134. Heaven's warmth, like heaven's light, is different in different places. It has one nature in the heavenly kingdom and another in the spiritual kingdom. It also differs in each community, not only in intensity but in quality. It is more intense and pure in the Lord's heavenly kingdom because the angels there accept more divine good. It is less intense and pure in the Lord's spiritual kingdom because the angels there accept more divine truth. In each community, it varies depending on people's receptivity. There is also warmth in the hells, but it is unclean. ¹

The warmth in heaven is meant by sacred and heavenly fire, and the warmth of hell by profane fire and hellfire. Both refer to love: heavenly fire to love for the Lord and love for one's neighbor, and hellfire to love for oneself and love of the world and all the craving that is associated with these loves. ²

The fact that love is warmth of a spiritual origin can be seen from the way we grow warm in proportion to our love, even becoming inflamed and heated in proportion to its intensity and quality, with its full heat evident when we are attacked. This is why it is usual to talk about inflaming, heating up, burning, boiling, and kindling when we are talking about either the affections of a good love or the cravings of an evil love.

脚注:

6622. In talking to spirits about what flows into ideas constituting thought I have said that men cannot by any means believe how countless the details are that an idea holds within it, for men have no conception of thought except as something simple and singular. Thus their judgement of the matter is based on quite external evidence. The spirits to whom I was talking at that time subscribed to the belief that ideas did not have anything inwardly present in them, a belief of which they had become convinced during their lifetime. But to enable them to understand that they perceived countless things as a single whole, I was led to tell them that the movements of millions of motor fibres combine to produce a single action. At the same time all things in the body work together and adjust themselves both collectively and individually to produce that action. Yet for all this that small action is seen as one that is simple and singular, as though it possessed no such complexity. It is similar with the countless things which combine to produce a single spoken word, such as the bending of the lips, and of all the muscles and fibres there; also the movements of the tongue, throat, larynx, trachea, lungs, and diaphragm, together with all their muscles collectively and individually. Since a person discerns the single utterance they make merely as a simple sound without anything more to it, one may see how crude is perception that relies on the senses. What then of perception that relies on sensory evidence regarding ideas constituting thought which exist in a purer world and are accordingly quite remote from the sensory level?