775. As all things have their divisions into broad and specific categories, including different kinds of goodness on both the spiritual and earthly planes, and on the resulting sensory and bodily planes, the present verse says every kind for each type. There are so many general categories of spiritual goodness and likewise of spiritual truth that they could never be listed. Still less could the particular varieties composing each general category be listed.
In heaven, all heavenly and spiritual goodness and truth are so carefully distinguished into their genera, and the genera into their species, that only what is perfectly distinct exists there. The forms are so far beyond counting that the number of individual species can be called unlimited. This shows the poverty and near insignificance of human wisdom, which hardly even knows that spiritual goodness and truth exist, let alone what they are.
[2] Earthly goodness and truth emerge and descend from heavenly and spiritual kinds of goodness (and from the truth that springs out of the latter kinds of goodness). Nothing good or true exists on the earthly plane that does not rise out of spiritual goodness, which itself rises out of heavenly goodness. Earthly goodness and truth also depend on the higher levels in order to remain in existence. If the spiritual level withdrew, the earthly level would be nothing.
The facts about the origin of all things are these: Absolutely everything comes from the Lord. The heavenly plane is from him. The spiritual plane comes into existence from him by means of the heavenly plane, as does the earthly plane by means of the spiritual, and the bodily and sensory planes by means of the earthly. Because this is how things come into existence from the Lord, it is also how they remain in existence. As is well known, to continue in existence is constantly to come into existence. 1
Those who view the rise and genesis of things in any other way — people who worship the material world, 2 for instance, and trace the origin of everything to it — are in the grip of such deadly theories that the phantasms of wild animals in the forest can be described as much more sane. This applies to many individuals who seem to themselves to excel others in wisdom.
Footnotes:
1. The Latin phrase here translated "to continue in existence is constantly to come into existence" is subsistentia est perpetua existentia — a common theological maxim (see §§3483, 5084:3; see also Marriage Love 380:8; Soul-Body Interaction 4). Swedenborg frequently built on it; see §§3648, 4322, 4523:3, 5116:3, 5377, 6040:1, 6482, 9502, 9847, 10076:5, 10152:3, 10252:3, 10266; Heaven and Hell 106, 303; Divine Love and Wisdom 151-152; Divine Providence 3:2; Soul-Body Interaction 9:1; True Christianity 46, 224:1. This notion is referred to as commonplace in part 5 of Descartes's Discourse on Method (Descartes [1637] 1968, 64): "It is certain, and this is an opinion commonly held among theologians, that the action by which [God] conserves [the world] now is the same as that by which he created it." Elsewhere Descartes offers this explanation: "The present time has no causal dependence on the time immediately preceding it. Hence, in order to secure the continued existence of a thing, no less a cause is required than that needed to produce it at the first" (Descartes [1641] 1952, 131). Thomas Aquinas makes a similar statement about all "creatures," that is, created things: "The being of every creature depends on God, so that not for a moment could it subsist [have independent existence], but would fall into nothingness were it not kept in being by the operation of the Divine power" (Summa Theologiae 1:104:1; translation in Aquinas 1952). In support of his position, Aquinas in turn cites another church father, Gregory the Great, specifically his Moralia in Job (Ethical Disputations on Job) 16:37; he is probably thinking of Gregory's statement there that "all things subsist in him [God]... . No created thing avails in itself either to subsist or to move." This Scholastic theory of perpetual creation is also discussed by the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) in his work The Principles of Human Knowledge (Berkeley [1710] 1952) §46. [JSR, SS, RS]
2. On the meaning of the phrase "people who worship the material world," see note 1 in §206. [SS]
