Angelic Wisdom about Divine ProvidenceSwedenborg, Emanuel
Religion
Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence
Swedenborg, Emanuel
Providence and government of God -- Christianity
38. No one who is in the pleasures of the lusts of evil can know anything
of the joys of the affections of good in which the angelic heaven is.
These pleasures and joys are opposites in internals and hence inwardly in
externals, though superficially they may differ little. Every love has
its enjoyments; the love of evil with those in lusts also has, such as
the love of committing adultery, of taking revenge, of defrauding, of
stealing, of acting cruelly, indeed, in the worst men, of blaspheming the
holy things of the church and of inveighing against God. The fountainhead
of those enjoyments is the love of ruling from self-love. They come of
lusts which obsess the interiors of the mind, from these flow into the
body, and excite uncleannesses there which titillate the fibers. The
physical pleasure springs from the pleasure which the mind takes in
lusts.
[2] After death everyone comes to know in the spiritual world what the
uncleannesses are which titillate the body's fibers in such persons and
comes to know the nature of them. In general they are things cadaverous,
excrementitious, filthy, malodorous, and urinous; for their hells teem
with such uncleannesses. These are correspondences, as may be seen in the
treatise _Divine Love and Wisdom_ (nn. 422-424). After one has entered
hell, however, these filthy delights are turned into wretchedness. This
has been told in order that it may be understood what heaven's felicity
is and its nature, of which we are now to speak; for a thing is known
from its opposite.
39. It is impossible to describe in words the blessedness, satisfaction,
joy and pleasure, in short, the felicity of heaven, so sensibly perceived
there. What is perceived solely by feeling, cannot be described, for it
does not fall into ideas of thought nor, therefore, into words. For the
understanding sees only and sees what is of wisdom or truth, but not what
is of love or good. Those felicities are therefore inexpressible, but
still they ascend in like degree with wisdom. They are infinitely
various, and each is ineffable. I have heard this, also perceived it.
[2] These felicities enter when a man, of himself and yet from the Lord,
casts out the lusts of the love of evil and falsity. For these felicities
are the happinesses of the affections of good and truth, the opposites of
the lusts of the love of evil and falsity. Those happinesses begin from
the Lord, thus from the inmost, diffuse themselves thence into things
lower even to lowermost things, and thus fill the angel, making him a
body of delight. Such happinesses are to be found in infinite variety in
every affection of good and truth, and eminently in the affection of
wisdom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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