Heaven and Hell - Swedenborg Foundation

HEAVEN AND HELL 58
heaven, and have no conception of anything apart from form.
This is why angels in churches, whether sculptured or painted,
are always depicted as men. In respect to this insight from
heaven they said that it is the Divine flowing into such as are in
the good of faith and life.
75. From all my experience, which is now of many years, I
am able to say and affirm that angels are wholly men in form,
having faces, eyes, ears, bodies, arms, hands, and feet; that they
see and hear one another, and talk together, and in a word lack
nothing whatever that belongs to men except that they are not
clothed in material bodies. I have seen them in their own light,
which exceeds by many degrees the noonday light of the world,
and in that light all their features could be seen more distinctly
and clearly than the faces of men are seen on the earth. It has
also been granted me to see an angel of the inmost heaven. He
had a more radiant and resplendent face than the angels of the
lower heavens. I observed him attentively, and he had a human
form in all completeness.
76. But it must be remembered that a man cannot see angels
with his bodily eyes, but only with the eyes of the spirit within
him, 70
because his spirit is in the spiritual world, and all things
of the body are in the natural world. Like sees like from being
like. Moreover, as the bodily organ of sight, which is the eye, is
too gross, as everyone knows, to see even the smaller things of
nature except through magnifying glasses, still less can it see
what is above the sphere of nature, as all things in the spiritual
world are. Nevertheless these things can be seen by man when
he has been withdrawn from the sight of the body, and the
sight of his spirit has been opened; and this can be effected
instantly whenever it is the pleasure of the Lord that man
should see these things; and in that case man does not know
70. In respect to his interiors man is a spirit (n. 1594).
And that spirit is the man himself, and it is from that spirit that the
body lives (n. 447, 4622, 6054).