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.

305. There is nothing of absolute Divinity in the material substances that make up earth, but they are still derived from absolute Divinity. On the basis of the origin of earth as described in the preceding section, we may conclude that there is no trace of absolute Divinity in the earth's material substances; they are completely devoid of absolute Divinity. There are, as already stated [184, 189], boundaries and limits of the atmospheres, whose warmth lapses into cold, light into darkness, and activity into torpor. Still, by being connected with their source, the substance of the spiritual sun, they retain something that is in that sun from Divinity. As noted above in 291-298 [291-294], this was the aura that envelops the Divine-Human One, the Lord. The material substances of earth arise from this aura by extension from the sun, by means of the atmospheres.