116. However, this calls for an explanation of how angels can feel and sense this as their own and so accept and retain it when in fact it is not theirs, given the statement that angels are not angels on their own but by virtue of what is within them from the Lord. The essence of the matter is this. There is freedom and rationality in every angel. These two qualities are there so that angels can be open to love and wisdom from the Lord. Neither of these, though--neither the freedom nor the rationality--belongs to the angels. They are in them but belong to the Lord. However, since these two elements are intimately united to angels' life, so intimately united that you could call them linked to their life, it seems as though they belong to the angels. Freedom and rationality enable them to think and intend and to speak and act; and what they think, intend, speak, and act as a result seems to be done on their own. This gives rise to the reciprocal element that is the means to union.

Still, the more that angels believe that love and wisdom are within them and claim them for themselves as their own, the more there is nothing angelic within them. To the same extent, then, there is no union with the Lord for them. They are outside the truth; and since truth is identical with heaven's light, they are correspondingly unable to be in heaven. This leads to a denial that they live from the Lord and a belief that they live on their own and therefore that they possess some divine essence. The life called angelic and human consists of these two elements--freedom and rationality.

This leads to the conclusion that angels have a reciprocal ability for the sake of their union with the Lord, but that the reciprocal element, seen as an ability, is the Lord's and not theirs. As a result, angels fall from angelhood if they abuse this reciprocal element that enables them to feel and sense what is the Lord's as their own by actually claiming it for themselves. The Lord himself teaches us in John 14:20-24, 15:4-5, 6 that union is reciprocal, and in John 15:7 that the Lord's union with us and ours with him occurs in things that belong to him, things called "his words."

71. To show that the merely natural person thinks about spiritual and Divine matters in terms of space, and the spiritual person independently of space, let the following illustration suffice.

The merely natural person thinks in terms of ideas that he has acquired from objects visible to his sight, all of which exhibit in them a configuration possessing length, breadth and height and having a shape delimited by these, whether angular or curvilinear. These dimensions are clearly present in his mental conceptions of visible objects in the world, and they are also present in his mental conceptions of things not visible, as in his conceptions of civil and moral matters. He does not, indeed, see them, but still they are present as extended concepts.

[2] It is otherwise in the case of a spiritual person, especially in the case of an angel in heaven. His thinking is unrelated to configuration and form having anything do to with spatial length, breadth or height, but having to do with the state of a thing arising from the state of a person's life. Consequently, instead of spatial length he pictures the goodness of a thing arising from the goodness of a person's life, instead of spatial breadth the truth of a thing arising from the truth of a person's life, and instead of height degrees of these. Thus he thinks in terms of correspondence, which is the relation of spiritual and natural things to each other. And it is because of this correspondence that length in the Word symbolizes the goodness of a thing, breadth the truth of a thing, and height degrees of these.

It is apparent from this that when an angel in heaven reflects on the Divine omnipresence, it is utterly impossible for him to think otherwise than that the Divine fills all things independently of space. What an angel thinks is true, because the light that enlightens his intellect is Divine wisdom.