Center for Swedenborgian Studies

The Helen Keller Collection

Black-and-white portrait of Helen Keller seated beside an open book and smelling a rose in a vase.
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From the age of 16 until her death, Helen Keller identified as a Swedenborgian Christian. She was introduced to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg by the elderly Mr. John Hitz, professional assistant to Alexander Graham Bell, Consul-General for Switzerland to the United States, and member of the Washington Society of the New Church. Keller and Hitz shared a love of the natural world, which they experienced on their many long walks together, and of spiritual topics, which were the subject of their extensive personal correspondence through letters. Subsequent to the early introduction to Swedenborg by Hitz, Keller became an avid reader of Swedenborg in raised letters and in braille and wrote about her strong connection to the ideas therein in articles, letters, speeches and her 1927 book titled My Religion. It was a faith that sustained her into old age.

Central to her belief system was the Swedenborgian concept of correspondences, or the idea that the world outside of us and the world within us respond to and reflect one another. Keller summarizes it this way: “In the world within and the world without I see a wonderful correspondence, a glorious symbolism which reveals the human and the divine communing together.” (Optimism, 94) Elsewhere she explains “for there is an inexhaustible ocean of likeness between the world within and the world without.” (The World I Live In, 56) Keller relied on this concept in her insistence that the entire cosmos was accessible to her via her own inner senses, despite losing faculties of the physical body.

A second Swedenborgian concept that informed her life’s activities was the idea that spiritual wholeness comes from the balance of two essential elements: love and wisdom. These two elements are perfectly unified in God and embodied in communities and in human individuals to the extent that the two can be brought into harmony. The product of the harmony of love and wisdom is usefulness, the three comprising a kind of trinity in the Swedenborgian theological tradition. Keller writes: “[The] central doctrine is simple. It consists of three main ideas: God as divine love, God as divine wisdom, and God as power for use. These ideas come as waves from an ocean which floods every bay and harbor of life with new potency of will, of faith, and of effort.” (Out of the Dark, 261)

Keller’s religion informed her beliefs about how best to improve the lives of people living with disabilities. While she spent many years traveling and delivering speeches to raise money for the American Foundation for the Blind, she believed that philanthropy alone was not enough. Rather, changes in labor laws and other policies were needed to reshape public spaces and work environments, so that everyone could participate in society, so that everyone could be useful. “I feel that the blind have a strong friend in the New Church; for it has never doubted our power to work, to overcome difficulties and to live the life of the spirit” she wrote in a letter to New Church minister Rev. Paul Sperry.

The Helen Keller Collection in the CSS Digital Archive is comprised of letters between Keller and Rev. Paul Sperry regarding the publication of My Religion, along with a slew of letters between Sperry and others assisting in the publication and translation of My Religion for international audiences. One of the most significant letters in the collection is one that talks of the contentness found in deaf individuals whose souls are open to the “harmonies of Heaven.” It is not only penned by Keller, but is also hand-signed. The collection contains an assembly of contemporaneous articles that cover Keller’s work, along with reviews and other press coverage surrounding the release of My Religion.