Emanuel Swedenborg: The Universal Human and Soul-Body Interaction

The Classics of Western Spirituality

by George F. Dole, Stephen Larsen

"Precisely the dimension of our heritage that most needs to be recovered...I cannot imagine a more timely publishing venture." Huston Smith Emanuel The Universal Human and Soul-Body Interaction edited and translated by George F. Dole introduction by Stephen Larsen preface by Robert H. Kirven "In Christendom to date, there is a thick fog about the existence of a spiritual world…To prevent ignorance of that world, and a consequent wavering faith about heaven and hell, from making such fools of us that we become materialistic atheists, the Lord has graciously opened the sight of my spirit. He has thus raised me into heaven and lowered me into hell, and has shown me visually what each is like." Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1771) Writing in his Religious History of the American People Sydney E. Ahlstrom comments on the impact that Emanuel Swedenborg had on nineteenth-century "His influence was in Transcendentalism and at Brook Farm, in spiritualism and the free love movement, in the craze for communitarian experiments, in faith healing, mesmerism, and a half-dozen medical cults; among great intellectuals, crude charlatans, and innumerable frontier quacks." Swedenborg was the son of a well-known Swedish theologian and had an outstanding career as a scientist and as assessor of his country's Board of Mines. His expertise encompasses the disciplines of geology, anatomy, astronomy, and physics. At age fifty-seven he underwent a religious experience that initiated him in his role of prophet and revealer of a system of thought that was destined to become one of the most important elements in the modern Christian esoteric tradition. This volume contains new translations by George F. Dole of "The Universal Human" from Arcana Coelestia (1747-1753) and the complete text of Soul-Body Interaction (1769). †

Genres: Religion, Mysticism

Paperback

First published July 1, 1984

About the author

Rev. Dr. Dole is an Emeritus Professor with Adjunct status at the Center for Swedenborgian Studies at GTA. He was born and currently resides in Maine. He holds a B.A. from Yale, an M.A. from Oxford, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Reviews

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I once attended an AA meeting in the Swedenborg Church behind the Yard at Harvard near Kirkland Hall. It was a nice place with some free literature to spark my interest. This book is comprehensive enough to dampen it. However it was interesting in a good way and I'm glad I've finished it once and for all. Amen.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superbly edited and translated by George F. Dole, prefaced by Robert H. Kirven, and introduced by Stephen Larsen, this masterwork by Swedenborg elucidates “the most obscure fact in this world”: “everything in the human body has a correspondence with something in heaven . . . to the point that there is not the smallest particle in the body that does not have something spiritual and heavenly corresponding to it, or—which is the same—that does not have a corresponding heavenly community . . . [and that these communities] exist in a design such that they reflect, taken altogether, a single person [inwardly and outwardly] . . . called the Universal Human (Maximus Homo).” (p. 40)

[Mahmoud Awad · Rating 3 out of 5]

This text is made up of extracts from the "Arcana Coelestia" (1753) and "Soul-Body Interaction" (1769). I would have read those instead if I had access, but I did not, so we're stuck with the Reader's Digest version. Normally I would gloss over the text and only mention truly important points, such as Swedenborg's unconditional enthusiasm for intellectual "discernment". However, this is not the average book and Swedenborg is not the average author. In fact, his theology is so uncommon I believe it to warrant a full review in the spoiler below.

In short, he details the mechanisms of the body revealed to him by angelic spirits, and their parallel to the "homo maximus" or universal human following the death in the material plane.

Like Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" or many inceptions of the Eastern cosmos, the sinful and the virtuous enjoy afterlives approximate to their nature in corporeal reality. Notably, however, there is no external punitive force here, no Satan and no personified godhead but for an emergent love/intelligence local to the universal human "cerebrum". A dead soul is "digested" by the cosmic body and stripped of antinutrients by angelic spirits until it enters the "blood" and joins the stellar community in a fitting role. Botanists, scientists and lovers of knowledge live as aspects of the brain, with Jannah's glory in gardens, gems, beauty and purity in general. They are auspicious, with a nimbus embodying their cognition.

Contrarily, the spirits put to the soles of the feet, the urine, anus and so on become putrid and hellish because they too are hellish, accompanied by a sulfurous stench and glow. The stench of these is fitting for their misdeeds. Feces seeps from adulterer spirits, carrion to violent spirits, feces AND carrion to the spirits of violent adulterers, and so on. I took a moment to note my own tendency for olfactory hallucination of burning rubber and urine at this point.

The strange repetition and insistence of hellish spirits identified with "sallow" faces and a frequently noted "latticework of teeth" (?!) become legitimately disquieting for their description in such dry and detached, rationalist text, no different than the lassitude in which he describes the mechanistic sensations of smell or hearing. Beyond this the text is surprisingly unemotional, more as an illustrative journey in the character of a modern Merck's manual of the gross anatomy. "Here you have the renal system, and it's kind of smelly but it does so-and-so. Moving on..."

At points esoteric philosophy glimmers through. Even a lay-reader will probably pick up the influence on William Blake, Jung, to a degree Lewis Carol's "Silent Planet" series, and neoplatonist/theosophist esotericism to which I am especially acquainted. Indeed his descriptions of the second, spiritual sun behind our physically solar one are interchangeable with "black sun" of Nazi mystics, for that alone I would posit this as an essential volume for readers interested in their notions.

If E. S. was a con, insane, or an insane con, he at least expressed the decency to deceive for the benefit of fairly wholesome principles.