481. In order that it may be known again how extraordinary the grossness of this age is, that its wise counselors do not see anything sinful in adultery - as discovered by angels in the incident reported just above (no. 478) - I will add the following account: ¹

I encountered certain spirits who, from practice in the life of the body, infested me with a peculiar skill, and this by a delicate and kind of undulating influx, such as is characteristic usually of upright spirits. But I perceived that they had in them a cunning and guile and the like, in order to captivate and deceive.

At length I spoke with one of them, who I was told had been the commander of an army when he lived in the world. ² And because I perceived that there was something lascivious in the ideas of his thought, I spoke with him in spiritual speech using representations, which expresses the meanings of things fully and more in an instant.

He said that in the life of his body in the previous world he had regarded adulteries as nothing. But I was able to say to him that adulteries are unspeakable, even though they appear to people like him, from the delight that seizes them and from their consequent persuasion, that they are delightful, indeed, permissible. Moreover he could know this from the fact that marriages are the seedbed of the human race, and so also the seedbed of the kingdom of heaven, and therefore are not to be violated, but held sacred. He could know this also, I said - which he ought to know, being in the spiritual world and in a state of perception - from the fact that conjugial love descends from the Lord through heaven, and that from that love, as from a parent, stems mutual love, which is what heaven is founded on. So, too, he could know this from the fact that when adulterers simply come anywhere near heavenly societies, they perceive their own stench and therefore cast themselves down in the direction of hell. At least he might have known, I said, that to violate marriages is contrary to Divine laws, contrary to the civil laws of all countries, and contrary to the light of reason, and thus contrary to commonly accepted morality, because it violates both Divine and human order. And so on.

[2] But he replied that he had thought nothing like that in his former life. He wished to reason out whether it were so, but I told him that truth is not subject to lines of reasoning; for reasonings incline to delights of the flesh which oppose delights of the spirit, because the flesh does not know what the latter delights are like. Rather he ought first to consider the things I had said, because they were true. Or he should think in accordance with that familiar principle, which is very well known in the world, that no one ought to do to another what he would not want another to do to him. Consider, for example, if someone were to have seduced his wife in this way, a wife he loved (as is the case in the beginning of every marriage). If, while in a state of fury over it, he were to have spoken in accordance with that state, would he, too, not have then denounced adulteries? And being a man of intelligence, would he not more than others have then confirmed himself against them, even so as to condemn them to hell? Indeed, because he was the commander of an army and associated in it with men of action, in order not to be the subject of reproach, would he not have either killed the adulterer or cast the harlot out of his house?

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