184. You can clearly tell that a trinity of gods dwells in the minds of Christians - although out of shame they would never say so - by the way many of them ingeniously demonstrate that three are one and one is three. They use various phenomena in plane geometry, solid geometry, arithmetic, and physics, as well as folding pieces of clothing and pieces of paper. Like a bunch of clowns, they horse around with the divine Trinity.

Their clowning is like people's eyesight when they have a fever: they see one object, be it a person, a table, or a candle, as three objects, or three objects as one. It is like the trick people play by softening wax in their fingers and pressing it into different shapes. First they make a three-sided shape to show the trinity; then they make a ball to show the unity, and they say, "Isn't the substance one and the same?"

Truly, though, the divine Trinity is like the pearl of great price [Matthew 13:46]. Dividing the Trinity into persons is like cutting a pearl into three parts: it completely destroys the pearl.

241. As for the Word in heaven, it has a spiritual style of writing that is completely different from our earthly style of writing. This spiritual writing style consists entirely of letters that have individual meanings. There are also little lines, curves, and dots above, between, and inside the letters to heighten the meaning.

Among angels in the spiritual kingdom, the lettering is like printed lettering in our world. Among angels in the heavenly kingdom, some copies of the Word have lettering like Arabic script, while others have lettering like the script of ancient Hebrew (except that the letters are curved at the top and bottom) with diacritical marks above, between, and inside the letters. Each mark contains an entire meaning of its own.

[2] Because the angels have writing like this, the names of people and places are replaced in their Word by special markings. From them the wise understand the spiritual or heavenly thing that each name means. For example, "Moses" means the Word of God that was written through Moses, and in a broader sense the historical Word. "Elijah" means the prophetic Word. "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" mean the Lord's divine heavenly quality, his divine spiritual quality, and his divine earthly quality. "Aaron" means a priestly quality and "David" a royal one, both of which belong to the Lord. The names of the sons of Jacob or the twelve tribes of Israel mean different aspects of heaven and the church; the names of the Lord's twelve disciples have similar meanings. "Zion" and "Jerusalem" mean the church's body of teaching from the Word. "The land of Canaan" means the church itself. Places and cities on this and on that side of the Jordan mean different aspects of the church and its body of teaching.

It is the same with numbers. In the versions of the Word in heaven these too are absent. In their places are the things the numbers correspond to.

From all this it is clear that the Word in heaven is similar in its literal meaning to our Word, and it corresponds to it as well. Their Word and our Word are therefore one.

[3] It is amazing that the Word in the heavens has been written in such a way that the simple understand it simply and the wise understand it wisely. As I say, there are many curves and diacritical marks over the letters that heighten the meaning. Simple people pay no attention to them and do not know what they mean. Wise people pay more and more attention to them depending on how wise they are, right up to the highest level of wisdom.

In its sanctuary every larger community keeps a copy of the Word written out by angels who were inspired by the Lord, so that the Word elsewhere will not change in the least detail.

The Word that is in our world is like the Word in heaven in that the simple understand it simply and the wise wisely. The mechanism for this is different here, however.