Science Quote by Emanuel Swedenborg

A scientist arguing that scripture is a kind of double-exposure photograph: one image for the eyes, another for the soul. Swedenborg’s line is doing more than defending the Bible’s holiness; it’s smuggling in a whole theory of reality where text functions like an interface between worlds. The “spiritual sense” becomes a technical term, almost an instrument reading, and that’s the tell of his background: he’s not pleading for faith so much as proposing a system.

The intent is audaciously institutional. By insisting the Word “treats everywhere” of the spiritual world, Swedenborg turns scattered stories, laws, and poems into a single, continuous report about “the state of the church” in both heaven and earth. That phrasing matters. Heaven isn’t just a destination; it’s an organized polity with a church, a condition, measurable trends. Earth’s religious life becomes a shadow-chart of a higher administration. The subtext is authority: if scripture is always already about the church’s spiritual health, then interpretation isn’t optional decoration; it’s diagnostic power.

Context sharpens the edge. In an Enlightenment era that prized empirical order, Swedenborg offers a compromise that feels like a workaround: accept rational method, but widen the data set to include visions. Calling the Word “spiritual and Divine” isn’t a pious flourish; it’s a conclusion drawn from his premise that meanings correspond across realms. The move is elegant: make scripture comprehensive, then declare it transcendent because it maps a universe larger than the literal page.