Spiritual Life and the Word of GodSwedenborg, Emanuel
Religion
Spiritual Life and the Word of God
Swedenborg, Emanuel
Spiritual life; Ten commandments; Word of God (Christian theology)
All things in the body, which are called members, viscera, and organs,
are nothing but natural corporeal forms corresponding to the spiritual
form of the mind; from this each and all things of the body so
correspond to each and all things of the mind that whatever the mind
wills and thinks the body at its command instantly brings forth into
act. When, therefore, two minds act as one their two bodies are
potentially so united that they are no more two but one flesh. To will
to become one flesh is marriage love; and such as the willing is, such
is that love.
It is allowed to confirm this by a wonderful thing in the heavens.
There are married pairs there in such marriage love that the two can be
one flesh, and are one whenever they wish, and they then appear as one
man. I have seen and talked with such; and they said that they have one
life, and are like the life of good in truth and the life of truth in
good, and are like the pairs in man, that is, like the two hemispheres
of the brain enclosed in one membrane, the two ventricles of the heart
within a common covering, likewise the two lobes of the lungs; these,
although they are two, yet are one in regard to life and the activities
of life, which are uses. They said that their life so conjoined is full
of heaven, and is the very life of heaven with its infinite beatitudes,
for the reason that heaven that heaven also is such from the marriage of
the Lord with it, for all the angels of heaven are in the Lord and the
Lord in them.
Furthermore, they said that it is impossible for them to think from any
intention about an additional wife or woman, because this would be
turning heaven into hell, consequently if an angel merely thinks of such
a thing he falls from heaven. They added that natural spirits do not
believe such conjunctions as theirs to be possible, for the reason that
with those who are merely natural there is no marriage from a spiritual
origin, which is of good and truth, but only a marriage from a natural
origin; therefore there is no union of minds, but only a union of bodies
from a lascivious disposition in the flesh; and this lust is from a
universal law impressed upon and thus implanted in everything animate
and inanimate from creation. The law is that everything in which there
is force wills to produce its like and to multiply its kind to infinity
and to eternity. As the posterity of Jacob, who were called the sons of
Israel, were merely natural men, and thus their marriages were not
spiritual but carnal, so they were permitted on account of the hardness
of their hearts to take more wives than one. (A.E., n. 1004.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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