Swedenborg ― Introducing the Mystic

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s groundbreaking essay on Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), originally published in Emerson’s book Representative Men in 1850, places the Swedish philosopher and mystic alongside other great men of genius, including Michel de Montaigne and William Shakespeare. Casting a sharp critical eye over the central tenets of Swedenborg’s philosophy, Emerson examines the dynamic relationship between Swedenborg’s mysticism and his scientific ways of reasoning.

Innovative, critically aware, and thoroughly engaging, Emerson’s essay is an indispensable tool in reading Swedenborg and understanding his subsequent influence on writers as established and respected as August Strindberg and Jorge Luis Borges. This accessible new edition includes a contextual introduction by Stephen McNeilly, a chronology of Swedenborg’s life and works, a chronology of Emerson’s life and works, endnotes, and an index.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is a globally renowned writer, essayist, poet, and lecturer who led the Transcendentalist movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Heralded today as one of the greatest writers of North America, Emerson had a profound influence on subsequent US and European literature and philosophy. His key works include Nature (1836), The American Scholar (1837), and The Conduct of Life (1860). Swedenborg: Introducing the Mystic is taken from his 1850 classic Representative Men.

Stephen McNeilly is the director of the Swedenborg Society and series editor of the Journal of the Swedenborg Society and the Swedenborg Archive imprint. For the Society he has published numerous volumes, including An Angel Speaks with Homero Aridjis and J. M. G. Le Clézio; Philosophy, Literature, Mysticism: An Anthology of Essays with Czeslaw Milosz et al.; Swimming to Heaven: the Lost Rivers of London with Iain Sinclair; Blake’s London: The Topographic Sublime with Iain Sinclair; and Several Clouds Colliding with Brian Catling and Iain Sinclair. He is also a visiting lecturer in art, philosophy and critical theory at several universities in the United Kingdom.