Non-fiction: Heaven and Hell

Overview
Emanuel Swedenborg offers a detailed account of the afterlife based on his reported spiritual visions and dialogues with angels and spirits. The narrative maps the moral and inner geography of heaven and hell, portraying them not as distant, uniform places but as living societies whose order and quality reflect the loves and thoughts of their inhabitants. The work blends metaphysical claims with descriptive psychology, seeking to show how human choices and affections shape postmortem existence.

Heaven: Structure and Life
Heaven appears as a hierarchical yet organic set of societies organized around mutual love and wisdom. Angels live in communities that correspond to varying degrees of celestial love and intelligence; each society has distinct functions, appearances, and ways of communicating, but all share an orientation toward the Divine. Happiness in heaven is described as the natural outflow of willing good for others, experienced through inward perception, harmonious relationships, and an ever-deepening understanding of spiritual truth.
Daily life in heaven is social and purposeful rather than contemplative withdrawal. Activities, conversations, and uses are ordered according to each angel's gifts, producing a sense of unity without loss of individuality. Sensory and emotional experiences are vivid but spiritually nuanced; what looks and feels beautiful corresponds to inner states of charity and truth. Higher heavens are characterized by more universal loves, while lower heavens retain more particular, earthly affections integrated into celestial ends.

Hell: Structure and Nature
Hell is depicted as a mirror opposite: communities formed by loves of self and the world, where social bonds are sustained by common evils rather than mutual good. Demons congregate with those who share deceptive patterns of thinking and desiring, creating societies that reinforce illusion, cruelty, and disorder. Hell's misery stems not from imposed punishment but from the natural consequences of selfish inclinations that make communion with the Divine and with others impossible.
Swedenborg emphasizes variety within hell as well; like heaven, it contains distinct groups with characteristic distortions of intellect, emotion, and will. Torment arises when inner desires clash with the realities of a spiritual world ordered by truth and goodness. The damned persist in their loves and therefore experience a world that fits those loves, a state presented as both logical and irreversible in degree.

Afterlife Experience and Correspondence
A central theme is the doctrine of correspondences: spiritual realities manifest through natural analogues so that inner states produce outer forms. The forms and atmospheres of heaven and hell correspond to the inhabitants' dominant loves and thoughts, allowing nonmaterial intentions to be perceived as concrete scenes, voices, and sensations. The living continue in a recognizable continuity of personhood, with memory, character, and social ties preserved, but inner motives determine spiritual perception and possibilities for growth.
Transition after death is immediate and based on the soul's predominant affection. Swedenborg reports that spirits initially feel as if still embodied and gradually become suited to their spiritual state, with communities accepting or excluding them according to shared loves. Communication occurs through what he calls the spiritual senses, enabling direct insight into others' intentions and thus creating a moral clarity absent from earthly life.

Salvation, Free Will and the Lord
Salvation is framed as a life reoriented toward love of God and neighbor, with "charity" given precedence over mere belief. The Lord (Jesus) is presented as the sole source of spiritual life and the one who enables regeneration. Human freedom is respected: the capacity to choose love or self-love is decisive, and the soul's choice determines its eternal condition. Repentance and reform are possible through the cultivation of truth and good, though habitual, hardened evils limit recovery.
Swedenborg underscores that judgment is not an arbitrary divine sentence but the natural outcome of a soul's character. Divine mercy and justice operate through the correspondence between inner will and outer state, so that finality is less a verdict and more the completion of a spiritual trajectory set in life.

Practical and Spiritual Implications
The account invites a reorientation of daily morality: inward intentions matter as much as outward actions because they shape spiritual destiny. Emphasis on love, humility, and usefulness encourages personal responsibility for spiritual development, while the vivid descriptions of afterlife societies aim to motivate ethical living rather than fear. The narrative also challenges literalist and materialist assumptions by proposing a richly structured spiritual world continuous with human experience and governed by moral law.