40. Divine love and wisdom is substance and is form. The everyday concept of love and wisdom is that they are something floating around in, or breathed out by, thin air or ether. Hardly anyone considers that in reality and in function they are substance and form.

Even people who do see that love and wisdom are substance and form sense them as something outside their subject, flowing from it; and they refer to what in their perceptions is outside the subject and flowing from it as substance and form even though they sense it as floating around. They do not realize that love and wisdom are the actual subject, and that what they sense as floating out from the subject is only the appearance of the inherent state of the subject.

There are many reasons why this has not come to light before. One of them is that appearances are the first things the human mind draws on in forming its understanding, and the only way to dispel these appearances is through careful probing into cause. If a cause is deeply hidden, we cannot probe into it unless we keep our discernment in spiritual light for a protracted period of time; and we cannot hold it there for a long time because of the earthly light that keeps pulling us back.

Still, the truth is that love and wisdom are the real and functional substance and form that make up the very subject.

349. What we can see in the created universe bears witness to the fact that nature has brought forth nothing and brings forth nothing. Divinity brings forth everything from itself, and does so through the spiritual world. Many people in our world take events at face value and say that the sun produces the things that we can see in our meadows, fields, gardens, and forests by its warmth and light, that the sun hatches grubs from eggs by its warmth and makes the beasts of the earth and the birds in the sky reproduce, and even that it brings us to life. People can talk this way if they are simply talking in terms of appearances but are not really ascribing these powers to nature. They are not actually thinking about it. It is like people talking about the sun, saying that it rises and sets and makes days and years, that it is now at one height or another. They are likewise talking in terms of appearances, and they can do so, without thinking about the sun as stationary and the earth as revolving.

People who prove to themselves that the sun does produce the things we see on earth by its warmth and light end up giving nature credit for everything, even the creation of the universe. They become materialists and ultimately atheists. They can later say that God created nature and endowed it with the ability to do all this, but they say this out of fear of harm to their reputation. All the while, by "God the Creator" they really mean nature--for some of them, its inmost essence--and completely trivialize the divine qualities that the church teaches.