It sounds strange to say that the universe was created by divine truth – “truth” doesn’t

sound like an active, building kind of thing – but it makes more sense when we think of

“truth” in its deepest sense: as love expressed, as love given form. Because the Lord was

love itself He had to create so He would have something to love. And truth is the thing

that turns love into creation, by giving love expression and giving it form.

That’s not easy to visualize. But it’s interesting – and a bit stunning – how those ideas

from the Writings were borne out by Albert Einstein 130-some years later. One of

Einstein’s most important findings was that mass and energy are really the same thing.

That’s expressed in the famous equation e=mc^2 , in which “e” is energy, “m” is mass and

“c” is the speed of light. It meant that mass – the “stuff” things are made of, the stuff we

can feel and heft – is actually made up of huge amounts of energy trapped in very small

spaces. This meant that breaking up “stuff” and releasing the energy would be very

powerful – it is the basis of nuclear weapons and powerplants – and also meant that the

universe was ultimately one big energy field, folded and crinkled to form mass, in ways

complex enough to form the world we know.

These things were not known or even imagined when the Writing were written, but

replace energy with “love” and mass with “truth” and you can see how alike it is. Truth is

love in patterns, crinkled and folded to form solid concepts, just as mass is energy in

patterns, folded and crinkled to form physical things. And that natural reality of mass and

energy is an extension of the spiritual reality of truth and love.Arcana Coelestia 9410:5Athanasian Creed 145

145. The extension of the Divine into the universe is what can be predicated of the Divine Proceeding, which is the Divine Truth and is called the Word. By this were all things made which were made and the world was created from it, according to the words in John, chapter 1. But an idea is to be held concerning the Divine Itself, the idea as of a Man whose Divine Love appears as a Sun from which the light is Divine Truth and the heat Divine Good. But still the idea of extension is applicable only to the natural world but not to the spiritual world, in which, extension as space and distance is only an appearance concerning which see the work on HEAVEN AND HELL in the chapter dealing with space.