In the same "speech" he says: "Since 1896 I call myself a Christian (see Inferno). I am not a Catholic, and have never been one, but during seven years' life in Catholic countries and in intimate relationship with Catholics I discovered that there was no difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, or merely an outward one, and that the schism which took place once was purely political, or was only concerned with theological points which in reality have nothing to do with religion. This was the cause of my tolerance towards Catholics which found a special expression in my Gustavus Adolphus, and gave rise to the fable about my being a Catholic. I am entered on the parish register as a Protestant, and shall remain one, but I am probably not orthodox, nor am I a pietist, but rather a Swedenborgian."
At the time when Inferno was written Strindberg was, however, more completely under the spell of Rome than he acknowledges in his later writings. He contemplated retreat in a Belgian monastery, and in Inferno he tells us that, when he read Sar Peladan's Comment on devient Mage, "Catholicism held its solemn and triumphant entry into my life." He found many points of contact between Swedenborg's mystical philosophy and that of the Catholic Church. The profound influence on modern thought exercised by Swedenborg, and which is clearly discernible in the writings of Goethe, Emerson, Balzac, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, Ruskin, Coventry Patmore, and Carlyle, is evidence of the spiritual catholicity of the great Swedish mystic. Superficial criticism is apt to dismiss Swedenborg as a deluded ghost-seer, whose psychical derangements are responsible for a farrago of communications on heaven and hell, prodigiously wearisome in details and lacking the saving grace of humour. Such criticism is made by those who know nothing of the intellectual versatility, and the scientific achievements of Swedenborg. His writings on anatomy, physiology, geology, and metallurgy alone would have entitled him to a distinguished place among the pioneers of science. Swedenborg studied mechanics, engineering, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and music, and took a keen interest in handicrafts.
There is a striking resemblance between Swedenborg and Strindberg in this versatility of mood and thought. It is emphasised by many minor traits of character and taste, such as the great love for children and flowers which both evinced. Separated by more than a century and a half, Strindberg found himself the spiritual descendant of Swedenborg. To him he dedicates his first Blue Book (1907) in the following words: "To Emanuel Swedenborg, Teacher and Leader, this book is dedicated by the Disciple." The Blue Books deal with every thinkable subject—religious, philosophical, scientific—in an aphoristic and combative manner which is pervaded by a curious mixture of pride and humility. Here speaks the High Priest of Knowledge, here quivers the helpless embryo of the humanity which is to come. In these motley pages the Teacher and the Disciple talk of telepathy, chemistry, astronomy, meteorology, spectral analysis, atoms and crystals, the psychology of plants, the secrets of birds, the formation of clouds, Darwinism, radium, woman, the secrets of chess, the secrets and magic of numbers, the Mesopotamian language, hieroglyphics, Hebraic research, symbolism, clairvoyance, and a hundred other subjects. In the preface to The Bondswoman's Son Strindberg speaks of his Blue Book as the synthesis of his life. The Disciple is worthy of the Master; to the Swedenborgian and eighteenth-century conception of the natural world and the spiritual world Strindberg has added the craving for a synthetic interpretation of facts, which was characteristic of the nineteenth century, and which found its foremost representatives in Spencer and Comte. In his sense of truth, in his work for the correlation of knowledge, in his readiness to forsake pleasant beliefs for unpleasant facts, Strindberg realised Swedenborg's description of a certain phase of angelic life: "To grow old in heaven is to grow young."
The renewal of intellectual youth, with its baffling polymathy and selfcontradictions, led Strindberg to question the composition of his own soul. In the preface to The Bondswoman's Son he confesses that he has sometimes wondered if he has incarnated different personalities. Dissociated fields of consciousness may be a psychopathic phenomenon, or indicative of an advanced state of psychic evolution. The problem has been approached from many points of view. The mystery of personality metamorphosis, of primary and secondary individualities, contained within the frame of one human body, is now a recognised subject of inquiry in the domain of abnormal psychology. Cases of multiple personality in which there is an absolute division between the "entities," and in which the memories do not intermingle, have been carefully studied and classified. The ease with which Strindberg apostatised, the mutually destructive theories which he advanced at different periods of life, the power with which he could objectify his past selves, and repeatedly paint "the face of what was once myself," point to a multiplicity of consciousness which, though not rare in genius, was especially active in him. In the preface to The Author, written in 1909, Strindberg says of himself as the writer of the book twenty years earlier: "The personality of the author is just as much a stranger to me as to the reader—and just as unsympathetic."
There is undoubtedly a gulf between the personality responsible for the preface to Lady Julie with its crude materialism, and the sensitised consciousness of the man who pours out his soul in the Blue Books and in Alone. Nietzscheanism was but a cloak, with which Strindberg covered the cor laceratum, which always suffered acutely through the misfortunes of others. The cloak did not fit him. In Alone, the dulcet autobiographical finale to the agitato of Inferno, we find him in self-imposed and vicarious suffering for the sins of a neighbouring grocer who has failed in business through incompetence and dishonesty. "I went through all his agony," he writes; "thought of his wife, of the approaching quarter-day, of the rent, of the cheques." Strindberg now lived in open enmity with the theories of the survival of the fittest and natural selection; his conception of the evolution idea led him to repudiate the current belief in the descent of man as a glorification of brute-nature, and to cry: "What a shame to have paid homage to the Ape-King, the seducer of my youth!"
To the natural capacity for suffering was added that imposed on him through the development of his psychic powers. He did not only live the lives of others "telepathically"; his sensibility became so exteriorised as to receive impressions at a great distance. Thus he used to feel, when one of his plays was being performed for the first time in some part of Europe, though he had received no information in regard to the performance. In 1907 he told Uddgren that, after going to bed at ten in the evening, he was sometimes awakened by the sound of loud applause which caused him to sit up in bed, wondering if he was at a theatre. Such a telepathic ovation was invariably followed by the news of some dramatic success. In the first Blue Book, "the Disciple" relates the following: "In a company I interrupted myself with a smile in the middle of an animated conversation. 'What are you smiling at?' somebody asked. 'The southern express pulled up at the Central Station just now,' was the reply. Another time something similar happened, and I said: 'The curtain has now fallen on the last act in Helsingfors, and I heard the applause after my first night.' I perceive the talk of the people in restaurants after the performance as ringing in the ears. I can hear this all the way from Germany when I have a first performance, though I have no previous knowledge of being played."
He records the psychic rapport which sexual union establishes between him, and the woman he loves. When she is absent, and thinks kindly of him, he perceives the fragrance of incense or jessamine; when she is travelling he knows if she is on a steamer or in a train. He can distinguish the throbbing of the propeller from the thumping of the buffers on the railway carriage.
The most remarkable passage in the Blue Book is perhaps the following summary of his clairpsychism:
"I feel at a distance when somebody touches my fate, when enemies threaten my personal existence, but also when people speak kindly of me or wish me well; I feel in the street if I meet friend or enemy; I have participated in the suffering caused by an operation on a person towards whom I feel comparatively indifferent; I have twice gone through the death agony of others with attendant physical and mental suffering; the last time I passed through three diseases in six hours, and rose well when the absent one had been liberated through death. This makes life painful, but rich and interesting."
[1] Bøken on Strindberg af Gustaf Uddgren.