427, 22. It is the same for charity and faith and their union as it is for volition and discernment and their union. There are two loves that are the grounds of a basic distinction in the heavens, namely heavenly love and spiritual love. Heavenly love is love for the Lord and spiritual love is love for our neighbor. The difference between these two loves is that heavenly love is a love for what is good, while spiritual love is a love for what is true. When we are moved by heavenly love, we do our acts of service out of love for what is good; while when we are moved by spiritual love we do them out of love for what is true. The marriage of heavenly love is with wisdom, and the marriage of spiritual love is with intelligence. Wisdom is doing what is good because it is good, and intelligence is doing what is good because it is true. This means that heavenly love acts out what is good, while spiritual love acts out what is true.

The only way I can describe the difference between these two loves is to say that people who are moved by heavenly love have wisdom written not on their memory but on their lives. This is because they do not talk about divine truths, they simply do them. In contrast, people who are moved by spiritual love have wisdom written on their memory, so they talk about divine truths and do them on the basis of the principles they hold in their memory.

Since people who are moved by heavenly love have wisdom written on their lives, whenever they hear something they know immediately whether it is true or not; and when they are asked whether something is true, they say either that it is or that it is not. They are the people referred to by the Lord's words, "Let your speech be 'Yes, yes; no, no'" (Matthew 5:37). Because this is their nature, they do not like it when people talk about faith. They say, "What is faith? Is it not wisdom? And what is charity? Is it not action?" If anyone says that faith is believing what we do not understand, they turn away and say, "That's crazy."

These are the people who live in the third heaven, and they are the wisest of all. People get that way in this world by applying whatever divine principles they hear directly to their lives with an aversion to evils as hellish and a total reverence for the Lord. Because they live in innocence, they look to others like little children; and because they never talk about truths of wisdom and there is no trace of self-importance in their conversation, they seem simple. However, when they hear others talking they can sense their whole love from their tone of voice and their whole intellect from what they are saying.

These are the people who are kept in the marriage of love and wisdom by the Lord. As already mentioned [381], they also reflect the heart region of heaven.