13. The Lord's Divine Nature in Heaven Is Love for Him and Thoughtfulness toward One's Neighbor

In heaven, the divine nature that emanates from the Lord is called divine truth, for reasons that will be given below. This divine truth flows into heaven from the Lord, out of his divine love. Divine love and the divine truth that derives from it are like the sun's fire and the light that comes from it in our world. The love is like the sun's fire, and the derivative truth is like the light from the sun. By reason of correspondence, fire means love and light means the truth that flows from it. ¹

This enables us to determine the character of the divine truth that emanates from divine love: in its essence, it is divine good united to divine truth, and because it is united, it gives life to everything in heaven the way the warmth of the sun, united to its light, makes everything fruitful on earth in spring and summer. It is different when the warmth is not united to light, when the light is therefore cold. Then everything slows down and lies there, snuffed out.

The divine good we have compared to warmth is the good of love within and among angels, and the divine truth we have compared to light is the means and the source of this good of love.

Footnotes:

212. We can tell quite clearly that the final level is the composite, vessel, and foundation of the prior ones by looking at the way purpose and means progress to result. Enlightened reason can grasp the fact that the effect is the composite, vessel, and foundation of the means and the purpose, but cannot grasp as clearly the fact that the purpose in all fullness and the means in all fullness are actively present in the result, with the result being completely inclusive of them.

This follows from what has already been said in this part, especially from the fact that one level comes from another in a three-stage sequence and that a result is simply a purpose in its final form. Since the final form is this kind of composite, it follows that the final form is their vessel and also their foundation.

3485. The representations that occur in the next life are appearances. But they are living representations because they come from the light of life. The light of life is Divine Wisdom, which is received from the Lord alone. Consequently all things that come into being from that light, unlike those from the light of the world, are real. For this reason people in the next life have said several times that the things they behold in that world are real, whereas those that man beholds are by contrast not real. The reason for this is that the former are living and so have a direct influence on their life, whereas the latter are not living and so have no direct influence on their life, except insofar as things with them belonging to the light of the world join themselves appropriately and by correspondence to those belonging to the light of heaven. From all these considerations it now becomes clear what representations are and what correspondences are.