A Language of Things

Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination

Devin P. Zuber

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780813943527
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Long overlooked, the natural philosophy and theosophy of the Scandinavian scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) made a surprising impact in America. Thomas Jefferson, while president, was so impressed with the message of a Baltimore Swedenborgian minister that he invited him to address both houses of Congress. But Swedenborgian thought also made its contribution to nineteenth-century American literature, particularly within the aesthetics of American Transcendentalism. Although various scholars have addressed how American Romanticism was affected by different currents of Continental thought and religious ideology, surprisingly no book has yet described the specific ways that American Romantics made persistent recourse to Swedenborg for their respective projects to re-enchant nature.

In A Language of Things, Devin Zuber offers a critical attempt to restore the fundamental role that religious experience could play in shaping nineteenth-century American approaches to natural space. By tracing the ways that Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and Sarah Orne Jewett, among others, variously responded to Swedenborg, Zuber illuminates the complex dynamic that came to unfold between the religious, the literary, and the ecological. A Language of Things situates this dynamic within some of the recent "new materialisms" of environmental thought, showing how these earlier authors anticipate present concerns with the other-than-human in the Anthropocene.

1

Planetary Pictures

In the Anthropocene, both climate science and biology seem to bring back spirits, once thought to have been killed by secular thought, back to life.

—Nils Bubandt

The foundation of Swedenborg’s thought begins in the materialistic mechanism of the early Enlightenment, but ends with an adumbration of Romanticism—one of his most ardent and enthusiastic early readers was the London artist and poet William Blake, a figure who typifies Romantic counter-Enlightenment tendencies. Identifying the continuities, trying to understand the breaks and paradigm shifts in Swedenborg’s prolific output—so much so, that at some forty-two thousand pages, his manuscripts are one of the world’s largest single-author manuscript collections from the eighteenth century—has presented no small challenge to several generations of scholars. To put it in slightly reductive terms, how does one account for Swedenborg’s movement from the mechanism of the mine into the mysticism of his garden? At the very least, Swedenborg constitutes, as Inge Jonsson puts it, an overlooked “link between seventeenth-century rationalism and the natural philosophy of Romanticism.”1

Swedenborg’s turn toward vitalistic and immanental theologies, his valuation of intuition and will as primary, over and above the faculties of reason, emerged from a life-long negotiation with the Rationalist tradition that had viewed nature as mechanized dead matter, a quantifiable universe of stuff that could be mastered through the Enlightenment’s holy trinity of reason, mathematics, and experience. Only these three things, Swedenborg had proclaimed at the start of his great mineralogical treatise, The Principia (1733), were necessary in order to “pierce” to the heart of nature, for “the whole world itself is a pure system of mechanism.”2

This chapter is primarily concerned with surveying the intellectual and scientific contexts that gave shape to Swedenborg’s earlier mechanistic outlook, while emphasizing those countervailing green tendencies that came later to germinate American environmental imaginaries. The chapter title, “Planetary Pictures,” is borrowed from James John Garth Wilkinson’s seminal 1849 biography of Swedenborg that was read and discussed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists. Wilkinson’s long first chapter is an attempt to synthesize Swedenborg’s multifarious scientific accomplishments, and then square them with the later mystical theology. Wilkinson’s book represents one of the first significant efforts to integrate these two halves of Swedenborg’s life, the scientific and the theological, and to see them as part of a single continuum.3 The biography is shaped, in part, by an 1840s radical milieu of reform, science, and revolution. Wilkinson was closely associated with various Fourierist utopian endeavors, and had spent time in Paris during the 1848 barricades, in the midst of his writing and research for the Swedenborg biography—a project that was being bankrolled by the American Henry James Sr. (father of William and Henry, and close friend of Emerson’s).4 In his “Philosopher of Nature” chapter, Wilkinson articulates a desire for a grand theory that could somehow account for the apparently interconnected turmoil of his day, in an architectonic manner akin to Swedenborg’s own system-building. “The unity of the world,” writes Wilkinson, “is beginning to be recognized as the basis of teaching; the universality of phenomena as the explanatory statement of single facts. The sweep of the ocean currents is seen by the child as part of a planetary picture. The fortunes of each trade are found to be regulated by the whole mundane society. Private medicine resolves itself into the question of public healing. And so forth.”5

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had just published their Communist Manifesto the year prior, and only seven years later, Ernst Haeckel would introduce to the world the concept of ecology in his Morphologie der Pflanzen (Morphology of plants) (1866), fulfilling Wilkinson’s wish for a “planetary picture” that could encompass natural and cultural systems as a single unity: the study of the relations within a single household (the λόγος, logos—study—of an οικος, oikos—a dwelling containing different inhabitants, in different sorts of relation with one another). Wilkinson’s “planetary picture” also parallels Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos project, a concept beginning to permeate the Anglo-Transcendentalist circles he was part of (Emerson had read the first volumes of Humboldt’s Kosmos by the late 1840s).6

Like Humboldt and other figures associated with an older Naturphilosophie tradition that streamed through the aftermath of the Enlightenment in Germany, Swedenborg’s proto-Romanticism anticipates some of Haeckel’s ecological holism in very general sorts of ways. This chapter and the next, which will turn more explicitly to Swedenborg’s correspondence, influx, and micro-and-macro-cosmic analogies, will (re)evaluate Swedenborg’s ideas from an explicitly ecocritical perspective, using a set of questions and ideas taken from some of the new materialist and posthumanist turns in environmental thought. Such a “greening” of Swedenborg has not been attempted before, and I will be making necessary recourse to prior studies that have embedded Swedenborg within the history of science and cognition (David Dunèr), post-Enlightenment Protestant theology (Friedemann Stengel), Western esotericism (Wouter Hanegraaff), and world literature (Inge Jonsson, Lars Bergquist, and Olof Lagerkranz). Although posthumanism and the new materialisms are contested terms and inchoate fields, with a variety of differing voices and claims, for any study that takes up a Christian mystic such as Swedenborg, their hostility to the ontotheological presents an immediate challenge: be it an explicit aim to “strip nature of its metaphysical halo,” or to divest matter of any “metaphysics of presence” that might come creeping in through the backdoor of critical theory (à la the negative dialectics of Theodor Adorno, or forms of political theologies).7 As will become evident, Swedenborg’s ideas have a natural affinity with those strands of posthumanism and the new materialisms that have developed out of contact with the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead, whose “process” thought continues to generate important environmental theologies, and whose own magnum opus, Process and Reality (1929), concludes with an argument for the dynamic exchange of love between God and the world.8 While these other discrepancies between Swedenborg and the new materialisms must be carefully parsed out—and they have, hopefully, created productive tensions for this book’s methodology and approach to its historical subjects—the core of my reading of Swedenborg hinges around two observations that are fairly straightforward, and that further provide useful points of entry into the next section that will provide a summary of Swedenborg’s scientific development.

The first observation is that Swedenborg, after his great crisis and turn from natural philosophy to theology, came to feel that life was a flow, a constant sequencing of what Karen Barad has termed “intra-activity.”9 Things (including the human) were no longer definable as singular, stable entities of contained agency, but were caught up in dynamic, ceaseless relations of “influx” and “efflux” into one another, and—for Swedenborg—with the Divine. Swedenborg would have fully agreed with Barad’s insistence that “nothing exists that precedes relations.” At the macro-level here, Swedenborg’s vision of the cosmos became a singular flow of spirits into an enormous human figure, the Maximus Homo, or “greatest [biggest] human.” This would seem initially to be the crudest of all anthropocentric conceits—that the universe looks, literally, like a giant man—and yet, Swedenborg’s Maximus Homo is not that far away from a Deleuzian notion of the “assemblage,” and its felt embodiment in Swedenborg’s own person caused unsettling, displacing effects to Swedenborg’s sense of self-identity, further loosening his subjectivity and agency. Swedenborg’s written records of his feeling this cosmic connection in his body offer ways to read the Maximus Homo through another figure that will be drawn from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, that of their “body without organs,” or BwO.

The second observation is even more generic and simple, and that is to underscore how the vibrating source for the flow of matter and life in Swedenborg’s systematic theology was, in essence, (Divine) love, an emanating love that caused forms to arise as it united itself with wisdom (or truth). “A kelson of the creation is love,” as Walt Whitman poetically puts it.10 This recurrent key sounds throughout Swedenborg’s theosophy, and it shows him in a sustained dialogue with Christian theological traditions, from Augustine onward. “Love” was not just (or only) some abstract principle of creation: it was the key to accessing, for knowing reality. With this overturning of his earlier Enlightenment episteme, where he had formerly championed “reason, geometry, and experience,” Swedenborg personifies a central contention made by the Whiteheadian philosopher Graham Harman, a leading exponent of the so-called “speculative realism” that has had a significant impact on posthumanist ecocriticism. “The real is something that cannot be known, only loved,” Harman claims, typifying speculative realism’s attempt to shift philosophy from epistemology—what can be known—to ontology—questions of being. True philosophy is thus “a love of wisdom that makes no claim to be an actual wisdom.”11 The preeminence of love—and its coordinates of wonder, beauty, and ecstasy—that are found in Swedenborg’s later work is all the more surprising when we consider the aridity of not only the Rationalist philosophy that he came to contemn, but the pervasive Lutheran theologies he was surrounded by as a young man, where love was secondary to having an intellectual faith in the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Swedenborg’s struggles with the Godhead came to be exacerbated by his scientific endeavors, especially after he started engaging with the proto-vitalist work of the great seventeenth-century microscopists Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Jan Swammerdam, using their research to explore the fuzzy parameters of life in the human body. Where did the soul, the anima, reside in the mortal flesh? Could its existence be definitively proven with a Baconian novum organum, with the reason, geometry, and experience that had uncovered the secrets of rocks and minerals that Swedenborg sought to discover in the Principia?

Here, Swedenborg’s ultimate answer to the age-old dilemma comes close to Whitehead’s own: in articulating a theology that posits we must first grasp, self-reflexively, a sense of our life and our place in the world as an image, as a totalizing kind of representation, Swedenborg could be said to key an aesthetic register over and above his Enlightenment epistemology and rationalist ethics. This was the heart of Swedenborg’s nine-volume allegorical interpretation of Genesis: that rather than literally or historically accounting for anything, the dense symbolism in the Hebrew text powerfully pictured, or in his words, “corresponded” to, the spiritual development of consciousness as it became aware of itself and of “life as an image,” as Lars Bergquist puts it, and of the ameliorative flow of divine love into (human) nature.12 The dynamic exchange between this divine love of Creator for the Creation was a perpetual “infinite and eternal process of creation,” where “an infinite variety of events may happen,” a making of the foundation between heaven and earth.13 In spite of being couched in eighteenth-century physicotheology, Swedenborg’s account of this process comes very close to the metaphysics that conclude Whitehead’s own Process and Reality. As Whitehead puts it: “[T]he kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action . . . is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love of heaven, and floods back again into the world.”14

To fully understand how and why Swedenborg turned to an immanental cosmology that placed divine love (and wisdom) pulsing like a sun at its center, and his further implication that representation, or the aesthetic, is not just “art” but a constitutive fact of all creation and veritably hardwired into perception, we must now turn to the early years of Swedenborg’s formation, when Sweden was roiled both by the emotional fervor of Continental Pietism and, in the universities at least, by the controversial ideas of René Descartes.

Crystals, Spirals, and Stars

Emanuel Swedenborg was born in 1688, the son of Jesper Swedberg, a prominent bishop and professor of theology (the entire family would change their name from Swedberg to Swedenborg in 1719, following their ennoblement by Queen Ulrika Eleanora). Swedberg cast a long shadow over his son, as most successful parents tend to do. In the later pages of Swedenborg’s journal of dreams that document his great spiritual and intellectual crisis, which began in earnest in 1742, seven years after his father’s death, some of the most vivid dreams betray a longing for his father’s approval of the physicotheological projects Swedenborg was then undertaking to find the soul in the human body.

Many years earlier, Swedberg had taken a theology professorship at the University of Uppsala where, starting at the age of twelve, Emanuel matriculated as a student (then a not abnormal age to enter university schooling for someone of Swedenborg’s class and social standing). Uppsala was still feeling the aftershocks of the influence of Descartes, who had been brought to Sweden by Queen Christina some fifty years earlier. A subsequent rift had opened up in the faculties between, on the one hand, the older Aristotelians with their forms of Renaissance scholasticism, and the new camp of the Cartesians on the other, who championed empiricism and an epistemological premise that thinking began with an intuition of the self: cogito ergo sum. Swedberg the father favored the former, the son the latter, and the young Emanuel quickly emerged as an important thinker in the nascent natural sciences in early eighteenth-century Sweden.

Uppsala and Stockholm were on the fringes of a then-emergent Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. As Swedenborg began making a name for himself—working with the inventor and mechanical genius Christopher Polhelm to publish Sweden’s first scientific journal, the Dadaelus Hyperborealis, and offering the first modern geological description of Scandinavia in his Height of the Waters (1719)—he found it necessary to travel to London and the Continent to meet with leading mathematicians, engineers, and astronomers, including Edmund Halley and John Flamsteed (Swedenborg even worked for a period as Flamsteed’s assistant at the observatory at Greenwich, in the famous Octagon Room). His first European trip, from 1710 to 1713, marked the beginning of a lifelong dynamic of necessary travel to Europe, both for access to cutting-edge research in mineralogy and physiology, and, later, the greater freedom of the press in Amsterdam and London for his increasingly heterodox theology, which would ultimately come under censure and charges of blasphemy from the Luther...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Language of Things
• 1 · Planetary Pictures
• 2 · Psychogeographies of Heaven and Hell
• 3 · Radical Correspondence: Emerson’s Ray of Relation
• 4 · Heralds of a New Gospel: John Muir and the San Francisco Swedenborgians
• 5 · Homes for Herons: The Eco-Aesthetics of Sarah Orne Jewett and George Inness
• Coda: Johnny Appleseed, Redux
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index