193. 8. A woman is actually transformed into a wife according to the description in the book of creation. We are told in this book that woman was created from the rib of a man, and that when she was brought to him, the man said,

She...is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'Ishshah (Woman) because she was taken from 'Ish (Man). (Genesis 2:22-24)

In the Word, a rib from the breast symbolically means, in its spiritual sense, not a rib but natural truth. This is the symbolism of the ribs which the bear carried between its teeth in Daniel 7:5; for bears symbolize people who read the Word in its natural sense and see truths there without understanding. The breast of a man symbolizes that essential and distinctive quality which makes it different in character from the breast of a woman. This quality is wisdom, as may be seen above in no. 187; for truth supports wisdom, as a rib supports the breast. These distinctive qualities are symbolized, because the breast is where all the qualities of a person are, so to speak, at their center.

[2] It follows from this that woman was created from man by a transmission and replication of his distinctive wisdom, which is formed from natural truth, and that man's love for this wisdom was transferred to woman so as to become conjugial love; moreover, that the purpose of this was to replace love of self in man with love for his wife, who, from a nature innate in her, cannot help but turn the love of self in man to his love for her. I have been told, too, that this comes about as a result of the wife's love, without either the man or the wife being conscious of it. It is because of this that no one is ever able to love his partner with a truly conjugial love so long as he is possessed of a conceit in his own intelligence from a love of self.

[3] Once this secret of the creation of woman from man has been understood, it can be seen that in marriage a woman is similarly created or formed, so to speak, from her husband, and that this transformation is brought about by the wife - or rather, through the wife by the Lord, who infuses into women the inclination to achieve it. For a wife receives into her an image of her husband by assimilating his affections into her (see above, no. 173); by uniting the internal will of her husband with hers (concerning which below); and also by incorporating into her the propagations of his soul (of which also below).

It is apparent from this that a woman is transformed into a wife according to the description in the book of creation understood in respect to its inner meaning, and that she is transformed through the qualities she takes from her husband and his "breast" and implants in herself.

The most famous rib in the Bible is, of course, the one taken from Man (or Adam) and formed into Woman (or Eve) in the Garden of Eden. This event illustrates a key moment in the spiritual history of humanity, one that still drives our lives today. The first Man formed in Genesis represents the earliest church on earth. The Lord raised early humans to a state in which they lived in love to the Lord and love for each other in communication with heaven, and knew from their affections what was true and good. They were also different from us in a couple of key ways. First, they had no sense that life was their own -- they felt all life, thought and emotion flowing to them from God. Second, they lacked the capacity to separate their hearts and their minds. They could not want one thing and use their minds to choose another; their minds followed their hearts. But in the Garden of Eden, the Man was lonely -- which represents the fact that people started to want their lives to be their own. So God gave them what they wanted by taking a rib from the man and forming it into Woman. The rib and the woman both represent the "proprium," which is sometimes translated as the "own" or the "as of self." It is a complex idea, but in a nutshell it is this: The proprium is the part of us that feels our life as our own, our thoughts as our own, our feelings as our own. This is ultimately false and evil and belongs in hell, because all life in fact comes from the Lord. But the Lord allows it so that we can be happy and can act in freedom. To create it for us, He had to take the lowest, least-alive aspects of us -- represented by a bone -- and build it into a part of us that does not feel the Lord but can still be kept alive. In particular, the rib represents the nearly-dead proprium, with barely any love or thought. The woman represents that proprium clothed with living flesh, or loves from the Lord felt as our own.