30. It is because the very essence of the Divine is love and wisdom that we have two abilities of life. From the one we get our discernment, and from the other volition. Our discernment is supplied entirely by an inflow of wisdom from God, while our volition is supplied entirely by an inflow of love from God. Our failures to be appropriately wise and appropriately loving do not take these abilities away from us. They only close them off; and as long as they do, while we may call our discernment "discernment" and our volition "volition," essentially they are not. So if these abilities really were taken away from us, everything human about us would be destroyed--our thinking and the speech that results from thought, and our purposing and the actions that result from purpose.

We can see from this that the divine nature within us dwells in these two abilities, in our ability to be wise and our ability to love. That is, it dwells in the fact that we are capable of being wise and loving. I have discovered from an abundance of experience that we have the ability to love even though we are not wise and do not love as we could. You will find this experience described in abundance elsewhere.

6091. 'And Jacob blessed Pharaoh' means a heartfelt desire for a joining together and resulting fruitfulness. This is clear from the meaning of 'blessing' here as a heartfelt desire for a joining together - for a joining of truth to factual knowledge in the natural since that is the subject here. 'Blessing has many meanings; in the spiritual sense it includes all things that are good and also those that are blissful. It therefore means being endowed with the good of love and charity, 3185, 4981, also a joining together or conjunction, 3504, 3514, 3530, 3565, 3584, as well as fruitfulness by virtue of the affection for truth, 2846, and a heartfelt desire for someone's happiness, 3185. Here therefore a heartfelt desire for that which is the subject here is meant, namely a desire for a joining together and thus fruitfulness. Fruitfulness follows as a result of the joining together, because once the joining together has been effected good grows and truth multiplies; for the marriage of goodness and truth is then the producer of that fruitfulness. It cannot come about prior to that except as a result so to speak of fornication, the good from which union is spurious, as is the truth. Good from that union is full of self-regard, and truth likewise has the same flavour.