"In April, 1745, God appeared to a Swedish civil servant named Emanuel Swedenborg in a London tavern. Swedenborg was no wild-eyed prophet but, rather, a fifty-seven-year-old scientist and engineer who had worked for years for the Swedish crown as an administrator of mines. However, travelling around Europe while on leave, he had begun to have intense dreams about Jesus Christ, in which everyday details were shot through with mystical bliss."
"From that night until his death, twenty-seven years later, Swedenborg devoted himself to conversing with "spirits and angels" and writing down the mystical truths that they told him. As Swedenborg's fame spread across Europe, in the seventeen-sixties, he came to the attention of a junior professor of philosophy at the University of Königsberg, in eastern Prussia, named Immanuel Kant."
"Kant had a lot in common with the Swedish mystic. He, too, was a northern European, a Protestant, and a man of science. At a time when philosophy and "natural philosophy"-the scholarly pursuits that developed into today's natural sciences-were not yet entirely separate, Kant published work not only about metaphysics and ethics but also about physics, cosmology, and earthquakes."
Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist and engineer, began experiencing intense visionary dreams about Jesus and, in April 1745, reported God's appearance as a man advising moderation at a meal. From that night until his death twenty-seven years later, Swedenborg said he conversed with spirits and angels and recorded mystical truths. Swedenborg's claims drew attention across Europe in the 1760s. A young Immanuel Kant, a northern European Protestant and man of science, took interest despite personal skepticism about the miraculous, partly because credible witnesses vouched for Swedenborg's clairvoyance. Kant wrote on metaphysics, ethics, and on scientific subjects including physics, cosmology, and earthquakes.
Read at The New Yorker
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