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:

2448. Verse 25 And He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew in the ground.

'He overthrew those cities' means that all truths were separated from them so that they might possess falsities alone. 'And all the plain' means all the things which belonged to [those] truths. 'And all the inhabitants of the cities' means that all goods were separated from them so that they might possess nothing but evils. 'And that which grew in the ground' means everything that is part of the Church.