1. Divine Love and Wisdom

Angelic Wisdom about Divine Love

Part 1

Love is our life. For most people, the existence of love is a given, but the nature of love is a mystery. As for the existence of love, this we know from everyday language. We say that someone loves us, that monarchs love their subjects, and that subjects love their monarch. We say that a husband loves his wife and that a mother loves her children, and vice versa. We say that people love their country, their fellow citizens, their neighbor. We use the same language about impersonal objects, saying that someone loves this or that thing.

Even though the word "love" is so commonly on our tongues, still hardly anyone knows what love is. When we stop to think about it, we find that we cannot form any image of it in our thoughts, so we say either that it is not really anything or that it is simply something that flows into us from our sight, hearing, touch, and conversation and therefore influences us. We are wholly unaware that it is our very life--not just the general life of our whole body and of all our thoughts, but the life of their every least detail. Wise people can grasp this when you ask, "If you take away the effects of love, can you think anything? Can you do anything? As the effects of love lose their warmth, do not thought and speech and action lose theirs as well? Do they not warm up as love warms up?" Still, the grasp of these wise people is not based on the thought that love is our life, but on their experience that this is how things happen.

99. The spiritual warmth and light that result from the emanation from the Lord as the sun form a single whole just as his divine love and wisdom do. Part 1 explains how divine love and wisdom form a single whole in the Lord. Warmth and light form a similar whole because they are emanations, and emanations constitute a whole by reason of their correspondence. The warmth answers to love, and the light to wisdom.

It therefore follows that since divine love is the divine reality and divine wisdom is the divine manifestation (see 14-16 above), spiritual warmth is divinity emanating from the divine reality and spiritual light is divinity emanating from the divine manifestation. This means that just as divine love is a property of divine wisdom and divine wisdom is a property of divine love because of this union (see 34-39 above), spiritual warmth is a property of spiritual light and spiritual light is a property of spiritual warmth. As a result of this kind of oneness, it follows that warmth and light are a single whole as they emanate from the Lord as the sun.

We will see later, though [125], that they are not accepted as a single whole by angels or by us.

163. There would be no creation if it were not for this pair of suns, one living and one dead. Generally speaking, the universe is divided into two worlds, a spiritual one and a physical one. Angels and spirits are in the spiritual world, and we are in the physical world. These two worlds are exactly alike in outward appearance, so much alike that there is no way to tell them apart; but as to inner appearance, they are completely different. The very people who are in the spiritual world (who are called angels and spirits, as I have just said) are spiritual beings; and since they are spiritual beings, they think spiritually and talk spiritually. On the other hand, we who are in the physical world are physical, so we think physically and talk physically. Spiritual thought and speech and physical thought and speech have nothing in common. We can see from this that the two worlds, the spiritual one and the physical one, are completely distinct from each other, so much so that there is no way for them to be in the same place.