Van Swedenborgs Werken

 

Divine Love and Wisdom #30

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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.

  
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Thanks to the Swedenborg Foundation for the permission to use this translation.

Van Swedenborgs Werken

 

Divine Love and Wisdom #22

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22. As for the thesis that the infinite elements in the human God are, in a distinct combination, one, this too can be seen as in a mirror in people. Every person has in him many constituents, and these beyond number, as we observed above, 1 but still he is sensible of them as one. He does not know from sensation anything about his brains, his heart and lungs, his liver, spleen and pancreas. Neither does he know from sensation anything about the countless elements in his eyes, ears, tongue, stomach, reproductive organs, and all the rest. And because he does not know these from a sensation of them, he is to himself as though a single unit.

The reason for this is that these constituents are all in such a form that not one of them can be lacking; for it is a form receptive of life from the human God (as we established in nos. 4-6 above). The arrangement and interconnection of all these constituents in such a form produces the sensation and consequent idea of their being as though not many and not beyond number, but seemingly one.

One may conclude from this that the incalculably many elements which are united as though into one in a person, are, in the supreme person who is God, in a distinct combination one - indeed, in a most distinct combination one.

Voetnoten:

1. No. 18.

  
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Many thanks to the General Church of the New Jerusalem, and to Rev. N.B. Rogers, translator, for the permission to use this translation.