Heaven and Hell # 342
342. I have talked with angels about children, wondering whether they were free from evils because they did not have any realized evil the way adults do. I was told, though, that they are equally involved in evil, even to the point that they too are nothing but evil. 1 However, they, like all angels, are withheld from their evils by the Lord and kept focused on what is good to the point that it seems to them as though they were focused on what is good of their own accord. So to prevent children from having a false notion about themselves after they have grown up in heaven - a belief that the good that surrounds them is from them and not from the Lord - they are let back into their hereditary evils from time to time and left in them until they know and recognize and believe the way things really are.
[2] There was one individual who had died in infancy and grown up in heaven who had this kind of opinion. He was the son of a particular king; so he was let back into his own innate life of evil. I could tell then from the aura of his life that he had a drive to lord it over others and regarded adultery as of no concern whatever - evils that were part of his heredity from his parents. Once he recognized that he was like this, though, he was again accepted among the angels he had been with before.
[3] In the other life, none of us suffers any punishment for inherited evil, because it is not ours. We are not at fault for our hereditary nature. We suffer punishment for any actualized evil that is ours - that is, for whatever hereditary evil we have claimed as our own by acting it out in our lives.
The reason grown-up children are let back into the state of their hereditary evil is not to punish them. It is to make sure they know that on their own they are nothing but evil and that they are borne from hell into heaven by the Lord's mercy, that they are in heaven not because they deserve it but as a gift from the Lord. This prevents them from inflating themselves over others because of the good that attends them, for this is in opposition to the blessing of mutual love just as it is against the truth of faith.
Poznámky pod čarou:
1. [Swedenborg's footnote] We are all born in evils of every kind, to the point that our own identity is nothing but evil: 210, 215, 731, 874-876, 987, 1047, 2307-2308, 3518, 3701, 3812, 8480, 8550, 10283-10284, 10286, 10731 [10732?]. So we need to be reborn - that is, regenerated: 3701. The evil we inherit is loving ourselves more than God and the world more than heaven, and regarding our neighbor as nothing compared to ourselves, except for our own benefit and therefore for ourselves; so that inheritance is love for oneself and for the world: 694, 731, 4317, 5660. It is from love for oneself and for the world, when they rule, that all evils come: 1307-1308, 1321, 1594, 1691, 3413, 7255, 7376, 7480 [7489?], 7488, 8318, 9335, 9348, 10038, 10742; which evils are a contempt for others, hostility, hatred, vengefulness, cruelty, and deceit: 6667, 7372-7374, 9348, 10038, 10742; and from these evils comes everything that is false: 1047, 10283-10284, 10286. These loves rush in to the extent that they are given free rein, and love for oneself aspires even to the throne of God: 7375, 8678.
