“Immediate” knowledge in Emmanuel Swedenborg’s revelations

The importance of turning to the philosophical heritage of Emmanuel Swedenborg, a “spiritualist”, natural scientist, Christian mystic, theosophist, and theologian, lies in the epistemological paradigm of “non-classical” philosophy with its new opportunities for analyzing the “eternal” problems of human existence, the need for interdisciplinary research in the field of anthropology, and a kind of “renaissance” of mystical practices in contemporary “everyday culture”. The key issue of Swedenborg’s metaphysics and theology is the concept of specific “immediate” knowledge that originates from above, from the Creator of the universe himself, with wisdom and love (including the love for truth) serving as the most important foundations and criteria for evaluating the moral outcomes of human life. It can be argued that Swedenborg’s elaborate, metaphorically and artistically impeccable dualistic model of being, wherein a “spiritual world” coexists alongside the natural world, does not contradict Kant’s perspectives (taking into account Kant’s polemics with another “northern magician”, Hamann, as well as with some of Swedenborg’s over-extravagant ideas), Schelling’s attitudes or even Hegelian phenomenology (with elements of dialectics not being alien to Swedenborg). The analysis of empirical material (fragments of the text of Swedenborg’s treatises) proves that the transcendental “divine principle” and the concept of “spirit”, which are fundamental to his thinking, are interpreted within the discourse of the “Age of Reason”. Therefore, it is unproductive to pit scientific systems against religious systems when studying “human reality”. All these observations lead to the conclusion that Swedenborg’s “revelations” represent an original realization of a grandiose and quite “objective” ontological task.