Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Inge Jonsson

Critical Essay by Inge Jonsson

SOURCE: Jonsson, Inge. “Emanuel Swedenborg: Scientist, Poet, Prophet.” In Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Lovaniensis: Proceedings of the First International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Louvain 23-28 August 1971, edited by J. I. Jsewijin and E. Kessler, pp. 331-40. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1973.

In the following essay originally delivered as a lecture in 1971, Jonsson offers a brief overview of Swedenborg's literary production as a scientist, poet, and religious thinker.

It is very likely to be supererogatory work to lecture on Emanuel Swedenborg to a highly qualified international audience. He has become a world author to a greater extent than any other Swede. It is part of the irony of history that his surname seems to indicate his nationality, at least to Anglo-Saxon ears; this is a mistake, to be sure, the prefix Sweden derives from the ancestral estate in Dalecarlia, but it probably works as a Swedish trade mark in the...
(read more)