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30 DIVINE LOVE AND WISDOM §75767778explained above in §§17–22. It then follows from this that Divinity ispresent in all time, nontemporally.If people do not know about God beyond time, if they cannot thinkabout such a God with some insight, then they are totally incapable ofseeing eternity as anything but an eternity of time. They cannot help gettingcaught in crazy thoughts about God from eternity, thinking aboutsome beginning; and a beginning has to do with nothing but time. Thisleads to the fantasy that God emerged from himself, and promptly degeneratesinto nature originating from itself. The only way out of this notionis through a spiritual or angelic concept of eternity, one that doesnot involve time. Once time is excluded, eternity and Divinity are oneand the same; Divinity is Divinity in and of itself, and not from itself.Angels say that while they can conceive of God from eternity, there is noway they can conceive of nature from eternity, let alone nature from itself;by no means whatever can they conceive of nature that is intrinsicallynature. This is because anything that has intrinsic existence is thereality itself that is the source of everything else. That intrinsic reality isthe “life itself” that is the divine love that belongs to divine wisdom andthe divine wisdom that belongs to divine love.This, for angels, is eternity, which transcends time the way the Uncreatedtranscends the creature or the Infinite one transcends the finite.There is no ratio whatever between them.Divinity is the same in the largest and smallest things. This follows from thetwo preceding sections, from Divinity being nonspatially present in allspace and nontemporally present in all time. There are larger and largerand smaller and smaller spaces; and since as already noted [§74] spaceand time are indistinguishable, the same holds true for segments of time.The reason Divinity is the same in all of them is that Divinity is notchangeable or inconsistent like everything that involves space and time,or nature. It is constant and unchanging, so it is everywhere and alwaysthe same.It does seem as though Divinity were not the same in one person asin another, as though it were different in a wise person than in a simpleone, for example, or different in an elderly one than in a child. This isjust the deceptive way things seem, though. The person may be different,but Divinity within is not. The person is a receiver, and the receiver orvessel will differ. A wise person is a more adequate receiver of divine loveand wisdom than a simple one, and therefore a fuller receiver. An elderly