Testimony to the Invisible: Essays on Swedenborg

by Czesław Miłosz (Editor), D.T. Suzuki, James Lawrence (Editor)

This collection of essays highlights the influence of Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) on art, spirituality, and culture. Opening with an essay by Spanish-language writer and metaphysician Jorge Luis Borges, from which the collection draws its name, the volume includes a description of Swedenborg's influence on Fyodor Dosteovsky by Czleslaw Mloscz; a look at Swedenborg from a mystical perspective from Wilson Van Dusen; the transcendentalist connection with Ralph Waldo Emerson in an essay by Eugene Taylor; and Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki's describes similarities between Swedenborg's philosophy and Buddhism. Essays by Kathleen Raine on Swedenborg's poetic influence and Colin Wilson on the psychological perspective on Swedenborg's visions round out the collection.

208 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1995

About the author

Czesław Miłosz was a Nobel Prize winning poet and author of Polish-Lithuanian heritage. He memorialised his Lithuanian childhood in a 1955 novel, The Issa Valley , and in the 1959 memoir Native Realm . After graduating from Sigismund Augustus Gymnasium in Vilnius, he studied law at Stefan Batory University and in 1931 he travelled to Paris, where he was influenced by his distant cousin Oscar Milosz, a French poet of Lithuanian descent and a Swedenborgian. His first volume of poetry was published in 1934.

After receiving his law degree that year, he again spent a year in Paris on a fellowship. Upon returning, he worked as a commentator at Radio Wilno, but was dismissed, an action described as stemming from either his leftist views or for views overly sympathetic to Lithuania. Miłosz wrote all his poetry, fiction, and essays in Polish and translated the Old Testament Psalms into Polish.

Awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature for being an author "who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts."

Reviews

[elderfoil...the whatever champion · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 ½ stars. Hard to fairly rate this book of essays on Swedenborg’s influence and connection with subsequent writers. It didn’t glue my eyeballs to each page and is built for a skimming dependent on individual interests and preferences. Still, there are many excellent points in discussing Swedenborg’s relevance to such diverse writers as Blake, Dostoevsky, Emerson and Transcendentalists, the Symbolists, Jung, and Borges. Czeslaw Milosz’s essay on Swedenborg and Dostoevsky interested me the most. Despite Fyodor having three Swedenborg texts in his library, linking Dostoevsky’s anti-materialist tendencies to Swedenborg is either obvious or untenable, depending on how strongly Milosz intended to argue causality. His more interesting points were mostly independent of the Swedenborg connection. This included a discussion of the “failure” of Dostoevsky’s “man-god” characters (Myshkin, Alyosha, etc.). My favored Russian aside, those with interests in discussions of philosophy, religion, and literature will find the various essays worth their time, no matter how convinced and excited they are by Swedenborg.