The place of Emanuel Swedenborg in the spiritual saga of Scandinavia

Between 1749 and 1771 the Swede Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) wrote and published eighteen religious works in Latin that he claimed were the foundation of a new Christian religion. He wrote that he had been called by God to unlock the spiritual secrets of the Bible through the doctrine of correspondences; to reveal the nature of the spiritual world based on experience in that realm; and to explain the keys to living a heavenly life. Stating in his last work, True Christianity (paragraph no. 779) that he was called only to write and publish, Swedenborg never­ attempted to found a church. Swedenborg published his books in Amsterdam and London, and if his 1758 print runs of 1,000 for five different works are typical, he had thousands of books available to distribute throughout Europe and he did so. However, the number of books in Scandinavia at the time of his death was probably fairly small. In 1772 there were less than a dozen readers in all of Europe, and only a small handful in Scandinavia. While awareness, education, and access are necessary prerequisites to the possibility of responding to these works, interest is essential. From the beginning, and over the years since their publication, individuals motivated to explore them seem to fall into the following categories: religious virtuosi/seekers; philosophers; occultists; artists, poets, and, writers. In this article the author, after a few remarks about issues on scholarship, turns her attention to three men with three different relationships to Swedenborg‘s religious writings, they are Edvard Munch (1863–1944), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), and August Strindberg (1850–1912). Then she makes an assessment of Swedenborg’s contribution to Scandinavia