115. Still, there is no understanding how the Lord is in an angel and an angel is in the Lord except through knowing what kind of union is involved. It is a union of the Lord with the angel and of the angel with the Lord, so it is a reciprocal union. On the angel's side, it is like this. Angels, like us, simply feel as though they participate in love and wisdom on their own, and therefore that love and wisdom are theirs, their very own. If they did not feel this way there would be no union, so the Lord would not be in them, nor they in the Lord. It cannot happen that the Lord is in any angels or people unless they, as subjects of his presence in love and wisdom, sense and feel this as their own. This enables them not only to accept but also to retain what they have accepted, and to love in response. This, then, is how angels become wise and remain wise. Can people decide to love God and their neighbor, can people decide to gain wisdom, unless they feel and sense that what they love, learn, and gain is their own? Can they retain anything in themselves otherwise? If it were not for this, then the inflowing love and wisdom would have no seat. They would flow right through without making any difference; and as a result angels would not be angels and people would not be human. They would be virtually lifeless.

It makes sense, then, that if there is to be union, there must be reciprocity.

71. To show that the merely natural person thinks about spiritual and Divine matters in terms of space, and the spiritual person independently of space, let the following illustration suffice.

The merely natural person thinks in terms of ideas that he has acquired from objects visible to his sight, all of which exhibit in them a configuration possessing length, breadth and height and having a shape delimited by these, whether angular or curvilinear. These dimensions are clearly present in his mental conceptions of visible objects in the world, and they are also present in his mental conceptions of things not visible, as in his conceptions of civil and moral matters. He does not, indeed, see them, but still they are present as extended concepts.

[2] It is otherwise in the case of a spiritual person, especially in the case of an angel in heaven. His thinking is unrelated to configuration and form having anything do to with spatial length, breadth or height, but having to do with the state of a thing arising from the state of a person's life. Consequently, instead of spatial length he pictures the goodness of a thing arising from the goodness of a person's life, instead of spatial breadth the truth of a thing arising from the truth of a person's life, and instead of height degrees of these. Thus he thinks in terms of correspondence, which is the relation of spiritual and natural things to each other. And it is because of this correspondence that length in the Word symbolizes the goodness of a thing, breadth the truth of a thing, and height degrees of these.

It is apparent from this that when an angel in heaven reflects on the Divine omnipresence, it is utterly impossible for him to think otherwise than that the Divine fills all things independently of space. What an angel thinks is true, because the light that enlightens his intellect is Divine wisdom.