The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love: To Which is Added The Pleasures of Insanity Pertaining To Scortatory LoveSwedenborg, Emanuel
Religion
The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love: To Which is Added The Pleasures of Insanity Pertaining To Scortatory Love
Swedenborg, Emanuel
Marriage -- Religious aspects -- New Jerusalem Church; New Jerusalem Church -- Doctrines; Sexual ethics
273. II. IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD ALL ARE CONJOINED ACCORDING TO INTERNAL,
BUT NOT ACCORDING TO EXTERNAL AFFECTIONS, UNLESS THESE ACT IN UNITY WITH
THE INTERNAL. This is, because in the spiritual world the material body
is rejected, which could receive and bring forth the forms of all
affections, as we have said just above; and a man (_homo_) when stripped
of that body is in his internal affections, which his body had before
concealed: hence it is, that in the spiritual world similarities and
dissimilarities, or sympathies and antipathies, are not only felt, but
also appear in the face, the speech, and the gesture; wherefore in that
world similitudes are conjoined, and dissimilitudes separated. This is
the reason why the universal heaven is arranged by the Lord according to
all the varieties of the affections of the love of good and truth, and,
on the contrary, hell according to all the varieties of the love of what
is evil and false. As angels and spirits, like men in the world, have
internal and external affections, and as, in the spiritual world, the
internal affections cannot be concealed by the external, they therefore
transpire and manifest themselves: hence with angels and spirits both
the internal and external affections are reduced to similitude and
correspondence; after which their internal affections are, by the
external, imaged in their faces, and perceived in the tone of their
speech; they also appear in their behaviour and manners. Angels and
spirits have internal and external affections, because they have minds
and bodies; and affections with the thoughts thence derived belong to
the mind, and sensations with the pleasures thence derived to the body.
It frequently happens in the world of spirits, that friends meet after
death, and recollect their friendships in the former world, and on such
occasions believe that they shall live on terms of friendship as
formerly; but when their consociation, which is only of the external
affections, is perceived in heaven, a separation ensues according to
their internal; and in this case some are removed from the place of
their meeting into the north, some into the west, and each to such a
distance from the other, that they can no longer see or know each other;
for in the places appointed for them to remain at, their faces are
changed so as to become the image of their internal affections. From
these considerations it is manifest, that in the spiritual world all are
conjoined according to internal affections, and not according to
external, unless these act in unity with the internal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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