325. 8. The state of a widow is harder than the state of a widower. The reasons are external and internal. The external reasons are plain for anyone to see; as for instance:

1. A widow cannot provide the necessities of life for herself and her household as a man can, or having acquired them, manage them as she did formerly with her husband's help and in partnership with him.

2. Nor can she properly protect herself and her household; for in their married life her husband was her protection and so to speak her good right arm; and even when she had to protect herself, still she relied on her husband.

3. By herself she is without counsel in such matters as require an inner wisdom and its consequent judgment.

4. A widow has no one receiving the love she has as a woman; thus she is in a state alien to the state innate in her and entered into by marriage.

[2] These external circumstances are natural ones, but they take their origin from internal causes as well that are spiritual, as does everything else in the world and the body (of which above, no. 220). An understanding of the external, natural circumstances is gained from the internal, spiritual causes, which come from the marriage between good and truth, and principally from these characteristics of it: that good cannot provide or manage anything accept by means of truth; that good cannot protect itself either except by means of truth, accordingly that truth is the protection and so to speak the good right arm of good; and that good without truth is without counsel, because it has its counsel, wisdom and judgment by means of truth.

[3] Now because a man from creation is a form of truth, and a wife from creation a form of its accompanying good, or to say the same thing, because a man from creation is a form of understanding, and a wife from creation a form of its accompanying love, it is apparent that the external or natural circumstances which make the widowhood of a woman harder take their origin from internal or spiritual circumstances.

These spiritual circumstances are, together with the natural ones, meant in the Word by what it says in regard to widows in a number of places (as may be seen in The Apocalypse Revealed, no. 764).

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