Homo Maximus: Emanuel Swedenborg and the interaction of soul and body

This thesis investigates the lifelong commitment of the Swedish parliamentarian, assessor of mines, and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) to the topic of soul-body interaction. It is a thematic intellectual biography, rooted in the history of science, religion and medicine, which places Swedenborg’s life and work in the context of Swedish and Scandinavian society, politics and intellectual life. It provides a new narrative about why soul-body was so crucial to him, why it informed almost all of what he did, and why he pursued the topic within an impressively large array of disciplines and research projects across six decades.

My thesis revises a number of understandings about his life, ideas, intellectual interlocutors, and sense of self. First, it tracks his engagement with the soul-body theme earlier than previously thought, and argues that his famous turn towards theology actually occurred during his anatomical studies. This led him to pursue his soul-body work within an anatomically informed cosmological theology, which postulated that the afterlife as a whole constituted the spiritual grand body of God, that he named Homo Maximus (‘the Grand Man’). Second, the thesis shows how Swedenborg relied on his understanding of the soul-body relationship to pursue various other goals; these consisted of attacking the orthodox conception of the doctrine of the Trinity, attempting to restore mankind’s lost Adamic prelapsarian powers, criticizing absolutist monarchy, spreading his millenarian theology of works, and striving to prove the existence of God. In contrast to dominant historiography, the thesis demonstrates that his famous ‘doctrine of correspondences’ was only a by-product of a larger soul-body quest. It also shows how his soul-body research directly informed his conversations with the dead and his elaborate doctrines about the afterlife.

By doing so, the thesis produces a richly contextualised history of the soul-body problem during the Swedish Age of Liberty (Frihetstiden, 1718-1772). It demonstrates the wide variety of applications of early modern soul-body debates, from anatomy to chemistry, taxonomy, theology, epistemology, economics, and politics in a transnational, European and global context. More broadly, Swedenborg’s late fame, and his innovative attempts to bring reason and revelation together show the need for a wider reassessment of his positioning within current scholarship on the religious Enlightenment.