Divine Love and Wisdom (Ager) n. 409

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409. (11) Love or the will does nothing except in conjunction with wisdom or the understanding. For as love has no sensitive nor any active life apart from the understanding; and as love introduces the understanding into all things of the mind (as was shown above, n. 407, 408), it follows that love or the will does nothing except in conjunction with the understanding. For what is it to act from love without the understanding? Such action can only be called irrational; for the understanding teaches what ought to be done and how it ought to be done. Apart from the understanding love does not know this; consequently such is the marriage between love and the understanding, that although they are two, they act as one. There is a like marriage between good and truth, for good is of love and truth is of the understanding. In every particular thing of the universe as created by the Lord there is such a marriage, their use having relation to good, and the form of their use to truth. From this marriage it is that in each and every thing of the body there is a right and a left, the right having relation to the good from which truth proceeds, and the left to truth from good, thus to their conjunction. From this it is that there are pairs in man; there are two brains, two hemispheres of the brain, two ventricles of the heart, two lobes of the lungs, two eyes, ears, nostrils, arms, hands, loins, feet, kidneys, testicles, etc.; and where there are not pairs, there is a right and a left side, all this for the reason that good looks to truth that it may take form, and truth looks to good that it may have being. It is the same in the angelic heavens and in their several societies. On this subject more may be seen above (n. 401), where it is shown that love or the will is unable to effect anything by its human form without a marriage with wisdom or the understanding. Conjunction of evil and falsity, which is opposite to the conjunction of good and truth, will be spoken of elsewhere.


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