Heaven and Hell (Swedenborg)
Encyclopedia
Heaven and Hell is the common English
title of a book written by mystic Emanuel Swedenborg
in Latin
, published in 1758.
The full title is Heaven and its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen, or in Latin: De Caelo et Ejus Mirabilibus et de inferno, ex Auditis et Visis.
This book is a detailed description of the afterlife
, where people go after the death of the physical body
. Topics range from details of the life of angels, including marriage
in heaven
(angels are married), time
and space
in heaven (there aren’t any), children in heaven, the enormous size of heaven, details of the after-death awakening process in the World of Spirits (which is midway between heaven and hell), going to hell
, or heaven, in free will (as opposed to being sent to either place by God), and the eternity
of hell – you could leave but you never want to, all of which the author claimed to have witnessed first hand.
Some of the things he claims to have experienced are that there are Jews
, Muslims and people of pre-Christian times ("pagans" such as Romans
and Greeks
) in Heaven. He says he spoke to angels from the Golden Age who had been happy in heaven for thousands of years. The fundamental issue, he says, is that love of self or of the world drives one towards Hell, and love of God and fellow beings towards Heaven.
The work proved to be influential. It has been translated into several languages, including Danish
, French
, Hindi
, Russian
, Spanish
, Icelandic
, Swedish
and Zulu
. Edgar Allan Poe
also mentions this book in his work The Fall of the House of Usher
. It also plays an important role in Honoré de Balzac
's novel Louis Lambert
. William Blake
referred to and criticized Heaven and Hell and Swedenborg by name several times in his poetical/theological essay The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
.
. According to Swedenborg, God is love itself. and intends everyone to go to heaven. That was His purpose for creation. Thus, God is never angry, Swedenborg says, and does not cast anyone into Hell. The appearance of Him being angry at evil-doers was permitted due to the primitive level of understanding of people in Biblical times. Specifically, holy fear was needed to keep the people of those times from sinking irretrievably into the consequences of their evils. The holy fear idea was in keeping with the fundamental truth that even they could understand, that everything comes from Jehovah, including anger at and punishment of wrong-doing. In the internal, spiritual sense of the Word, however, revealed in Swedenborg’s works, God can be clearly seen for the loving Person He actually is.
suggests in his book Early Mormonism and the Magic World View that Heaven and Hell influenced Joseph Smith, Jr. in the creation of the Mormon
view of the afterlife detailed in Doctrine and Covenants Section 76.
However, many of the similarities are rooted in Biblical language and by interpreting Biblical texts. For example, the general view of three Heavens in the resurrection appears to have its root from the writings attributed to the apostle Paul found in the New Testament, 1 Cor 15:40–42:
"There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead."
Allegorically, Swedenborg likens both the nature of each heaven as well as the illumination in the sky of each heaven to the sun, moon, and stars (Heaven and Hell 119). He states that the sun of the celestial heaven and the moon of the spiritual kingdom is the Lord (Heaven and Hell 118). In Mormonism
's view of I Cor 14:40–42, the resurrected bodies of those in three degrees of glory
(celestial, terrestrial, and telestial heavens) are likened to the sun, moon, and stars.
Other historians, including Richard Bushman
, propose that the similarities between the revelations of Smith and Swedenborg are due to the influence of Paul's writing on both of them.
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
title of a book written by mystic Emanuel Swedenborg
Emanuel Swedenborg
was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, and theologian. He has been termed a Christian mystic by some sources, including the Encyclopædia Britannica online version, and the Encyclopedia of Religion , which starts its article with the description that he was a "Swedish scientist and mystic." Others...
in Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, published in 1758.
The full title is Heaven and its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen, or in Latin: De Caelo et Ejus Mirabilibus et de inferno, ex Auditis et Visis.
This book is a detailed description of the afterlife
Afterlife
The afterlife is the belief that a part of, or essence of, or soul of an individual, which carries with it and confers personal identity, survives the death of the body of this world and this lifetime, by natural or supernatural means, in contrast to the belief in eternal...
, where people go after the death of the physical body
Body
With regard to living things, a body is the physical body of an individual. "Body" often is used in connection with appearance, health issues and death...
. Topics range from details of the life of angels, including marriage
Marriage
Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found...
in heaven
Heaven
Heaven, the Heavens or Seven Heavens, is a common religious cosmological or metaphysical term for the physical or transcendent place from which heavenly beings originate, are enthroned or inhabit...
(angels are married), time
Time
Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....
and space
Space
Space is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum...
in heaven (there aren’t any), children in heaven, the enormous size of heaven, details of the after-death awakening process in the World of Spirits (which is midway between heaven and hell), going to hell
Hell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...
, or heaven, in free will (as opposed to being sent to either place by God), and the eternity
Eternity
While in the popular mind, eternity often simply means existence for a limitless amount of time, many have used it to refer to a timeless existence altogether outside time. By contrast, infinite temporal existence is then called sempiternity. Something eternal exists outside time; by contrast,...
of hell – you could leave but you never want to, all of which the author claimed to have witnessed first hand.
Some of the things he claims to have experienced are that there are Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
, Muslims and people of pre-Christian times ("pagans" such as Romans
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
and Greeks
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
) in Heaven. He says he spoke to angels from the Golden Age who had been happy in heaven for thousands of years. The fundamental issue, he says, is that love of self or of the world drives one towards Hell, and love of God and fellow beings towards Heaven.
The work proved to be influential. It has been translated into several languages, including Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Hindi
Hindi
Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
, Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, Icelandic
Icelandic language
Icelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
, Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
and Zulu
Zulu language
Zulu is the language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers, the vast majority of whom live in South Africa. Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa as well as being understood by over 50% of the population...
. Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
also mentions this book in his work The Fall of the House of Usher
The Fall of the House of Usher
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in September 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. It was slightly revised in 1840 for the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque...
. It also plays an important role in Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
's novel Louis Lambert
Louis Lambert (novel)
Louis Lambert is an 1832 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac , included in the Études philosophiques section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine...
. William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
referred to and criticized Heaven and Hell and Swedenborg by name several times in his poetical/theological essay The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a book by the English poet and printmaker William Blake. It is a series of texts written in imitation of biblical prophecy but expressing Blake's own intensely personal Romantic and revolutionary beliefs. Like his other books, it was published as printed sheets...
.
Summary
Swedenborg wrote about Heaven and Hell, based on what he said was revelation from GodGod
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
. According to Swedenborg, God is love itself. and intends everyone to go to heaven. That was His purpose for creation. Thus, God is never angry, Swedenborg says, and does not cast anyone into Hell. The appearance of Him being angry at evil-doers was permitted due to the primitive level of understanding of people in Biblical times. Specifically, holy fear was needed to keep the people of those times from sinking irretrievably into the consequences of their evils. The holy fear idea was in keeping with the fundamental truth that even they could understand, that everything comes from Jehovah, including anger at and punishment of wrong-doing. In the internal, spiritual sense of the Word, however, revealed in Swedenborg’s works, God can be clearly seen for the loving Person He actually is.
Influence on Joseph Smith and Mormon theology
D. Michael QuinnD. Michael Quinn
Dennis Michael Quinn is a historian who has focused on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was a professor at Brigham Young University from 1976 until his resignation in 1988. At the time, his work concerned church involvement with plural marriage after the 1890 Manifesto, in which...
suggests in his book Early Mormonism and the Magic World View that Heaven and Hell influenced Joseph Smith, Jr. in the creation of the Mormon
Mormon
The term Mormon most commonly denotes an adherent, practitioner, follower, or constituent of Mormonism, which is the largest branch of the Latter Day Saint movement in restorationist Christianity...
view of the afterlife detailed in Doctrine and Covenants Section 76.
However, many of the similarities are rooted in Biblical language and by interpreting Biblical texts. For example, the general view of three Heavens in the resurrection appears to have its root from the writings attributed to the apostle Paul found in the New Testament, 1 Cor 15:40–42:
"There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead."
Allegorically, Swedenborg likens both the nature of each heaven as well as the illumination in the sky of each heaven to the sun, moon, and stars (Heaven and Hell 119). He states that the sun of the celestial heaven and the moon of the spiritual kingdom is the Lord (Heaven and Hell 118). In Mormonism
Mormonism
Mormonism is the religion practiced by Mormons, and is the predominant religious tradition of the Latter Day Saint movement. This movement was founded by Joseph Smith, Jr. beginning in the 1820s as a form of Christian primitivism. During the 1830s and 1840s, Mormonism gradually distinguished itself...
's view of I Cor 14:40–42, the resurrected bodies of those in three degrees of glory
Degrees of glory
In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' theology, there are three degrees of glory which are the ultimate, eternal dwelling place for nearly all who lived on earth after the Spirit world.Joseph Smith, Jr...
(celestial, terrestrial, and telestial heavens) are likened to the sun, moon, and stars.
Other historians, including Richard Bushman
Richard Bushman
Richard Lyman Bushman is an American historian and Gouverneur Morris Professor of History emeritus at Columbia University. He is currently the Howard W. Hunter Visiting Professor in Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University...
, propose that the similarities between the revelations of Smith and Swedenborg are due to the influence of Paul's writing on both of them.
Print versions
- Swedenborg, E.Heaven and its wonders and Hell from things heard and seen. Swedenborg Foundation, December 1, 2001. Translator: George F. Dole, Language: English. ISBN 0-87785-476-9
- A 1958 translation: ISBN 0-85448-054-4
External links
- Online version of Heaven and Hell
- Searchable copy of Heaven and Hell""
- Did Emanuel Swedenborg Influence LDS Doctrine?, Craig Miller (self published at craigwmiller.tripod.com)