Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence

by Emanuel Swedenborg

193. ( i ) All man's thoughts are from affections of his life's love; there are and can be no thoughts apart from them. It has been shown above in this treatise and also in the one entitled Angelic Wisdom about Divine Love and Wisdom, Parts I and V particularly, what the life's love and the affections and the thoughts from them are essentially, and what the sensations and actions arising from them in the body are. Inasmuch as these are the causes from which human prudence issues as an effect, something needs to be said about them here also. For what has been written earlier elsewhere cannot be as closely connected with what is written later as it will be if the same things are recalled and placed with both in view.

[2] Earlier in this treatise, and in that just mentioned about Divine Love and Wisdom, it was shown that in the Lord are divine love and wisdom; that these two are life itself; that from the two man has will and understanding, will from the divine love and understanding from the divine wisdom; that heart and lungs in the body correspond to these two; that this may make plain that as the pulsation of the heart along with the respiration of the lungs rules the whole man as to the body, so the will together with the understanding rules him as to his mind; that thus there are two principles of life in everyone, one natural and the other spiritual, and that the natural principle of life is the heartbeat, and the spiritual is the will of the mind; that each adjoins a consort to itself with which it cohabits and performs the functions of life; and that the heart joins the lungs to itself, and the will the understanding to itself.

[3] Now, as the soul of the will is love, and the soul of the understanding is wisdom, both of them from the Lord, love is the life of everyone and is such life as it has in union with wisdom; or what is the same, the will is the life of everyone and is such life as it has in conjunction with the understanding. More on the subject may be seen above in this treatise and especially in Angelic Wisdom about Divine Love and Wisdom, Parts I and V.

194. It was also demonstrated in the treatises mentioned that the life's love produces subordinate loves from itself, called affections; that these are exterior and interior; and that taken together they make one dominion or kingdom as it were, in which the life's love is lord or king. It was also shown that these subordinate loves or affections adjoin consorts to themselves, each its own, the interior affections consorts called perceptions, and the exterior consorts called knowledges, and each cohabits with its consort and performs the functions of its life. In each instance, it was shown, the union is like that of life's very being with life's coming forth, which is such that the one is nothing without the other; for what is life's being unless it is active and what is life's activity if it is not from life's very being? The conjunction in life, it was likewise shown, is like that of sound and harmony, of sound and utterance, too, in general like that of the heart's pulsation and the respiration of the lungs, a union, again, such that one without the other is nothing and each becomes something in union with the other. Union must either be in them or come about by them.

[2] Consider, for example, sound. One who thinks that sound is something if there is nothing distinctive in it is much mistaken. It also corresponds to affection in man, and as something distinctive is always in it the affection of a person's love is known from the sound of his voice in speaking, and his thought is known from the varied sounds which speech is. Hence the wiser angels perceive just from the sound of his voice a man's life's love together with some of the affections which are its derivatives. This has been remarked that it may be known that no affection is possible without its thought, and no thought without its affection. More on the subject can be seen above in this treatise and in Angelic Wisdom about Divine Love and Wisdom.

195. Inasmuch as the life's love has its enjoyment, and its wisdom its pleasure, and likewise every affection, which is essentially a lesser love derived from the life's love like a stream from its source or a branch from a tree or an artery from the heart, therefore every affection has its enjoyment and the perception or thought from it its pleasure. Consequently these enjoyments and pleasures make man's life. What is life without joy and pleasure? It is not animated at all, but inanimate. Reduce enjoyment and pleasure and you grow cold and torpid; take them away and you expire and die. Vital heat comes from the enjoyments of the affections and the pleasures of the perceptions and thoughts.

[2] As every affection has its enjoyment and the thought thence its pleasure, it may be plain whence good and truth are and what they are essentially. Whatever is the enjoyment of one's affection is one's good, and one's truth is what is pleasant to the thought from that affection. For everyone calls that good which he feels in the love of his will to be enjoyable, and calls that truth which he then perceives in the wisdom of his understanding to be pleasant. The enjoyable and the pleasant both flow out from the life's love as water does from a spring or blood from the heart; together they are like an element or the atmosphere in which man's whole mind is.

[3] The two, enjoyment and pleasure, are spiritual in the mind and natural in the body, and in each make man's life. From this it is plain what it is in man that is called good, and what it is that is called truth; likewise what it is in man that is called evil and false; whatever destroys the enjoyment of his affection is evil to him, and what destroys the pleasure of his thought thence is false to him. It is plain, moreover, that evil on account of the enjoyment in it and falsity on account of the pleasure in it may be called good and truth and believed to be good and truth. Goods and truths are indeed changes and variations of state in the forms of the mind, but they are perceived and have life only through the enjoyments and pleasures they have to give. This is noted to make known what affection and thought are in their life.

196. Inasmuch as it is not the body but man's mind that thinks and that does so from the enjoyment of one's affection, and inasmuch as man's mind is his spirit which lives after death, man's spirit is nothing else than affection and thought therefrom. It is altogether plain from spirits and angels in the spiritual world that thought cannot exist apart from affection, for they all think from the affections of their life's love; the enjoyments of these affections attend each as his atmosphere, and all are united by these spheres exhaled from the affections by their thoughts. The character of each one is known also by the sphere of his life. It may be seen from this that all thought is from an affection and is the form of that affection. The same applies to the relationship between will and understanding, good and truth, and charity and faith.

197. (ii) The affections of the life's love of man are known to the Lord alone. Man knows his thoughts and his intentions in them because he sees them in himself, and as all prudence is from them, he sees this, too, within him. Then if his life's love is self-love, he comes to take pride in his own intelligence, ascribes prudence to himself, gathers arguments in support of it, and thus recedes from acknowledging divine providence. Much the same happens if love of the world is his life's love, but he does not then recede to the same extent. It is plain from this that these two loves ascribe all things to man and to his prudence and when interiorly examined ascribe nothing to God and to His providence. When persons who do this happen to hear that the reality is that there is no such thing as human prudence, but that divine providence alone governs all things, they laugh at this if they are outright atheists; if they hold something of religion in remembrance and are told that all wisdom is from God, they assent on first hearing it, but inwardly in their spirit deny it. Such especially are priests who love themselves more than God, and the world more than heaven, or what is the same, worship God for position's or riches' sake, and yet have been preaching that charity and faith, all good and truth, all wisdom, too, and in fact prudence are from God and none of them from man.