Somnambulism or magnetic sleep ( magnetism) encouraged an approach based upon a belief in the psychogenesis of many conditions, relying on the rapport with a hypnotist. The insight that unknown psychological forces were at work and the induction of the trance states of magnetic sleep to explore unknown psychic functions as well as to serve therapeutic ends heralded a new phase in the  numbers of students attracted to F.A. Mesmer in Paris and the amount of trained  mesmerists rapidly increased., until  by 1789, an eclectic, spiritualistic form of mesmerism was established and was rapidly spreading throughout Europe hence providing also a link with the famous  Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) founder of a new religious movement . Thus Swedenborg was not the first seer to claim contact with a higher reality. But unlike Jacob Boehme, his seventeenth-century predecessor in mystical religion, Swedenborg made his inspirations accessible to a very wide public. His detailed descriptions of the spiritual worlds and their inhabitants attracted numbers of adherents among both the curious and the bereaved. At the age of 54,  Swedenborg had strange dreams and fantasies, tremors, prostrations, trances, sweating, and swooning, until in a grand vision in April 1745, the "Lord God" appeared. And although less dramatic in the case of a psychologist by profession Helen Schucman, there is obviously a parallel insofar the voice who went on to dictate A Course In Miracles, claimed to be Jesus Christ, except that Swedenborg subconsciously wanted to found a new Church.

Regarding the ultimate source of Swedenborg's insights there basicly have been  two lines of interpretation. Major biographers such as Martin Lamm (1880-1950)  and Inge Jonsson  have strongly emphasized the continuity between Swedenborg's scientific and visionary phase. Other Swedenborg specialists, such as, for example, Ernst Benz (1907-1978) and Marsha Keith Schuchard, while not denying the relevance of Swedenborg's scientific background, suggest that the essential sources of his spiritual worldview lie elsewhere. Swedenborg is presented by them as a modern representative of Western esotericism, whose worldview is ultimately based upon such currents as Neoplatonism, the Hermetic philosophy of the Renaissance, Jewish and Christian Kabbalah, and the Christian theosophy of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) and his followers. According to the latter authors  (in favor of the "esoteric Swedenborg") write that Swedenborg must have intentionally suppressed this aspect because he feared that quotations from Kabbalists and mystics might discredit his work in the eyes of his rationalist readers. In the absence of many explicit source references, the alleged dependence of Swedenborg's worldview on traditional esoteric cosmologies is defended by invoking the structural similarity that is claimed to exist between them. Swedenborg was aware of a range of philosophers of nature influenced by hermetic, alchemical, and Kabbalistic traditions. His library catalog shows that he owned books of this kind; he must have had some familiarity with the outlines of Jacob Boehme's system (although mostly indirectly, by mediation of Johann Konrad Dippel [1678-1734]); he sometimes uses terminology derived from the Paracelsian tradition; and he was certainly familiar with the Cambridge Platonists Henry More (1614-1687) and Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688) as well as with the Christian Kabbalist Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (1614-1698). In addition, he was seriously influenced by the "divine physics" of his contemporary Andreas Rudiger (1673-1731). However, we should realize that it was quite normal for an erudite scientist and natural philosopher in the first half of the eighteenth century to be acquainted with such authors and their ideas, since they were still very much a normal part of acceptable philosophical and scientific discourse; in fact, it would have been strange if Swedenborg had not been aware of them. Generally, however, he seems to have been interested in their more strictly philosophical insights concerning the workings of nature and its relation to the soul. The influence of the authors just mentioned does not add up to an "esoteric philosophy" however, in the sense of an integrated religious worldview based upon hermetic, alchemical, or Kabbalistic foundations and referring to supra-rational sources of revelation (gnosis) yet Swedenborg used what one could call a somnanbule, seer, or visionary  method called clairvoyance.

For Swedenborg the Word was "the means for uniting heaven and earth." It "comes from the Lord and was sent down to us through heaven" and was "written not only for people on earth but also for the angels present with us, ... which is why the Word has the nature it does and why it is unlike any other piece of literature" (Secrets of Heaven §2310).

There is, in fact, a dramatic difference between how angels perceive the Word and how human beings perceive it. Angels perceive the inner meaning and nothing else:

They know nothing whatever of the literal contents, or the most obvious meaning of even one word, still less the names of different lands, cities, rivers, and people that come up so frequently in the narrative and prophetic parts. All they picture are the things those words and names symbolize. Adam in Paradise, for instance, brings the earliest church to their minds-and not even the church but its belief in the Lord. Noah brings up the picture of that church's remnant among its successors, lasting up to Abram's time. Abram never makes them think of the man who lived but of a saving faith, which he represented. And so on ....

Several people found themselves carried up into heaven's outermost entry hall while I was reading the Word, and they spoke to me from there. They said that they had no inkling of a single word or letter there but saw only the things symbolized on the next deeper level of meaning. These, according to their description, were so beautiful, followed in such a perfect sequence, and affected them so deeply that they called it glory. (Secrets of Heaven §§64-65)
The complete and utter ignorance of the angels concerning the literal meaning finds its exact counterpart in the no less radical ignorance of human beings concerning the inner meaning. As repeated many times by Swedenborg himself, it is indeed impossible to infer the inner meaning from the literal meaning. Each single word functions as a code for an abstract or spiritual concept.

The subject of the Word as a whole, once decoded in this manner, is regeneration (§64); and this process is described as exemplified in the life and inner development of the Lord, on the one hand, and in the historical development of religious consciousness, on the other. As for the book of Genesis, these two strands are distributed as shown in the diagram on the next page. For Exodus the situation is easier: the entire book is devoted to the spiritual church founded by the Lord.

The account of the six days of creation in Genesis 1 is interpreted as referring to the six consecutive stages in human regeneration: from the initial stage of being "dead" to the stage of a fully developed spiritual person. The seventh day refers to the individual who has progressed from there to the highest stage, that of a "heavenly person," and the description of the Garden of Eden is actually a description of that person's nature and constitution. Swedenborg then reveals that, in fact, this "person" stands for the earliest church and proceeds to describe how this church slowly declined from its original heavenly state. This happened because the members "insisted on autonomy" (Secrets of Heaven §137), that is to say, began to let themselves be guided by self-love and love for the world. From this, they began to believe only what their physical senses told them (their sensory part being represented by the serpent in paradise) and to "examine closely the tenets of faith in the Lord, to see whether they were true" (§ 192). This attitude of criticism and skepticism is represented by eating from the tree of knowledge. They were now under the influence of evil, although an earthly goodness remained with them. No longer willing to believe anything but what they apprehended by the senses, they were well on their way to hell; but to prevent them from having to end up there, the Lord promised that he would come into the world. Swedenborg describes the further degradation of the church, through several generations down to the Flood; the members eventually could no longer apprehend any truth at all, developed an "animalistic nature" (§239), and turned away from everything belonging to faith and love. Cain means "the teaching that faith was separate from love" (§325), while Abel means charity; the murder of the latter by the former means the victory of heretical doctrines over charity. However, a new faith was provided by the Lord, by means of which charity was implanted anew; Seth means this new faith, and Enosh the charity implanted by means of it. Swedenborg continues by describing a number of further churches, represented in the Bible as persons (apart from Seth and Enosh, he mentions Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah). All of these churches derive from the first one called Humankind and are considered branches of the earliest church. From the church called Noah arose three classes of doctrine, referred to as Shem, Ham, and Japheth; they eventually perished in the Flood, that is to say, in a deluge of evil and falsity (§603); but the ark, meaning "a member of this church" (homo hzljus Ecclesiae, that is, Noah), was saved, thus ensuring the survival of the truth and good residing with him (§639).

Thus ended the earliest church. After the Flood, a new church had to come into existence. This ancient church is referred to as "Noah and his sons." Swedenborg now becomes somewhat less easy to follow in his narrative of this church's development. Its members originally had one doctrine, but they wished "to explore religious truth in a self-directed way" and did so by means of rational argumentation; as a result, they sank into "error and perversions" (§975). In the commentaries to Genesis 10 (§§1131-1137), we find an excellent example of Swedenborg's extreme tendency toward systematic categorization:

·               Sons of Japheth: those who engaged in outward worship corresponding to inner worship
·               Sons of Gomer and Javan: those who engaged in a form of it that was further removed from inner worship
·               "The islands of the nations": those whose worship was even further removed
·               Sons of Ham: those who revered knowledge, facts, and ritual and separated them from any deeper properties

Sons of Cush: those who revered the knowledge of spiritual things

·              Sons of Raamah: those who revered the knowledge of heavenly things
·              Nimrod: those who engage in outward worship that holds evil and falsity within it
·              Descendants of Mizraim: those who take facts, apply logic to them, and in this way invent new forms of worship for themselves; and those who turn religious knowledge into a mere system of fact

·               Canaan: outward without inward worship
·               Shem: inward worship
·              The church established by Eber had outward worship (Joktan) and inward (Peleg)

With Genesis 12, we reach the parts of the Bible written as "true history" (§ 1401). As we have seen, these parts are to be regarded as historically accurate and as carrying an inner meaning. According to the literal meaning, the stories about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and what follows describe the third, the "Hebrew church" (§1850:2); but according to the inner meaning, they are about the life of the Lord. We will return to them below.
From this point on, references to the historical "churches" in Secrets of Heaven no longer add up to a more or less continuous narrative, but consist of various specific observations about churches. A general line of further development can, however, be distilled from them. After the final decline of the ancient church, a new one was created:

The new sky and earth were the Hebrew church, which again had its final period, or last judgment, when it became idolatrous. So a new church was raised up, this time among Jacob's descendants. It was called the Jewish religion and was nothing more than a religion that represented charity and faith. In that religion, among Jacob's descendants, there was no charity or faith, so there was also no religion, but only a representation of a religion. The reason was that direct communication of the Lord's kingdom in the heavens with any true religion on earth was impossible, so indirect communication was set up through representations. The final period or last judgment of this so-called church occurred when the Lord came into the world, because representative acts-specifically sacrifices and other rituals like them-came to an end at that point. The demise of these rituals was achieved by their extermination from the land of Canaan.

Afterward, a new sky and earth were created. That is, a new church was created, which has to be called the nascent [Christian] church. It was started by the Lord and afterward grew gradually stronger, and in its early days it possessed charity and faith. The Lord predicts the death of this church in the Gospels, as does John in the Book of Revelation, and its death is what people call the Last Judgment. Not that heaven and earth will now be obliterated, but that a new church will be raised up in some region of the globe, leaving the current church to remain in its superficial worship, as the Jews remain in theirs. The worship of these people is devoid of charity and faith, or in other words of religion, as is fairly well known.53 (Secrets of Heaven §1850:3, 4)

What we read here is that the true "Hebrew" church degenerated to a pseudo-church referred to as the "Jewish" one. Likewise the "Primitive" Christian church based upon the Lord's teachings degenerated to a pseudo church, referred to as the Christian one. The general pattern is that charity and true faith get lost, and mere outward worship and a focus on doctrine divorced from charity take their place. The general process of the degeneration of churches is again taken up, in great detail, in §§2312-2468, referring to Genesis 19, and in §§2901-2986, referring to Genesis 23. From here on, Swedenborg continues discussing in general terms the nature and development of a true "spiritual" and "heavenly" church, sometimes also using the occasion to add further detail to his earlier description of specific churches (thus, for example, in the commentaries in §§4811-4930 on Genesis 38, which interprets Judah as meaning the "Jewish church," and Tamar as meaning the "genuine church"). These long exegetical chapters become increasingly technical, with much space devoted to detailed descriptions of questions such as, for example, "the union of earthly truth with spiritual virtue by various means" (§3902). We notice that, throughout all these discussions, the general framework remains the one described above, which links love to good and faith to truth, and subdivides love into spiritual and heavenly. One excellent further example of this approach (but many more could be given) is the commentary on Genesis 48 (§§62166306), which deals with "the church's intellect (consisting of truth) and its will (consisting of goodness). Ephraim means the church's intellect; Manasseh, its will" (§6216).
Swedenborg leaves no doubt that the members of the Jewish church had become focused on outward things so completely that they had entirely lost touch with internal verities and had become incapable of spiritual understanding (see also Hanegraaff2004a). By the time this church had reached its final stages of decay, human consciousness had sunk to the lowest point in history; and it was at that point of deepest darkness that the Lord appeared on earth.

The chapters from Genesis 12 on are considered historically accurate, as we have seen, but their inner meaning is not about Abraham and his descendants but about the inner development of the Lord in his years of infancy, childhood, and boyhood. His inner development was one that led from a state of darkness to one of light, thus providing the ideal model of the development that each human individual should undergo. The ensuing interpretations do not, however, add up to a coherent account in temporal sequence: Swedenborg does not give us a coherent, sequential spiritual biography of the Lord's inner life. While the descriptions do convey a sense of how the Lord only gradually became aware of his true identity and his mission, Swedenborg hardly presents this in a narrative form but mostly speaks in abstract terms about the various aspects of his spiritual maturation. For example, he points out that the phrase "Go from your land" means that the Lord was to withdraw from bodily and worldly concerns (Secrets of Heaven §1407); that "there was famine in the land" means the scarcity of knowledge that still affected him when he was young (§§1459-1460); that "Abraham went down into Egypt to reside as an immigrant" means that the Lord was taught concepts from the Word (§1461); that the wars described in Genesis 14 mean the spiritual battles he fought;55 and so on. These discussions again tend to become quite technical, for example, when they deal with the precise processes by which the Lord's human quality came to be joined to his divine quality (represented by Lot and Abraham, respectively);56 by which his rational side came to fruition through "the influence of his inner self on his outer self's desire for information" (§1890); by which truth was connected with good within this rational side (§1898-1902); by which "the heavenly part of the spiritual dimension influenced and united with facts on the earthly level" (§5396b); and so on (§§3012-3212). Throughout, the discussions bear the imprint of Swedenborg's systematic scientific mind: the awakening to divine consciousness is described by means of a dry and precise technical language, reminiscent of physics or chemistry. It would be beyond the scope of this overview to analyze these discussions in detail: any value they may have for the reader lies not in the broad outlines of the message, as already sketched above, but in the specific details of Swedenborg's commentary on each and every verse.

The same is true for Swedenborg's interpretation of Exodus. If large parts of Genesis deal with the inner processes by means of which the Lord came to full spiritual consciousness, the whole of Exodus deals with the church that he founded. Again, the presentation is not in temporal sequence and takes the form of often highly abstract generalized statements. To get a sense of what this means, take the example of Exodus 1:1-6. The biblical text is given as follows (to clarify the relation with Swedenborg's interpretation, the passage has been subdivided by the present author into six numbered segments; these are different from the verse divisions):

[1] And these are the names of the sons of Israel coming to Egypt with Jacob (a man and his household they came): [2] Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah; Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin; Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. [3] And every soul issuing from Jacob's thigh was seventy souls. [4] And Joseph was in Egypt. [5] And Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation. [6] And the children of Israel reproduced and burgeoned, and multiplied and proliferated greatly, greatly, and the earth was filled with them. (Secrets of' Heaven §6633)

[1] The nature of the church after truth has been introduced into secular facts in regard to truth and goodness.

[2] This whole process of the establishment of the church, from start to finish (the names of the twelve sons of Jacob and the tribes named after them meaning all aspects of goodness and truth, that is, of love and faith).

[3] Everything produced by general truth, which was complete.

[4] There was a heavenly quality within the earthly level.

[5] The situation with the inner plane of the church had now changed, and likewise the situation with the outer plane in particular and general.

[6] The church's truth grew in goodness; it grew tremendously in the truth that comes from goodness, until the church was fulLS7

The development of the "spiritual church" having been described in these highly abstract terms, its deliverance by the Lord begins to be described from Exodus 3 on: the members of the church are taught that the Lord will deliver them and "that he will take them to heaven after they have been given many different kinds of truth and goodness" (Secrets of Heaven §6825). Swedenborg continues to systematically apply this truth-good duality, for example, by asserting that Moses represents the goodness of divine law, and Aaron, its truth.

Those who belonged to the true spiritual church were delivered, but those in the church who were governed by faith separated from charity and therefore remained "steeped in falsity and evil"-underwent damnation. This process of damnation is the true meaning of the eleven plagues of Egypt, each one of which is interpreted in great detail as representing a "stage of devastation." Swedenborg continues by interpreting the wanderings through the desert as the further preparation of those belonging to the spiritual church before the Lord's coming. In order for them to be led to heaven, they first had to be "conducted safely through the midst of damnation and then underwent spiritual challenges, the Lord always at their side" (§8039). This process, too, including all the struggles, is described in the greatest detail. In Exodus 19, we are told about "the Lord's While Swedenborg himself attached very great importance to his sentence by-sentence exegesis of the Word, there can be no doubt that his eventual success as a religious author must be attributed, rather, to his visionary accounts of "things heard and seen" in heaven and hell. Secrets of Heaven originally does not seem to have attracted many readers, and those that were interested tended to zoom in on the spectacular accounts of memorable occurrences (we will see that even a biblicist theologian like Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, with his great interest in questions of biblical exegesis, was no exception in this regard). Swedenborg appears to have realized at one point that, from what we would nowadays call a public relations perspective, the memorable occurrences were by far his strongest "selling point" and decided to adapt his publishing strategy. In 1758, that is, two years after the final volume of Secrets of Heaven was published, no fewer than five much smaller works appeared, four of which draw heavily on the non exegetical parts of his magnum opus. Two of them have their basis in what we have called the "first strand" of Secrets of Heaven: De Nova Hierosolyma et Ejus Doctrina Coelesti (The New Jerusalem and Its HeavenlyTeaching) is dependent on the "Teachings about Charity" and "Teachings about Charity and Faith," and the contents of De Equo Albo (The White Horse) are largely drawn from Secrets of Heaven §§2760-2763. Most influential, however, became the two books which have their basis in the memorable occurrences: De Telluribus in Mundo Nostro Solari (known as "Other Planets") is an only slightly edited re-publication of the final parts of the "third strand"; and Swedenborg's most popular work, De Coelo et Ejus Mirabilibus, et de Inferno (Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell), is a much amplified and rearranged presentation of material found throughout the rest of the memorable occurrences.

As pointed out by George F. Dole, Swedenborg was "clearly concerned to convey the connection between Heaven and Hell and Secrets of Heaven" (Dole 2000, 3). Not only were the contents of the smaller book referred to as "secrets of heaven" in § 1, but Heaven and Hell is heavily annotated with cross-references to Secrets of Heaven (see Swedenborg 2000, 451-454). Dole draws the logical conclusion that Swedenborg intended Heaven and Hell at least in part as a vehicle for information already published in Secrets of Heaven. As well as demonstrating a striking concern for consistency, the cross references clearly indicate a hope that it would attract the reader to that larger work. Indeed, with the exception of the final parts on the inhabitants of other planets, the memorable occurrences strand consists entirely of information about heaven and hell and their inhabitants. Swedenborg first speaks of what happens to people when they awake from death and enter into eternal life (§§168-189, 314-319, 320-323, 443-448), and continues with a general sketch of heaven and hell, as well as what may be seen-surprising in an author with a Lutheran background-as an equivalent of purgatory (§§449-459, 537-553, 684-700, 814-831, 938-970, 1106-1113 ).We will come back to this below. A short part is devoted to the present condition of the members of the earliest church (they are now very high up in heaven and live in a state of supreme happiness), as well as of their later descendants up to those who perished in the Flood and are now in one of the lowest hells (§§1114-1129, 1265-1272). The heavenly world of spirits and angels is described in rich detail at intervals throughout §§1273-1885, which include long discussions of subjects such as the angels' and spirits' manner of perception (§§1383-1400, 1504-1520), their speech (§§1634-1650, 1757-1764), and how they understand the inner meaning of the Word (§§1767-1777, §§1869-1879).

From here, Swedenborg moves to a series of specific subjects: the differences between, and heavenly origins of, visions, dreams, and prophecy (§ § 1966-1983); the Last Judgment, as actually referring not to an event on earth but to the after-death fate of the individual (§2117-2134); the state of children in the other life (§§2289-2309); the difference between outer memory, which belongs to the body, and inner memory, which belongs to the spirit (the latter constituting the individual's "Book of Life" in which everything he or she has ever thought, said, or done is written down up to the tiniest detail, and on the basis of which he or she is judged after death; §§2469-2494); the after death fate of peoples and nations that were born outside the church (generally they are described much more mildly than the Jews and especially the Christians, most of whom are seen as much worse than the non-Christians §§2589-2605); how marriage and adultery are regarded in heaven (§§2727-2759);66 and true human freedom as opposed to the pseudo-freedom that comes from hell (§§2870-2893).

Having discussed these specific aspects, Swedenborg returns to the general picture. He first provides a long theoretical discussion of what is meant by representations and correspondences (§§2987-3003, 3213-3227, 3337-3352,3472-3485); and from that perspective he proceeds to a very detailed description of the structure of the heavenly "universal human," on which more below.67 Finally, there are paragraphs about the nature of sicknesses (all of them have their origin in hell; §§5711-5727); the two angels, one spiritual and one heavenly, and the two infernal spirits-more precisely, an evil spirit and a genius, or demon-that are always present with, and fight over the soul of, each individual (see especially §§5977-5980); and the nature of the soul and the "inflow" of the divine into it.

If we take the accounts of memorable occurrences as a whole and try to combine their discussions about various aspects of heaven and hell into a coherent picture, we can draw some conclusions that are never made explicit by Swedenborg himself but are nevertheless implicit in his work. To begin with, Swedenborg states that "the whole of heaven has been formed to correspond with the Lord and his divine humanity. Human beings have been formed to correspond in absolutely every particular with heaven, and through heaven with the Lord" (Secrets of Heaven §3624). In other words, there are three levels: the Lord himself, his heavenly manifestation as a "universal human" of enormous proportions, and the human being as a small version of the universal human. About the Lord himself, as he exists in and of himself, Swedenborg says practically nothing; but the fact that the universal human "represents" him means that the two cannot be conflated, and the same is implied by statements such as that the Lord appears as the sun to the inhabitants ofheaven, and that inhabitants of the third heaven "see the Lord himself" (§3475).

Much attention, in contrast, goes to the heavenly universal human. Universal it certainly is: "the Lord's heaven is immense-so immense as to surpass all belie£ The inhabitants on our planet are very few, by comparison-almost like a pond in relation to the ocean" (§3631). Essential to Swedenborg's concept is that this entire heavenly universal human consists of spirits and angels, who are ordered in spiritual and angelic communities. In the long descriptions from §3624 to §5573, he discusses the anatomy of this universal human's body in meticulous detail, describing how every one of its organs is constituted of specific communities and sub-communities, the spiritual orientation of which corresponds to the inner sense of the components of human anatomy. One cannot but be reminded here of the detailed anatomical studies that had occupied Swedenborg in his scientific work during the years immediately preceding his spiritual crisis and the results of which were published in his Oeconomia Regni Anima/is (Dynamics of the Soul's Domain; 1740-1741). In addition, several scholars have seen in Swedenborg's universal human a clear example of Kabbalistic influence as well. Usually, in this regard, they have referred to the figure of Adam Kadmon,71 while seldom mentioning the equally obvious parallels in the Schi'ur Koma tradition about the measures of God's mystical body,?2 But given the absence in Swedenborg of any explicit references to Jewish sources in that regard, how convincing is it to explain his universal human as an instance of "borrowing"? Elsewhere it has been argued by the present author that we are dealing here with a case of phenomenological similarity, which is insufficient as proof of actual dependence. Anybody acquainted with the ancient idea that the human being is a microcosmos corresponding with the macrocosmos can draw the logical conclusion-without any need for Kabbalah-that, if a human being is a small world, the large world must look like a human being; and Swedenborg himself quite explicitly refers to the concept of the macrocosmos in discussing the universal human. In doing so, however, with characteristic attention to logical consistency and completeness, he distinguishes between the inner and the outer self, corresponding to the inner heaven and the outer cosmos:
The inner self is made in the image of heaven, and the outer self, in the image of the world. In fact the inner self is heaven in its smallest form, while the outer self is the world in its smallest form, so that the person is a microcosm. (Secrets of Heaven §6057)

Thus, we see that the doctrine of the two worlds and the doctrine of macrocosmos and microcosmos are combined, so as to yield a double picture: heaven relates to its individual inhabitant as a universal human to a small, and likewise the external physical universe relates to the individual living person as macrocosmos to microcosmos. The grand and the small mirror one another on a visible as well as an invisible, or outward and inward, level.

Now, this fundamental Swedenborgian concept appears to be inseparable from another basic assumption: his denial of any essential distinction between humans, spirits, angelic spirits, and angels, or put differently, his radical humanization of heaven (those of us who have lived the right kind of life become spirits, angelic spirits, and angels in the next life). Swedenborg's doctrines of the universal human and of the continuity from human beings to angels follow with strict logical necessity from only two axioms: (1) his firm belief in the difference between a higher and a lower world, and (2) his acceptance of the traditional notion of the human being as microcosmos. For an extremely systematic thinker like him, the combination of the two inevitably brought up the question: if a human being is the universe in miniature, what then is a human being's parallel in heaven? Obviously, there were two candidates: angels and the spirits of the deceased. But since earth is modeled on heaven in all details, the existence of two of heaven as the sun. What is surprising-and hardly a believe it, since they cannot understand it-is that the divinities there maintain this same position in relation to e, there.

Everyone ... appears upright, head above and feet below Those in heaven have their heads toward the Lord .... Trish, on the other hand, appear in angels' eyes with their down and their feet up. (Secrets o/Heaven §§3638, 3641)

There is reason to assume that this reflects a certain amount of hesitation on Swedenborg's part concerning a subject on which he held somewhat conflicting ideas. If the heavenly universal human represents the Lord, it is logical to conclude that such an infernal grand being must represent his counterpart, the Devil; but this would seem to give the Devil a status precisely equal to that of the Lord, which has far-reaching and troubling theological implications. In Secrets 0f Heaven, at least, Swedenborg seems determined not to take that road: "It is wrong to believe that any devil has existed from the beginning of creation other than those who once were people" (§968). When he nevertheless described hell as a grand being in his later writings, speaking of it as "a single devil", he would seem to have chosen the other way out of the dilemma. Whether this is correct, and if so, how he then dealt with the inevitable theological implications would merit a separate discussion beyond the scope of the present one, which must restrict itself to Secrets of Heaven.

Swedenborg is equally evasive about a final aspect of the afterlife that sits somewhat uneasily with the sharp ethical dualism of his system. Again and again, he makes clear that there is no such thing as a gray area between heaven and hell: those whose life is ruled by love for one's neighbor and for the Lord go to heaven, while those whose life is ruled by self-love and love for the world go to hell. There is nothing in between. And yet, he does speak of an after-death state that allows human beings to be purged of their "falsity" so as to be eventually admitted to heaven. People who absorbed such falsity "out of simplicity and ignorance" spend a considerable length of time "in the underworld" (located "under the feet [of the universal human] and the region round about for a short distance"), where they undergo the process of devastation before finally being carried into heaven. Clearly, this aspect of Swedenborg's teaching is reminiscent of what is known in Roman Catholicism as purgatory, a concept that was rejected by the Reformation and appears in a Lutheran context only rarely, and in a later period.

Oetinger and Swedenborg

On October 13, 1765, Oetinger wrote a letter to Swedenborg, followed by a second one when he received no response. Swedenborg found both letters when he returned from Amsterdam and responded right away. This was the beginning of a correspondence that would continue until shortly before Swedenborg's death. Already in his first letter, Swedenborg significantly remarks that, without divine revelation, not the least verse in the Bible (he is referring specifically to Revelation) can be understood. We have seen that this point is also made in the very first lines of Secrets if Heaven and is constantly repeated in later sections. Swedenborg finds it important to point out in his first letter to Oetinger that his writings should not be understood as "prophecies" but as "revelations." Prophecies in his view use unclear hieroglyphic, allegorical, symbolic, and imaginative language. Swedenborg, however, explains and reveals in clear and unambiguous language the true meaning of such mysterious statements; and he is able to do so only because the Lord himself has revealed to him their true meaning. The reference is, of course, to what we have described earlier as an allegorical method of "decoding" the literal sense so as to disclose the internal.

Nothing could be further from Oetinger's biblical literalism, and one can only be surprised at how long it actually took Oetinger to face up to this fact. Most likely the explanation has to do with a remarkable tension-perhaps a contradiction-that exists between Swedenborg's method of exegesis and his visions. At this point Oetinger does not yet manage to get beyond the contradiction that Swedenborg's visions reveal heavenly realities whereas his exegesis of Scripture causes these realities to evaporate into abstract allegories. We would suggest that Oetinger and Swedenborg did not essentially disagree about the nature of the spiritual world: both describe it in highly literal terms as filled with concrete and manifest realities. Their disagreement concerned the question of whether the spiritual realities manifest themselves in this world, literally as described in the Bible. Here Swedenborg maintained a strict Cartesian dualism. The material world is entirely "disenchanted," ruled by mechanical laws, and explicitly described as "dead." It is not permeated by any divine principle or life-force, and it maintains no causal connections-either instrumental or occult-with the spiritual world. The classic Cartesian problem of how, then, to explain that there can be any relation between these two worlds, Swedenborg solves in terms of his doctrine of correspondences, which, as we have seen, in his work has essentially the function of a scientific hypothesis. Clearly such a framework makes it impossible to imagine the spiritual manifesting itself in concrete and bodily fashion in our material world.

Oetinger's philosophy of nature, in contrast, was thoroughly panentheist and predicated on the unquestionable authority of the Bible, according to the Protestant perspective discussed earlier. Human beings cannot presume to set the rules and define the criteria according to which the Bible should be read and interpreted, for this would mean that the frail and imperfect human understanding is given preference over God's perspective and is given the authority to decide what in the Bible is acceptable and what is not. God's Word itself is the authority: if we find its literal meaning hard to understand or accept, this is due to our imperfect perception and understanding rather than to any ambiguity or contradiction in the Bible. Neither can there be any contradiction between the Bible and the book of nature; but one should realize that the natural world in its present fallen state is merely a "first draft" for a more perfect future world and still contains many "irregularities." For this reason, we cannot trust any formulation of universal "laws of nature": all we have is the necessarily fragmentary and provisory data of empirical research, and hence we cannot blindly trust even the signatures of things:

Therefore there must as yet be much imperfection also with the signatura rerum. ... [T]he earth, as a planet, must change into a comet. But when according to the Creator's arbitrary revelation the earth is, still prior to the great separation of the idle and the truthful, brought to a state of regularity by means of a small adaptation of the polar star, so that the Ecliptica is brought nearer to the Aequatori, only at that moment will the signatura rerum attain their perfect state, the mountains will proclaim peace, and the hills justice, Ps. 72, 3. Truth will grow from the earth, Ps. 85, 12. The clouds will rain justice, and the earth will open up and bring only salvation, all this according to the litera. Then, then, will we perceive the signaturas rerum with our very eyes, without many reasonings, Jes. 52, 8,9,10 .... Until that time, we medici must be content with reading a few grains of wisdom per signaturas naturalis …(Oetinger 1771,p. 23)

This dynamic theosophical perspective on nature, as fallen and in need of regeneration, is alien to Swedenborg's Cartesian view of nature as a dead mechanism that can be grasped in terms of universal scientific laws; and this opposition is inseparable from the one that exists between Oetinger's incarnational theology, on the one hand, and Swedenborg's docetist tendencies on the other.

Of crucial importance in this respect is Oetinger's key term Geistleiblichkeit, which unfortunately is almost untranslatable into English. It could be rendered rather clumsily as "spiritual bodiliness," but while Oetinger distinguishes between Leib and Korper, in English we have only the term body for both. Korper in Oetinger's terminology stands for the gross body in its present fallen state; Leib, however, is an extremely positive term (and it is because of this difference that the translation "spiritual corporeality" might be seen as somewhat misleading). The background to this valuation is to be sought in the incarnational theosophy of Jacob Bohme, whose system describes how the unmanifested Ungrund gives birth to God and refers to God's body as "eternal nature" (die ewige Natur). More specifically, in Oetinger's theosophy the incarnation of God does not only refer to the birth of Jesus Christ but can be traced at least as far back as the appearance of Wisdom or the world soul, whose body oflight constitutes the angelic heaven (Deghaye 2000, 169 and passim). All these instances of incarnation-the birth of God himself, the appearance of Wisdom, the birth of Jesus Christ-are to be seen as models for what is meant by spiritual rebirth and salvation: the future resurrection of the body means that within the natural body (Koerper) of the faithful, will be born a delicate, spiritual body [Leib], a hidden sideric or etheric, an independent, imperishable body .... Body remains body, spirit remains spirit: but the spirit comes from the body; the body however does not become spirit, it remains the vehicle of the spirit. Spirit cannot exist without a spiritual body, which is nourished from the life of Jesus, the Lord and Sovereign of life, who has life itself within him. For bodiliness is the end if God's works [denn Leiblichkeit ist das Ende der Werke Gottes].

This last sentence, no doubt Oetinger's most famous saying, is usually quoted with reference to its appearance in his Biblisches und emblematisches Warterbuch, art. "Leib."(Oetinger [1776] 1999,222-223) It means-and this is crucial to any understanding of Oetinger's thought-that the body is not considered an imperfection that needs to be transcended, but a supreme divine gift that needs to be purified and transmuted in order for it to attain to its state of perfection.

Oetinger vehemently opposes his incarnational theosophy to what he considers the "satanic" doctrine of docetism. Docetism is the very essence of the antichrist, can be traced to the gnostic Cerinthus (fl. ca. 100 A.D.), and is continued in his own time by the perspectives of Leibniz.

What is idealism? A panic-reaction to materialism. Ach! who could make understandable, from the history of the devil, how he has maneuvered from century to century to pour this fright, this human fear, this worldliness, into the hearts of most of the philosophers and theologians, so that God's words, which should bring forth in us only massive and figurative concepts, are no longer explained according to their actual meaning, nor even according to juridical rules of interpretation, but according to the idealist and sadducean Geisterey and Antigeisterey, and according to predetermined opinions, by which one changes the rich concepts of Scripture into empty and enfeebled statements.

I will not give a definition of idealism before having said this one thing: according to idealism, Christ has not come in Water, Blood and Spirit, but only in Spirit; Christ's body is no more than an illusion, a mere phenomenon, [for] inside he is a purely spiritual being. Thus said Cerinthus, as can be read in Irenaeus. The entire Letter if John and the Gospel if John is written against this doctrine ofCerinthus. (Oetinger [1763] 1977, I, 136)

The philosopher is much too spiritual to allow the highest Intelligence to tell him that God sits on a throne, white and red, Jaspis and Sardis, and with the colors of the rainbow; but they [the philosophers] will see to their dismay that the Infinite gives himself a form and modality through the seven spirits. This is entirely contrary to the Leibnizian and Mohammedan philosophy. But he who does not philosophize cannot accept this philosophy, for it is Cerinthian, it leads to the result that Christ has not come in the flesh. Hermes says: he who fears God, philosophizes up to the ultimate (Oetinger [1776] 1999, 253-254,lemma "Philosophia".123

It was only gradually that Oetinger began to realize that Swedenborg might actually be a representative of the very "cerinthian" perspective considered by him to be the essence of the antichrist. Oetinger clearly began to distance himself after November 8, 1768, when Swedenborg sent him a small tract that he had written, titled ''About the Natural and the Spiritual Meaning of the Word." In this work, Swedenborg describes what happens to theologians after their death: in heaven they are instructed about the fact that Swedenborg's method of exegesis is the only true one, and their subsequent salvation or damnation depends upon whether they accept or reject that fact. Swedenborg was thinking here mostly of the deists and rationalists, but Oetinger understood it as directed at him personally: " ... Swedenborg threatens me, that when I do not accept his doctrine, I will be sent ad inferiora after my death."(Oetinger Selfbiography)
In the following year, Oetinger became more and more explicit in his criticism of Swedenborg's method of exegesis, and from several writings published from 1770 to 1772, it becomes clear that he has begun to perceive in Swedenborg a representative of the "cerinthian" idealist school. He had been reading the writings of the rationalist-idealist theologian Johann Salomo Semler (1725-1791), who argued that the book of Revelation was inauthentic and should be removed from the canon; and he was struck by the similarity with Swedenborg's perspective. Both Semler and Swedenborg, he concluded, rejected the hard literal sense of Scripture and tried to eliminate from it whatever they happened to find offensive; Semler's rationalist approach turned out to be the logical end result of the idealist and allegorical method of exegesis practiced by Swedenborg, which got rid of any problem posed by the concrete contents of the Bible by changing them into abstract concepts. When Oetinger discussed the book of Revelation in his Biblisches und emblematisches Worterbuch of 1771, his object of criticism was undoubtedly Swedenborg quite as much as Semler; but at the same time the passage below illustrates with particular clarity why Oetinger had so long remained ambivalent about Swedenborg:

It is a very gross opinion, to take recourse to the pretext that the things of Revelation can be set aside, because what is mainly important for reaching salvation is in the words of Jesus and the Epistles of the apostles. And even when they read the holy Revelation, which is easier to understand than much in the Epistles (2 Peter 3, 16), they interpret it as if what is in fact actual and corporeal were written in a veiled manner; they think that in the invisible world all is spiritual, while actually hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling, eating, drinking takes place there in a much more real manner [eigentlicher] than in this lower world. They do not know what spiritual means. Spiritual is also bodily, but immaculate, imperishable, never withering away (1 Peter 1, 4), about which one will be happy with an unspeakable beatified joy (2 Thess. 1, 10). Heaven or the invisible world contains whatever may satisfy the eyes with the loveliest colors and beauties, the ears with musical instruments and songs, the nose with the most bring forth in us only massive and figurative concepts, are no longer explained according to their actual meaning, nor even according to juridical rules of interpretation, but according to the idealist and sadducean Geisterey and Antigeisterey, and according to predetermined opinions, by which one changes the rich concepts of Scripture into empty and enfeebled statements.

I will not give a definition of idealism before having said this one thing: according to idealism, Christ has not come in Water, Blood and Spirit, but only in Spirit; Christ's body is no more than an illusion, a mere phenomenon, [ for] inside he is a purely spiritual being. Thus said Cerinthus, as can be read in Irenaeus. The entire Letter of John and the Gospel of John is written against this doctrine ofCerinthus. (Oetinger [1763] 1977, 1,136)

The philosopher is much too spiritual to allow the highest Intelligence to tell him that God sits on a throne, white and red, Jaspis and Sardis, and with the colors of the rainbow; but they [the philosophers] will see to their dismay that the Infinite gives himself a form and modality through the seven spirits. This is entirely contrary to the Leibnizian and Mohammedan philosophy. But he who does not philosophize cannot accept this philosophy, for it is Cerinthian, it leads to the result that Christ has not come in the flesh. Hermes says: he who fears God, philosophizes up to the ultimate (Oetinger [1776] 1999, 253-254 [lemma "Philosophia"]).

It was only gradually that Oetinger began to realize that Swedenborg might actually be a representative of the very "cerinthian" perspective considered by him to be the essence of the antichrist. As pointed out by Ernst Benz, Oetinger clearly began to distance himself after November 8, 1768, when Swedenborg sent him a small tract that he had written, titled "About the Natural and the Spiritual Meaning of the Word." In this work, Swedenborg describes what happens to theologians after their death: in heaven they are instructed about the fact that Swedenborg's method of exegesis is the only true one, and their subsequent salvation or damnation depends upon whether they accept or reject that fact. Swedenborg was thinking here mostly of the deists and rationalists, but Oetinger understood it as directed at him personally: " ... Swedenborg threatens me, that when I do not accept his doctrine, I will be sent ad inftriora after my death."(Oetinger Self biography)

In the following year, Oetinger became more and more explicit in his criticism of Swedenborg's method of exegesis, and from several writings published from 1770 to 1772, it becomes clear that he has begun to perceive in Swedenborg a representative of the "cerinthian" idealist school. He had been reading the writings of the rationalist-idealist theologian Johann Salomo Semler (1725-1791), who argued that the book of Revelation was inauthentic and should be removed from the canon; and he was struck by the similarity with Swedenborg's perspective. Both Semler and Swedenborg, he concluded, rejected the hard literal sense of Scripture and tried to eliminate from it whatever they happened to find offensive; Semler's rationalist approach turned out to be the logical end result of the idealist and allegorical method of exegesis practiced by Swedenborg, which got rid of any problem posed by the concrete contents of the Bible by changing them into abstract concepts. When Oetinger discussed the book of Revelation in his Biblisches und emblematisches Worterbuch of1771, his object of criticism was undoubtedly Swedenborg quite as much as Semler; but at the same time the passage below illustrates with particular clarity why Oetinger had so long remained ambivalent about Swedenborg:

It is a very gross opinion, to take recourse to the pretext that the things of Revelation can be set aside, because what is mainly important for reaching salvation is in the words of Jesus and the Epistles of the apostles. And even when they read the holy Revelation, which is easier to understand than much in the Epistles (2 Peter 3, 16), they interpret it as if what is in fact actual and corporeal were written in a veiled manner; they think that in the invisible world all is spiritual, while actually hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling, eating, drinking takes place there in a much more real manner [eigentlicher] than in this lower world. They do not know what spiritual means. Spiritual is also bodily, but immaculate, imperishable, never withering away (1 Peter 1,4), about which one will be happy with an unspeakable beatified joy (2 Thess. 1, 10). Heaven or the invisible world contains whatever may satisfy the eyes with the loveliest colors and beauties, the ears with musical instruments and songs, the nose with the most penetrating of smells, the palate with the sweetest food and drink, and the feelings with the things of the Song of Songs. (Oetinger,1776/1999,417)

Although Swedenborg is not explicitly mentioned here, the passage discusses the main two strands of his work-scriptural exegesis and visionary experiences of the invisible world-in close connection. Getinger once more rejects the allegorical approach to scriptural exegesis in favor of a concrete and literal understanding; and in doing so, he describes the things of the invisible world as supremely "real" even in comparison with what we consider real in our world. Swedenborg had described heaven in precisely the same way. His visions must have been irresistible to Getinger because they described the highly concrete "sensual" realities of heaven more clearly and in greater detail than any author known to him. It is therefore psychologically understandable that he tried to turn a blind eye to any suspicions he might have had that the very person who gave such wonderfully concrete descriptions of heaven might turn out to be an adherent of the "cerinthian perversion" when it came to the bodily presence of the divine in this world.

The proof of such bodily presence for Getinger was the Bible itself, taken in its literal sense; and the event par excellence in which God would bodily manifest himself for all to see was, of course, the second coming of Christ predicted in Revelation. Given the centrality of that event for Getinger, it became impossible for him to further ignore Swedenborg's "cerinthianism" after he had received a copy of the latter's Vera christiana religio in 1771. To begin with, Getinger believed in Bengel's prediction that Christ would return in 1836, and would therefore be highly skeptical of any alternative dating. In 1768, however, Swedenborg had made a somewhat mysterious reference to an event that would take place as soon as 1770: "In two years one will see the doctrine of the New Church, predicted by the Lord in Revelation 21-22, appear in its fullness-in plenitudine." Swedenborg had in fact been thinking here of a book of his that would be published in that year, but Getinger misunderstood it as a prophecy about the coming of the New Church itself and had decided to use it as a touchstone for judging the truth of Swedenborg's revelations. The year 1770 came and went without a sign of the New Church; but what did come was Swedenborg's book True Christianity, with mottos from Daniel 7 and Revelation 21 about the coming of the Son of Man and the Heavenly Jerusalem. Here Oetinger now read, to his horror, that Swedenborg completely denied any actual return of Christ and interpreted the biblical prediction in a purely metaphorical sense. Christ would not make his appearance bodily and in person, but only in a spiritual sense, for the "second coming of Christ" actually meant nothing but the final revelation of the true internal sense of Scripture. The Bible speaks of Christ arriving in power and glory on the clouds of heaven; but those clouds mean "the literal sense" while the power and the glory mean "the internal sense." This was already bad enough from Oetinger's perspective, but it got worse. Swedenborg made it very clear that the "second coming of Christ" meant the appearance not of a person but of a book: his own True Christianity. In other words, it was through Swedenborg himself that Christ had "returned to earth;" and this had happened on a very precise day, which had been a cause of celebration in heaven itself:

After this work [True Christianity] had been finished, the Lord gathered his twelve disciples who had followed him in the world, and the next day he sent all of them out into the entire spiritual world, to preach the Gospel. ... This happened in the month of June, on the 19th day, in the year 1770. (True Christianity §791)

True Christianity contains vehement polemics against anybody who believes that Christ will bodily return to earth, and against these backgrounds, Oetinger could no longer deny the complete incompatibility between Swedenborg's perspective and his own. On August 17, 1771, he writes to a friend: "Swedenborg has sent me his new book, and in it his wiles are revealed at last. The future of Christ should not be taken according to the letter. He [Swedenborg] is supposed to be the future" (Oetinger to Hartmann, August 17, 1771, as quoted in Ernst Benz, Swedenborg in Deutschland, 1947, 215).
It must have been very painful for Oetinger to admit to himself that his enemies had been right all along. It was now his turn to warn others, as in a revealing letter to a Rector Hasencamp from Duisburg:

Mr. Pastor Henke has ... reported that you had spread Swedenborg's doctrines. Due to his recently published book, I am, however, very worried about him. I send you the book, from which you will see how much he is against us. I ask you to bring out a book in defense of the literal sense [of the Bible] and write down in it my objections as well as your own, because he denies the most important doctrines of Scripture. For he denies the white horse, he denies the two witnesses, he denies the three angels, he denies Christ's office of high priest, he denies the veritable and true idea of salvation ... , he denies the content of the letter to the Hebrews and is thus entirely in agreement with Semler, against whom I have published the book about the materialism of the Holy Scripture and in which I have also refuted the Leibnizians' abstractions and debodifications [Entkorperungen] of apocalyptic expressions. He denies the thousand-year reign, he denies the city of God, and I'm afraid that he will yet cause a complete destruction of [biblical] interpretation. I much regret that originally, because he confirmed the below and the above after death, I have given him support in my first writings: I did this only because I did not yet know that instead of the future of Christ he would be selling a mere symbol [Sinnbild]. For he says that Christ will not come in person but only in the word, to build the new heaven and the new earth; the [personal] future of Christ, however, is supposedly presented in his [Swedenborg's] person. All this is flatly against our doctrines. Therefore prepare yourself to defend the teachings of the Reformers before the Augsburg confession .... Mr. Osiander agrees with me. He [Swedenborg] draws from the correspondences more conclusions than is permitted .... On the one hand we prophesize, oil the other hand we have faith. This is how things stand with us. We are dust, so let us not speak too cleverly, even though we are full of confidence in the fullness of faith. (Oetinger to Hasencamp, October 17,1771, as quoted in Benz 1947, 218-219)

One well understands Oetinger's confusion when the news reached him, in 1771, that Swedenborg himself was planning to visit Wurttemberg. How should he receive the man he had been defending for years (although with many qualifications, as we have seen) but in whom he had now come to recognize an opponent of all he believed in, a representative of the "cerinthian" system of the antichrist? He was spared the ordeal, however: Swedenborg died the year after and never made it to Wurttemberg.

Having already taken a look at Oetinger's discussions of Swedenborg in his Lehrtafel (1763) and Swedenborgs und anderer Irrdische und himmlische Philosophie (1765), in conclusion let us briefly examine how Swedenborg appears in the two other major books published by Oetinger in the last period of his life: Die Metaphysic in Connexion mit der Chemie (Metaphysics in connection with Chemistry; 1771) and the Biblisches und emblematisches Worterbuch (Biblical and Emblematic Dictionary; 1776).

Due to the publication ban, Die Metaphysic was published under the name of Oetinger's son, Halophilo Irenao Oetinger. Like the Lehrtafel, it is a highly unsystematic work, interspersed with complete treatises by authors other than Oetinger himself (Johann Joachim Becher, Georg Ernst Stahl, Hermann Boerhaave, Johann Ludwig Fricker, Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, Guillaume Postel), some of them in Latin. We have already seen how Oetinger in the Metaphysic discusses the doctrine of signatures as providing only provisory and fragmentary empirical knowledge because of the asyet-imperfect state of nature. Having pointed out that the doctrine of signatures is basic to theologia emblematica,132 Oetinger uses the occasion to warn against "heteroclite" scriptural exegetes like Swedenborg, "whom one must severely contradict in this respect, although his other things de statu post mortem are not as ridiculous as they might seem":

Swedenborg thinks quite mistakenly that the symbolic reference to the invisible is the core and the essence of Holy Scripture. The literal understanding, for example of the white horse, the walls, gates, the height, length and breadth of the new Jerusalem are supposedly there only to fill up the images; this is supposed to be only the outer shell, inside of which the sensus in tern us lies like the core, and in the end the shell falls away. The exegetical method ... knocks to the ground what is most important in Holy Scripture, and although Swedenborg has threatened that whoever does not follow him will be degraded over there [that is, in heaven], one should not care about that, for if somebody adds or detracts something from the certain and truthful, plain words, God threatens him with a greater degradation. (H. I. Oetinger 1771, 25)

This is not to deny, as he points out on the next page, that "there are many mystical enigmatic things in Holy Scripture, which must be understood emblematically;" but clearly such emblematic interpretation respects the "massive" sense of the letter and does not cause it to evaporate into empty abstractions.

In a long treatise on musical and number symbolism based upon the system of his friend and pupil Johann Ludwig Fricker (1729-1766), Oetinger admits that Swedenborg gives useful information about the inhabitants of heaven; but he adds that his sensorium can grasp only some dimensions of the spiritual world. Swedenborg should have modestly accepted his limitations, instead of thinking he could grasp the whole of spiritual reality (H. I. Oetinger 1771, 452-453, and cf. 457).

Further in the Metaphysic, we find an "Apology by a Politician and Friend of Mr. Prelate Oetinger against the Gottinger Review about the Metaphysics of Ezechiel, Jac. Bohme and Newton." We may safely assume that Oetinger himself wrote this response to the review in Gottinger Anzeigen vongelehrten Sachen 26/27 (1766) which, as we have seen, had occasioned the publication ban. Full of indignation, the author criticizes the unfairness of the reviewer, who has the audacity to ridicule even "the great Newton;" and very significantly he attempts to minimize the role of Swedenborg in Oetinger's book of 1765: "Swedenborg is not the main subject of the book, but is included as by accident .... Mr. Prelate has merely undertaken a critical investigation of Swedenborg: the main subject is the psychology of Ezekiel" (H. 1. Oetinger 1771, 474).

Apart from two passing references, this is what Oetinger has to say about Swedenborg in the Metaphysic. Since the book was published in 1771, it must have been finished before or around the time that vera christiana religio opened Oetinger's eyes. Already two years earlier, however, Oetinger's problems with Swedenborg's doctrine of signatures had inspired him to the idea of refuting it by a book on emblematic theology. In February 1769, he wrote to Hartmann: "What I have put down about emblematic theology is very crude. Is directed against Swedenborg, who misuses the signature. He makes the signature look ridiculous." (as quoted in Ernst Benz, Swedenborg in Deutschland, 1947, 109.) Probably he was referring to his work on the new and greatly expanded version of his Biblisches und emblematisches Worterbuch, an embryonic version of which had already appeared as part of his Reden nach dem allgemeinen Wahrheits-Gefuhlin 1759. However, when that expanded version appeared in 1776, it was officially directed not against Swedenborg but against a typical product of rationalist exegesis, Wilhelm Abraham Teller's (1734-1804) bestselling Worterbuch des neuen Testaments (1772). In no other work of Oetinger do we find his doctrine of Geistleiblichkeit expressed with such passion and at such length.

Swedenborg's name does not 100m large in the Worterbuch: we may assume that, by the time it was reaching its completion, Oetinger had more or less gotten over the trauma. No longer do we find any attempt at a systematic refutation; Swedenborg is merely mentioned in a number of lemmas and never in a positive sense. In the lemma "Christus" Oetinger remarks that Swedenborg has violated the meaning of the Second Coming, and the same point is made in the lemma "Erscheinung, Epiphania, Optasia." Under ''Paradiss, Paradisos," he remarks that some important ideas about the subject are absent from Swedenborg as well as Boehme. In the lemma "Phantasia," he suggests that Swedenborg's fantasy was led astray. In "Stadt Gottes-neu jerusalem," he writes that "Schwedenborg transforms the city of God into a play of thoughts and invents instead a community on earth, which however does not arrive." Finally, in his appendix about Revelation, he writes full of irritation about Swedenborg's "misinterpretations," concluding that "Swedenborg will have to answer for his mystical extravagances. What must be taken symbolically, one should take as such. It is easy to see what is symbolic. Things that are impossible merely according to philosophy should not right away be taken as veiled or symbolic." And thus we see that the man who had been responsible more than anyone else for spreading Swedenborg's fame in the German context ends up rejecting him as a danger to the true faith.

 

Bibliography used in regards to Friedrich Christoph Oetinger;

Swedenborgs und anderer irdische und himmlische Philosophie zur Priifung des Besten ans Licht gestellt.2 parts. Ed. K.C.E. Ehmann 1858; facsimile reprint as Swedenborgs irdische und himmlische Philosophie (ed. E. Beyreuther) in Oetinger, Samtliche Schriften 2. Abt., 2 Bd., J. F. Steinkopf: Stuttgart 1977.

 [1763] 1977. Die LehrtaJeI der Prinzessin Antonia. Edited by Reinhard Breymayer and Friedrich Haussermann. Texte zur Geschichte des Pietismus Abt. VII, Bd. 1. 2 vols. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.

 [1765] 1979. Theologia ex Idea Vitae Deducta. Edited by Konrad Ohly. Texte zur Geschichte des Pietismus Abt. VII, Bd. 2. 2 vols. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.

 [1776] 1999. Biblisches und Emblematisches Worterbuch. Edited by Gerhard Schafer et al. Texte zur Geschichte des Pietismus Abt. VII, Bd. 3. 2 vols. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.

For updates click homepage here