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Q. What trait do you most admire in Swedenborg? A. I most admire the complexity and scope of his visionary cosmos, which merges the "minute particulars" of natural science with a sweeping celestial panorama.
 


If Swedenborg were alive today, I would...as a biographer and historian, I would ask him about the contents of his missing journal entries, papers, and books--i.e., his travel journals from 1713-14 and 1736-39, his political Memorial on the Polish crisis in 1734, the books omitted and pamphlets untitled in his Library Catalogue. Of course, I would ask many questions about his activities and friends in France, Italy, Holland, and England, in order to build up a more solid historical context for his writings.


Heaven or Hell? 
I am intrigued and sometimes puzzled by his motives for placing various members of his family and social circles in heaven or hell, for he sometimes seems to reverse his earlier opinions of them when he sends them to either location (for example, his negative treatment of Eric Benzelius, Charles XII, and others, whom he initially admired in "real life").


The inspiration for writing "Why Mrs. Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision" was: 
As a literary historian, I was first drawn to Swedenborg because of his influence on William Blake and William Butler Yeats, who seemed to draw on Kabbalistic themes in Swedenborg. While investigating where this influence of Jewish mysticism came from, I found it necessary to research Freemasonry, Jacobitism, and Moravianism, which all provided a plausible historical context for Swedenborg's merging of themes of Jewish and Hindu mysticism into his Christian vision. By relating Swedenborg's own writings on the physiology of sex and vision to these traditions, I came to believe that he made a uniquely scientific contribution to our understanding of visionary eros.


What are you working on now?
 I am currently completing research for a political-Masonic study of Swedenborg, which is tentatively titled "Emanuel Swedenborg: Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven." This secular analysis will draw on Franz Lindh's pioneering publications on Swedenborg's financial affairs, which will be supplemented by information I have found in the Stuart Papers at Windsor as well as diplomatic and Masonic archives in London and Stockholm.



How would like Swedenborg to be remembered? 
I would like him to be remembered as a creative and innovative theosopher, who merged Jewish, Asian, and Christian traditions with a complex physiological view of the universe, which was greatly appealing to imaginative artists and philosophers over the next centuries. I will add to that portrait an additional image of him as a politically active intelligence agent and sincere patriot, who used his psychic gifts and mathematical-financial expertise to serve his embattled country, which was vulnerable to the same kind of dismemberment and destruction that Poland suffered.