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Fig. 3.1: Interior of Swedenborgs Minneskyrka, Stockholm. Courtesy of Swedenborgs Minneskyrka Fig. 3.1: Interior of Swedenborgs Minneskyrka, Stockholm. Courtesy of Swedenborgs Minneskyrka. Photo: Thomas Xavier Floyd, 2015. Open Access. © 2021 Devin Zuber, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110639476-004 Devin Zuber Chapter 3 An Apocalypse of Mind: Cracking the Jerusalem Code in Emanuel Swedenborg’s Theosophy The Swedish scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) came to believe that the ideas contained in his mystical writings constituted the coming of the New Jerusalem, the dawning of a new age as foretold in the book of the Apocalypse. Both allegorical and yet tied to a specific historical claim – thataspiritual apocalypse, a “last judgement,” began unfolding in the year 1757 – Swedenborg cata- lysed a later generation of Romantic thinkers and writers (such as William Blake) who gravitated towards his millennial combination of Enlightenment empiricism with vi- sionary accounts of things “seen and heard” in heaven and hell. This chapter surveys Swedenborg’s conceptualisation of Jerusalem within his eschatological contexts, before considering how his delineations of alternative spiritualities, flourishing outside Christendom, galvanised later Swedenborgian and New Age imaginaries. Attention will also be given to how Swedenborg’s New Jerusalem led to distinctive artistic and ecclesiastical iconographies within the Swedenborgian church tradition. In 1743, the Stockholm-born natural scientist Emanuel Swedenborg was undergoing a serious spiritual crisis. He was in the midst of an ambitious project to locate the seat of the soul in the human body, applying years of his training in the various natu- ral sciences now to the labyrinths of brain and blood. His research, he was con- vinced, would prove to the growing scepticism and materialism of his age, once and for all, that spiritual causation existed in nature, and that the human was more than just matter, the mind not merely a Lockean tabula rasa: his project would grandly dem- onstrate “the mode in which the soul flows into its mind, and the mind into its body.”1 1 Swedenborg, 1955 no. 640. Following standard practice in scholarship on Swedenborg, all citations of his work refer to passage (and not page) numbers, in both his scientific and theological works, ex- cept where noted. Note: Forcommentsandsuggestionsonthischapter,IamindebtedtoJimLawrenceandRebecca Esterson, my colleagues at the Center for Swedenborgian Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, as well as the Rev. Göran Appelgren, pastor of the Swedenborgs Minneskyrka in Stockholm. Any re- maining errors are wholly my own. Devin Zuber, Associate Professor of American Studies, Religion, and Literature, The Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California 76 Devin Zuber But Swedenborg quickly hit a metaphorical wall, having pushed his Enlightenment ra- tionalist empiricism to its utter limits, and the epistemological framework undergirding his scientific thought began to crack and fragment under the duress of his transcenden- talist predilections. After a sequence of terrifying dreams, waking hallucinations, and visions that culminated with an epiphany of Christ when he was traveling through Holland during Easter in 1744, Swedenborg began to abandon his scientific search for the soul, feeling called towards a different kind of writing and task.2 A second vision of Christ a year later in London confirmed his sense that he was to undertake a new theo- logical vocation: “from that day I left all worldly scholarly endeavour and worked in spiritualibis from what the Lord commissioned me to write. Daily the Lord then often opened my bodily eyes, so that right in the middle of the day I could look into the other life and in the most joyful alertness talk with angels and spirits.”3 Over the next twenty-seven years, up until his death in 1772, Swedenborg em- barked on an ambitious theological project devoted to explicating the “inner” spiritual sense of Christian scriptures, bolstered by Swedenborg’s clinical accounts of his experi- ences “seen and heard”–ex visa et audita – of heaven, hell, and other places. While the ensuing eighteen separate theological works (several of which appeared in multiple volumes, like the massive Arcana Caelestia,or“Secrets of Heaven”) seem to have been geared towards attracting the attention of contemporaries in the church and the natu- ral sciences, Swedenborg’s work was largely ignored or discredited by established the- ologians; it would take a later generation of Romantic figures, such as William Blake or, in Scandinavia, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, for Swedenborg’s heterodox views on spirituality to find a home in the visionary aftermath of the Enlightenment.4 Due to the hostility articulated towards his doctrines by the Swedish Lutheran church,thereceptionofSwedenborginhisowncountrywasmoreorlessdrivenunder- ground. Even during Swedenborg’s lifetime, his doctrines had infamously came under scrutiny in 1770 during a much publicized heresy trial in Gothenburg; the Royal Council, 2 See the entries in Swedenborg’s “drömboken,” or journal of dreams, published only posthumously. Emanuel Swedenborg Swedenborg’sDreamDiary, trans. Lars Bergquist (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2001), 124–137. 3 Carl Robsahm, Memoirs of Swedenborg and Other Documents, trans. Anders Hallengren, ed. Stephen McNeilly (London: Swedenborg Society, 2011), 7. 4 See Chapter 18 (Anna Bohlin), 360–89. Swedenborg did have a measurable impact on Lutheran theo- logical circles in Germany, particularly in the work of the Schwabian theosophist Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, who had published the first book about Swedenborg’s theology in 1765; see Friedmann Stengel, Aufklärung bis zum Himmel. Emanuel Swedenborg im Kontext der Theologie und Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). Written in Neolatin, Swedenborg’s theological work was readily translated into English and German within his lifetime. The authoritative modern schol- arly editions of the Arcana Caelestia are the volumes being released as Secrets of Heaven by the Swedenborg Foundation; see Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven I, trans. Lisa Hyatt Cooper (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2008); Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven II, trans. Lisa Hyatt Cooper (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2013). Chapter 3 An Apocalypse of Mind 77 on advice from the Lutheran Consistory, decreed that they would totally “condemn, re- ject, and forbid” teaching the theological content of Swedenborg’sdoctrines.5 It was not until much later, in 1873, that Swedish laws would ultimately permit the establishment of non-Lutheran churches, and separatist Swedenborgian congregations were finally allowed to openly form, worship, and operate in Sweden – long after similar “churches of the New Jerusalem” had sprung up in England, America, and even Germany.6 Swedenborg’s somewhat contraband status in Scandinavia, however, rendered him quite attractive for later writers like Almqvist and Fredrika Bremer who themselves grav- itated towards various theological heterodoxies. Nevertheless, Swedenborg’shighlyidi- osyncratic interpretation of the “New Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, made ready like a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 21:2), as an allegorical code for the advent of a new spiritual age that his own writings were the harbingers of, ended up catalysing the religious-utopian imaginaries of a wide number of Romantic and post-Romantic painters, poets, and artists – other Scandinavians distinctly influenced by Swedenborg in this regard would include Thomas Thorild (1759–1808), P.D.A. Atterbom (1790–1855), Bernhard von Beskow (1796–1868), and the Finnish writer Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804–1877).7 This chapter is a brief attempt to crack Swedenborg’sown“Jerusalem code,” unravelling its em- beddedness within the discourses of both eighteenth-century theologies of history and allegorical hermeneutics, as well as its migration and transferability to a wide variety of other aesthetic projects, both in Scandinavia and elsewhere. Swedenborg’s glosses on the Apocalypse and the “new” Jerusalem were both synchronic and dia- chronic, tied to the specificity of a historical moment (through his claim that an es- chatological “last judgment” had already taken place in the spiritual world, in 1757), but also to a transcendent dimension of what Walter Benjamin would term the Jetztzeit [“now-time”] of a messianic (and anti-modern) sort of temporality: there wasn’tjustone single last judgment or apocalypse at a particular historical juncture, Swedenborg ar- gued, but the imminent possibility for all individuals (present and future) to experience within themselves last judgments, and to carry a model of the new Jerusalem within the spiritual architecture of their regenerated souls.8 5 Lars Bergquist, Swedenborg’s Secret: The Meaning and Significance of the Word of God, the Life of the Angels and Service to God (London: Swedenborg Society, 2005), 403–12. 6 Olle Hjern, “The Influence of Emanuel Swedenborg in Scandinavia,” in Scribe of Heaven: Swedenborg’s Life, Work, and Impact, eds. Jonathan Rose, Stuart Shotwell and Mary Lou Bertucci (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2005), 156; Feodor Goerwitz, “The New Church on the Continent of Europe,” in The New Jerusalem in the World’s Religious Congresses of 1893, ed. L. P. Mercer (Chicago: Western New-Church Union, 1894), 88–9. 7 Hjern, “The Influence of Emanuel Swedenborg
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