The Great Swede

Emanuel Swedenborg was a physicist; in 1716 King Charles XII of Sweden appointed him assessor-extraordinary to the Royal Board of Mines. He was also perhaps the most versatile genius-of-all-trades since Leonardo da Vinci.

For the Swedish army he devised a method of transporting ships overland.

He drew plans for a one-man submarine and a "flying carriage." In Sweden's House of Nobles he spoke brilliantly in favor of trade, liquor-control laws, and the decimal system. He was a physicist who anticipated Kant and Laplace in the nebular hypothesis, and a paleontologist far ahead of his time. His contributions to science included a modern theory of molecular magnetics, a system of crystallography, a mercury air pump, and a method of determining longitude at sea from the moon.

As a physiologist, he made many discoveries, including an anticipation of the functions of the ductless glands.

Then, one April night in 1744, when he was 56 years old, he had a vision of Christ, and a new life began for Emanuel Swedenborg.

Extrasensory Perception. In a series of writings that now add up to some 30 heavy volumes (some of them in "automatic writing" dictated to him, as he believed, from the spirit world), he evolved a new Christian theology centered in a merging of the orthodox Trinity into Lord Jesus Christ and the belief that the Christ's Second Coming had already occurred--in the form of the Word, revealed to Emanuel Swedenborg. The afterlife and spirit world were as real to the new Swedenborg as his native Stockholm. He made Sweden's Queen Louisa Ulrica blanch with a secret message from her deceased brother, and he titillated his contemporaries with reports of new marriages made in heaven between noted persons long dead.

Clairvoyance was another talent of Swedenborg's. It has led Duke University's famed Extrasensory Perceptionist Joseph B. Rhine to call him "the pioneer in the work I am doing." At about 6 o'clock one night in 1759, Swedenborg, who was visiting a friend in-- Goteborg, suddenly turned pale. A great fire had broken out, he announced, in Stockholm, 325 miles away, and as it spread, he gave out bulletins like a mental radio station.

The house of one of his friends was already in ashes, he reported, and his own was threatened. At 8 o'clock he exclaimed: "Thank God! The fire is extinguished, the third door from my house." Two days later a messenger arrived from Stockholm, confirming all details.

"A Colossal Soul." At Swedenborg's death, in 1772, there were no plans to form an association of his followers. But 16 years later a group of British Sweden-borgians formed the first Church of the New Jerusalem at Great Eastcheap, London, and as early as 1784 a London Scot named James Glen was preaching Swedenborgianism in Philadelphia and Boston.

The inspirations of the great Swede appealed to many an intellectual who did not join the New Church; Emerson saw him as "a colossal soul [who] lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by them, and requires a long focal distance to be seen." Henry James called him "the sanest and most far-reaching intellect." Last week the Church of the New Jerusalem met in Manhattan for its 131st General Convention. On hand were 250 delegates, including the Rev. Yonezo Doi, whose flock in Japan and Korea numbers 3,400 Swedenborgians. Meeting in their trim, light-filled church off Park Avenue on 35th Street and in their church in Brooklyn Heights, the prosperous-looking, efficient men and women of New Jerusalem heard reports of mild but encouraging growth in the U.S. and the rest of the world (total membership: 25,000). Said Convention President Franklin H. Blackmer, keying his words to the main theme of the forthcoming World Council of Churches Assembly at Evanston, 111.: "The Second Coming of the Lord is a process already going on, changing the very environment ... of all mankind. It is not to be a bodily Coming . . . That Second Coming is as the very spirit of truth . . . We feel Swedenborg has been a chosen instrument ... to make the truth concerning the Second Coming better known."

* Bronze model by Swedish-American Sculptor Carl Milles, now at the Cranbrook Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

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