“Eden” by itself stands for love, in most cases the love that comes from the Lord and our love for the Lord, which is the highest human love of all. Of course, “Eden” is closely identified with “garden,” which means intelligence and the intellect. The “Garden of Eden,” then, means the state of love and wisdom with people who are in a pure state of love to the Lord. The Garden of Eden is referred to throughout Scripture, but is described in detail in Genesis 2:8-17. Those verses, understood on a spiritual level, show the nature of what the Writings call the Most Ancient Church, in which people of pre-historic times were elevated to a state of love to the Lord and communion with heaven, a degree of innocence and love that we cannot truly imagine in the modern world.

The relationship between men and women is deep and nuanced, and one entire book of the Writings -- Conjugial Love -- is devoted to the subject. So we can hardly offer a full explanation here. In a very general sense, though, the Writings say that men are creatures of intellect, driven by the love of growing wise; women, meanwhile are creations of affection, driven by the love of wisdom and the good that wisdom can do. They are formed this way to reflect the Lord's Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, and so that they can form marriages that reflect the unity of Divine Love and Divine Wisdom. Marking differences between men and women can be a touchy thing, but realistically it's easy to see that men tend to love acquiring knowledge whether it has any practical application or not. Many of them can spout out sports statistics or hold court on the workings of the internal combustion engine, even though it is knowledge they are not likely to ever use. They find such knowledge interesting for its own sake. It follows, then, that when the Bible speaks of men, the men represent facts, ideas, knowledge, truth, intellect and wisdom -- or in the negative sense falsity, twisted logic, and reasoning that is devoid of concern for others.