Platonists, to one of whom, Henry More (Morinus), he also refers in the Economy. He had read John Norris, the interpreter of the French Platonist Malebranche, whom he had also read. He knew the so-called Theology of Aristotles, really a work of a disciple of Plotinus. Swedenborg quotes St. Augustine liberally, and Thomas Aquinas and other Neoplatonist church fathers; 4 he quotes, of course, Plato, the father of them all, and he weaves in Aristotle (calling him often merely "the Philosopher," as was usual) whenever it suits him. It suits him well, because he uses him to support his saying that "the action of God," the law by which He acts, "is God himself." And he knew Spinoza.5
Swedenborg did not invent a religion, any more than he invented the science of anatomy.
His discoveries in regard to the human body were based, he tells us, on his study of what the experts in anatomy had set forth, with only a little of his own experience in dissection thrown in. As far as religion is concerned the order was probably reversed, and a spark of personal experience preceded his study of it, but he would have been the last to deny that in his spiritual search he consulted the experts. He did not always put quotation marks around what he used from them—most of it was well known—and he was not concerned to get a doctor's degree for his knowledge.
He was concerned with harmonizing his scientific conscience and his religious yearning, and with the aid of Neoplatonism he was able to sketch out a system, a picture of the whole, which began to fulfill this purpose.
The Hindu, Buddhist 6 and Greek predecessors of Plotinus and his Christian and Kabbalistic successors saw the created world as having emanated as force or radiated as light from the unknowable, uncreated Source, called God or Law or Light, matter being the radiation farthest from the Divine Center.
Neoplatonism 7 often spoke of this procession as a ladder reaching from God to the material world, but until Swedenborg had convinced himself that an immaterial force directing the development of an embryo could produce a material body he was probably not sure, as a physicist, that the ladder really rested on solid ground. He had identified this force, with the soul, and he saw the soul as created by the divine light and capable of receiving it.
