Emanuel Swedenborg: The Development of His Thought [Hardcover]

Martin Lamm (Author), Tomas Spiers (Translator), Anders Hallengren (Translator), Paul Valery (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 7, 2008

Swedenborg Foundation Publishers is celebrating 150 years of publishing activity in America, a milestone we have dubbed our "Sesqui", short for Sesquicentennial. You will see a whole new dynamic, honoring both our 150th anniversary and the new millennium, as you examine the books.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Swedish

About the Author

Martin Lamm (1880-1950) was a member of the Swedish Academy and chairman of the Department of History of Literature at Stockholm University

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 354 pages
• Publisher: Swedenborg Foundation Publishers; First Edition edition (March 7, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 087785193X
• ISBN-13: 978-0877851936
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,031,766 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Weaves scientific philosophy with spirituality, March 19, 2001

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Emanuel Swedenborg: The Development of His Thought (Hardcover)

In Emanuel Swedenborg: The Development Of His Thought, Tomas Spiers and Anders Hallengren successful collaborate to provide a superbly crafted English translation of Martin Lamm's seminal examination of the celebrated 18th century scientist and theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg. Weaving Swedenborg's scientific philosophy with his spirituality in an engaging, informative, and insightful biography, Lamm makes accessible a very highly recommended and seminal contribution to Swedenborgian studies that will well serve to introduce a whole new generation of readers to a remarkable man and his astonishing contributions to science and metaphysics that are still evident and influential today.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lamm's Swedenborg, March 5, 2010

By 

William R. Sneeberger - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Emanuel Swedenborg: The Development of His Thought (Hardcover)

The Swedenborg foundation must be a remarkable institution. Not only have they published and kept in print a biography that refutes, and at times even ridicules, the claims of Swedenborg's divine revelations, they promote this book as a cornerstone of Swedenborg scholarship. And for good reason. Emanuel Swedenborg: The Development of his Thought by Martin Lamm is a work of rigorous and far-reaching scholarship that, at its publication in 1915, examined, as no one had done before, how Swedenborg's theological work directly sprang from his earlier scientific writings. Lamm also connects Swedenborg's works to many previous theologians and philosophers, correcting numerous claims of earlier Swedenborg biographers, nearly all of whom were believers in Swedenborg's divine visions.
But Lamm's major thesis goes well beyond revealing unnoticed sources for Swedenborg's theological ideas. He wishes to demonstrate that Swedenborg had no need of divine revelation to write, during the last 25 years of his life, his theology. Lamm instead claims that Swedenborg did little more flesh out, often in great detail, the theories he had promoted before his visionary period. Lamm is not able, finally, to well support this claim and, along the way, makes a number of pronouncements that would, at the very least, irritate followers of Swedenborg. And yet, Lamm's scholarship is so thorough and erudite that the Swedenborg Foundation still sees it as essential reading, "the cornerstone of scholarship on Swedenborg," a century after its first issue.
These varied sources for Swedenborg's conceptions include Plato, Plotinus, Aristotle, Neoplatonists, St. Augustine, Kabalistic philosophy and exegesis, Johann Dipell, Nicolaus Malebranche, Pico della Mirandola, Pietists, mystic philosophy, and numerous others. Lamm's intellectual curiosity is remarkable, and his argument is cogent--it does indeed seem quite possible, even probable, that Swedenborg could have come up with his voluminous theological writings without divine guidance. Yes, he could have, if it weren't for those very claims of divine revelation.
Lamm spends very little space explaining away these claims--he makes little comment concerning Swedenborg's instances of clairvoyance which are found in every other biography. Certainly, in the last century, the science of psychology has come a long way, but even if we were to judge Lamm's suppositions concerning Swedenborg's sanity by the standards held at the turn of the twentieth century, we find Lamm on very shaky ground. Lamm makes a distinction between "psychosensory hallucinations" and "pseudohallucinations." The first type involves a person believing to see or hear figments through the sensory organs of one's everyday life and to situate these figments in an everyday environment. In Swedenborg, we most often find pseudohallucinations, as Swedenborg claims to see and hear them from "internal" sight and hearing, from a "spiritual" sight and hearing, and these hallucinations are placed in spirit realms, not in any earthly place. To quote Lamm: "The subject [of pseudohallucinations] conceives of it as something objective, independent of his will; but he does not at any moment, during the course of the hallucination, confuse these `inner' visions or these `internal' voices with real visions or voices. On the contrary, most often he considers himself as the object of a psychic influence; maleficent or beneficent forces come into association with him through these visions or voices and dominate his inner life."
Lamm then explains that pseudohallucinations can be minor mental disturbances of a completely sane person, and this is how he sees Swedenborg and his visions. For Lamm does recognize that Swedenborg showed no outward signs of insanity. None of Swedenborg's acquaintances noticed anything out of the ordinary in his behavior and, in fact, saw him as a pleasant, enjoyable social companion. His writings also, Lamm tells us, only become more clear, more systematized, more coherent in Swedenborg's old age.
But Swedenborg claimed to have daily discussions with demons in hell, with angels in heaven, to take hundreds of pages of dictation from God himself on Biblical interpretation for the final twenty-five years of his life. These cannot, by any standard, be seen as minor mental disturbances of a completely sane man. Either Swedenborg was accurate and truthful, or he was insane. There still is no middle ground between the two.
But Lamm is in one regard misleading in his explication of Swedenborg. Lamm speaks of Gabriel Beyer as "a favorite disciple" of Swedenborg when Swedenborg accepted no disciples, and, contrarily, discouraged Beyer from promulgating his theology. Lamm describes the vision Swedenborg had of seeing Jesus Christ in one of his rooms in London as a psychosensory hallucination then claims that Swedenborg then "does not cease from thinking that, after an experience of that nature, he might well be considered a saint." Again, nothing further from the truth. Swedenborg understood himself to be a special instrument of the Lord but never understood why. Instead, he insisted, repeatedly, that this had nothing to do with his own spiritual development. He understood himself to be not an especially virtuous person. He never gave a speech on his visions, never attempted to found any church, never accepted any disciples but, instead, published anonymously his theological findings and exegesis. In his old age, he revealed himself as the author of these strange books on the workings of the spirit, but even then he preferred to steer conversation away from the topic. Swedenborg could have been insane, but he did not see himself as an especially spiritually advanced individual.
But these are but quibbles for the people at the Swedenborg Foundation. Their belief in the importance of scholarship and their sheer open-mindedness must be seen as eminently worthy of Swedenborg himself.