268. We may gather how great angels' wisdom is from the fact that in heaven there is a communication that involves everyone. The intelligence and wisdom of one individual is shared with another: heaven is where everyone shares everything of value. This is because the very nature of heavenly love is to want what is one's own to belong to another; so no one in heaven regards his or her good as authentically good unless it is someone else's as well. This is also the basis of heaven's happiness. Angels are led into it by the Lord, whose divine love has this same quality.

I have also been granted knowledge, by experience, of this kind of communication in the heavens. Once some simple people were taken up into heaven, and after they had arrived, they arrived also at an angelic wisdom. They understood things they could not grasp before and said things they could not express in their former state.

454. Some spirits think that heaven and heavenly joy consist in a life of ease in which they are waited on by others. But they are told that happiness in no way consists in being inactive and finding happiness in that. This would mean that everybody wished to subordinate other people's happiness to his own, and when everybody wished to do that nobody would have it. Such life would not be an active life but a life of idleness in which they would become listless, even though they may well know that unless one is active there is no happiness in life. Angelic life consists in use, and in good deeds of charity. For angels never feel happier than when they are informing and teaching spirits that stream in from the world, or when they are ministering to men and are preventing the evil spirits with them overstepping the mark, and inspiring men with what is good; also when they are arousing the dead into the life of eternity, and after that introducing such souls into heaven if they are capable of it. The happiness they find in all this is more than can possibly be described. Angels in this way are images of the Lord; they love their neighbour more than themselves; and this is what makes heaven heaven. Consequently angelic happiness consists in use, stems from use, and is proportionate to use, that is, to the good deeds of love and charity. As for those spirits who had adopted the idea that heavenly joy consisted in being idle, and that in idleness they would be experiencing eternal joy, they were allowed - once told all this to make them ashamed of that idea - to perceive what such a life was really like. They perceived that it was an utterly dreary kind of life, and destructive of all joy; and that after a short while they would find it repulsive and nauseating.