Emanuel Swedenborg: Visionary Savant in the Age of Reason

This biography was written in 1948 by Ernst Benz, eminent German theologian and church historian. On reading Benz’s monumental biography, one walks with Swedenborg through his own age. Benz locates Swedenborg in this eighteenth-century world with its remarkable characters, extraordinary advances, and burning issues. We experience the young man’s inspiration and towering ambition, his passionate appetite for the new mathematical sciences, and prodigious capacity for research and work. We see his public life and political activity as a noble in the Swedish upper house, and we travel with him across the rutted roads of Europe to Amsterdam, Leipzig, Paris, Rome, and London. But there is more. Benz’s work has not dated; indeed, its publication in English has become ever more urgent. Benz has performed a cardinal service to the estimate of Swedenborg’s importance in European religious thought. As a non-Swedenborgian, Benz has deployed his massive scholarship in the history of religion to place Swedenborg securely in the mainstream of the Western esoteric tradition and the history of Christian visionaries.