Science Quote by Emanuel Swedenborg

A scientist-mystic draws blood in one line: the Word, treated "as to the letter", is a corpse unless it’s animated by lived practice. Swedenborg is targeting a familiar religious failure mode: reverence that stops at recitation. His phrasing is surgical. "Such a Life" isn’t decorative piety; it’s the missing condition that turns language into something operative. Strip away life, and the text becomes "dead" - not wrong, not irrelevant, just inert. That’s a harsher indictment than disbelief because it implies you can be surrounded by sacred language and still be spiritually bankrupt.

The subtext is anti-fundamentalist before the modern label existed. "As to the letter" signals suspicion of literalism: the letter is the outer shell, useful but insufficient. Swedenborg’s theology leans on correspondences, the idea that scripture encodes inner realities. He’s warning that when you read only at the surface, you mistake the container for the contents - and then congratulate yourself for owning the container.

Context matters: Swedenborg comes out of the Enlightenment with a scientist’s instinct for systems, causality, and proof, then pivots into visionary theology. This sentence reads like a lab note turned spiritual criterion: if the reading doesn’t produce transformation, it failed the experiment. The line works because it refuses to flatter the reader. It doesn’t ask whether you believe the Word; it asks whether your life gives it pulse.