575. The gnashing of teeth, though, is the constant clash and strife of false convictions with each other (and therefore the warfare of the individuals who hold the false convictions) united to contempt for others, hostility, derision, mockery, and blasphemy. These even break out into various kinds of butchery. Everyone there is defending his or her own false convictions and calling them true. From outside the hells, these clashes and battles sound like gnashing teeth, and they turn into the gnashing of teeth when truths from heaven flow into hell.

In these hells dwell all the people who acknowledged nature and denied the Divine. The people who deliberately convinced themselves are in the deeper hells. Since they cannot accept any ray of light from heaven and can therefore not see anything within themselves, most of them focus on their senses and their bodies. These are people who do not believe anything they cannot see with their eyes and touch with their hands. So for them, all sensory illusions are the truths on which they base their arguments. This is why their arguments sound like the gnashing of teeth. It is because in the spiritual world all false statements grate, and teeth correspond to the outmost aspects of nature and to our own outmost natures, which have to do with our senses and our bodies. ¹

On the gnashing of teeth in the hells, see Matthew 8:12; 13:42, 50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30, and Luke 13:28.

Imibhalo yaphansi:

217. That in the Word 'vine' means spiritual good and 'fig' natural good is totally unknown nowadays because the internal sense of the Word has been lost. Nevertheless this is what vine and fig mean or embody whenever they occur, as with the Lord's statements in His parables involving a vineyard and also a fig tree, and in the incident recorded in Matthew,

Jesus seeing a fig tree by the wayside went to it but found nothing on it but leaves only; therefore He said to it, Let no fruit from now on ever be born from you! Therefore the fig tree withered at once. Matthew 21:19.

This meant that no good, not even natural good, was found on earth. 'Vine' and 'fig' have the same meaning in Jeremiah,

Were they ashamed that they committed abomination? No indeed, they were not at all filled with shame and they did not know how to blush. Therefore I will surely gather them, says Jehovah; there will be no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree; and its leaf has fallen. Jeremiah 8:12-13.

This means that all good, both spiritual and natural, had perished, for people were such that they were not even capable of being filled with shame, just as nowadays people governed by evil are so brazen that they even boast about that evil. In Hosea,

Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel; like the first fruit on the fig tree, in the beginning, I saw your fathers. Hosea 9:10.

And in Joel,

Fear not, you beasts of my fields, for the tree will bear its fruit, the fig tree and the vine will give their full yield. Joel 2:22.

'Vine' stands for spiritual good, 'fig' for natural good.