333. Useful functions for our acceptance of what is spiritual from the Lord are all the elements of our religion and its worship, everything, then, that teaches us to recognize and understand God and to recognize and understand what is good and what is true--that therefore teaches us eternal life. These, like academic disciplines, we get from parents, teachers, sermons, and books, and especially by devoting ourselves to living by them. In the Christian world, this comes through teaching and preaching from the Word, and through the Word, from the Lord.

We can describe the range of these functions much as we describe physical functions--in terms of nourishment, for example, clothing, shelter, recreation and pleasure, and protection of our state, as long as we apply them to the soul. We may compare nourishment to the good that love does, clothing to the truth that wisdom provides, dwelling to heaven, recreation and pleasure to life's happiness and heavenly joy, protection to [safety from] the attacks of evil, and preservation of our state to eternal life.

The Lord grants all these gifts upon our acknowledgment that everything physical also comes from the Lord and that we are simply like servants or stewards given responsibility for the Lord's goods.

71. The following example should illustrate how merely earthly people think in spatial terms about matters spiritual and divine, while spiritual people do so without reference to space. When merely earthly people think, they use images they have garnered from things they have seen. There is some shape to all of these involving length, breadth, and height, some angular or curved form bounded by these dimensions. These dimensions are clearly present in the mental images people have of visible, earthly things; and they are present as well in their mental images of things they do not see, such as civic and moral matters. They do not actually see these dimensions, but they are still present implicitly.

It is different for spiritual people, and especially for heaven's angels. Their thinking has nothing to do with form and shape involving spatial length, breadth, and height. It has to do with the state of the matter as it follows from a state of life. This means that in place of length they consider how good something is as a result of the quality of the life from which it stems; in place of breadth they consider how true something is because of the truth of the life from which it stems; and in place of height they consider the level of these qualities. They are thinking on the basis of correspondence, then, which is the mutual relationship between spiritual and earthly things. It is because of this correspondence that "length" in the Word means how good something is, "breadth" means how true it is, and "height" means the level of these qualities.

We can see from this that the only way heaven's angels can think about divine omnipresence is that Divinity fills everything, but nonspatially. Whatever angels think is true, because the light that illumines their understanding is divine wisdom.