1. Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence

Divine Providence Is the Form of Government Exercised by the Lord's Divine Love and Wisdom

To understand what divine providence is--that it is the way the Lord's divine love and wisdom govern us--it is important to be aware of the following things, which were presented in my book on the subject.

In the Lord, divine love is a property of divine wisdom and divine wisdom is a property of divine love (Divine Love and Wisdom 34-39).

Divine love and wisdom cannot fail to be and to be manifested in others that it has created (Divine Love and Wisdom 47-51).

Everything in the universe was created by divine love and wisdom (Divine Love and Wisdom 52, 53, 151-156).

Everything in the created universe is a vessel of divine love and wisdom (54-60 [55-60]).

The Lord looks like the sun to angels; its radiating warmth is love and its radiating light is wisdom (Divine Love and Wisdom 83-88, 89-92, 93-98, 296-301).

The divine love and wisdom that emanate from the Lord constitute a single whole (Divine Love and Wisdom 99-102).

The Lord from eternity, who is Jehovah, created the universe and everything in it from himself and not from nothing (Divine Love and Wisdom 282-284, 290-295). These propositions may be found in the work titled Angelic Wisdom about Divine Love and Wisdom.

47. Divine love and wisdom cannot fail to be and to be manifested in others that it has created. The hallmark of love is not loving ourselves but loving others and being united to them through love. The hallmark of love is also being loved by others because this is how we are united. Truly, the essence of all love is to be found in union, in the life of love that we call joy, delight, pleasure, sweetness, blessedness, contentment, and happiness.

The essence of love is that what is ours should belong to someone else. Feeling the joy of someone else as joy within ourselves--that is loving. Feeling our joy in others, though, and not theirs in ourselves is not loving. That is loving ourselves, while the former is loving our neighbor. These two kinds of love are exact opposites. True, they both unite us; and it does not seem as though loving what belongs to us, or loving ourselves in the other, is divisive. Yet it is so divisive that to the extent that we love others in this way we later harbor hatred for them. Step by step our union with them dissolves, and the love becomes hatred of corresponding intensity.

92. It has not been known previously that angels and spirits possess a completely different light and heat from that of people. Indeed, it has not been known that a different light and heat is possible. For people have not penetrated in their thinking more deeply than into the interior or purer elements of nature. Consequently many people have even imagined the abodes of angels and spirits to be in the upper atmosphere, and some in the stars, thus within nature and not above or outside it.

But in fact angels and spirits are altogether above or outside nature, and they dwell in a world which exists under another sun. And because intervals of space in that world are appearances, as demonstrated above, ¹ therefore one cannot say that they are in the upper atmosphere or in the stars; for they dwell with people, conjoined with the affections and thoughts of their spirits. For the human being is a spirit. It is owing to it that he thinks and wills. Consequently the spiritual world is where people are, and not at all removed from them.

In short, every person in the interiors of his mind is in that world, in the midst of spirits and angels there, and he thinks because of its light, and loves because of its warmth.

Imibhalo yaphansi: