“Harmony and Openness to Many Levels of Reality” – the Thought of Emanuel Swedenborg in the Writings of Czeslaw Milosz

Abstract

One of the most important features of Czeslaw Milosz’s (1911–2004) literary output is his dialogue with religious thinkers. The Swedish eighteenth-century theologian and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg is among his important “interlocutors”. The present paper aims at discussing the key motifs in Milosz’s reflections on Swedenborg’s theology as well as defining the specific character of his interpretation of the thought of the author of Arcana Coelestia. In Swedenborg’s work, Milosz looked primarily for a remedy for the disease of modernity, whose most severe symptom is the disintegration of the world, which became subjected to the rule of William Blake’s Urizen. For Milosz the modern man is homeless within the inhuman space of an infinite universe which cannot be grasped by imagination. Swedenborg, on the other hand, restores the vertical points of reference, Heaven and Hell, and at the same time places them within the human soul. The restitution of spatial points of reference is of immense significance to Milosz, who emphasizes that Swedenborg’s system was aimed at liberating imagination, fettered by the scientific world-view. While reading Swedenborg, Milosz remarked also that the cause of Christianity’s weakness lay in its loss of original integrity and unity, and in its theology of marital love characterized by fear and escapism. The source of Milosz’s fascination with Emanuel Swedenborg’s thought has to do, among other things, with the positive and integrating force of Swedenborg’s thought, the idea of uniting man with God, matter with spirit, faith with reason, and language with being.