‘The Swedishman at Brother Brockmer’s’: Moravians and Swedenborgians in eighteenth-century London (original) (raw)

2013, Philosophy, Literature, Mysticism: an anthology of essays on the thought and influence of Emanuel Swedenborg

Swedenborg’s involvement with the London Moravian Community, suspected for some time, can now be documented from the diaries (May 4/15th 1745) of the Moravian Church at Fetter Lane in the City of London. The influence of Zinzendorf’s writings on Swedenborg’s thinking can also be demonstrated, despite Swedenborgian attempts to downplay it. But what the Swedenborgians stress is that individual Moravians read Swedenborg’s writings and were themselves influenced by him. One early reader was the prominent Moravian minister at Northampton, Francis Okely, who had become acquainted with Swedenborg’s works as early as 1768. Okely was a prolific translator of sixteenth and seventeenth-century mystical writers, believing these writings to be useful for his spiritually-fallen fellow citizens in eighteenth-century England. Swedenborg’s attempt to reinvigorate a human-based Christian faith would have been attractive to some Moravian readers, and his works seem to have circulated in these circles. Okely initially was impressed with Swedenborg’s teachings, which often parallel the seventeenth-century writers he was interested in, but later wrote to Swedenborg that he did not understand The True Christian Religion (first published, in Latin, in 1771). Later, Robert Hindmarsh’s Theosophical Society (a Swedenborgian reading group) included such members as the painter Richard Cosway, and Cosway was a close friend of James Hutton, Moravian leader in England, painting Hutton’s portrait in 1786. By the end of the eighteenth century, Okely’s son, William, also a Moravian minister, was openly scornful of Swedenborg’s claims to spiritual insight.