310. 1. What our own prudence is and what the prudence is that is not our own. People are devoted to their own prudence when they convince themselves that the way things seem is the way they really are, and particularly when they accept as truth the appearance that their own prudence is everything and that divine providence is nothing but a generality; though as already explained [201], no such generality could exist without being made up of specifics. They are then caught up in illusions as well, since any appearance that we take to be truth becomes an illusion. Further, to the extent that they justify themselves with illusions, they become materialists to the point that eventually they believe only what they can apprehend with one of their physical senses. They rely primarily on sight because it especially interacts with our thinking. Ultimately they become sense-centered; and if they come down decisively in favor of the material world and against God, they close off the inner levels of their minds and put a kind of veil in the way. From then on, they think underneath this veil, as though nothing above it existed. The ancients called sense-centered people like this "serpents of the tree of knowledge." In the spiritual world they say that as they become fixed in their opinions, people like this close the deeper levels of their minds all the way to the nose. The nose means our sense of what is true, and that sense is lacking.

Now I need to describe what these people are like.

[2] They are exceptionally adroit and shrewd, ingenious debaters. They call their ingenuity and shrewdness intelligence and wisdom and see no evidence to the contrary. They look on people who differ from them as simple and stupid, especially if those people revere God and acknowledge divine providence. In the deeper principles of their minds--which they themselves know very little about--they are like the people called Machiavellians, people who trivialize murder, adultery, theft, and perjury as such. If they do argue against such crimes, it is only to be careful that their actual nature does not become obvious.

[3] As far as our life in this world is concerned, the thought that it might be different from that of animals never crosses their minds. They think of our life after death as a kind of living mist that rises up out of the corpse or the tomb and then sinks back down and dies. This insanity leads to the belief that spirits and angels are made of air. Any of these materialists who are obliged to believe in eternal life believe that this is what our souls are like. This means that our souls do not see, hear, or speak, that they are blind, deaf, and mute. All they do is think in their own bit of air. "How could the soul be anything more?" materialists ask. "Aren't the outer senses dead along with the body? We won't get them back until our souls are reunited with our bodies." They cling to these conclusions because they can think about the state of the soul after death only in physical terms, not in spiritual terms. Without their physical concepts they would have lost their belief in eternal life.

They particularly justify their own self-love, calling it the fire of life and the spur to the various useful activities in the state. This makes them their own idols; and their thoughts, being illusions based on illusions, are false images. Since they approve of the pleasures of their obsessions, they are satans and devils. We call them satans because they inwardly justify their obsessions with evil, and devils because they act them out.

[4] I have also been shown what the shrewdest sense-centered people are like. Their hell is deep down at the back, and they want to be unnoticed. So it looks as though they are flying around like ghosts (which are their hallucinations). They are called demons. Once some of them were let out of hell so that I could find out what they are like. They promptly attached themselves to my neck just below the base of my skull and from there moved into my feelings. They did not want to enter my thoughts, and adroitly evaded them. They altered my feelings one at a time, shifting my mood imperceptibly to its opposite, into obsessions with evil; and since they were not touching my thoughts at all, they would have distorted and inverted them without my noticing it if the Lord had not prevented it.

[5] That is what becomes of people who in this world do not believe there is any divine providence, and who pay close attention to others only to find out what their urges and desires are and in this way influence them until they have complete control over them. Since they do this so subtly and shrewdly that others are not aware of it, and since they keep the same nature after death, as soon as they arrive in the spiritual world they are dismissed into this hell. In heaven's light they seem to have no noses, and strange as it may seem, even though they are so shrewd, they are still more sense-centered and superficial than anyone else.

It is because the ancients called sense-centered people "serpents" and because people like this are more deft, shrewd, and clever at debating than others that it says, "The serpent was made shrewd beyond every beast of the field" (Genesis 3:1) and, "The Lord said, 'Be prudent as serpents and simple as doves'" (Matthew 10:16). So too the dragon, who is also called the old serpent, the devil, and satan [Revelation 20:2], is described as "having seven heads and ten crowns, and on the heads seven diadems" (Revelation 12:3, 9). The seven heads mean shrewdness, the ten horns the power of persuasion by distortions, and the seven diadems the holy values of the Word and the Church profaned.

201. 4. By his divine providence the Lord gathers the impulses of the whole human race into a single form, which is a human form. We will see in the next section that this is a pervasive feature of the Lord's providence. People who credit everything to the material world also credit everything to human prudence. This is because people who credit everything to the material world are at heart denying God, and people who credit everything to human prudence are at heart denying divine providence: the two are inseparable.

Still, for the sake of their good name and out of a fear of losing it, both kinds of person will claim verbally that divine providence is universal and that we are responsible for the details, the aggregate of these details being what we mean by our prudence.

[2] But think seriously: what is "universal providence" when the details are taken away? Is it anything but a mere word? By "universal" we mean something that comes from details taken together, as a generality arises from specific instances. If you take the details away, then, what is the "universal" but something with a vacuum inside, like a surface with nothing inside it, or like a compound with no components?

If we say that divine providence is a universal government and that things are not governed but just kept connected and that the activities of government are managed by others, could this be called a universal government? No king has this kind of government, because if some king were to give his subjects control over everything in his kingdom he would no longer be a king, he would simply be called a king. He would have only the honor of the name, and no honor of real substance. We could not credit such a king with any government at all, let alone a universal government.

[3] Providence on God's part is called prudence on our level. If we cannot speak of universal prudence in the case of a king who has not kept anything for himself but the name, so that the kingdom can be called a kingdom and thereby held together, by the same token we cannot speak of a universal providence if we are taking care of everything with our own prudence.

Much the same holds for the terms "universal providence" and "universal government" when we talk about the material world, if we assert that God created the universe and then provided the material world with the ability to manage everything on its own. What is "universal providence" in this case but a metaphysical term that apart from being a term has no reality whatever?

Many of the people who give the material world credit for everything that is brought forth and give our own prudence credit for everything that happens, but who still say that God created the material world, think of divine providence only as an empty phrase. As things really are, though, divine providence includes the smallest details of the material world and the smallest details of our prudence, which is why it is universal.