Download the pdf - Swedenborg Foundation

12 DIVINE LOVE AND WISDOM §2829303132same holds true for everything in the life of that composite person who is(as already noted [§24]) our larger and smaller community, our monarchyor empire, the church, and also the angelic heaven. Take love andwisdom away from these collective bodies and ask whether there is anythingleft, and you will be struck by the fact that without love and wisdomas their source, they are nothing.No one can deny that in God we find love and wisdom together intheir very essence. He loves us all out of the love that is within him, andhe guides us all out of the wisdom that is within him.Further, if you look at the created universe with an eye to its design,it is so full of wisdom from love that you might say everything taken alltogether is wisdom itself. There are things without measure in such a pattern,both sequential and simultaneous, that taken all together they constitutea single entity. This is the only reason they can be held togetherand sustained forever.It is because the very essence of the Divine is love and wisdom thatwe have two abilities of life. From the one we get our discernment, andfrom the other volition. Our discernment is supplied entirely by an inflowof wisdom from God, while our volition is supplied entirely by aninflow of love from God. Our failures to be appropriately wise and appropriatelyloving do not take these abilities away from us. They onlyclose them off; and as long as they do, while we may call our discernment“discernment” and our volition “volition,” essentially they are not. So ifthese abilities really were taken away from us, everything human aboutus would be destroyed—our thinking and the speech that results fromthought, and our purposing and the actions that result from purpose.We can see from this that the divine nature within us dwells in thesetwo abilities, in our ability to be wise and our ability to love. That is, itdwells in the fact that we are capable of being wise and loving. I have discoveredfrom an abundance of experience that we have the ability to loveeven though we are not wise and do not love as we could. You will findthis experience described in abundance elsewhere.It is because the divine essence itself is love and wisdom that everythingin the universe involves what is good and what is true. Everythingthat flows from love is called good, and everything that flows from wisdomis called true. But more on this later [§§83–102].It is because the divine essence itself is love and wisdom that the universeand everything in it, whether living or not, depends on warmth andlight for its survival. Warmth in fact corresponds to love and light