Swedish writer and educator, brilliant and eclectic student of fields that ranged from physics and astronomy to the Bible, seeking to find a Key to Everything.
The son of a Swedish royal chaplain, Swedenborg spent 30 years working on the Board of Mines, from 1716. With his scholarly private interests, he established Sweden’s first scientific journal and anticipated a number of modern inventions, including prototype submarines and aeroplanes. He also published treatises on cosmology, lunar measurements, chemistry, physics, the circulations of the blood and sensory perception, and developed a theory of atomic structure with anticipates our own by describing matter as a system of indefinitely divisible particles grouped in swirling vortices.
In his search to locate the human soul and prove its immortality, Swedenborg was granted transcendent religious experiences which began in 1743. The following year Jesus appeared to him again with a commission to present a new revelation based on the premise that Heaven and Hell are not places, but states of being. He wrote a series of 30 volumes describing Heaven and Hell and the New Jerusalem. His visions were frequent and he himself visited heaven and hell, conversing with angels and spirits, and even with God Himself. His basic conclusion was that the universe is a harmonious whole temporarily disturbed by sin, (equated with error.)
Swedenborg died 3/29/1772, London, England.
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