Description
Along with the other titles published in 1758, The Worlds in Space consists largely of reworked extracts from Arcana Caelestia, and was intended as a pointer towards that larger work. It is, perhaps, the most controversial of Swedenborg’s books, and one that even Swedenborg’s followers have struggled to embrace. Swedenborg asserts that there is life elsewhere in the universe, even within our solar system, and that this life is intelligent and human too. He meets the spirits of the dead of these planets, learning how they lived and what they believe. His encounters lead him to reflect on how humans on Earth live and how in successive ages we have moved further and further away from the spiritual to the corporeal side of things. The book still serves as an excellent introduction to Swedenborg as he often uses his adventures as a launching point to explain simply and concisely the workings of the world of spirits, heaven and hell, and the theology he has derived from his otherworldly travels. This translation has also been reprinted, with a new foreword by Dr Raymond Moody, as Life on Other Planets.
This edition includes a List of Scripture References and an Index of Subject. Translation of De Telluribus (1758).
With a translator’s introduction by John Chadwick.
Author Bio
JOHN CHADWICK was educated at St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. During the Second World War he was stationed at the now famous Bletchley Park. In 1950 he published The Medical Works of Hippocrates, co-authored with his cousin, William Neville Mann, a distinguished physician and he also worked on the Oxford Latin Dictionary before beginning a Classics lectureship at Cambridge in 1952. That year he began working with Michael Ventris on the progressive decipherment of Linear B, the two writing Documents in Mycenean Greek in 1956. In 1958 he published The Decipherment of Linear B and later became a Fellow of the British Academy and of Downing College, Cambridge. He was also the fourth (and last) Perceval Maitland Laurence Reader in Classics at Cambridge. He was a member of the Swedenborg Society Advisory and Revisions board for over 50 years. The titles he translated during that time include; The True Christian Religion (in 2 volumes); The Last Judgment; The Worlds in Space; Conjugial Love; and he also edited and compiled A Lexicon to the Latin Text of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.