Angelic Wisdom about Divine ProvidenceSwedenborg, Emanuel
Religion
Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence
Swedenborg, Emanuel
Providence and government of God -- Christianity
59. It has not been known that divine providence in all its procedure
with man looks to his eternal state. It can look to nothing else because
the Divine is infinite and eternal, and the infinite and eternal or the
Divine is not in time; therefore all future things are present to it. It
follows that there is eternity in all that the Divine does. But those who
think from time and space perceive this with difficulty, not only because
they love temporal things, but also because they think from what is on
hand in the world and not from what is at hand in heaven; this is as
remote to them as the ends of the earth. Those, however, who are in the
Divine, inasmuch as they think from the Lord, think from what is eternal
as well as from what is at present, asking themselves, "What is that
which is not eternal? Is not the temporal relatively nothing and does it
not become nothing when it is past?" The eternal is not so; it alone
_is;_ its _esse_ has no end. To think thus is to think both from the
present and the eternal, and when a man not only thinks so but lives so,
the proceeding Divine with him or divine providence looks in all its
procedure to the state of his eternal life in heaven and guides to it. In
what follows it will be seen that the Divine looks to the eternal in
everybody, in an evil as well as in a good person.
60. (iv) _An image of the infinite and eternal offers in an angelic
heaven._ Among things we need to know about is the angelic heaven.
Everyone who has any religion thinks about heaven and wishes to go there.
Yet heaven is granted only to those who know the way to it and walk in
that way. We can know the way to an extent by knowing the character of
those who constitute heaven and by knowing that no one becomes an angel
or comes into heaven unless he brings with him from the world what is
angelic. In what is angelic there is a knowledge of the way from walking
in it, and a walking in the way through a knowledge of it. In the
spiritual world, moreover, there are actually ways leading to every
society of heaven or of hell. Each sees his own way as if for himself. He
does so because a way is there for every love; the love discloses the way
and takes a man to his fellows. No one sees other ways than the way of
his love. Plain it is from this that angels are nothing but heavenly
loves; otherwise they would not have seen the ways tending to heaven.
This will be plainer still when heaven is described.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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