SOURCE: Jonsson, Inge. “Swedenborg and His Influence.” In Swedenborg and His Influence, edited by Erland J. Brock et al., pp. 29-43. Bryn Athyn, Penn.: Academy of the New Church, 1988.

In the essay below, Jonsson examines Swedenborg's influence on scientific and societal thinking, maintaining that Swedenborg's ideas were an expression of a yearning to create order out of a chaos of information that could not be confined within the limits of scientific rationality.

In the years around 1760 literary circles in Stockholm slowly began to realize that the anonymous author of a remarkable series of books published in England since 1749 was not only a compatriot but a man of high reputation as a scientist and a civil servant. The series consisted of eight huge volumes in Latin called Arcana Coelestia, Heavenly Secrets, and a number of smaller books summarizing the message in these interpretations of the first books of the...