1. Divine Love and Wisdom

Angelic Wisdom about Divine Love

Part 1

Love is our life. For most people, the existence of love is a given, but the nature of love is a mystery. As for the existence of love, this we know from everyday language. We say that someone loves us, that monarchs love their subjects, and that subjects love their monarch. We say that a husband loves his wife and that a mother loves her children, and vice versa. We say that people love their country, their fellow citizens, their neighbor. We use the same language about impersonal objects, saying that someone loves this or that thing.

Even though the word "love" is so commonly on our tongues, still hardly anyone knows what love is. When we stop to think about it, we find that we cannot form any image of it in our thoughts, so we say either that it is not really anything or that it is simply something that flows into us from our sight, hearing, touch, and conversation and therefore influences us. We are wholly unaware that it is our very life--not just the general life of our whole body and of all our thoughts, but the life of their every least detail. Wise people can grasp this when you ask, "If you take away the effects of love, can you think anything? Can you do anything? As the effects of love lose their warmth, do not thought and speech and action lose theirs as well? Do they not warm up as love warms up?" Still, the grasp of these wise people is not based on the thought that love is our life, but on their experience that this is how things happen.

119. The east in the spiritual world is where the Lord is seen as the sun, and the other directions follow from that. Now that I have discussed the spiritual world's sun and its essence, its warmth and light, and the Lord's consequent presence, I need to talk as well about the regions of that world. The reason for talking about the sun and that world is that our subject is God, and love and wisdom. To discuss these apart from their origin would be to start from effects and not from their causes. Yet effects teach us nothing but effects. When only they are highlighted, they do not show us any cause; rather, causes show us effects. Knowing about effects on the basis of their cause is being wise, but exploring causes on the basis of their effects is not being wise; because when we do, various illusions present themselves that we as investigators identify as causes. To do this is to make foolishness of wisdom. Causes precede and effects follow. We cannot see preceding things from following things, but we can see following things from preceding things. That is the pattern.

This is why we are dealing with the spiritual world first here. That world is where all the causes are. Later [134, 154] we will discuss the physical world, where everything we see is an effect.