3. 1. The universe as a whole and in every detail was created out of divine love, by means of divine wisdom. I explained in Divine Love and Wisdom that the Lord from eternity, who is Jehovah, is essentially divine love and wisdom, and that he himself created the universe and everything in it out of himself [Divine Love and Wisdom 28-33, 52-60, 282-295]. It then follows that the universe and everything in it was created out of divine love by means of divine wisdom.

I also explained in that work that love cannot do anything apart from wisdom and that wisdom cannot do anything apart from love [Divine Love and Wisdom 401]. Love without wisdom (or our volition apart from our discernment) cannot think anything. It cannot actually see, feel, or say anything. This means that love apart from wisdom (or our volition apart from our discernment) cannot do anything. By the same token, wisdom apart from love (or our discernment apart from our volition) cannot think anything, see or sense anything, or even say anything. This means that wisdom apart from love (or our discernment apart from our volition) cannot do anything. If you take the love away, there is no longer any intention, so there is no action. If this is how things work for us when we do something, it was all the more true of the God who is love itself and wisdom itself when he created and made the universe and everything in it.

[2] Everything that meets our eyes in this world can serve to convince us that the universe and absolutely everything in it was created out of divine love by means of divine wisdom. Take any particular thing and look at it with some wisdom, and this will be clear. Look at a tree--or its seed, its fruit, its flower, or its leaf. Collect your wits and look through a good microscope and you will see incredible things; and the deeper things that you cannot see are even more incredible. Look at the design of the sequence by which a tree grows from its seed all the way to a new seed, and ask yourself, "In this whole process, is there not a constant effort toward ongoing self-propagation?" The goal it is headed for is a seed that has a new power to reproduce. If you are willing to think spiritually (and you can if you want to), surely you see wisdom in this. Then too, if you are willing to press your spiritual thinking further, surely you see that this power does not come from the seed or from our world's sun, which is nothing but fire, but that it was put into the seed by a creator God who has infinite wisdom. This is not just something that happened at its creation; it is something that has been happening constantly ever since. Maintenance is constant creation, just as enduring is a constant coming into being. This is like the way labor ceases if you take the intention out of the activity, the way speech ceases if you take thinking out of it, or the way motion ceases if you take the energy out of it, and so on. In short, if you take the cause away from the effect, the effect ceases.

[3] A force is instilled into everything that has been created. However, the force does not do anything on its own; it depends on the one who instilled it. Look at some other subject on our planet. Look at a silkworm or a bee or some little creature and examine it, first physically, then rationally, and finally spiritually. If you can think deeply, you will be stunned at everything. If you listen to the inner voice of wisdom, you will exclaim in amazement, "Can anyone fail to see Divinity here? These are the marks of divine wisdom!"

Beyond this even, if you look at the functions of everything that has been created, you will see how they follow in sequence all the way to humanity and from us to our source, the Creator. You will see how the connectedness of everything depends on the Creator's union with us; and if you are willing to admit it, the preservation of everything depends on this as well.

In what follows, you will see that divine love created everything, but that it did nothing apart from divine wisdom.

87. 2. Good does not exist by itself, nor truth by itself, but they are everywhere united. Anyone with any sense who tries to form for himself an idea of goodness, finds he cannot do it without adding something that expresses it and presents it to view. Unless something is added, good is a nameless entity. That which expresses it and presents it to view has to do with truth.

Try saying just "good" without at the same time mentioning some particular or other with which it is associated, or define it abstractly, that is, without attaching any additional idea, and you will see that it has no reality, but that it has reality when something is added. If you focus the sight of reason on it, moreover, you will perceive that without any added qualification goodness has no assignable attribute and so no way of being compared, no capacity for being affected, and no character - in a word, no quality.

It is the same with truth if it is referred to without a subject. Educated reason can see that its subject has to do with good.

[2] Instances of goodness are beyond number, however, and each one rises to its highest point and descends to its lowest point as though along the degrees of a scale, changing its name, too, as it varies in its progression and quality. Because of this it is difficult for any but the wise to see the relationship of goodness and truth to things and their union in them. Nevertheless, it is evident from common sense that good does not exist apart from truth, nor truth apart from good, as soon as it is accepted that each and every thing in the universe relates to goodness and truth, as we showed under the previous heading (nos. 84, 85).

[3] That good does not exist by itself nor truth by itself may be illustrated and at the same time attested by various considerations. Take, for example, the following, that there is no essence without a form, and no form without an essence. Good is the essence or being, while truth is what gives form to the essence and expression to the being.

Again, in the human being we find will and intellect. Good has to do with the will, and truth with the intellect. The will does not accomplish anything by itself but through the intellect, nor does the intellect accomplish anything by itself but from the will.

Or again, in the human being there are two sources of physical life, the heart and the lungs. The heart is unable to produce any conscious or active life without the breathing of the lungs, nor are the lungs able to do so without the heart. The heart relates to good, and the breathing of the lungs to truth. There is also a correspondence between them.

[4] Something similar exists in each and every part of the mind and in each and every part of the body in the human being. We do not have the space, however, to present further confirmations here. See instead the same ideas more fully established in Angelic Wisdom Regarding Divine Providence, nos. 3-26, where these points are explained under the following series of headings:

1. The universe, together with every created thing in it, comes from Divine love through Divine wisdom, or to say the same thing, from Divine good through Divine truth.

2. Divine good and Divine truth emanate from the Lord as a unity.

3. This unity exists in some sort of image in every created thing.

4. Good is not good except to the extent that it is united with truth, and truth is not truth except to the extent that it is united with good.

5. The Lord does not permit anything to be divided; a person must either be in a state of good and at the same time of truth, therefore, or he must be in a state of evil and at the same time of falsity.

Further discussions may be found as well.