14. XIV. The Word in the heavens.

The Word exists in all the heavens, and it is read there as it is in the world, and sermons are based on it. For it is the Divine Truth which is the source of the angels' intelligence and wisdom. For without the Word no one knows anything about the Lord, love and faith, redemption, and all the other secrets of heavenly wisdom. In fact without the Word heaven would not exist, just as without the Word there would be no church in the world, so that there would be no linking with the Lord. I demonstrated above that natural theology is impossible without revelation, and in the Christian world without the Word. If it is not granted in the world, neither would it be granted after death. For the nature of a person's religious belief in the world dictates its nature after death, when he becomes a spirit. The whole of heaven is not made up of angels created before the world or at the same time as it, but of those who were people on earth, and were then angels inwardly. By means of the Word these in heaven acquire spiritual, that is, inner wisdom, because the Word there is spiritual.

[2] The Word in the Lord's spiritual kingdom is not the same as the Word in the world. In the world there is the natural Word, but in that kingdom there is a spiritual Word. The difference is like that between its natural and spiritual senses. The nature of the spiritual sense has been demonstrated at length in my Arcana Caelestia, where the whole contents of Genesis and Exodus have been explained in accordance with that sense. The difference is such that no word is the same. Things take the place of names, and likewise of numbers; the histories are replaced by matters concerning the church. The surprising thing is that, when an angel reads it, he is unaware that it is not the same as what he read in the Word while in the world. This is because he no longer has any natural ideas, since they are replaced with spiritual ones; and the natural and the spiritual are linked by correspondences into a kind of unity.

So when someone passes from the natural into the spiritual, it seems to him as if they were the same. In fact an angel does not know that he is wiser than he was in the world, though his wisdom is really so superior as to be comparatively indescribable. He is unable to recognise the difference, because in his spiritual state he knows nothing of the natural state, which he had in the world; and he is unable to compare and differentiate them, because he cannot return to his former state so as to make a comparison. Still an angel in heaven is constantly being brought to a higher degree of perfection in wisdom than he had in the world, because his affection for spiritual truth is purer. ¹

[3] However, the Word in the Lord's celestial kingdom is far superior and wiser than the Word in His spiritual kingdom. The difference is of the same kind as that which distinguishes the natural Word in the world from the spiritual Word, as has been stated. For that Word contains an inmost sense, called celestial, which in all its details refers to nothing but the Lord. In this Word the Lord is read in place of Jehovah, and of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and also the Lord is named in place of David, Moses, Elijah and the rest of the Prophets; and His divinity is distinguished by special marks. The names of the twelve tribes of Israel, and also the names of the Apostles, when read there, convey something about the Lord as regards the church; and so with all the rest. From this it became plain to me that the whole of the Sacred Scripture deals in its inmost sense with nothing but the Lord.

The difference which distinguishes the two Words, the spiritual and the celestial, is like that between thoughts, the province of the intellect, and affections, the province of the will. For the angels of the celestial kingdom are guided by love to the Lord and so affection for good; the angels of the spiritual kingdom are guided by faith in the Lord and so by perception of truth.

[4] Another difference between the celestial and spiritual Words is their script. The script of the spiritual Word is made up of letters resembling the printed letters of our world; but each letter has a meaning. If therefore you were to see that script, you would not understand a single word. For one letter succeeds another without a break, with dashes and dots above and below, since it is in accordance with spiritual speech, which has nothing in common with natural speech. The wiser angels are, the more they see of the inner secrets of their Word so written, more so than the simpler angels. What is stored there is plainly visible to the eyes of the wise, but not to the eyes of the simple. It is similar to what happens with our Word, but to a greater degree; here too the wise see more than the simple.

The script of the celestial Word, however, is made up of letters not known in the world. They are indeed alphabetical, but each one of them is composed of curved lines with serifs above and below, and there are small marks or dots in the letters, and also above and below them. I was told that the most ancient people on this earth had such a script. Some details agree with the Hebrew script, but not much. Such a script expresses the affections which make up a love; so it contains more secrets than they themselves can ever utter. They express these unutterable secrets which they perceive from their Word by means of representations. The wisdom hidden away in this Word surpasses the wisdom in the spiritual Word as a thousand does one.

[5] To make the difference between the three Words, the natural, the spiritual and the celestial, intelligible, let us take as an example the first chapters of Genesis, which deal with Adam, his wife and the Garden. ² In the natural Word which we have in this world there is a description of the creation of the world, the first creation of man, and the earthly pleasures and delights of man and the world. By the persons named following him up to the Flood are meant his descendants, and the numbers mean their ages. But in the spiritual Word the angels of the spiritual kingdom have, this is not what is meant. The first chapter is a description of the reform and regeneration of the people of the most ancient church; this too is called a new creation. The second chapter describes as the Garden the intelligence of the people of that church; Adam and his wife stand for the church itself, and their descendants down to the Flood describe the changes in the state of that church, up to the time when it came to an end and was finally destroyed by the Flood.

But in the celestial Word possessed by the angels of the Lord's celestial kingdom, the first chapter describes the glorification of the Lord's Human; the Garden describes his Divine wisdom. Adam himself is understood to mean the Lord as regards the Divine itself and at the same time the Divine Human. His wife stands for the church, which since it has life from the Lord is called Eve from [the Hebrew word for] life. Adam says of her that she was to be his bone and his flesh, and [they should be] one flesh, because the church comes from the Lord, and is out of Him and with Him as if one. The names of the descendants of Adam describe the successive states by which the Lord was received by the people of that church and linked with them, until there was nothing at all received and so no linking.

[6] So when the first chapters in our Word are read by upright people, especially by boys and girls, and they feel joy at the state when everything was created and at the Garden, then these meanings are unfolded, and the spiritual angels understand them in accordance with their Word, and the celestial angels in accordance with theirs, without being aware that a person or a child is reading it. These meanings are unfolded in their due sequence because they correspond, and correspondences are from creation like this. This makes it plain what the Word is like in its depths, that is, it has three senses. The last is the natural one for men on earth; this deals mainly with worldly matters and where it deals with Divine matters, they are still described by the kind of things which the world contains. The middle sense is the spiritual one, which describes the kind of things which belong to the church. The inmost sense is the celestial one, which contains the kind of things which belong to the Lord. For the whole of nature is a theatre representing the Lord's kingdom; and the Lord's kingdom, heaven and the church, is a theatre representing the Lord Himself. For just as the Lord glorified His Human, so too He regenerates a person; and as He regenerates a person, so too did He create him.

[7] These facts may establish what the Word is like in its depths. The natural Word as possessed by the Christian part of the world contains within itself a spiritual and a celestial Word. For the spiritual sense of our Word is the Word in the heavens which make up the Lord's spiritual kingdom; and the celestial sense of our Word, its inmost sense, is the Word in the heavens which make up the Lord's celestial kingdom. Our Word therefore contains both the spiritual and the celestial Words; but the spiritual Word and the celestial Word do not contain the natural Word. The Word of our world is therefore the one most full of Divine wisdom, and consequently more holy than the Word of the heavens.

Footnotes:

9094. 'And they shall also divide the dead one' means that the injuring affection as well will be dispersed. This is clear from the meaning of 'that which is dead' as evil and falsity, dealt with above in 9008, so that 'a dead ox' means an affection for evil and falsity in the natural, thus an injuring affection since evil causes injury by means of falsity; and from the meaning of 'dividing' as dispersing, as above in 9093. It is not easy to explain in a way that can be understood the nature of the matters contained in the internal sense of this verse. They are such as can be comprehended by angels, but only to some extent by men. For angels see the arcana of the Word in light that flows from the Lord; and in that light countless things are made visible which cannot be put into words, or even into mental pictures that a person could assimilate while living in the body. The reason for this is that with people in the world the light of heaven flows into the light of the world and so into such things there as either eliminate, reject, or darken and thereby weaken the light of heaven, such things being worldly and bodily cares, especially those that flow from self-love and love of the world. This is the reason why the perceptions belonging to angelic wisdom are for the most part beyond description and also beyond comprehension.

[2] However, a person enters into such wisdom after the body has been cast aside, that is, after death, but only the person who, when in the world, received the life of faith and charity from the Lord. The ability to receive that wisdom is held within the good of faith and charity. Much experience too has allowed me to know that the things which angels see and think about in the light of heaven are beyond description. When I have been raised into that light I have seemed to myself to understand everything the angels spoke there. But when I was brought down from there to the light of the external or natural man and in that light wished to recall the things I had heard there, I could not put them into words or even find ideas in my mind to embrace them, except for a few, and even these few in a dim manner. From all this it is evident that the things seen and heard in heaven are such as eye has never seen or ear heard.

[3] This is what the things that lie concealed inmostly in the internal sense of the Word are like. The situation is similar with the contents of the internal sense in this verse and the next. The things there which are capable of being explained and understood are these: All the truths present with a person possess life from affections belonging to some love or other. Truth without life from that source is like a sound emitted by the mouth without an idea behind it, or like a sound made by a mechanical man. From this it is evident that the life of a person's understanding comes from the life of his will, consequently the life of truth from the life of good, since truth occupies the understanding and good the will. If therefore two truths exist which do not receive their life from the same general affection but from dissimilar affections, they are inevitably dispersed since they clash with each other. And when truths are dispersed, the affections they belong to are dispersed as well. For there is a general affection, which brings all the truths present with a person together under it; and that general affection is good. These are the things that are capable of being stated regarding what is meant in the internal sense by two men's oxen, one of which inflicts a blow on the other ox, which as a result dies, and now by the stipulation that the living ox shall be sold, the silver shall be divided, and the dead ox too.

[4] Is there anyone belonging to the Church who does not know that every detail of the Word is Divine? But can anyone see anything Divine in these laws regarding oxen and asses falling into a pit, and regarding oxen striking with their horn, if they are considered and explained only on the level of the sense of the letter? Yet those laws are Divine, even on this level, if at the same time they are considered and explained on the level of the internal sense, because on this level every detail of the Word refers to the Lord, His kingdom and Church, thus to things that are Divine. For if anything is to be Divine and holy it must refer to Divine and holy subjects; the subject to which it refers makes it such. The worldly and civil regulations, such as the judgements, statutes, and laws declared by the Lord from Mount Sinai and contained in this chapter of Exodus and those that follow, are Divine and holy through inspiration. But inspiration is not dictation; rather it is influx from the Divine. What flows in from the Divine passes through heaven, where it is celestial and spiritual. But when it enters the world it becomes worldly, yet holds within itself what is celestial and spiritual. From this it is evident where the Divinity of the Word springs from and where it resides in the Word, and what inspiration is.