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:

3004. Very deep arcana lie concealed within the internal sense, which up to now have not come to anyone's knowledge. This becomes clear from what has been stated and shown up to this point, and from what will be shown in the Lord's Divine Mercy in what follows. It becomes absolutely clear from the internal sense of our Lord's two names JESUS CHRIST. When these are mentioned few have any other notion than that they are proper names which are little different from, though more sacred than, the names of any other human being. Better educated people know, it is true, that Jesus means Saviour, and Christ the Anointed, from which they conceive some more interior notion. But this is not the same as the things which the angels in heaven perceive from those names. They perceive things more Divine still, that is to say, when Jesus is mentioned by someone reading the Word they perceive Divine Good, and when Christ is mentioned, Divine Truth. And when both are mentioned together they perceive the Divine marriage of good to truth, and of truth to good. Thus they perceive everything Divine within the heavenly marriage, which is heaven. What the heavenly marriage is, see 2173, 2803.