Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom

Angelic Wisdom Concerning the
Divine Love and the Divine
Wisdom

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Divine Love
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Title: Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine
Wisdom
Author: Emanuel Swedenborg
Translator: John Ager
Release Date: August 31, 2005 [EBook #16627]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANGELIC
WISDOM ***

Produced by E-text donated by the Kempton Project, submitted by
William Rotella

ANGELIC WISDOM CONCERNING THE DIVINE LOVE AND
THE DIVINE WISDOM
BY
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG
Standard Edition
Swedenborg Foundation Incorporated New York -------- Established
1850
First Published in Latin, Amsterdam, 1763 First English translation
published in U.S.A., 1794 55th Printing, 1988 ISBN 0-87785-056-9
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 76-46144 Manufactured in
the United States of America
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
The previous translation of this work has been carefully revised. In this
revision the translator has had the valuable assistance of suggestions by
the Rev. L.H. Tafel and others. The new renderings of existere and
fugere are suggestions adopted by the Editorial Committee and
accepted by the translator, but for which he does not wish to be held
solely responsible.
1. PART FIRST.
LOVE IS THE LIFE OF MAN.
Man knows that there is such a thing as love, but he does not know
what love is. He knows that there is such a thing as love from common
speech, as when it is said, he loves me, a king loves his subjects, and

subjects love their king, a husband loves his wife, a mother her children,
and conversely; also, this or that one loves his country, his fellow
citizens, his neighbor; and likewise of things abstracted from person, as
when it is said, one loves this or that thing. But although the word love
is so universally used, hardly anybody knows what love is. And
because one is unable, when he reflects upon it, to form to himself any
idea of thought about it, he says either that it is not anything, or that it
is merely something flowing in from sight, hearing, touch, or
interaction with others, and thus affecting him. He is wholly unaware
that love is his very life; not only the general life of his whole body,
and the general life of all his thoughts, but also the life of all their
particulars. This a man of discernment can perceive when it is said: If
you remove the affection which is from love, can you think anything,
or do anything? Do not thought, speech, and action, grow cold in the
measure in which the affection which is from love grows cold? And do
they not grow warm in the measure in which this affection grows warm?
But this a man of discernment perceives simply by observing that such
is the case, and not from any knowledge that love is the life of man.
2. What the life of man is, no one knows unless he knows that it is love.
If this is not known, one person may believe that man's life is nothing
but perceiving with the senses and acting, and another that it is merely
thinking; and yet thought is the first effect of life, and sensation and
action are the second effect of life. Thought is here said to be the first
effect of life, yet there is thought which is interior and more interior,
also exterior and more exterior. What is actually the first effect of life is
inmost thought, which is the perception of ends. But of all this hereafter,
when the degrees of life are considered.
3. Some idea of love, as being the life of man, may be had from the
sun's heat in the world. This heat is well known to be the common life,
as it were, of all the vegetations of the earth. For by virtue of heat,
coming forth in springtime, plants of every kind rise from the ground,
deck themselves with leaves, then with blossoms, and finally with fruits,
and thus, in a sense, live. But when, in the time of autumn and winter,
heat withdraws, the plants are stripped of these signs of their life, and
they wither. So it is with love in man; for heat and love mutually

correspond. Therefore love also is warm.
4. GOD ALONE, CONSEQUENTLY THE LORD, IS LOVE ITSELF,
BECAUSE HE IS LIFE ITSELF AND ANGELS AND MEN ARE
RECIPIENTS OF LIFE.
This will be fully shown in treatises on Divine Providence and on Life;
it