Faith & Spirit Quote by Emanuel Swedenborg

Swedenborg opens with the kind of brisk, engineering-minded premise that sounds almost modern: identify the primary variable, or every downstream calculation will be wrong. The line reads like a systems warning more than a prayer. “First of all” is the language of method, not mysticism; it signals a hierarchy of knowledge in which theology isn’t a soft add-on but the operating system. For a man trained in the Enlightenment’s confidence in order and causality, God becomes the master key that makes the rest of reality legible.

The subtext is also a quiet challenge to the era’s fashionable deism and rising skepticism. Swedenborg isn’t arguing that spirituality matters in some vague, uplifting way; he’s insisting that the specific identity of “the God of heaven” is determinative. That specificity matters because Swedenborg’s later theological project (especially in works like Heaven and Hell) reframes God not as an abstract first cause but as a knowable, structured presence with moral and cosmological consequences. If you get God wrong, you don’t just misunderstand church doctrine; you misread the architecture of the universe, including human psychology and ethics.

There’s a persuasive tactic here: he borrows the authority of scientific sequencing to smuggle in metaphysical certainty. Establish the axiom, then everything “depends.” It’s less an invitation to debate than a demand for correct orientation, the way a compass demands north before you start walking.