66. Truly conjugial love is naked

It is the angels of the third heaven who above all are in the heavenly marriage, for they are in love to the Lord, and consequently in the marriage of good and truth. For this reason they are more than other angels in conjugial love, innocence, and chastity. They walk about out of doors with a girdle about their loins, but go without the girdle at home. Yet in their nakedness they see their wives as wives without any lasciviousness. They said that seeing their wives clothed takes away the idea of marriage. What is remarkable, nakedness does not excite or fire them, yet there is a kind of external bond of conjugial love. They lie together in bed as they were created, and sleep like that. They say they could not do otherwise, because conjugial love itself which is perpetual brings them together; and thus the life of one communicates with the life of the other, and the wife makes the husband's life her own. So it is as we read of Adam when he saw Eve his wife: 'Behold my bone and my flesh'; as also that they were naked and not ashamed, that is, there was no lasciviousness. But as soon as through his wife Adam departed from love to the Lord, which is meant by the tree of life in the garden (on which see there and on Revelation 2:7, which happened through acting of themselves and from their proprium, that is, from the knowledge and pleasure of the natural man, then the marriage of good and truth was destroyed; hence nakedness became lascivious when the chastity of marriage ceased; and that is why they were ashamed of their nakedness and dressed themselves in fig-leaves, and afterwards in sheepskins. Hence nakedness in the Word is understood as standing for lasciviousness such as that of adultery as...[Revelation 3:18, 16:15] ¹

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