20. Anyone who has learned about God's order can also understand that man was created so as to become an angel, because in him order reaches its ultimate stage (see 9 above). In this stage something of the wisdom of heaven and the angels can be formed, and it can be reconstituted and multiplied. God's order never stops half-way, and forms anything there without the ultimate stage; for it is not in its fullness and perfection unless it goes to the ultimate. But when it is there, then it takes shape and uses the means at its disposal there to reconstitute and extend itself, which it does by reproduction. The ultimate is therefore the seed-bed of heaven.

This too is what is meant by the description of man and his creation in the first chapter of Genesis:

God said, Let us make ¹ man in our image, according to our likeness. And God created man in His image, in the image of God did He create him. Male and female He created them; and God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply. Genesis 1:26-28.

Creating in the image of God and in the likeness of God means conferring on him the whole of God's order from first to last, and so making him an angel as regards the interiors of his mind.

Footnotes:

5708. 'Five measures more' means that it was much increased. This is clear from the meaning of 'five' as much, dealt with below; and from the meaning of 'measures' as states of truth received from good, dealt with in 3104. As regards 'five', this is a number which can mean little, or else something, or even much. Whatever its specific meaning, this stems from its relationship with the number of which it is a factor, 5291. When it is a factor of ten, much the same as ten, but in a smaller degree, is implied, five being half the number ten. For just as compound numbers have a similar meaning to the simple ones of which they are the product, 5291, 5335, so do divisors have a similar meaning to the compound numbers they divide, as with the relationship of five to ten, also to twenty, as well as to a hundred, a thousand, and so on. 'Ten' means what is full and complete, see 3107, 4638. 'Five measures more' were given to Benjamin than to the rest of his brothers on account of what was meant by this in the spiritual sense. Ten measures could not be given because that amount would have been far too much. The ancients knew from what had been handed down to them from the Most Ancient Church the meanings that certain numbers carried; they therefore used those numbers whenever something cropped up, the meaning of which could be conveyed by those numbers, as is the case with five here. At other times they employed many other numbers, such as three to mean what was complete from start to finish, seven to mean what was holy, or twelve to mean all things in their entirety.