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.

(References: 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.

(References: 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)

334. It is abundantly clear that these are for our use and that they are gifts freely given if we look at the state of angels in the heavens. They have bodies, rational abilities, and spiritual receptivity just as we on earth do. They are nourished for free, because they are given their food daily. They are clothed for free, because they are given their clothing. They are housed for free, because they are given their homes. They have no anxiety about any of these things; and to the extent that they are spiritually rational, they enjoy pleasure, protection, and preservation of their state.

The difference is that angels see that these things come from the Lord because they are created in response to the angels' state of love and wisdom, as explained above in 322, while we do not see this because things recur according to the calendar and happen not according to our states of love and wisdom but according to our efforts.

4658. To the inner parts of the ear belong those who have 'the sight' of the inner hearing, who obey whatever its spirit there tells them and make exactly right declarations of what it tells them. I have also been shown what these are like from the following experience. I became aware of a kind of noise coming through from below me, coming up on the left side of me into my left ear. I realized that they were spirits who were trying to work their way out, but I could not make out what kind of spirits they were. Having worked their way out, however, they then spoke to me. They said that they were students of logic and metaphysics and that they had confined their thoughts to these areas of knowledge with no other end in view than that they would be considered learned and so would acquire positions and wealth. They moaned about the wretched life they now led, for they had become steeped in those areas of knowledge for no other purpose, and so had not used this to bring perfection to their power of reason. Their speech was slow and muted.

[2] Meanwhile two were talking to each other overhead, and I asked who they were. I was told that one of them was a very renowned figure in the learned world, and I was led to believe that he was Aristotle. Who the second one was, I was not told. The first of them was at that point taken back to a state he had passed through when he lived in the world; for anyone can easily be taken back to a state of his life when in the world because every state of his life is present within him. But to my surprise he positioned himself at my right ear and there spoke in a hoarse yet intelligible voice. From the meaning conveyed in his utterances I became aware that he was of an entirely different disposition from those schoolmen who had emerged first, in that the things he had written were the product of his own thought and that this was the origin of his philosophical ideas. Consequently the terms which he invented and gave to different facets of his thoughts were verbal expressions by which he described the things of an interior kind. I also became aware of the fact that he had been prompted to engage in such pursuits by a great delight and a desire to know the ideas that are part of thought, and that he followed obediently whatever his spirit had told him. This was why he had positioned himself at my right ear. His followers, called the Schoolmen, ¹ are different. They do not proceed from thought to terms but from terms to ideas comprising thought, and so go down the road from the opposite end. Indeed, many do not even set off down it to these ideas but stay with terms; and if they use these it is to prove whatever they like, and to give falsities an appearance of truth, in keeping with their desire to convince people of these. Consequently their pursuit of philosophy serves to make them stupid rather than wise persons, so that darkness prevails among them instead of light.

[3] I talked to them after that about the science of analysis, and I was led to say that a small child speaking for merely half an hour presents more philosophy, analysis, and logic than he could have done in volumes describing them, for the reason that every detail of human thought and consequently of human speech involves analysis, the laws of which originate in the spiritual world. I went on to say that anyone who wishes in his thinking to begin in an artificial way with terms is not unlike a dancer who wishes to start to learn how to dance from what he knows about motor fibres and muscles. If in trying to dance he fixed his mind simply on his knowledge of these he could scarcely lift a foot. Yet even without that knowledge he moves all his motor fibres spread throughout the whole body, using them to operate his lungs, diaphragm, sides, arms, neck, and every other part of the body, to describe all of which many volumes would not be sufficient. Similar to such a dancer were those who wish in their thinking to begin with terms. He agreed with what I said and declared that if that is the way people learn they are proceeding in the wrong direction. If anyone wished to be so stupid, he added, then let him go that way; even so, let him always keep in mind what is useful and what is interior.

[4] After this he showed me what kind of idea he had had about the Supreme Deity. He had represented Him to himself as one with a human face and a halo around his head. He now knew that the Lord was that Person, that the halo was the Divine as this proceeded from Him, and that He flowed not only into heaven but also into the whole world, disposing and ruling over these. He added that the one who disposes and rules heaven also disposes and rules the whole world because the one is inseparable from the other. He also declared that he had believed in one God alone whose attributes and qualities had been designated by the same number of names as there were gods whom others worshipped.

[5] I saw a woman who was reaching out her hand, desiring to stroke his cheek. When I wondered at this he said that while in the world he had often seen a woman like this one who seemed to be stroking his cheek, and that her hand had been beautiful. Angelic spirits said that women like her had been seen on occasions by people in early times who gave the name Pallas to them, and that whoever had appeared to him had been one of those spirits who, when they had lived as people in ancient times, had taken delight in ideas and so had gone into the field of thought, though not into philosophy. And since such spirits had resided with him and had taken delight in him because he had begun in his thinking with that which was interior they had put forward such a woman to represent this.

[6] Finally he intimated what kind of idea he had had about the human soul or spirit, which he called pneuma, namely something living but invisible, like something ethereal. He also said that he had known his spirit would live on after death because it was his inward essential self which, having the ability to think, could not die. He then went on to say that he had not been able to have any clear thought about the soul, only an obscure one, because his only source of knowledge about it was himself and, to a small extent, what he had received from the ancients. Aristotle himself lives among intelligent spirits in the next life, but many of his followers dwell among people who are stupid.

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