The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “wisdom” as “accumulated philosophic or scientific learning; the ability to discern inner qualities and relationships; good sense.” That sounds reasonable: It means knowing a lot, and knowing what to do with that knowledge. Right?
Swedenborg’s definition, however, is a little different. In “Divine Love and Wisdom” (a book with a bit to say on the subject), he writes that “wisdom is nothing more than the image of love.” The image of love? What does that mean? And how can it possibly relate to the sensible dictionary definition?
Imagine, though, that you’re called on to settle a dispute between two co-workers. Each one offers a litany of grievances, nasty things the other has said and done. What do you do?
One approach would be to seek facts and knowledge and judge on them alone. You could tote up the grievances, look at their severity, try to calculate who started it and who’s had the worst of it and hand out some punishment. The other approach would be to try to understand each person’s feelings, the source of their anger, and seek a solution that will make both happy (or at least no longer angry).
Which approach is the wise one? We’d say the second. Why? Well, partly because it would actually work, but more profoundly because it is the one that addresses love, that addresses the emotional states of the people involved. A truly wise decision is one that seeks to create more love, one that seeks an atmosphere of caring and respect. And could a selfish, uncaring person be part of such a decision? Not really. In this situation, wisdom is a result of love: love for the people involved, the love of a caring solution, and love for the good things those people could do if they worked together with mutual caring and respect.
Put that way, wisdom as “the image of love” makes a bit more sense. Yes, it considers facts and involves knowledge, and it looks at them through a loving lens. Wisdom is love applied to life.
There’s also a deeper, more profound and philosophical answer to the question. This involves the idea that love - the Lord’s love, which is love itself - is the actual substance of reality, that it flows out from the Lord to form spiritual reality, and flows through spiritual reality to form physical reality. That love molds itself into forms so it can function as the reality we know, but everything is ultimately made of energy that comes from the Lord’s love.
That’s a difficult concept to grasp, but it’s actually reflected in modern physics. The leading scientific theory is that the universe started with the “Big Bang,” a moment of essentially infinite energy that ballooned out to form space and time. As the volume of the energy increased, it started cooling and forming patterns, and those patterns eventually got so tight and small that they began behaving as particles of matter - the particles that make up all the physical “stuff” in the universe. This means that matter - even the very stuff of our bodies themselves - is really just energy trapped in space. That’s a strange thought, but it’s well-demonstrated. It is, in fact, the underlying meaning of Einstein’s famous equation “e = mc2,” and is the basis of atomic energy.
In the physical universe, then, there are really two aspects that are equally important and intrinsically intertwined: the energy that existed at the moment of the Big Bang, and the patterns and wrinkles that formed the energy into matter. And so it is with spiritual reality as well: There is love itself, which is the essential energy, and there is wisdom, which is the wrinkling and shaping that gives love a way of creating things and expressing itself.
To put that in simpler terms, we could say that wisdom is a way of packaging love so that it can be used. The Lord does that on a universal scale: He packages His love in the form of all creation so that we can live and flourish and learn to love as well. And we - hopefully - do that in the scale of our own lives. Presented with a problem, we start pulling together little threads of love, little ways of caring, and weaving them together into a solution: a package of love; a little bit of wisdom.
Why, then, is the common idea of wisdom such an intellectual one - as Merriam-Webster would have it- That’s because the physical world is a sort of twice-filtered expression of the Lord’s love, and His love is hidden away to such a degree that we cannot see it or sense it in any way. Smack yourself in the head with a rock, and you don’t feel the Lord’s love - you feel a rock smacking you in the head. The fact that that rock is an expression of the Lord’s love is pretty well hidden.
“Facts” are similar. They express reality, and reality is an expression of the Lord’s love, but it is so deeply hidden that those “facts” are about as soft and loving as that head-smacking stone. But, like that stone, those facts are very visible, very tangible. So when we think of “wisdom” on the physical plane, what we identify is the large collection of rocky facts involved. Thus wisdom seems like an intellectual thing.
True wisdom, however, involves cracking open those facts to see the states of love they represent, and working with the love. That’s harder to see, but much more important.
(Izinkomba:
Apocalypse Revealed 189; Arcana Coelestia 1226; Conjugial Love 130; Divine Love and Wisdom 34, 35, 39, 180, 213, 287, 358; True Christian Religion 242)
