest to give a few samples of what the intrepid professionals believe they have discovered by studying Swedenborg's dreams and what they consider his behavior.

In a paper by R. Lagerborg,¹³ of Finland, Mr. Lagerborg quotes from E. Hitschmann, a German colleague, that Swedenborg's disease is paranoia, and that it is undoubtedly a regression to the infantile. "As a boy Swedenborg wanted to surpass his father [no evidence adduced] to be a Nazir, an instrument of God." He also suffered from "narcissism." "With his illness, the underside turns up, a more primitive psyche appears, and when he becomes like a child again the childish dreams of greatness return. The Lord's words to him 'eat not so much' contain reminiscence of paternal admonition. Father and God—the—Father coalesce, and what his parents said about angels speaking through him becomes a reality for the insane man."

Hitschmann also said there were homosexual components in Swedenborg's love of God, while Lagerborg considers his references to innocence and childhood in heaven as proof of the regression theory. Lagerborg, however, is also willing to consider it a case of Jungian regression, to primitive man's mythomania. Physically, Lagerborg says, one must remember that Swedenborg was oversexed [no evidence for this] and that fear of impotence caused the tension of the crisis, the ecstasy, the hallucinations, the desire for self-improvement and "erotomania."

Lagerborg's final dictum is that "all mysticism regresses to mankind's irrational attempts. A mental disease starts this off, and we return to the crutches of our ancestors."

Von Winterstein, another psychoanalyst, confirms and elaborates Hitschmann's diagnosis.¹⁴ According to Von Winterstein, Swedenborg had an unsolved inverted Œdipus complex. Instead of hating his father for being the husband of his mother (as he apparently "normally" should) he had, mainly owing to the early death of his mother, a repressed and unconscious homosexual attachment for his father. The evidence for this, as Von Winterstein sees it, is, for one thing, that Swedenborg quarreled with his father about money (presumably to dissemble his love), but chiefly that Swedenborg emphasized the significance of "God," which is a "father-symbol," both before and after his "conversion." .

Swedenborg, according to Von Winterstein, in changing from science to religion, "accepted the purport of his homosexual attachment, and developed paranoia as a kind of psychological penalty for his perversity. The turning to God is merely a symbol for accepting and condoning, at least in a disguised form, the implied relation to the father."

Evidently it is not for the uninitiated to try to penetrate such clever disguises.

In regard to Swedenborg, as has been stated, the present study is not meant to be an attempt to explain in psychoanalytical terms of how Swedenborg came to have those experiences which seemed to him to come from another world than this. Whether such an interpretation would leave any more room for Swedenborg as an experiencer of spiritual truths than Freud's study of Da Vinci leaves for the great painter is a question that really seems to have been answered by the psychoanalysts cited above.

In Swedenborg's diaries material can certainly be found which shows that he "projected" many of his fears and wishes into "visions" of both good and evil, things that nagged and haunted him apparently from outside of himself. We can see that fairly easily now when those realms have been more or less charted. But if such material is all that is used for a picture of him there would indeed be little difference between it and that of some poor wretch in an insane asylum. From this point of view it would be impossible to fit in his contributions to ethics and his deep and subtle religious experiences. He would be just another case history, pegged out on the conventional pattern.

But the religious impulse has its geniuses as well as its idiots. The cause of truth is not served by classing the former with the latter just because the case history of every religious genius, if it were as well known as Swedenborg's, would be found to contain false sense perceptions, conflicts, terrors, and even beatitudes which could be pigeonholed under the same labels as those of the idiots.

It is not meant to imply that such is the constant practice of all modern soul doctors whether they call themselves psycho-this or psycho-that. Many, especially of the followers of Jung, "admit" the "religious drive" (as has been mentioned) as something not pathological. Others, even if they apply pathologic labels, do so with the same breadth of understanding that made Ibsen in The Wild Duck plead for the preservation of the "vital illusion."

A good example of this in the Swedenborg case is the treatment of it by Dr. Karl Jaspers (doctor of medicine and professor of philosophy at Heidelberg), who wrote, in 1926, a psychiatric study of Strindberg, Van Gogh, Swedenborg and Hölderlin.15¹⁵ Dr. Jaspers is not concerned with tracing the origin of all emotion to infantile perversions,¹⁶ he is busy fitting four different personalities into a grandly elastic frame of schizophrenia. Dr. Jaspers proves to his own satisfaction—again apparently on the sole basis of Swedenborg's notes of dreams and visions—that all four of his subjects were schizophrenes (suffering from split mind and consequent delusional thinking), yet the Swedenborg conjured up by him seems as weirdly unlike the whole man as that of the various psychoanalysts quoted.

Nor is it possible to find any real likeness between Swedenborg and the three others considered by Dr. Jaspers. After all, Strindberg's mania went so far as to make him assert publicly that "all women" were out to slay him and poor Van Gogh cut off his own ear in a fit of depression.

What similarity is there between the Swedenborg of Dr. Jaspers and the man of whom Count Höpken, the wise Swedish statesman, wrote (as cited previously), "He possessed a sound judgment on 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"? And, Höpken said, Swedenborg "was a true philosopher and he lived like one." Could such tributes have been paid to Strindberg?

Either Dr. Jaspers was not going by all the data or he did not have them. But he is also a professor of philosophy, and he can look beyond psychiatry. It is conceivable, he says, that something subjectively spiritual exists, and that this Spirit (Geist) is timeless, but may reveal itself in time through "emotions." It is as if, he says, this demonic force under control in the healthy can break through at the beginning of the schizophrenic process. Not, Dr. Jaspers explains, that it is either sick or healthy, "but the morbid process gives a chance and a condition for this breaking-through, though it may be only for a short while. It is as though the soul were unlocked," and made creative, if it has native talent.

These creative schizophrenes do us good, Dr. Jaspers continues, "when we experience the appeal of their being, their inward quesotioning orientation, and when we find in their works, as in all that is genuine, that gaze into the Absolute, which, always hidden, only becomes visible for us in its final form."

With a certain amount of German indefinition, this amounts to saying that even the insane, if they have native talent, can be peek-holes for the Absolute, which, in Swedenborg's case, was called God.

It is most curious to consider that if Swedenborg, like many a mystic of every religion, had limited himself to reporting the visions and intercourse with whatever forms of the Godhead his religion called for, he would probably not have been thought different from them. All of them insist that man has a soul and that it somehow survives the death of the body, so even that belief need not have disqualified him from respectful attention. Oddly enough it comes down to this: Swedenborg is blamed not so much for saying that the soul survives the death of the body as for insisting that he became capable of talking with such souls, or spirits. It is as if at the word "spirit" such fears of superstition arise in modern man (because he is still so close to it) that all power of objective judgment departs from him, and the label that means "insane" to him is hunted out and affixed to the sinner who said "spirits."

It might be possible for us, instead of giving way to panic, to try to find out whether Swedenborg could not have believed in "spirits," given his background and experience, without having been "psychotic." (Many people nowadays cherish, one might almost say, a pet psychosis, convinced it can do no harm provided they know its name.)

Or again, it might be worth while, if it is true that Swedenborg had a "split" mind, to investigate whether that very fact could not have helped to produce phenomena for him of the kind that some scientists of today call "psychic," such as telepathic phenomena. Dr. Jaspers suggests that a split mind is almost essential for attaining the creative glimpse of the Absolute, either in art or in religion. If, in other words, the common-sense mind is in full control all the time, feeding and protecting the body, few if any magic casements will be opened on this or any other possible world.

Suppose we translate the "split" of the schizophrenic into the "dissociation" which may tend to produce either "inspiration" or psychical phenomena.

For, it can never be shouted too much, in the matter of understanding mental events "not by one road alone is so great a goal reached."

Arthur Koestler in Arrival and Departure speaks of a childhood puzzle that looked like a tangle of red and blue lines. But if you put a blue tracing paper over it a clown emerged. And if you put red tracing paper over it a lion emerged. You can explain man both ways, he says; "the method is correct, and the picture is complete in itself. But beware of the arrogant error of believing that it is the only one."

Swedenborg may have had an "inverted Œdipus complex." He may also have been of at least a schizoid type. But he may equally well have had psychic experiences of the kind that modern experimental psychical research makes part of its object of study.

Whatever one may decide as to what were the "spirits" of whom Swedenborg spoke, he soon realized that he had to be dissociated from the external world in order to "converse with them."

On March 4, 1748, he noted that for thirty—three months he had been able to talk with "them," yet had also been able to be "like another man in the society of men," but, "when however I intensely adhered to worldly things in thought, as when I had care concerning necessary expenses, about which I this day wrote a letter, so that my mind was for some time detained therewith, I fell as it were into a corporeal state, so that spirits could not converse with me . . . whence I am able to know that spirits cannot speak with a man who is much devoted to worldly and corporeal cares; for bodily concerns draw down the ideas of the mind and immerse them in corporeal things." ¹⁷

Instead of shying from this, like a horse from a piece of white paper in the dark, let us try to see how far modern psychical research can go in making Swedenborg's belief in "spirits" intelligible, even if not credible. That may belong to another department! Do not be put off by the fact, if it is a fact, that psychical research is not "generally accepted"; what science ever was so, in its beginning—certainly not psychoanalysis!

Try the new piece of tracing paper, even if the only picture which emerges from under it is one which you feel you must classify under "imagination." The only question then is whether Swedenborg's experiences, imaginative or not, have value in themselves as pieces of thinking that can send us off to reflect for ourselves on fundamental issues. This highly intelligent man, as by common testimony he continued to be till his death—how did the possible future of man out of the body present itself to him? With what religion did he finally content himself? His experiences and opinions on these subjects may have been all in his imagination, but they were still experiences.