Find the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADLVwsdoXNU Find the reading of the text here: https://soundcloud.com/swedenborgcommunity/hh-authors-preface

This is a project of the Swedenborg Community Victoria. Visit www.swedenborgcommunityvictoria.net.au

With thanks to the Swedenborg Society, London, for permission to use the Harley Translation (1958) of Swedenborg's original Latin text, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell: From Things Heard and Seen. Visit www.swedenborg.org.uk

I’d like to welcome you on this journey, reading Emanuel Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell. Many people encountering Swedenborg’s work for the first time begin here, with his most well known book. It certainly captures the popular imagination, as illustrated by the recent Netflix movie, “Things Heard and Seen”

But as you open the book, there may be ideas you find difficult to understand, and that is what this podcast is all about: setting Swedenborg in context and helping you understand what he is saying.

Feel free to read along with us - you’ll find the accompanying video and audio in the same place as these notes - or you're welcome to read ahead and post questions for us to answer.

So let's dive in!

CONCEPTS IN SWEDENBORG: Swedenborg was born in 1688 and died in 1772. He was the son of a Swedish Bishop of the Lutheran Church, Jesper Swedberg. He is therefore steeped in a thoroughly Christian heritage. But it’s worth understanding from the outset that much of his commentary upon the Christianity of his day is highly critical. Still, we have to begin there to understand what he writes, and you will notice him writing for a Christian audience.

The Bible - which he frequently refers to as “The Word” In Swedenborg’s understanding there is a deeper meaning to the Bible, “the sense of the letter” being what is obvious to the reader without any sense of something deeper. This can be appreciated by grasping what Swedenborg calls the “Science of Correspondences”: where physical objects, events, speech, or people can be understood as referring to or representing spiritual realities. A simple example in everyday use is sight: we often “I see” to mean “I understand” That is set out in great detail in his first published spiritual work, ARCANA CAELESTIA, which translates as “Heavenly Secrets”, 12 volumes in English, and contains a word by word exposition of the spiritual meaning found within the first two books of the Bible, Genesis and Exodus.

He jumps right in with a concept held by many fundamentalist Christians even today, what he terms the “Consummation of the Age”, by which he means the end of the world, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. And you might pick up that his idea is not as dramatic as some beliefs (physical return of Christ, dead raised from graves). As he writes towards the end of his Preface: “the end of the Church [is] when there is no longer any love and consequently no faith, [at which time] the Lord will open the Word in its internal sense and reveal arcana of heaven.” … “Such immediate revelation is now made because that is what is meant by the Coming of the Lord.”

So for Swedenborg, when we die, we are not laying asleep waiting until the time of the return of Jesus Christ to experience new life. The renewal of life begins immediately after death.

INFLUENCES Other Movies What Dreams may Come (1998, Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding Jnr, from novel by Richard Matheson), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Dreams_May_Come Bardot Blues (2017, by Marcia Kimpton), http://geewhizlabs.com/swedenborg/Sermons/LaySermons/20081005-MK-FindingForgiveness.pdf Brazillian movie, Nosso Lar (Astral City: A spiritual journey 2010), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_City:_A_Spiritual_Journey We know Charles Dickens had a copy of Heaven and Hell at the time when he wrote, A Christmas Carol, https://swedenborg-philosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Lutze_christmas-charol.pdf