Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence by Emanuel Swedenborg (best book reader txt) 📕

available, for these are like tools to a workman. We say, in the measure you will you can understand, meaning, so far as you love to understand, for will and love act as one. This seems like a paradox, but it appears so to those who do not love or hence will to understand. They say they cannot understand, but in the following section we shall tell who cannot understand, and who can hardly understand.

[4] It is plain without confirmation that unless man had will from the faculty called liberty, and understanding from the faculty called rationality, he would not be human. Beasts do not have these faculties. Beasts seem to be able to will and to understand, but cannot do so. They are led and moved to do what they do solely by a natural affection, in itself desire, which has knowledge for its mate. Something civil and moral there is in their knowledge, but it does not transcend the knowledge, for they have nothing spiritual enabling them to perceive or to think analytically of what is moral. They can indeed be taught to do something, but this is natural only, is assimilated to their knowledge and at the same time to their affection, and reproduced through sight or hearing, but never becomes with them anything of thought, still less of reason. On this see some things above, n. 74.

[5] Without those two faculties man could not be con-joined to the Lord or reformed and regenerated. This has been shown above. The Lord resides with men, whether evil or good, in these two faculties and conjoins Himself by them to every man. Hence an evil man as well as a good man can understand and has the will of good and the understanding of truth potentially—that he does not possess them actually is owing to abuse of those faculties. The Lord resides in those faculties in everyone by the influx of His will, namely, to be received by man and to have an abode with him, and to give him the felicities of eternal life; all this is of the Lord's will, being of His divine love. It is this will of the Lord which causes what a man thinks, speaks, wills and does, to seem to be his own.

[6] That the influx of the Lord's will effects this can be confirmed by much in the spiritual world. Sometimes the Lord fills an angel with His divine so that the angel does not know but that he is the Lord. Thus inspired were the angels who appeared to Abraham, Hagar, and Gideon, and who therefore spoke of themselves as Jehovah; of whom the Word tells. So also one spirit may be filled by another so that he does not know but that he is the other; I have seen this often. In heaven it is general knowledge that the Lord operates all things by willing, and that what He wills takes place.

From all this it is plain that it is by those two faculties that the Lord conjoins Himself to man and causes the man to be reciprocally conjoined. We told above and shall say more below about how man is reciprocally conjoined by the two faculties and how, consequently, he is reformed and regenerated by means of them.

[7] Without those two faculties man would not have immortality or eternal life. This follows from what has been said: that by the two faculties there is conjunction with the Lord and also reformation and regeneration. By conjunction man has immortality, and through reformation and regeneration he has eternal life. As every man, evil as well as good, is conjoined to the Lord by the two faculties every man has immortality. Eternal life, or the life of heaven, however, only that man has with whom there is reciprocal conjunction from inmosts to outmosts.

The reasons may now be clear why the Lord, in all the procedure of His divine providence, safeguards the two faculties in man unimpaired and as sacred.

97. ( viii) It is therefore [a law] of divine providence that man shall act in freedom from reason. To act in freedom according to reason, to act from liberty and rationality, and to act from will and understanding, are the same. But it is one thing to act in freedom according to reason, or from liberty and rationality, and another thing to act from freedom itself according to reason itself or from liberty and rationality themselves. The man who does evil from love of evil and confirms it in himself acts indeed from freedom according to reason, but his freedom is not in itself freedom or very freedom, but an infernal freedom which in itself is bondage, and his reason is not in itself reason, but is either spurious or false or plausible through confirmations. Still, either is of divine providence. For if freedom to will evil and do it as of the reason through confirmation of it were taken from the natural man, liberty and rationality and at the same time will and understanding would perish, and he could not be withdrawn any longer from evils, be reformed or united with the Lord, and live to eternity. The Lord therefore guards man's freedom as a man does the apple of his eye. Through that freedom the Lord steadily withdraws man from evils and so far as He can do this implants goods, thus gradually putting heavenly freedom in place of infernal freedom.

98. We said above that every man has the faculty of volition called liberty and the faculty of understanding called rationality. Those faculties, moreover, it should be known, are as it were inherent in man, for humanness itself is in them. But as was just said, it is one thing to act from freedom in accord with reason, and another thing to act from freedom itself and according to reason itself. Only those do the latter who have suffered themselves to be regenerated by the Lord; others act in freedom according to thought which they make seem like reason. Unless he was born foolish or supremely stupid, every person can attain to reason itself and by it to liberty itself. Many reasons why all do not do so will be disclosed in what follows. Here we shall only tell to whom freedom itself or liberty itself, and at the same time reason itself or rationality itself cannot be given and to whom they can hardly be given.

[2] True liberty and rationality cannot be given to those foolish from birth or to those who become foolish later, while they remain so. Nor can they be given to those born stupid and dull or to any made so by the torpor of idleness, or by a disease which perverts or entirely closes the interiors of the mind, or by love of a bestial life.

[3] Genuine liberty and rationality cannot be given to those in Christendom who utterly deny the Divine of the Lord and the holiness of the Word, and have kept that denial confirmed to life's close. For this is meant by the sin against the Holy Spirit which is not forgiven in this world or in the world to come (Mt 12:31, 32).

[4] Liberty itself and rationality itself cannot be given to those who ascribe all things to nature and nothing to the Divine, and have made this a conviction by reasonings from visible things; for these are atheists.

[5] True liberty and rationality can hardly be given to those who have confirmed themselves much in falsities of religion; for a confirmer of falsity is a denier of truth. But they can be given to those, in whatever religion, who have not so confirmed themselves. On this see what is adduced in Doctrine for the New Jerusalem about Sacred Scripture, nn. 91-97.

[6] Infants and children cannot attain to essential liberty and rationality before they grow up. For the interiors of the mind of man are opened gradually, and meanwhile are like seeds in unripe fruit, without ground in which to sprout.

99. We have said that true liberty and rationality cannot be given to those who have denied the Divine of the Lord and the holiness of the Word; to those who have confirmed themselves in favor of nature and against the Divine; and hardly to those who have strongly confirmed themselves in falsities of religion; still none of these have destroyed the faculties themselves. I have heard atheists, who had become devils and satans, understand arcana of wisdom quite as well as angels, but only while they heard them from others; on returning into their own thought, they did not understand them, for the reason that they did not will to do so. They were shown that they could also will this, did not the love and enjoyment of evil turn them away. This they understood, too, when they heard it. Indeed they asserted that they could but did not will to be able to do so, for then they could not will what they did will, namely, evil from enjoyment in the lust of it. I have often heard such astonishing things in the spiritual world. I am fully persuaded therefore that every man has liberty and rationality, and that every man can attain true liberty and rationality if he shuns evils as sins. But the adult who has not come into true liberty and rationality in the world can never do so after death, for the state of his life remains to eternity what it was in the world.

VI. IT IS A LAW OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE THAT MAN SHALL REMOVE EVILS AS SINS IN THE EXTERNAL MAN OF HIMSELF, AND ONLY SO CAN THE LORD REMOVE THE EVILS IN THE INTERNAL MAN AND AT THE SAME TIME IN THE EXTERNAL

100. Anyone can see from reason alone that the Lord who is good itself and truth itself cannot enter man unless the evils and falsities in him are removed. For evil is opposed to good, and falsity to truth, and two opposites cannot mingle, but as one approaches the other, combat arises which lasts until one gives way to the other; what gives way departs and the other takes its place. Heaven and hell, or the Lord and the devil, are in such opposition. Can anyone reasonably think that the Lord can enter where the devil reigns, or heaven be where hell is? By the rationality with which every sane person is endowed, who cannot see that for the Lord to enter, the devil must be cast out, or for heaven to enter, hell must be removed?

[2] This opposition is meant by Abraham's words from heaven to the rich man in hell:

Between us and you a great gulf is fixed, so that those who would cross from us to you cannot, nor those over there cross to us (Lu 16:26).

Evil is itself hell, and good is itself heaven, or what is the same, evil is itself the devil, and good itself the Lord. A person in whom evil reigns is a hell in least form, and one in whom good reigns is a heaven in least form. How, then, can heaven enter hell when a gulf is fixed between them so great that there is no crossing from one to the other? It follows that hell must by all means be removed for the Lord to enter with heaven.

101. But many, especially those who have confirmed themselves in faith severed from charity, do not know that they are in hell when they are in evils. In fact, they do not know what evils are, giving them no thought. They say that they are not under the yoke of the law and so the law does not condemn them; likewise, that as they cannot contribute to their salvation, they cannot remove any evil of themselves and furthermore cannot do any good of themselves. It is these who neglect to give some thought to evil and therefore keep on in evil. They are meant by the Lord under "goats" in Matthew 25:32, 33; 41-46, as may be seen in Doctrine of the New Jerusalem on Faith, nn. 61-68; to them it is said in verse 41, "Depart from Me, you accursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

[2] Persons who give no thought to the evils in them, and who do not examine themselves and then desist from the evils, cannot but be ignorant what evil is, and cannot but love it then from delighting in it. For one who is ignorant of it loves it, and one who fails to give it thought, goes on in it, blind to it. Thought sees good and evil as the eye sees beauty and ugliness. One who thinks and wills evil is in evil, and