Survey / Soul-Body Interaction

These short works by Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), originally published separately, offer his summaries of two very different areas of his thought. In Survey, he discusses some key tenets of Christian doctrines, both Catholic and Protestant, and describes how his own theology differs from them. The more philosophically centered work Soul-Body Interaction weighs in on the contemporary debate about the relationship between the soul and the body--a debate that continues to our time in the form of the mind-body question, the exploration of the action of mind on body and of the nature of consciousness. In Swedenborg's treatment, this topic leads to an exposition of the way that life flows from the transcendent God into all living things.