Afterlife: A Guided Tour of Heaven and Its Wonders - Swedenborg ...

AFTERLIFE
In a word, heaven portrays itself in marriage love
because heaven for angels is the union of the good and the
true, and it is this union that constitutes marriage love.
Marriages in the heavens differ from marriages on earth
in that earthly marriages are also for the purpose of having
children, while this is not the case in the heavens. In place
of the procreation of children there is the procreation of
what is good and true. The reason for this replacement is
that their marriage is a marriage of the good and the true,
as presented above, and in this marriage what is good and
true is loved above all, as is their union; so these are what
are propagated by the marriages in the heavens. This is
why in the Word births and generations mean spiritual
births and generations, births of what is good and true.
The mother and father mean the true united to the good
that is prolific, the sons and daughters the good and true
things that are born, and the sons-in-law and daughtersin-law
mean the unions of these [descendants], and so on.
We can see from this that marriages in the heavens are
not the same as marriages on earth. In the heavens there
are spiritual weddings that should not be called weddings
but unions of minds, because of the union of the good and
the true. On earth, though, there are weddings, because
they concern not only the spirit but the flesh as well. Fur -
ther, since there are no weddings in the heavens, two
spouses there are not called husband and wife, but because
of the angelic concept of the union of two minds into one,
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