Precisely the dimension of our heritage that most needs to be recovered…I cannot imagine a more timely publishing venture.
Huston Smith
Emanuel Swedenborg: 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 America: His influence was everywhere: 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).
