1. Divine Love and Wisdom

Angelic Wisdom about Divine Love

Part 1

Love is our life. For most people, the existence of love is a given, but the nature of love is a mystery. As for the existence of love, this we know from everyday language. We say that someone loves us, that monarchs love their subjects, and that subjects love their monarch. We say that a husband loves his wife and that a mother loves her children, and vice versa. We say that people love their country, their fellow citizens, their neighbor. We use the same language about impersonal objects, saying that someone loves this or that thing.

Even though the word "love" is so commonly on our tongues, still hardly anyone knows what love is. When we stop to think about it, we find that we cannot form any image of it in our thoughts, so we say either that it is not really anything or that it is simply something that flows into us from our sight, hearing, touch, and conversation and therefore influences us. We are wholly unaware that it is our very life--not just the general life of our whole body and of all our thoughts, but the life of their every least detail. Wise people can grasp this when you ask, "If you take away the effects of love, can you think anything? Can you do anything? As the effects of love lose their warmth, do not thought and speech and action lose theirs as well? Do they not warm up as love warms up?" Still, the grasp of these wise people is not based on the thought that love is our life, but on their experience that this is how things happen.

199. All processes of perfection increase and rise by and according to levels. I have already explained that there are two kinds of level, horizontal and vertical, in 184-188 above. I have explained that the horizontal levels are like levels of light tending toward darkness or wisdom tending toward ignorance, while vertical levels are like those of a purpose, a means, and a result, or like something antecedent, something subsequent, and something final. These latter levels are described as rising and falling, since they involve height; while the former are described as waxing and waning because they involve width.

These levels are so different from each other that they have nothing in common; so they need to be grasped clearly and not confused with each other in any way.

151. The Lord created the universe and everything in it by means of that sun that is the first emanation of divine love and wisdom. "The Lord" means God from eternity or Jehovah, who is called the Father and the Creator, because as explained in Teachings for the New Jerusalem on the Lord, the Lord and the Father are one. When I return to the topic of creation below [282-357], therefore, I will refer to "the Lord."