The Writings offer a tremendous amount of material on angels. The book "Heaven and Hell" offers detailed discussions as it describes heaven; "Conjugial Love" has much to say about marriage and romantic love in heaven; "Divine Love and Wisdom" offers insight into how angels in their nature reflect the nature of the Lord. So we'll offer some basics here and recommend those books to those who want more detail.

(références: Divine Love and Wisdom 231; Divine Providence 60-67)

Basically, the Writings say that if people in this life open themselves to the Lord, follow the Lord's teachings and let the Lord change their selfish desires into generous loves, they will go to heaven as angels after they die. If they don't, and instead embrace their selfishness, they will go to hell as evil spirits. The Writings also say that this is the only source of angels and evil spirits - they were all once people. There is no separately created race of angels, no fallen angel Lucifer who is now the Devil; that belief is based solely on a few lines of misinterpreted scripture.

This makes sense if you look at it logically. If the Lord could create beings that would live in love and harmony with him with no possibility of evil, why would He have bothered with us? Why not just make more of them? The fact is, such beings would not have any choice in their actions, making them no better than animals. And ultimately, if they were purely good then they would really just be extensions of the Lord, so in loving them He would be loving Himself. The reverse is true of the idea of Satan or "the" Devil. The Lord creates us from love so that he can love us, bring us to heaven and make us happy. For Satan to exist, the Lord would have had to create him, and it would be contrary to His essence to create something that was not intended for heaven, for joy, and for union with the Lord.

So angels were once people, who got to be angels by embracing the idea of being good and followed the Lord's teachings as best they could. The Writings make it clear these people can come from anywhere, from any religious background. Some churches may have doctrine that is closer to the truth than others, but the point of any religion is for people to desire to be good and try to be good using the tools they have.

When those people die, they go first to a place called the "world of spirits." There everyone who has recently died can learn about the Lord and spiritual life and prepare for heaven. There also, people's inner affections start showing on the surface; those who are ultimately evil start losing the ability to cover it up, and the love starts shining through for those who are ultimately good. As this continues and as people learn more, they naturally start congregating with others who have similar loves. This way evil people eventually take themselves to hell, where they can be with others who share their evil. Good people, on the other hand, can be prepared for heaven.

Two important things have to happen for us to truly enter fully into heaven. First, the Lord will push aside our remaining evil desires, so they cannot hurt us or tempt us anymore; angels are in a marvelous state of peace, with no active evil to trouble them. Second, we will each be led by the Lord to the perfect married partner, the one whose soul matches ours, the one we can love blissfully to eternity. All angels are married, because the marriage of a man and a woman represents the marriage of love and wisdom in the Lord, and also the marriage of the desire for good and understanding of truth in each of us. Because of this, we can only fully receive and return the Lord's love as married partners, and heaven is suffused with the sphere of marriage and the love of marriage.

The angelic couples will find their way to communities of other angels whose loves match their own, people with whom they can share the deepest friendships imaginable. They will have houses which reflect the character of their loves, and will be given work to do that springs from their loves and fills them with joy. Beyond that, their lives are much as life might be in this world, though free of sickness and aging and boredom and conflict. They have bodies that are human in form - no wings! - but a beauty in face and form that reflects the good loves they have inside. They eat and drink and laugh and sleep and have parties and games; all filled with the delight of mutual love.

The Writings tell us the work angels do is varied far beyond what we can imagine, though they only describe a few aspects. Among other things, angels care for people in this life, passing on to them true ideas and desires for good from the Lord. They also teach those in the World of Spirits, greet those who have just died, raise those who died as children, keep order in hell and do many other things.

We would finally note that there are three degrees of angelic life, based on the loves people embraced in this life. The first, lowest heaven, called the "natural heaven," is filled by those who are in the love of service. Angels there love to do what's right because they know it is right. The second, middle heaven, called the spiritual heaven, is filled by those who are in the love of the neighbor. Angels there love to engage their minds with spiritual questions to gain an ever-deeper understanding of how to be loving to one another. The third, highest heaven, known as celestial, is filled with those who are in love of the Lord Himself. From that love they have such innocence that they look like children, and they instantly perceive what is true, in all its variety, from the light of that love.

(références: Apocalypse Revealed 818; Arcana Coelestia 228-233, 454, 1802, 2551, 2572 [3-4], 5470, 6872 [2-3], 8747, 9503 [1-3], 9814 [2], 10604 [2-4]; Conjugial Love 44 [6-10], 52; Divine Love and Wisdom 19, 63, 71, 115, 116, 202, Divine Love and Wisdom 321, 322, 334; Heaven and Hell 75, 133, 266, 267, 304, 311, 415)

415. The Vastness of Heaven

The vastness of the Lord's heaven follows from many of the things that have been presented above, especially from the fact that heaven is from the human race (see 311-317), not only that portion of it born within the church but also the portion born outside it (see 318-328). This means that heaven includes everyone who has lived a good life since the very beginning of our planet.

Anyone familiar with the continents and regions and nations of this world may gather what a multitude of people there are on our whole globe. Anyone who goes into the mathematics of it will discover that thousands and thousands of people die on any given day, making hundreds of thousands or millions every year; and this has been going on since the earliest times, thousands of years ago. All of these people have arrived in the other world, called the spiritual world, after their decease, and they are still arriving.

I cannot say how many of these are or are becoming angels of heaven. I have been told that most of the earliest people became angels, because they thought more deeply and spiritually and were therefore enveloped in heavenly affection; while for later ages it was not so many because as time passed we became more externally minded and began to think more on the natural level, which meant that we were enveloped in more earthly affection.

This enables us to gather at the outset that heaven is huge simply from the inhabitants of this planet.

5126. 'And you will put Pharaoh's cup into his hand' means in order that they might consequently serve the interior natural. This is clear from the meaning of 'putting the cup to drink' as making one's own, dealt with above in 5120, besides the obvious meaning of serving; and from the representation of 'Pharaoh' as the interior natural, dealt with in 5080, 5095, 5118. For there is an interior natural and there is an exterior natural, the exterior natural being made up of impressions which enter in directly from the world by way of the senses into the natural mind, that is to say, they enter the memory belonging to that mind and therefore enter the place where mental images are formed, see 5118.

[2] So that people can know what the exterior natural and what the interior natural are like, which make up the exterior man, and from this can know what the rational is which makes up the interior man, a brief reference to them must be made here. From infancy to childhood a person relies solely on his senses, for during those years he is receiving, through his bodily senses, nothing but earthly, bodily, and worldly impressions, which during those years are also the raw material from which he forms his ideas and thoughts. Communication with the interior man has not yet been opened up, except insofar as he is able to take in and hold on to those impressions. The innocence which exists in him at this time is solely external, not internal, because true innocence resides within wisdom. But the Lord uses this - his external innocence - to bring order into what enters through the senses. If innocence did not come to him from the Lord in that first period no foundation would ever be laid down on which the intellectual or rational degree of the mind proper to a human being could be established.

[3] From childhood to early youth communication is opened up with the interior natural, by the person's learning about what is decent, public-spirited, and honourable, both through what parents and teachers tell him and through his own efforts to find out about such matters. During early youth to later youth however communication is opened up between the natural and the rational, by his learning about what is true and what is good so far as his public life and private life are concerned, and above all about what is good and what is true so far as his spiritual life is concerned, all of which he learns about through listening to and reading the Word. Indeed insofar as he uses truths to immerse himself in good deeds, that is, insofar as he puts the truths he learns into practice, the rational is opened up; but insofar as he does not use truths to immerse himself in good deeds, or does not put truths into practice, the rational is not opened up. Nevertheless the things he has come to know remain within the natural; that is to say, they remain in his memory, left on the doorstep so to speak outside the house.

[4] But insofar - during these years and the next period of life - as he impairs the things he knows, refuses to accept them, and acts contrary to them, that is, insofar as he believes falsities and practises evils instead, the rational is closed, as is the interior natural also. But in spite of that, the Lord's Divine Providence enables communication to remain open enough to give him the ability to understand the good or truth he knows about. But he does not make these his own unless he truly repents and for a long while after that wrestles with falsities and evils. With people however who allow themselves to be regenerated the opposite takes place; for gradually, that is, in consecutive stages, their rational is opened up, the interior natural then becoming ranged in order beneath it, and the exterior natural beneath that. This occurs especially in the period from late youth to adulthood; it also continues in progressive stages to the final period of those regenerating people's lives, and after that in heaven for ever. From all this one may know what constitutes a person's interior natural and what his exterior natural.