Angelic Wisdom about Divine ProvidenceSwedenborg, Emanuel
Religion
Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence
Swedenborg, Emanuel
Providence and government of God -- Christianity
[11] Sixth: _Everything confirmed by the will and at the same time by the
understanding remains to eternity, but not what is confirmed only by the
understanding._ For what pertains to the understanding alone is not
within man but outside him; it is only in the thought. Nothing enters man
and is appropriated to him except what is received by the will; then it
comes to be of his life's love. This, it will be shown in the next
number, remains to eternity.
319. Everything confirmed by both the will and the understanding remains
to eternity because everyone is his own love, and love attaches to the
will; also because everyone is his own good or his own evil, for that is
called good or evil which belongs to the love. Since man is his own love
he is also the form of his love, and may be called the organ of his
life's love. It was stated above (n. 279) that the affections of man's
love and his resulting thoughts are changes and variations of the state
and form of the organic substances of his mind. What these changes and
variations are and their nature will be explained now. Some idea of them
may be obtained from the alternating expansions and compressions or
dilations and contractions in the heart and lungs, called in the heart
systole and diastole, and in the lungs respirations. These are reciprocal
extensions and retractions or expansions and contractions of their lobes.
Such are the changes and variations in the state of the heart and lungs.
Such changes and variations occur in the other viscera of the body and in
their parts, too, by which the blood and the animal juices are received
and transmitted.
[2] Similar changes and variations take place in the organic forms of the
mind, which, as we showed above, are the substances underlying man's
affections and thoughts. There is a difference. Their expansions and
compressions or reciprocal activities in comparison have so much greater
perfection that they cannot be described in words of natural language,
but only in words of spiritual language, which can sound only as saying
that the changes and variations are vortical gyrations in and out, after
the manner of perpetually winding spirals wonderfully massed into forms
receptive of life.
[3] Now to tell the nature of these purely organic substances and forms
in the evil and in the good respectively: in the good the spiral forms
travel forward, in the evil backward; the forward-traveling are turned to
the Lord and receive influx from Him; the retrogressive are turned
towards hell and receive influx from hell. It should be known that in the
measure in which they turn backward these forms are open behind and
closed in front; and on the other hand in the measure in which they turn
forward, they are open in front and closed behind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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