Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 25

by Signe Toksvig

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Swedenborg in Daily Life

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG no longer cared whether he should be thought insane if he told people about their friends and relatives in the other world. "I have related a thousand particulars respecting departed spirits, informing certain persons that are now alive concerning the state of their deceased brethren, their married partners and their friends." ¹ But he did not tell everybody. His friend Robsahm, for instance, reports how Swedenborg "with great firmness" refused to have anything to do with the great ruck of the curious, people who thought "that he was a fortune-teller and could reveal wonderful secrets, thefts, etc." Nor did he receive all the disconsolate widows who wanted to know the state of their husbands. He was careful to have one of his servants in the room when he gave other-world information, for, as he said, "it is well known that such people misrepresent, because they do not properly understand what they hear." ²

However, such misrepresentation of course overtook the true stories about him as they flew from mouth to mouth. He often complained of this, characterizing some stories as only partly true, others as wholly untrue. Foremost was, of course, the story of the Queen of Sweden and the secret known only to her and her dead brother. Besides that story, the one of finding the receipt for the Dutch ambassador's widow and the one about the Stockholm fire perceived by him clairvoyantly in Gothenburg were those he was most often asked about, and which he always confirmed. But first the questioner was asked to tell Swedenborg what he had heard and Swedenborg would tell him if it were true.

Of the many people who came and went in his large garden and in his simple house, one or two have left their recollections. Robsahm, the aforementioned treasurer of the Bank of Stockholm, writing his memoirs of Swedenborg in much the same neat cursive hand³ that Swedenborg used in the manuscript of the Principia, said that the latter "worked without much regard to the distinction of day and night." "'When I am sleepy,' he said, 'I go to bed.'" He asked his servant, the wife of his gardener, to make his bed and to put a large jug of water in his anteroom, all the attendance he required. He made his own coffee in his study, where the fire was never allowed to go out. He drank a great deal of coffee with a lot of sugar in it. (In experimental psychic research it has been found that coffee helps the "psi" ability.) When he was not invited out, his dinner consisted of nothing but a roll soaked in boiled milk, but in company he would eat freely and indulge moderately in a merry glass.

His dress in winter was a fur coat of reindeer skin, and in summer it was a dressing-gown, both well worn, but his outdoor clothes were neat though simple. "Still, it happened sometimes that, when he prepared to go out, and his people did not call attention to it, something would be forgotten or neglected in his dress; so that, for instance, he would put one buckle of gems and another of silver on his shoes." Robsahm saw this himself, he says, at his father's house where Swedenborg was asked to dine, and the occurrence "greatly amused several young girls."

And their amusement probably greatly amused Swedenborg, but when less naïve persons tried to ridicule him they often found the laugh turned on themselves. No less a dignitary than Archbishop Troilius, who was fond of playing "tresett" (a card game needing three people) and who had just lost one of his card partners, Erland Broman, met Swedenborg in a large gathering and asked him jocularly, "By the way, Assessor, tell us something about the spirit world. How does my friend Broman spend his time there?"

Swedenborg answered instantly, "I saw him but a few hours ago shuffling his cards in the company of the Evil One, and he was only waiting for your worship to make up a game of tresett." ⁴

Robsahm freely asked Swedenborg questions in regard to his psychic gifts, inquiring once whether other people could come into the same degree of spirituality. Swedenborg warned against trying, saying it was the direct road to insanity; indeed he often said it was nothing for ordinary people to experiment with; but he did not maintain he was the only person who had the gift of communicating with the other world. Once friends of his wrote to him about a boy who apparently was "psychic," could converse with spirits and could heal people, and Swedenborg offered to place him with a good family in Stockholm where he could become educated.⁵ And he often wrote that all men could and should have been able to communicate with the other world, if they had only kept the spiritual part of themselves alive and open.

One day when a public execution had taken place, Robsahm was with Swedenborg in the evening, and asked him how a man who leaves the world in this manner feels at the moment he is executed. Swedenborg said that when such a man laid his head on the block, he was already so much out of himself that after decapitation when he entered into the world of spirits he didn't realize that the execution had taken place, but was terrified of it and tried to make his escape. Then good spirits would come to him and reveal to him that he was really dead, and, if he had been purposely wicked on earth he would escape from them as quickly as possible and lead himself to his likes in hell, but if he had committed his crime without premeditation, he could repent, receive instruction, and in time become a blessed spirit.

Another of Swedenborg's friends who put down his recollections of him, though it was eighteen years after Swedenborg's death, was the Danish Major-General Tuxen.⁶ Tuxen lived in Elsinore, the charming Danish town on the Sound, where sailing ships were often becalmed. Luckily for Tuxen, who was most curious to meet Swedenborg, having read some of his works, there was no breeze on a day in 1768 when Swedenborg was on board a ship off Elsinore, and Tuxen was asked to dine at the Swedish Consul's to meet the famous man.

Tuxen asked and received confirmations of the stories relating to Swedenborg's psychic powers, and he also asked for information concerning various Danish personages in the other world. He was given some interesting answers, and, without his asking, he was also informed as to the fate of the Russian Empress Elizabeth, that it was much better than might have been supposed.

Now it is only in our day that it has come out what Tuxen's job really was:⁷ the King of Denmark had practically forced him to be a Danish secret agent to secure information on Russian affairs, a charge which he held from 1742 till his death in 1792. Officially he had various other posts, so that Swedenborg's detailed and unsolicited information about the Empress Elizabeth, who had died in 1762, must have considerably impressed him. At any rate Tuxen continued to seek every opportunity to meet Swedenborg that wind and weather might furnish, and in 1770 he found a good one. Swedenborg's ship was becalmed off Kullen, near Elsinore, and Tuxen boarded it. That was the time, mentioned before, when he disturbed him in trance, but Swedenborg soon recovered himself, and consented to dine with Tuxen, "pulling off his gown and slippers, putting on clean linen, and dressing himself as briskly and alertly as a young man of one and twenty" (being eighty-two).

At Tuxen's house the Major-General apologized for having only his sickly wife and her young girls to meet him, to which Swedenborg replied, "And is not this very good company? I was always partial to the company of ladies."

This made Tuxen ask if he had ever wanted to marry. No, he said. Once Charles XII wanted him to marry Polhem's daughter but she refused. Tuxen excused himself, but his guest told him to ask anything. The Dane inquired if Swedenborg while young could resist sexual temptation. "Not altogether," he said, "in my youth I had a mistress in Italy."

Mrs. Tuxen—a notoriously hysterical woman—began to tell him about her bad health, and Swedenborg assured her that the time was coming when she would again attain the same health and beauty as when she was fifteen, not specifying that it would be necessary for her to die first. The daughter sang and Swedenborg said, "Bravo, very fine!" And he persuaded the mother to sing with the daughter, paying Mrs. Tuxen many compliments. He talked on other "indifferent subjects," Tuxen wrote, such as the "favorite dogs and cats that were in the room, which caressed him and jumped on his knee, showing their little tricks."

Tuxen loved him, and continued his faithful friend, and even became one of his disciples. That they were not many we have Swedenborg's own word for, since, in a postscript to his recollections, Tuxen said that once when he asked Swedenborg how many people he knew in this world that favored his doctrines, the latter answered "that there were not many yet that he knew of, still he might compute their number at perhaps fifty, or thereabouts; and in proportion the same number in the world of spirits."

Not the statement of a messianic megalomaniac, certainly, and all the evidence of Swedenborg's contemporaries goes to show that he was free from such insanity.

Among his character witnesses, so to speak, there is a Swedish-American pastor by the name of Nicholas Collin, who published his recollections of Swedenborg in the Philadelphia Gazette, in 1801.⁸

As a young man Collin had had frequent opportunities to see Swedenborg during the years 1765-68, and he too testified that although the latter was firmly persuaded of his religious mission, "he had no desire to see it enforced by violent measures; nor did he exert himself in making proselytes except by his writings. As to Sweden he never intimated a wish to be the head of a sect; but indulged in the fond hope that the ecclesiastical establishment would by a tranquil gradual illumination assume the form of his New Church. His natural mildness, education, connections, learning and experience both in public and private life produced a warm esteem for social order inimical to fanatical turbulence."

Not that Collin thought Swedenborg lukewarm in his beliefs. The Swedish-American Lutheran pastor wrote, "All parties generally agree that he had a firm belief in all his doctrines, and all his visions in the spiritual world. I never heard any person in Sweden surmise the contrary. He withdrew, in the unimpaired possession of his talents, from a career of public life which would have led him to greater honors and emoluments; and he sacrificed the enjoyments of his favorite sciences. He could expect no pecuniary advantage from his new pursuits; and the compensation of honor was dubious. By the laws of Sweden he was not permitted to print his books at home, nor to translate them; neither could he set up as a public teacher."

Pastor Collin was full of admiration for Swedenborg's character, his "integrity and benevolence," but that it was "an extraordinary character" and a frequent subject of public discussion he also admitted. As Collin was tutor in the house of Dr. Celsius, who knew Swedenborg well, he had opportunities to make observations, since the latter not only received company in his own house but "appeared in public and mixed in private societies."

In the summer of 1766 the young tutor himself called on Swedenborg with the innocent introduction that he desired to speak with a "character so celebrated." Swedenborg received him very kindly, gave him "delicious coffee," and they talked for three hours "principally on the nature of human souls and their states in the invisible world." The young man asked if Swedenborg could procure for him an interview with his deceased brother. The old man inquired what his motives were. Collin confessed he had none but brotherly affection and "an ardent wish to explore scenes so sublime and interesting to a serious mind." Good reasons, Swedenborg said, but not sufficient; but if any important spiritual or temporal concern had been involved he would have then "solicited permission from the angels who regulate such matters."

Swedenborg had a pretty tall, erect, rather slender figure, Collin said, a fair complexion, eyes of serene brightness. "At the time of my interview with him he was seventy-seven [78] yet retained marks of beauty and appeared to have considerable vigor of mind and body."

In Collin's opinion many people believed in Swedenborg's intercourse with the invisible world, though "not a few judicious persons believed that Swedenborg might on some occasions receive information from invisible agents, and yet be a visionary as to many things; and that such a faculty was not at all a proof of doctrines unconnected with it."

The same persons carefully investigated the facts of the cases where Swedenborg had apparently acquired supernatural knowledge, such as the case of the Queen of Sweden, the Marteville receipt, etc., which Collin himself had heard frequently, always the same as to substance though differing in details, "nor was either of them disputed, so far as I knew."

Swedenborg's religious doctrines, according to Collin, were hardly known to the general public "because Swedenborg was not solicitous to communicate them, and few of his readers thought proper to do it." He never, he said, heard anyone discuss the doctrine of the unity of God, except among some of the learned.

There were, however, people who did not overlook Swedenborg's doctrines. These were clergymen of quite a different stripe from the amiable and liberal Collin, who was to become pastor of Swedes' Old Church in Philadelphia.

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG AT ABOUT
EIGHTY-ONE

Painted by the noted Swedish portrait painter Per Krafft, the elder, at the request of Count A. J. von Höpken. In Gripsholm Castle. (Courtesy, Svenska porträttarkivet.)

It must be admitted that Swedenborg was frank in saying what he thought about the kind of clergymen he didn't like. Robsahm once asked him whether a certain pastor whose pathos and eloquence had always kept his church filled were not in a blessed state. "This man," was the answer, "went straight to hell among the societies of the hypocrites; for he was only spiritually minded while in the pulpit; at other times he was proud of his talents, and of the success he had in the world; he was an inflated man. No, no," he added, "there no dissimulation and no deceitful arts are of any avail . . ."

There is a story that a young man who seems to have regarded Swedenborg as a danger to Christian society approached him and asked what was the lot of his, the young man's, father in the other world. Swedenborg told him it was pitiable, "if your father belonged to that order of which very few are saved. Your father was a clergyman, was he not?" ⁹ This was true.

Since Swedenborg denied the vicarious atonement and the Trinity (as a trinity of persons) and generally insisted that religion was not something to save men from the consequences of their wickedness but something to prove to them that wickedness had inevitable consequences, and that hence the Lutheran theory of saving "faith" was wrong, it is hard to see how the pastors of the Lutheran state church of Sweden could look on him with a very friendly eye. Nor did they, although for a long while his good connections and favor at Court made them shut both their eyes when they looked in his direction. It was fairly easy so long as his books printed in Latin remained abroad, but when they were introduced little by little into Sweden, and when a Swedish clergyman, Dean Beyer of Gothenburg, began openly to say that Swedenborg was right, the ecclesiastical guns were unmasked.

Swedenborg was not surprised, he told Robsahm, when the latter asked him why only Beyer had accepted his explanation of Scripture. The clergy, he said, hear their doctrine of "faith alone" daily through schools and university, and then they cannot change. The clergy of every religion is like that, he added; they cannot be made to give up the most preposterous propositions after they have confirmed themselves in the doctrines.

The attack was led by Dean Ekebom of Gothenburg, who, in the marvellous manner of his kind, declared: "I am not acquainted with the religious system of Assessor Swedenborg, nor shall I take any trouble to become acquainted with it."

Still, leaning apparently on hearsay and on angry glances at one of Swedenborg's books, he did not hesitate to declare "Swedenborgianism" "corrupting, heretical, injurious, and, in the highest degree, objectionable." ¹⁰

Swedenborg had gone to Amsterdam with the manuscript of a new book when the full heresy hunt was on in 1769, but he fought back by letter, a letter which the orthodox clergymen involved said was "sinister." Swedenborg did in effect call them all liars, but what the clergy was most upset by was, not unnaturally, that Swedenborg in the letter came right out and said that the Doctrine of the New Church had been published to the world by the Saviour through his servant, Swedenborg.

When Swedenborg returned to Stockholm in October, 1769, he found himself well received, dined with the Crown Prince and Princess, had long talks with them, with the senators, with all but one of the bishops present, "all of whom treated me with kindness," as he wrote to Dr. Beyer. There is no doubt that the storm raged chiefly among the more provincial clergy, and in May, 1770, Swedenborg wrote a spirited letter to the King himself, reminding His Maiesty how, when he had been dining with the royal family, as well as five senators, his "mission constituted the sole topic of conversation, and how he had declared it before the whole of Christendom."

No answer was sent to this letter, but the King, together with Swedenborg's powerful friends, quietly sanded up the whole matter, the only sop given to the irate Dean Ekebom being that the two men accused of being "adherents" of Swedenborg's, Drs. Beyer and Rosén, were no longer to lecture on theological matters at the gymnasium.

Swedenborg, however, did not wait in Sweden to see the end of the affair. It may be true, as Robsahm tells, that in 1769 a senator warned him that some of the clergy had plotted to have him declared insane and shut up in an asylum. In any case, feelings had run high. Before Swedenborg left for Amsterdam in 1770 he gave Robsahm a protest to be submitted if his writings were condemned in his absence. He certainly did not leave in either 1769 or 1770 out of fear. He had the stuff of martyrs in him, but his books, his work, his "mission," sent him to his printers abroad.

As his works were being more and more widely read, he began to receive letters about them. The learned German prelate Oettinger, mentioned before, who was a reader of Jacob Boehme, was extremely enthusiastic about Swedenborg too—but not about "the internal sense" of the" Bible, nor about "correspondences," only about the experiences Swedenborg reported from the other world. He told him so directly: "Your experiences command more belief than your explanations of scripture." ¹¹

This was decidedly not what the aged Swedenborg wanted to hear. He had not relinquished his job, science, preferment, honor, nor had he spent his life struggling with "temptations" and arguing with men and spirits in order to be what he called a "subject," a mere transmitter of spirit-messages. He often said that these experiences were unimportant in themselves; they were only of value in proving that he did have access to much higher, angelic information on the subject of the Bible than anyone else.

He could not explain the reasons for his certainty, which perhaps was not so much of a certainty after all, since he became really annoyed when it was questioned.

He had no doubt forgotten about "the marvellous powers of the human mind," especially the memory. Long ago he himself had written that "in the whole study and pursuit of psychology nothing more wonderful is met with than the memory, nor anything more difficult of disentanglement . . ." ¹²

Though he knew that man's "ruling love" was what to a large extent determined his thinking, he did not seem to realize that it not only determined what a man would remember but also how and in what guise it would present itself. Memory would register indifferently a real and an imagined event, an objective and a subjective one, but the ruling love would often pick an imagined event and insert it into the series of real events¹³ and the passage of years would gloss it over with the patina of belief till not its own father could tell the difference.

Swedenborg might have forgotten how his interpretations of the Bible had come to him through his hand being moved involuntarily, or how voices had dictated to him, or how he had even written without knowing what he was writing (in any case he never suspected that some of these messages might have come from his own unconscious), but he had not forgotten his Vision. It had come to him resolving his long religious crisis, it had given him the mystic's direct experience of the Godhead, and all his conscious and subconscious life after that had been focused on the interpretation of it. After seventy it had become inextricably connected in his mind with the reinterpretation of the Bible, since he had to have both the Bible and his doctrines of the New Church for that new spiritual orientation which he wanted mankind to have.

This for him was his mission. He came to believe he had been "commanded" to announce it; in the spiritual world he said he had seen his theological books with the words "the Lord's Advent" written on them.¹⁴ Not in pride but in what he considered obedience did he announce that a man filled with the spirit of the Lord would, at the command of the Lord, receive the internal sense of Scripture in his understanding and publish it in the press. This release of the Lord in the Book was to be the real Second Coming.

But no one of any importance in Sweden, except the undeniably woolly-minded Beyer, seemed to take him seriously on this, for him, so vital point that he had a commission to elucidate the inner meaning of the Bible by means of "correspondence."

Men like Höpken were delighted with the ethical and philosophic aspects of his books; they approved, if not publicly, of his attacks on what Höpken in a letter called "the polytheism taught by the priests," but Swedenborg, not they, had had the Vision. Some of them believed that he could really talk with spirits, but the thing to which he considered his spirit-communication a testimony, his mission to interpret the "Word," fell on deaf ears, or at any rate on ears very hard of hearing.

No Stockholmer has left a detailed account of how in this matter Swedenborg struck a sensible burgher of his time, but luckily an Amsterdammer has done so. The story of Swedenborg's friendship with Johan Christian Cuno gives us not only some valuable glimpses of the seer's personality but an account of how that extraordinary personality impinged on an orthodox Christian of his time, a man who, although he had some literary interests, was really a stout human bulk of received ideas, his feet well planted on the floor of the Amsterdam Stock-Exchange.