Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Parent Extraordinary
IF ever a man rejoiced in himself and in all his works, that man was Swedenborg's father, Jesper Swedberg. (The family name was ennobled into Swedenborg later on.) Few, sparse, and dry are the direct autobiographical details left by his son Emanuel, and this may have been due to a revulsion from the high fermentation of his father's vanity. Much else in Emanuel's life undoubtedly was a reaction from his father, hence a long look has to be taken at this clergyman, especially at his piety. His life reminds one of "the enormous difference between piety and goodness" 1 noted by Pascal, and of a story told of Swedenborg in which he is reported to have said that very few clergymen could be saved. 2
To make sure he wouldn't be forgotten, Jesper Swedberg presented each of his children with his "Life," six copies written out by himself, 1,012 pages, folio size. 3 He dedicated it to his "children and posterity for needed instruction in how to pass well through this world." The library at Upsala University was also to have a copy so that the "less envious" might profit by it.
Why did he write his autobiography? Not, as the envious would say, to praise himself, but only because "no one knows me better than I do myself, especially since, by the Grace of God, I am very careful to see that self-love neither blinds nor seduces me." His descendants would thus have a good example to follow, he told them, since he could prove to them how wonderfully God had dealt with him.
God, so the bargain would seem to run, was to prosper Jesper Swedberg in every worldly way, and Jesper Swedberg was to give God the credit and to preach against worldly things.
So, at any rate, it worked out from the beginning with only stimulating opposition from the Devil. At seven Jesper was saved from drowning in a millrace. "And if I'm not mistaken I think Satan meant to drown me as he meant to drown Moses in his tender years or to kill me as he tried to kill Christ through Herod's cruel and inhuman slaughter of the infants of Bethlehem. Probably he didn't like it that even in my childhood I was fond of reading the Bible aloud to the people who came to pick hops and so on. My greatest joy was to preach to them. I sat up high, but fell down so that I was lame for some time; that too was his doing."
Jesper was destined to study theology. There is genuine feeling in his account of his early sufferings with drunken and stupid teachers and those who believed in hammering in learning "per posteriora," but once he was grown and his talent for dramatic preaching could be unfolded, his troubles were over.
Brightly shallow and in constant motion, he pushed quickly ahead. In 1683, at thirty, he had already been named chaplain to the Royal Life Guards in Stockholm, and he had secured a wealthy wife from a distinguished family. She was Sara Behm, daughter of an official of the Board of Mines, and said to be descended through her mother from Gustavus Vasa. 4
Jesper had meant to marry another girl, but "God who takes a wonderful part in the deals of matrimony" sent a snowstorm. This caused Jesper's brother to lose his way and arrive accidentally at a manor where Jesper had just come as tutor. Half the night they talked, and the result was that Jesper decided to try to marry a sister of the girl his brother was going to marry.
"With this dear wife of mine God sent me great riches," but he did not intend to be henpecked. From the start he explained to Sara that just as he would not interfere in her housekeeping but would give her the money she required for it the moment she asked for it, and even a little more, so she was not to interfere in his work. Pray for him, yes, but no more.
Secondly, he explained, "If I am sitting in good company with worthy men taking my ease and pleasure without too much drinking, without shocking or angering anybody, that she will then not grudge me this cheerful ease and amusement after my hard work and much worry and in no way either urge me to leave it or cause me to be called."
If one looks at Sara's picture it hardly seems to have been a necessary warning to her, especially as he praises her for her gentle sweetness. But there is more than sweetness in her face. It has an inward look, something subtle in reserve. Her son Emanuel was to resemble her. This is evident in the clear-cut features, and in a lightly hovering expression about the mouth, the lips of which are sensitive and sweetly curved but seem to hint that the owner could be ironic.
Many years later Swedenborg was to write in one of his anatomical treatises that he considered the mouth to be the one feature which man himself creates, since all the muscles of the face are connected with it or lead to it and every expression of the face thus helps to mold this feature, itself so mobile and responsive. 5
Looking at his father's portrait, one is certain that if there was irony in his wife's smile it was lost on Jesper Swedberg. Low forehead, bulging nose, thick lips that seem to stick out in self-satisfaction, heavy black brows under which alert eyes stare forever outward. In one picture a big broad hand reposes on the perceptible mound of his black-gowned stomach, but it is a hand with long, slender, almost backward-curving fingers. Jesper Swedberg really loved music.
Far from poor himself and now "by God's aid" enriched with his wife's money, he left her during her first pregnancy to spend a year abroad. It was in 1684. He made the obligatory visits to England, France, and Germany. In Westminster Abbey he was pleased to see the stone on which Jacob slept when he was flying from his brother Esau in Mesopotamia. But what most impressed and delighted him was the English sabbath. He tells with satisfaction of a nobleman (he did not like nobles) who got his valet to row him to church along the Thames one Sunday. They were both put in jail for sabbath-breaking.
But Jesper Swedberg didn't like "all the many sects and parties, I mean those that the so-called reformed church is divided into. Not speaking of the biggest party which is called Thoris and Wigg, of High church and Low church, of Quakers and Anabaptists, but only of the so-called English church."
Taking this posy of traveler's impressions with him from England, he went on to Paris, where all his worst suspicions were confirmed. He said that not King Solomon himself had seen or heard of more worldly vanities than were here displayed. He noted the many foreigners who were there, not to consult the good libraries or the learned men, but to learn to dance or fence and speak the
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1. BISHOP JESPER SWEDBERG, 1653-1735 The father of Emanuel Swedenborg. Painted in 1707, by an unknown artist. In Gripsholm Castle. (Courtesy, Svenska portättarkivet.) |
2. SARA BEHM, 1666-1696 Wife of Jesper Swedberg and the mother of Emanuel Swedenborg. (Courtesy, Nordiska museet.) |
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language. The last accomplishment he was very dubious of—"God grant it be not at the cost of their timely and eternal welfare."
A speaking example of this he found when he arrived in Strasbourg. The city had just been won without a blow by the French. How? Because the commandant, a Strasbourger, had learned French in his youth in Paris, and when the general of the besieging troops spoke to him in this language, offering him a large bribe to sell out, his soldiers didn't understand what was going on and the city was lost.
Not always edified by the behavior of German Lutherans on the sabbath, "God help us, what didn't I see there and they living in the midst of Catholics," he was enthusiastic about the results of drilling people in the catechism, and he came back to Sweden, and to Albrecht, his first child, full of the returned traveler's desire to improve his own country.
His zeal was tempered by prudence, however. Very early in his career, he says himself, "I laid down two chief rules for myself. Firstly, never to meddle in affairs that had nothing to do with my office, especially not with political or worldly affairs. Secondly, never to speak ill of anyone were he my greatest enemy and persecutor."
Not only in the late seventeenth century would those have been excellent rules for a preacher to follow who desired to leave apostolic obscurity, but Jesper Swedberg had positive ability as well.
This ability was largely dramatic. In those times sermons could stretch to three or four hours of tedious doctrinal disquisitions. Not so Jesper Swedberg's. He could, and did, do that as well, so as to show off his vast (often inaccurate) learning, as he does with battalions of footnotes in his autobiography; but even in the book this man who had "the word" in his power can flash out, and in the pulpit he must have given a stirring performance, revivalist style.
His use of simple, strong-smelling words and pungent, homely similes was not original with him, Luther had authorized that, but in Jesper Swedberg there was a native vein of poetry. He wrote hymns that sometimes had a clear folk-song quality. Above all, he could tell a story.
At the beginning of his Stockholm career, when he had King Charles XI in the church one day, he launched into a vivid poetic account of how he had been walking in a green meadow after his hard work and how he had met two troops of children. One lot was weeping and wailing. Why? No one had taught them how to get to heaven. The other troop was joyful, they had been rightly taught. But why were the first lot in such a bad state?
He said he went to their schoolrooms to find out, and here he became shrewdly realistic. In a grammar school he found the pupils in a state of indiscipline, in spite of plentiful blows from a drunken schoolmaster, when they couldn't untangle the complicated doctrinal puzzles they were given. "Why are you drunk so early in the morning?" "Oh, I am very poor," he said, "at home I have a sick wife and a house full of children with neither bite nor sup. It muddles my head and when I leave the house I'm only too glad to be asked to have a glass of brandy. My salary is small and I hardly get half of it."
Previously, Jesper Swedberg said, he had visited a couple of private schoolrooms in noble houses. They knew their catechism all right, but only by heart, not in their hearts. Grand French finery hung all around, which was all they cared about—that and the French frivolity which was taught them by a French governess. What they saw and heard at table from their elders was such that he wished himself far from there. They even heard reflections on the King—no wonder their souls were lacking in spiritual nourishment.
The picture he gave of a lapdog-kissing, arrogant nobility was full of dramatic detail, it could have gone into any proletarian description of the wicked capitalist, but that was not his animus. The rich children, like the poor, were being deprived of true religion, something which he vaguely summarized as the Fear of God.
Undoubtedly sincere in his charges, Jesper Swedberg was not so foolhardy in attacking the nobles as he might seem, because King Charles XI, clearing the ground for absolute monarchy, was busily shearing them of both property and power. Preferment for the clergy came from the King, and Charles XI was quick to be both entertained and pleased by Swedberg and to see his usefulness. The King was one of those stern and pious warriors produced by Sweden. He took being the Lord's anointed seriously, believing that this entailed more responsibilities than privileges. Jesper Swedberg's childhood acquaintance with poor, drunken teachers had given him sincerity about education, a subject about which the King was no less concerned than about procuring able clerical aid in the reduction of the nobles. It was not long before the chaplain of the King's guards was promoted to court chaplain, then to a rural parsonage, and almost immediately afterwards to be third professor of theology at Upsala University. Quickly, in the twinkling of a royal eye, he was made rector, then first professor of theology and dean of the university. Eventually he was to become Bishop. (In 1702, Charles XII made him Bishop of Skara.)
Never, Swedberg was fond of saying, did he acquire any of his offices through "hopping and shopping." Not a penny did he ever pay. Thus he enlarged on the blessed feeling it was to have such calls come to one through Divine favor only.
King Charles XI made no mistake in his rapid promotion of the miner's son. Almost part of Swedberg's theology was his belief in absolute monarchy. "The King should be King and the subject should be subject." What if the King were bad? That was God's punishment on the subjects for their bad behavior, and to be borne patiently.
His clerical brethren against whom he never ceased fulminating for their "jealousy and backbiting" were to say later that of course Swedberg thought every kind of parliamentary system a nuisance, placing so many obstacles between himself and royalty, whom he was expert in milking for financial favors.
Jesper Swedberg deplored such people at great length. If there was one thing he knew about himself, he very often said, besides the fact that he had no self-love, it was that he was utterly without the money-grubbing instinct. There was no avarice in his soul. He was scornful of the clergy for taking tithes or confession fees, he never hounded his parishioners for them. "I never kept accountbooks. The Bible was, is and will be all the book I want." Of course, he added, if people brought him presents, that was another matter.
Nor did he despise the income from the church properties to which he was entitled, and when, after inevitably becoming a bishop, he gave his son Jesper a parish (that Jesper who had been "rather wild" before he was tamed in America and the British navy), Jesper had to pay him the customary yearly tribute, only being let off during the first couple of years.
Swedberg gained great popularity through not ferreting out all the pennies of the poor, as the majority of the clergy had to. Very few of them had inherited copper mines or had married wealth. Nor did they have his knack of loosening the royal purse strings, whether it was to reimburse him for "giving" the catechism to the royal guards, or to rebuild his house in a bigger and finer style each of three times when his old enemy the Devil caused it to be burnt.
The "incredible sums" which he says he used for the publication of his many devotional books were of course spent only for the glory of God, though Jesper signed them, and he never forgets to remind the reader of the thirty thousand riksdaler he lost on his hymnbook, the one which he says his jealous colleagues prevented from being adopted. (He was able to unload some copies on the Swedish congregations in America, and they liked it.) At the same time he notes with satisfaction that he never really lost any money; somehow it all came back to him. The manner is not specified, but at the end of his autobiography he says he is just wealthy as he ever was. Inconsistency in his statements never worried him; knowing the Bible literally by heart, he had a barrage of scripture to support his most contradictory positions.
It is not surprising that this man, so sublimely self-occupied and self-deceived, should scarcely have mentioned his children in this book that was written for his children. Emanuel hardly figures in it, except as the author of some Latin verses which his father requested him to write on the occasion when a copper plate engraved with the Bishop's picture was "miraculously" preserved in a fire. But we know that in 1688, while Swedberg was still in Stockholm, his wife Sara gave birth to Emanuel, and that at the age of about two years he was moved to Upsala with the family.
The dean of the University of Upsala (and chief professor of theology) had his dwelling in the town which was dominated by the cathedral in more senses than one. Its Gothic towers rose not only over the medieval castle but over the town of about five thousand inhabitants and above the whole of the undulating countryside The university had been its child in Roman Catholic times. It was still its child in Protestant times, soon to be restive and wanting to lead a life of its own, but obliged as yet to put theology first.
Protestant intellect had given itself to shaping codes of doctrine and dogma as hair-splittingly futile as any of the medieval ones. Protestant emotion out of which the whole Reformation had sprung—aided by the fervent heart of Luther—opposed this desiccating process, and finally rebelled in the so-called "pietist" movement, which was sweeping Germany about the time that Jesper Swedberg was making his grand tour. 6
Completely unintellectual, it suited him to absorb the idea that "faith," which had come to mean tediously involved doctrine, was not nearly so important as a direct relationship with God expressed in "works." This relationship was nobly interpreted by believers with a touch of the mystic in them as the carrying into life of Christian principles no matter what worldly objections might be, but their hordes of lesser followers turned the movement into one of such "pietism" as glazed inactivity on the sabbath, disapproval of dancing and cards, and scorn of finery. For them this was the positive side of religion, and far less dangerous and difficult than Christian ethics.
The students at Upsala feared the new Dean might be a "pietist" and that "no student might wear wig or sword." But he went easy at first. "Wear wigs," he said, "especially if you need them." That made the boys laugh; they soon decided the hearty, pungent, booming Dean was a good fellow, and they gave him the deference of the young which makes a university such a cozy hothouse for the egoist with a flair for popularity.
He did indeed like to use pietist language against what was "worldly," against "sin," which showed itself in two things, sabbath-breaking and frivolous modern apparel, especially the wearing of wigs. The fashionable full-bottom wig had spread from France to Sweden, and literally nothing so appalled Swedberg as this. Throughout his whole book he comes back again and again to the virtue there is in wearing one's own "God-given" hair, and the dreadful consequences of the other custom. "My whole body trembles," he said, "when I am consecrating ministers and have to lay my hands on hair which is, perhaps, whore-hair."
He mentions that one theological student who wore such a wig as well as lace collar and cuffs was later mixed up in a murder.
Then as now the extravagance of women's fashions was a good target. Even Swedberg's first wife, Sara Behm, felt she had to be in the fashion. As her husband puts it, "Since every woman in those days wore a sinful and troublesome fontange or top-knot, she was obliged to do as others did and wear it, but, hearing that a cow in the island of Gothland had with great labor and pitiful bellowing brought forth a calf with a top-knot, she took her own and her girls' fontanges and threw them all into the fire."
Worse than these sins which reacted only on the individual (or innocent cows) was sabbath-breaking, of which a terrible instance threatened when the Court proposed a masquerade on a Sunday. From the pulpit Swedberg assured them that such doings were punished by the Lord with pestilence and war, so that the masquerade was canceled. But there was enough sabbath-breaking to account for the pestilence and war which soon did harass the country. So he notes, with the deep and melancholy satisfaction of the righteous.
Jesper Swedberg's God, who ought really to have been called The-Fear-of-God, was an Absolute Monarch, fond of endless adulation, before whom the worshiper groveled, and whom by egregious flattery he hoped to move to the granting of favors. Angels, devils, ghosts, demons, weird omens, and portents were all part of His supernatural cast with which to awe rebellious mankind. Freaks of nature, such as the Gotland calf wearing the fontange, showed His indifference to His own laws of nature. Enthroned above them He seemed indeed to be Caprice Incarnate, rather than the embodiment of eternal law.
Although there is so little information on Emanuel's childhood, there is a scrap which seems to show that, curiously enough, he passed unaffected by this creation of egoism and primitive fancies.
A tradition says that Emanuel (as is reported of other "psychic" subjects) had unseen playmates in his childhood. He would speak of things far beyond his years, and when his parents asked him where he heard them he said that it was from the boys with whom he played in the garden house. As they knew he was alone there, they opted for the marvelous and said that angels spoke through his mouth. 7
When he was old Swedenborg himself reported to an inquiring Englishman this saying of his parents. The words attributed to the child were marvelous enough, considering his youth. He said that from his sixth to his twelfth year he liked to discuss faith with clergymen, and that he said the life of faith was love and this lifegiving love was the love of one's neighbor; furthermore that God gave the gift of faith to everyone, but only those could receive it who had that love. "I knew of no other faith beyond this that God created nature, maintains it, gives reason and character to men and whatever follows from that. The learned belief which is that God credits his son's 'merits' to whom He wants to when He wants to, even to those who have neither repented nor improved, I knew nothing of then, and if I had, it would then as now have been far beyond my understanding." 8
He seems to have had a happy childhood, brothers and sisters to play with by the shining Fyris River that wound through the town. Upsala was a vivid place to grow up in. It mounted to the majestic, grim, rose-red brick of the old castle on a steep escarpment, and to the cathedral in which the soaring pillars were like many tall slender gray beeches grown together and vaulting out in the high dusk above. Besides the lacquer-red wooden houses of ordinary citizens there were several fine, well-proportioned buildings of a warm yellow and there were wide green spaces. Upsala was not a small town; it had architecture, it had history, going back to pagan times. Emanuel came out of the heart of Sweden.
Years afterwards he wrote about the unconscious innocence of childhood, with an accent of autobiography.
"Children do not take credit for anything themselves, all that they get they thank their parents for; they are delighted with the few trifling things that are given to them; they have no care about food and clothing and none about the future; they do not look to the world and covet many things from it; they love their parents and nurses and the little comrades with whom they play. They are attentive and they obey. Being in this state, they accept whatever life offers and hence, without knowing why, their manners are good and they learn to talk." 9
One can almost see the polite, quiet little Swedish child, solemnly blue-eyed. It must be remembered that Swedenborg had no children of his own, except the child he had once been.
Elsewhere he describes children playing ball and other mildly competitive games under the eyes of their parents and tutors. He observes how "the least inanimate object seems to them alive, when they're at their little pastimes." Few things so shocked him as when once in London he saw parents egging on their children to fight, for money.
When Emanuel was eight years of age, his mother died. She was in her thirtieth year. She had borne nine children, five boys and four girls. Albrecht, her first-born, died ten days after her. Eliezer died later.
Her husband paid tribute to her sweetness, gentleness, and kindness, and remarried within a year.
God again, Swedberg says, provided him with the right kind of wife, by letting him be the means of bringing a young rake to a deathbed conversion, and thus drawing his attention to the young man's wealthy aunt.
Their marriage was arranged before he had had a chance to meet her, but he had managed to find out that she was "godfearing, pious, generous to the poor, wealthy, handsome, a clever housekeeper, and had no children."
Only he can tell what follows: "Two days before the wedding I arrived in Stockholm where she also had arrived two days previously. I was brought into a room where she was sitting alone, but I didn't know it was she, I couldn't imagine it as nobody had told me. I sit down next to her. We talk for a long while about this and that like the strangers we were. Until at last she asks: 'What does the Professor think of our bargain?' I answer, 'What kind of bargain?'—'The one you wrote to me about.' 'What did I write to you about? I don't know of anything.'—'Aren't we to be bride and groom tomorrow?'—'Is that who you are!' I said. And so we confirmed our friendship with handshakes and loving embraces and such like, with mutual pleasure and contentment."
Sara Bergia was her name, and she had already been twice married. "She was barren," Swedberg records, "and now all of a sudden she had seven children."
To them she was a good mother, and her favorite was Emanuel. In his notebook of "other-world" experiences, he startles one by mentioning "my mothers," with equal affection.
It was an age of dutiful children and strong family bonds. Kinship implied much. Love, or at least the expression of it, was obligatory. A kinship term was hardly ever used without the word "dear" (käre) preceding it, often abbreviated to the first letter. You wrote about d:father, d:mother, d:aunt, unless you were actually going to law with your aunt. D:brother and d:sister extended to in-laws.
Set tributes to d:parents were the thing, and Emanuel made several of them to his d:father.
Probably while he was young he shared many people's belief that his father was the bluff, kind, modest man he obviously felt himself to be, and indeed said that he was. Nor can it be denied that Jesper Swedberg along with feathering his own nest was often willing to help others, especially that extension of himself, his family. He took personal trouble in a good cause, preferably in public, and he had sound, commonsense ideas on educational methods. He advocated better pay and a higher status for teachers. He helped to prepare a better translation of the Bible. It horrified him to have Swedish interlarded with French words. His children must often have heard him speak the ringing words he wrote: "I'll care for our noble mother-tongue while I eat Swedish bread and drink Swedish beer."
His delivery of the obvious was always in the stateliest manner, unhampered by any hesitancy of self-criticism.
Emanuel could hardly at this time have begun his reflections on the tawdriness of good works undertaken mainly for self-glorification, nor on the grim discord which is so apt to exist between the inner and the outer man. But in later life while reading his father's autobiography he cannot have helped noticing many things, illuminated by recollection.
He may have remembered the banquet to the paupers of Upsala which his father describes twice to make sure it will be clear how much he cares for the poor and how little for the "worldly." When his fine new stone house had been built for him, he gave a banquet for the paupers and hospital patients of the town. Swedberg himself, his wife and children waited on them. Emanuel was ten years of age then. All that was lacking to inform the left hand thoroughly of what the right was doing was a radio commentator and a movie camera.
As a pendant to this story there is one of how a little blackmail was used on the King. When the young hero, Charles XII, was engaged in ruining the poor people of Sweden with his obstinate warfare, he ordered total mobilization, even of the servants of the clergy. Jesper Swedberg insisted to the King's face that he had to be allowed to keep his coachman. But Charles was flintily silent, whereupon the Bishop burst out:
"I've been reading the books of wise statesmen, O most gracious King, and I've found that among the devices for keeping subjects obedient is the one by which the Government takes care to have the clergy on its side. If the common people go mad, nobody except the parson can manage them. But if the parson is badly treated he'll tell everything he knows, even in the pulpit, which is not right. The farmer sits and listens, and he sighs, and so it goes whenever they meet. We hope with the help of God, that God will spare us riot and rebellion. But they have happened and they can happen again. That is why the Government has always thought it wise to keep the clergy in good humor."
To all of which Charles answered not one word.
Still more striking Emanuel must have found the discord between the chapters in which his father describes the excellence of his own disposition, and some of the examples he gives elsewhere of his behavior. The Bishop (as he now is) duly thanks God for his fine mind and beautiful character; how since his youth he had always sought good and hated evil; though to begin with he had some faults, yet he loved to be told of them; how he only hated quarrels and enmities; how he took special joy in forgiving his enemies and doing good to them. He admits to a quick temper, but stresses his gentle and forgiving heart. He was always sober. But always merry and bright. He loved work. Perfectly unhappy if he wasn't working.
That was true, he was in ceaseless activity. As to the forgiving and gentle heart, Emanuel must have thought it odd that in this book his father included the letter to Andreas Hesselius.
Andreas was his nephew by marriage. The Bishop was in charge of the Swedish congregations abroad, one of his most self-mentioned glories, and he had sent Andreas to take charge of a parish in America. Later he recalled him, without having any job for him at home. Andreas sent his uncle a letter in which can be traced a resentment of that, and some veiled reference to the fact that he had been done out of an inheritance. He also mentions that he is sorry not to be able to oblige his uncle in the matter of writing a new history of the American congregations in which the Bishop is to be eulogized.
It is not a very friendly letter. The man is evidently overcome by many troubles, but the retort, printed in full, is a scream of excommunication and anathema. So disproportionate is it that the reader is considerably puzzled, until he discovers that the Queen had enjoyed an account of America written by Hesselius, in which there was no mention of Bishop Swedberg.
"I never asked you for a eulogy," Swedberg declares. "In all my books I never praise myself, but other people have done it in abundance." Nor, he points out, had Hesselius brought him the customary present of furs from America. But the reference to the inheritance stung worst of all. The Bishop had published one of his favorite godly works with money left for that purpose by his second wife, Hesselius's aunt. Didn't she have the right to leave the money as she wished? "Who can justly object, save the unjust driven by the spirit of avarice whose tongue is a fire and a world of injustice and ignited by hell?"
There were thousands of words the reverse of gentle forgiveness.
Only a man like Swedberg who had never taken a real look at himself could have called attention to this. Nor could he have written of various other matters which illustrate his attitude toward physical cause and effect. Material for Emanuel, who was to be concerned about a universe of law.
The Bishop tells how he had been left a silver mug by a courtier whom he attended on his deathbed, but he didn't receive it. "The will was contested, for the silver mug was fine and important. The court preacher who buried him got the silver mug, but also rather a hard death in Bender, Turkey. A lynx ate him up. The silver mug couldn't help him."
Archbishop Swebelius had not, Swedberg thought, stood up for his hymnbook as he should. When the Cathedral of Upsala burned, the Archbishop's corpse, which lay in a copper cofiin and was immured in a grave with a stone on top, was all incinerated. "But my hymnbooks which weren't even bound didn't get as much as scorched . . . thus does God preserve in the fire that which evil people do not like."
When Professor Jerfeld, "a bold and arrogant man," told King Charles XI right to his face that Swedberg's hymnbook might lead to much trouble, even to a war of religion, the angry King "pushed him against the wall, because of which he had to take to his bed, where he could think about his bold arrogance. He died in a few days." Swedberg's marginal comment on this is: "Prof. Jerfeld gets into hot water."
Less bloodthirsty miracles were also wrought for him, such as the stopping of rain or the coming of it, as needed. He says furthermore that he was able to heal people by the laying on of hands, to drive out demons, and he claims he even raised a girl from the dead. He expects that the envious and the worldly will jeer at him for this, and for recording it, but he will comfort himself by remembering that the Pharisees jeered at Christ himself, and that Christ had his evangelists put his miracles into writing.
Instead of being crucified, however, Jesper Swedberg was to be made a bishop. In 1703 he left Upsala to live at the episcopal residence of Brunsbo, near Skara.
One of his children he did not take with him; this was Emanuel. Since the age of eleven Emanuel had been entered in the university, and he was now to live with his brother-in-law, the college librarian, Eric Benzelius.
He was in his fourteenth year; his childhood was over. It is doubtful if he continued to see his father as the Bishop imagined himself. Swedenborg's lifelong passion for the genuine, both in religion and in science, has roots so deep that its origin must be traced to his most impressionable years. During them he had always before him a spectacular example of that "love of self" whose many subtle disguises he was to become expert in penetrating, even in himself.
But in 1703 the adolescent youth gave his entire love to a new world, one in which selflessness is quite often found—that of science.