Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence, Emanuel Swedenborg [best ereader for graphic novels .txt] 📗

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.

[2] In the spiritual world I once heard two priests debating with a certain royal ambassador about human prudence whether it is from God or from man, and the debate was heated. The three believed alike at heart, namely, that human prudence does all and divine providence nothing, but the priests in their theological zeal at the moment asserted that there was nothing of wisdom and prudence from man. When the ambassador retorted that there was nothing of thought then, either, they said "yes, nothing of thought." But as angels perceived that the three believed alike, they bade the ambassador, "Put on priestly robes, believe yourself to be a priest, and then speak." He robed himself, believed he was a priest, and thereupon declared in a deep voice that never could there be wisdom or prudence in man save from God. He defended this with the customary eloquence filled with rational arguments. Then the two priests were told, "Put off your robes, put on those of political ministers, and believe that that is what you are." They did so, thought then from their interior selves, and gave voice to the arguments they had entertained inwardly before in favor of human prudence and against divine providence. Upon this the three, believing alike, became warm friends and set out together on the path of one's own prudence, which leads to hell.

198. It was shown above that man can have no thought except from some affection of his life's love and that the thought is nothing other than the form of the affection. Now, man sees his thought but cannot see his affection, which he feels; it is therefore from sight which dwells on the appearance, and not from affection which does not come into sight but into feeling, that he concludes that one's own prudence does all things. For affection shows itself only in a certain enjoyment of thought and in pleasure ever reasoning about it. This pleasure and enjoyment make one with the thought in those who, from self-love or love of the world, believe in one's own prudence. The thought glides along in its enjoyment like a ship in a river current to which the skipper does not attend, attending only to the sails he spreads.

199. Man can indeed reflect on what his external affection finds enjoyable when it is also an enjoyment of a bodily sense, but he still does not reflect that that enjoyment comes from the enjoyment of his affection in thought. For example, when a lecher sees a lewd woman his eyes light with a lascivious fire and from this he feels a physical pleasure; he does not, however, feel his affection's enjoyment or that of the lust in his thought, only a strong desire more nearly physical. The same is true of the robber in a forest at sight of travelers and of the pirate at sea on sighting vessels, and so on. Obviously a man's enjoyments govern his thoughts, and the thoughts are nothing apart from them; but he thinks he has only the thoughts, when nevertheless these are affections put into forms by his life's love so that they appear in the light; for all affection has heat for its element and thought has light.

[2] The external affections of thought manifest themselves in bodily sensation, and sometimes in the thought of the mind, but the internal affections of the thought from which the external exist never make themselves manifest to man. Of these he knows no more than a rider asleep in a carriage does of the road or than one feels the rotation of the earth. Now, when man knows nothing of the things beyond number that take place in the interiors of his mind, and the few external things which come to the sight of his thought are produced from the interiors, and the interiors are governed by the Lord alone through His divine providence and the few external by the Lord also together with man, how can anyone assert that one's own prudence does all things? Were you to see just one idea laid open, you would see astounding things, more than tongue can tell.

[3] It is clear from the endless things in the body that there are so many things in the mind's interiors that the number cannot be given, and nothing of them comes to sight or sense except only a much simplified action. Yet to the action thousands of motor or muscular fibres contribute, and thousands of nerve fibres, thousands of blood-vessels, thousands of cells in the lungs which must cooperate in every action, thousands in the brains and in the spinal cord, and many more things still in the spiritual man which is the human mind, in which all things are forms of affections and of perceptions and thoughts from the affections. Does not the soul, which disposes the interiors, dispose the actions also which spring from them? Man's soul is nothing else than the love of his will and the resulting love of his understanding; such as this love is the whole man is, becoming so according to the disposition he makes of his externals in which he and the Lord are together. Therefore, if he attributes all things to himself and to nature, self-love becomes the soul; but if he attributes all things to the Lord, love to the Lord becomes the soul; this love is heavenly, the other infernal.

200. Inasmuch as the enjoyments of his affections, from inmosts down through interiors to exteriors and finally to outermost things in the body, bear man along as wave and wind bear a ship; and inasmuch as nothing of this is apparent to man except what takes place in the outermost things of the mind and the body, how can he claim for himself what is divine on the strength merely of the fact that those few outermost things seem to be his own? Even less should he claim what is divine for himself, knowing from the Word that a man can receive nothing of himself unless it is given by heaven; and knowing from reason that this appearance has been granted him in order to live as a human being, see what is good and evil, choose between them, and appropriate his choice to himself that he may be united reciprocally with the Lord, be reformed, regenerated and saved, and live forever. It has been stated and shown above that this appearance has been granted to man in order that he may act in freedom according to reason, thus as of himself, and not drop his hands and await influx. From all this it follows that proposition iii to be demonstrated has been confirmed: Through His divine providence the Lord leads the affections of the life's love of man and at the same time the thoughts, too, from which human prudence comes.

201. (iv) By His divine providence the Lord assembles the affections of all mankind into one form—the human form. In a subsequent paragraph it will be seen that this is the universal effort of divine providence. Those who ascribe everything to nature deny God at heart, and those who ascribe everything to human prudence, at heart deny divine providence; the one cannot be separated from the other. Yet both groups for their reputation's sake and for fear of losing it profess in words that divine providence is universal, but say its details fall to man and in their aggregate are grasped by human prudence.

[2] But consider: what is universal providence when the details are taken from it? Is it anything but just an expression? For that is called universal which consists of the total of details as what is general does of particulars. If, then, you remove details, what is the universal except something empty, thus like a surface with nothing underneath or an aggregate without content? If it should be said that divine providence is a universal government but nothing is governed but only held in connection and items of the government