156a. 14. Marriage is a better condition than celibacy. This is established by what was already said about marriage and celibacy. A married condition is preferable because it comes from creation, because its source is the marriage of good and truth, because it has a correspondence with the marriage of the Lord and the church, because the church and married love are constant companions, because its purpose is the primary purpose of all creation - the orderly propagation of the human race and also the heaven of angels, for this comes from the human race.

In addition, marriage is human fulfillment, because a person becomes fully human through it, as the next chapter will show.

No celibate people are fully human.

But if you offer the proposition that the celibate state is better than the married state and open the proposition to examination, to be affirmed and established by presenting proofs of it, what comes out of it is that marriages are not holy, and chaste marriages do not exist, and even that chastity in the feminine sex is nothing other than their abstaining from marriage and vowing perpetual virginity, and on top of this, that people who vow perpetual celibacy are meant by the eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:12). Besides many other things that are not true because they come from an untrue proposition.

(The eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God is a reference to spiritual eunuchs - those who are married and abstain from the evils of fornication. Clearly this does not mean the Italian castrati.)

151b. I add to these things two stories. The first: ¹

While I was going home from the Wisdom Games (described in no. 132 above) I saw on the way an angel dressed in blue. He came up beside me and said, "I see that you are coming from the Wisdom Games and that the things you heard there make you happy. I can tell that you are not entirely in this world, because you are in the natural world at the same time, so you don't know about our Olympic Seminars where the wise men of old gather and find out from newcomers out of your world what changes and developments wisdom has been going through - and still is. If you like, I'll lead you to a place where many of the old philosophers and their children - in other words, their students - live."

He led me toward the boundary between the north and the east, and then, from a rise, I looked in that direction. I saw a city!

To one side of it were two hills. The one nearer the city was lower than the other.

"That city is called Athens," he told me. "The lower hill is Parnassus and the higher one is Helicon. They call them this because in and around the city the old philosophers of Greece live - like Pythagoras, Socrates, Aristippus, Xenophon - with their students and novices."

I asked about Plato and Aristotle.

He said, "They and their followers live in another place, because they used to teach rational concepts that have to do with knowledge, while the philosophers who live here taught moral concepts that apply to life." He said that students from this city of Athens are often sent to educated Christians to report what they think these days about God, the creation of the universe, the immortality of the soul, the human condition compared to that of animals, and other things having to do with inner wisdom. "Today a crier has announced an assembly," he said, "an indication that the scouts have come across new arrivals from Earth, from whom they have heard things worth looking into."

We saw many people going out of the city and its environs, some with laurels on their heads, some holding palms in their hands, some with books under their arms, and some with pens in their hair by their left temples.

We joined in with them and went up together. What did we see on the Palatine Hill but an octagon called the Palladium. We went in. What did we see inside but eight hexagonal alcoves, with a library in each and also a table where the laureates sat together.

And in the Palladium itself we saw seats carved out of stone, where the others sat down.

Then a door opened on the left, and two newcomers from Earth were brought in through it. After the greetings, one of the laureates asked them, "What is the news from Earth?"

They said, "It's new that some people resembling animals, or animals resembling people, have been found in the woods, and from their faces and bodies they were known to have been born humans, lost or left in the woods at the age of two or three." They said they could not speak any thoughts nor learn to pronounce words in any language. They didn't know what food was good for them, either, as animals do, but put whatever they found in the woods into their mouths, clean and unclean alike. And other things like that. "Some of our scholars have conjectured from these things, and some have inferred, many things about the human condition compared to the animal state."

When they heard these things some of the ancient philosophers asked what they did conjecture and infer.

The two newcomers answered, "Many things. But they boil down to these:

(a) By nature and birth, man is more stupid and therefore more lowly than all animals, and this is all he amounts to if he is not taught.

(b) He can be taught, because he has learned to articulate sounds and to speak with them. By this means he began to express thoughts, step by step, more and more, to the point where he can pronounce laws for society - though animals are equipped with many of the laws from birth.

(c) Animals have rationality the same as people.

(d) So if animals could talk they would reason about everything as skillfully as people do. An indication of this is that they think from reason and good sense the same as people do.

(e) That intellect is just a modification of the sun's light, working with heat, by means of the ether, so it is just an activity of your inner nature, and it can rise to the point where it seems like wisdom.

(f) So it is useless to believe that people live after death any more than animals do - except perhaps for a few days after death, in the life breathing out of their body like a ghostly cloud before it dissipates into nature, not much different than the way a twig in ashes looks like what it used to be.

(g) So religion, which teaches that there is life after death, is invented to keep the simple shackled inwardly by its laws, as they are shackled outwardly by civil laws."

To these things they added that only the clever scholars worked it out this way, and not the intelligent ones. The philosophers asked what the intelligent ones thought. They said they had not heard, and that this was their own opinion.

152b. When they heard these things everyone sitting at the tables said, "Oh, what times these are on earth! Alas, what changes wisdom has undergone! How changed it is into foolish cleverness!

The sun has set and is under the earth diametrically opposite its meridian! Who can't tell from the account of those people lost and found in the woods that man is like that if he is not taught?

He is what he's taught to be, isn't he? Isn't he born more ignorant than the animals? Doesn't he learn to walk and talk? If he didn't learn to walk would he stand on his feet? And if he didn't learn to talk could he even mumble any thoughts?

"Doesn't everyone turn out as he is taught - foolish from false concepts and wise from truths? And when foolish from false concepts, he has the complete fantasy that he is wiser than anyone who is wise due to truths, doesn't he? Aren't there foolish and insane people who are no more human than those people they found in the woods? Isn't that what people are like when they have lost their memory?

"From all these things we conclude that an untaught person is neither a person nor an animal, but he is a vessel that can receive what does make you human, and so he is not born human but becomes human. And a person is born in such a form as to receive life from God, so that he can be something that God can put everything good into, and can bless him forever through a union with Himself.

"We can tell from what you say that wisdom today is so dead or foolish that people know nothing at all about the human condition as compared to the animal state. This is why they do not know about the human condition after death. And as for those who can know this but do not want to, and therefore deny it, as many of your Christians do - we might compare them to the people found in the woods. Not that they are stupid for lack of instruction. They have made themselves stupid through false observations, which are shadows of the truth."

153b. But then someone standing in the middle of the Palladium, holding a palm in his hand, said, "Please unfold this mystery.

How can someone created in the form of God be changed into the form of a devil? I know that angels in heaven are forms of God and that angels of hell are forms of the devil, and the two forms are opposite to one another - one a form of folly, the other a form of wisdom. So tell how someone, created in the form of God, can go from day into such night that he can deny God and eternal life."

The teachers responded to this one by one - first the Pythagoreans, then the Socratists, and afterwards the others.

But among them was a Platonist. He spoke last, and his opinion was the best. Here it is.

"People in the Saturnian or Golden Age knew and acknowledged that they were forms to receive life from God and that therefore wisdom had been inscribed on their souls and hearts. So they saw truth in the light of truth, and through truth they could be aware of good from the joy of loving it. But the human race in the following ages withdrew from acknowledgement that all the truth of wisdom, and therefore the good of love, that people have, continuously flows down from God. As they did, they stopped being a place for God to inhabit. And then conversation with God and association with angels stopped, too. For the inner part of their minds changed its direction of being raised by God upwards to God, and it turned out toward the world more and more, and thus God turned them to Himself through the world. In the end they were turned around in the opposite direction - downwards to their own selves.

"A person who is inwardly upside - down and therefore turned away cannot see God, so people separated themselves from God and became forms of hell or the devil.

"It follows from this that in the first ages they acknowledged in their heart and soul that all the good of love and all the truth of wisdom from it in them were from God, and also that these were God's in them. So they realized that they were only vessels of life from God and were therefore called images of God, sons of God, and born of God. But in the following ages they acknowledged it, not in heart and soul, but with a sort of induced faith, then with a memorized faith, and finally just with their mouths. And to acknowledge something like that with your mouth only is not to acknowledge it, but in fact to deny it in your heart.

"You can see from these things what wisdom is like today on earth among Christians, when they can get inspiration from God by written revelation, yet they do not know the difference between man and animals. So there are many who think that if people live after death the animals will survive, too, or that animals do not live after death so man will not survive, either.

"Our spiritual light, which enlightens the sight of the mind, has become darkness to them, hasn't it? And the light of nature that they have, which only enlightens physical sight, has become dazzling."

154b. After all this, everyone turned to the two newcomers and thanked them for coming and speaking to them. And they asked them to report to their brothers these things they had heard.

The newcomers answered that they would encourage their friends to see the truth that in the measure that they attribute every good of charity and truth of faith to the Lord, not to themselves, they are humans and become angels of heaven.

155b. The second story: Early one morning a very beautiful song I heard somewhere up above me woke me up. And then in that first stage of waking up, which is more inward, peaceful, and sweet than the rest of the day, I was able to stay for some time in a spiritual condition, as if outside my body, and give keen attention to the feeling being sung. The singing of heaven is nothing but a mental feeling coming from the mouth as melody, for it is the sound, apart from the words, of someone voicing a feeling of love. This gives the words their life.

In the state I mentioned, I could tell it was a feeling that had to do with the delights of married love, made into a song by some wives in heaven. I noticed this because of the sound of the song, in which those delights varied in marvelous ways.

After this I rose up and looked around - in the spiritual world.

A golden rain seemed to appear in the east, below the sun there!

It was the early morning dew coming down so copiously. When the sun's rays hit it, it looked like a kind of golden rain before my eyes. This made me even more wide awake. I went out (in the spiritual world), happened to meet an angel on the way, and asked him if he saw the golden rain coming down from the sun.

He answered that he saw it whenever he was thinking about married love.

Then he looked that way and said, "The rain is falling above a dwelling where three husbands are, with their wives. They live in the middle of the Eastern Paradise. We see that rain falling from the sun over the dwelling because wisdom about married love and its delights dwells with them - wisdom about married love with the husbands and wisdom about its delights with the wives. But I notice that you are thinking about the delights of married love, so I'll take you to that house and introduce you."

He led me, through places that seemed like paradise, to houses built of olive wood with two cedar columns outside the door, and he introduced me to the husbands and asked them to let me join them and speak with their wives. They nodded and called their wives.

The wives cast a penetrating look into my eyes.

I asked why.

They said, "We can tell exactly how you feel about love for the other sex and how your feeling affects you, and this tells us how you think on the subject. We see that you're thinking about it intensely but yet chastely." And they said, "What do you want us to tell you about it?"

I answered, "Please say something about the delights of love in marriage."

The husbands nodded, saying, "Please do explain something about the delights. Their ears are chaste."

And the wives asked, "Who told you to ask us about the delights of that love? Why not ask our husbands?"

"This angel who is with me." I answered. "He said in my ear that wives are the vessels of married love and can sense it because they are loves by birth, and all delights have to do with love."

They answered this with a smile on their lips. "Be careful. Don't say such a thing, unless you say it ambiguously, because it's a nugget of wisdom hidden deep in the hearts of our sex. We don't reveal it to any husband except one who has a real love for marriage. There are many reasons, which we keep well hidden."

Then the husbands said, "Our wives know all about our mental state. Nothing is hidden from them. They see, sense, and feel whatever comes out of our will. On the other hand, we know nothing about what goes on inside them. Wives have this gift because they are very tender loves. They also amount to forms of ardent zeal to preserve the friendship and confidence of marriage, which keeps life happy for both. They see to this for their husbands and for themselves, thanks to a wisdom that is inherent in their love. It is so discreet that they don't want to say they love, so they can't say it. Only that they are loved."

"Why is it that they don't want to and therefore can't?" I asked.

The wives said that if the least thing like that slipped from their mouths, a chill would come over their husbands and separate them from bed, chamber, and sight.

"But this happens to husbands who do not hold marriages sacred, so they do not love their wives from a spiritual love. It works differently for those who do love in this way. In their minds the love is spiritual, and the earthly love in their bodies comes from that.

"In this house we get the natural love from the spiritual, so we trust our husbands with our secrets about the delights of married love."

Then I politely asked them to explain some of those secrets to me, too.

They glanced at a window on the south side, and there a white dove appeared! Its wings shimmered as if with silver, and its head was capped as if with a gold crown. It stood on a branch bearing an olive. When it began to spread its wings the wives said, "We'll tell you something. While the dove is there it's a sign to us that we may."

Then they said, "Every man has five senses - sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. But we have a sixth sense that is a sense of all the delights of married love in our husbands. And this sense is in our hands when we touch our husbands' chests, arms, hands, or cheeks - especially their chests - and when they touch us. All the happiness and pleasures of the thoughts in their minds and all the happiness and joys in their souls, and the cheer and mirth in their hearts, come across to us from them and take form, and we can perceive them, sense them, touch them, and tell them apart as clearly and distinctly as ears can tell the notes of a tune and a tongue can tell the flavors of fine foods.

"In a word, you might say the spiritual joys of our husbands wear a natural embodiment for us. So our husbands call us the sense organs of chaste married love, and therefore of its delights.

"And yet this sense of our sex comes out, is supported, continues, and gets better in the degree that our husbands love us due to wisdom and discernment and we, on our part, love them for those same things in them.

"In heaven, this sense that our sex has is called wisdom at play with its love and love with its wisdom."

These things made me want to know more - like the different kinds of delights.

They said, "They are infinite. But we don't want to tell you more, so we can't. The dove in our window with the olive branch under his feet has flown away."

I waited for it to come back, but it was no use.

Meantime, I asked the husbands, "Don't you have the same sense of married love?"

"We have a general sense," they said, "but not the specific one. We get a general happiness, a general joy, and a general pleasantness from the specific happiness, joy, and pleasantness our wives have. And this general feeling that we get from them is like a calm peacefulness."

When this was said, a swan appeared outside the window! It was standing on the branch of a fig tree. It spread its wings and flew off.

When the husbands saw this they said, "This is a sign to us to be quiet about married love. Come back another time, and maybe more things will come out." And they withdrew.

We went away.

182. To this I will append two narrative accounts. Here is the first:

Several weeks later ¹ I heard a voice from heaven saying, "Behold, another assembly is convening on Parnassium hill. Come, we will show you the way."

I went, and as I drew near, I saw on the hill Heliconeum someone with a trumpet, with which he announced and proclaimed the assembly. I also saw people from the city Athenaeum and its bordering regions ascending as before, and in the midst of them three newcomers from the world. The three were Christians, one a priest, the second a politician, and the third a philosopher. On the way the people entertained them with various kinds of conversation, especially concerning the ancient wise men, whom they mentioned by name. The visitors asked whether they would see these wise men. The people said that they would, and that if they wished, they would meet them, since they are friendly and cordial.

The visitors asked about Demosthenes, Diogenes and Epicurus.

"Demosthenes is not here," the people said, "but with Plato. ² Diogenes stays with his disciples at the foot of the hill Heliconeum, because he regards worldly matters as of no importance and occupies his mind solely with heavenly ones. Epicurus lives at the border to the west, and he does not come in to join us either, because we draw a distinction between good affections and evil ones, saying that good affections accompany wisdom and that evil affections are opposed to wisdom."

[2] When they had ascended the hill Parnassium, some of the keepers of the place brought crystal goblets containing water from a spring there; and they said, "The water comes from a spring which the people of old told stories about, saying that it was broken open by the hoof of the horse Pegasus and afterwards became sacred to the nine Muses. ³ But by the winged horse Pegasus they meant an understanding of truth which leads to wisdom. By its hooves they meant empirical observations which lead to natural intelligence. And by the nine Muses they meant learning and knowledge of every kind. These stories today are called myths, but they were allegories which the earliest people used to express their ideas."

"Do not be surprised," the people accompanying the three visitors said to them. "The keepers have been told to speak as they did, to explain that what we mean by drinking water from the spring is to be taught about truths and through truths about goods, and thus to become wise."

[3] After this they entered the Palladium, and with them went the three newcomers from the world, the priest, the politician, and the philosopher. Then the people with the laurel wreaths who sat at the tables ⁴ asked, "What news do you have from earth?"

So the newcomers replied, "We have this news. There is someone who maintains that he speaks with angels, having had his sight opened into the spiritual world, as open as the sight he has into the natural world; and he reports from that world many novel ideas, which include, among other things, the following: A person lives, he says, as a person after death, the way he did before in the world. He sees, hears, and speaks as he did before in the world. He dresses and adorns himself as before in the world. He becomes hungry and thirsty, and eats and drinks, as before in the world. He experiences the delight of marriage as before in the world. He goes to sleep and wakes up as before in the world. The spiritual world has lands and lakes, mountains and hills, plains and valleys, springs and rivers, gardens and groves. One finds there palaces and houses, too, and cities and towns, just as in the natural world. They have written documents and books as well, and occupations and businesses, also precious stones, gold and silver. In a word, one finds in that world each and every thing that one finds on earth - things which are infinitely more perfect in heaven. The only difference is that everything in the spiritual world comes from a spiritual origin, and consequently is spiritual, because it originates from the sun there, which is pure love; while everything in the natural world comes from a natural origin, and consequently is natural and material, because it comes from the sun there, which is nothing but fire.

"This person reports, in short, that a person after death is perfectly human, indeed, more perfectly human than before in the world. For before in the world he was clothed in a material body, while here in this world he is clothed in a spiritual one."

[4] When the newcomers had thus spoken, the ancient wise men asked what people on earth thought of these reports.

The three visitors said, "We know that they are true, because we are here and have seen and investigated them all. We will tell you, therefore, what people said and judged concerning them on earth."

At that the priest then said, "When those who are members of our order first heard these reports, they called them hallucinations, then fabrications; later they said he saw ghosts; and finally they threw up their hands and said, believe if you will. We have always taught that a person will not be clothed in a body after death before the day of the Last Judgment."

The ancient wise men then asked, "Are there not any intelligent ones among them who can show them and convince them of the truth that a person lives as a person after death?"

[5] The priest said that there were some who showed it to them, but without convincing them. "The ones who show it say that it is contrary to sound reason to believe that a person does not live as a person until the day of the Last Judgment and meanwhile is a soul without a body.

"What is a person's soul, they ask, and where is it in the meantime? Is it an exhalation or a bit of wind flitting about in the air, or some entity hidden away at the center of the earth where its nether world is located? The souls of Adam and Eve, and of all the people after them, for six thousand years or sixty centuries now - are they still flitting about the universe or still being kept shut up in the bowels of the earth, waiting for the Last Judgment? What could be more distressing or more miserable than having to wait like that? May their fate not be likened to the fate of captives held chained and fettered in prison? If that is to be what a person's fate is like after death, would it not be better to be born a donkey than a human being?

"Moreover, is it not contrary to reason to suppose that a soul can be clothed again with its body? Does the body not get eaten away by worms, mice and fish? And this new body - can it serve to cover a bony skeleton that has been charred by the sun or has fallen into dust? How can these decomposed and foul-smelling elements be gathered together and joined to souls?

"But when people hear arguments like these, they do not use reason to respond to them, but hold to their belief, saying, 'We keep reason in obedience to faith.' As for all people being gathered together from their graves on the day of the Last Judgment, this, they say, is a work of omnipotence. And when they use the terms omnipotence and faith, reason is banished; and I can tell you that sound reason is as nothing then, and to some of them, a kind of hallucination. Indeed, it is possible for them to say in reply to sound reason, 'You are crazy.'"

[6] When the wise men of Greece heard this, they said, "Are logical inconsistencies like that not dispelled of themselves as mutually contradictory? And yet sound reason cannot dispel them in the world today. What can be more logically inconsistent than to believe what they say about the Last Judgment, that the universe will then come to an end and that at the same time the stars of heaven will fall down on to the earth, which is smaller than the stars; and that people's bodies, being then either cadavers, or embalmed corpses other people may have eaten, ⁵ or particles of dust, will come together with their souls?

"When we were in the world, we believed in the immortality of human souls on the basis of inductive arguments which reason supplied us, and we also determined places for the blessed, which we called the Elysian Fields. And we believed these souls to be human forms or likenesses, but ethereal since they were spiritual."

[7] After they said this, they turned to the second visitor, who in the world had been a politician. He confessed that he had not believed in a life after death, and had thought concerning the new reports he began to hear about it that they were fictions and fabrications. "Thinking about it I said, how can souls be corporeal beings? Does not every remnant of a person lie dead in the grave? Is the eye not there? How can he see? Is the ear not there? How can he hear? Where does he get a mouth with which to speak? If anything of a person should live after death, would it be anything other than something ghostlike? How can a ghost eat and drink? And how can it experience the delight of marriage? Where does it get its clothing, housing, food, and so on? Besides, being airy apparitions, ghosts only appear as though they exist, and yet do not.

"These and others like them are the thoughts I had in the world concerning the life of people after death. But now that I have seen it all and touched it all with my hands, I have been convinced by my very senses that I am as much a person as I was in the world, so much so that I have no other awareness than that I am living as I did then, with the difference that I now reason more sensibly. I have sometimes been ashamed of the thoughts I had before."

[8] The philosopher had a similar story to tell about himself, with the difference, however, that he had classed these new reports he heard regarding life after death with other opinions and conjectures he had gathered from ancient and modern sources.

The sages were dumbfounded at hearing this; and those who were of the Socratic school said they perceived from this news from earth that the inner faculties of human minds had become gradually closed, with faith in falsity now shining like truth in the world, and clever foolishness like wisdom. Since our times, they said, the light of wisdom has descended from the inner regions of the brain to the mouth beneath the nose, where it appears to view as a brilliance of the lips, and the speech of the mouth therefore as wisdom.

Listening to this, one of the novices there said, "Yes, and how stupid the minds of earth's inhabitants are today! If only we had here the disciples of Heraclitus who weep over everything and the disciples of Democritus who laugh at everything. What great weeping and laughing we would hear then!"

At the conclusion of this assembly, they gave the three newcomers from earth emblems of their district, which were copper plaques on which some hieroglyphic symbols were engraved. With these the visitors then departed.

Footnotes: