Philosophy, Literature, Mysticism

I first became aware of Swedenborg 40 years ago when reading the poem Correspondances by Baudelaire. I found that Swedenborg was referred to in the notes, and I was sufficiently intrigued to borrow a biography from the University library. I remember the evening when I began reading it and soon became fascinated. I subsequently bought quite a few volumes of his work and started reading them over the summer. As it happens, this anthology of essays on the scope and influence of Swedenborg contains an essay on Baudelaire and symbolist poetry. The volume is wide ranging, with essays on Kant, CS Peirce, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, Emerson, Blake, Balzac, Dostoevsky, William James, Rossetti, Boehme, and CG Jung. Most of these were originally published in the Journal of the Swedenborg Society but there are six original contributions. Schopenhauer seems to have been fascinated by Swedenborg's clairvoyant capacities but, curiously, could not share his view that the soul survived physical death. Swedenborg was one of Emerson's representative men, while Balzac coined the term 'Buddha of the North.'

There are two essays by Nobel Prize winner Cseslaw Milosz, one on Blake and the other on Swedenborg as mystic. The term mystic is frequently derogatory, especially in humanist circles, but many distinguished writers are in fact mystics, including a number of those influenced by Swedenborg. Jung was one of the 20th century figures influenced by Swedenborg who might be seen as a pioneer of depth psychology and an accomplished traveller in other worlds, which Jung himself penetrated. The editor has performed a great service in bringing these contributions together in a single volume to show the extent of Swedenborg's influence on major philosophical and literary figures. It is surely time for a revival of interest among contemporary writers and intellectuals in this major 18th-century figure who has been unjustly neglected and who represents a synthesis of science and personal spiritual experience.