A Brill Calendar: January 29

Swedenborg and Holland

Few valid general observations don’t benefit from an illustrating, specific example underlying them.

When it comes to the proposition that during the 18th century and the hey-days of the European ‘Grand Tour’, Holland provided to scholars a unique meeting-place for old and new friends and relations, in addition to state-of-the-art publishing facilities like those of the Leyden Luchtmans Firm; a specific example may be provided by the life of a Great Swede, Emanuel Swedenborg (Stockholm, January 29 1688 – London, March 29 1772).

If you wish to study an extraordinary figure, then don’t look further. Swedenborg; a scholarly omnivore, passionately aspiring to become a famous Man of Science, a man with a boundless capacity for hard work, and a mind craving for universal truths and an unprecedented mysticism.

After graduating from Uppsala University in 1709, Swedenborg made a first acquaintance with Holland and Leyden University – already basking in the sun of an omniscient and precocious Herman Boerhaave - revisiting the Province and the City a quarter of a century later. At that later occasion Swedenborg saw one of his controversial and seminal works, ‘OEconomica Regni Animalis’ (2 Vols. Folio, 1740 – ’41) printed in Amsterdam. (That ‘animalis’, by the way, has little to do with the animal kingdom, but everything with ‘anima’, the human soul.)

Steadfastly returning each time to his native country, Swedenborg, indefatigable European traveller, was back again in the 18th century Dutch hub of scholarly publishing just four years later. What is perhaps his most stunning book, a ‘Journal of Dreams’, reflecting a personal, existential crisis, began its life in The Hague in 1744.

In analyses of European unity and diversity as they are presented for socio-political strategies more than two centuries later, it is seldom that the pioneering contribution to them of trans-national scholarship and its organizational and entrepreneurial context is valued properly.