Divine Love and Wisdom (Ager) n. 410

Previous Number Next Number Next Translation See Latin 

410. (12) Love or the will conjoins itself to wisdom or the understanding, and causes wisdom or the understanding to be reciprocally conjoined to it. That love or the will conjoins itself to wisdom or the understanding is plain from their correspondence with the heart and lungs. Anatomical observation shows that the heart is in its life's motion when the lungs are not yet in motion; this it shows by cases of swooning and of suffocation, also by the fetus in the womb and the chick in the egg. Anatomical observation shows also that the heart, while acting alone, forms the lungs and so adjusts them that it may carry on respiration in them; also that it so forms the other viscera and organs that it may carry on various uses in them, the organs of the face that it may have sensation, the organs of motion that it may act, and the remaining parts of the body that it may exhibit uses corresponding to the affections of love. From all this it can now for the first time be shown that as the heart produces such things for the sake of the various functions which it is afterwards to discharge in the body, so love, in its receptacle called the will, produces like things for the sake of the various affections that constitute its form, which is the human form (as was shown above). Now as the first and nearest of love's affections are affection for knowing, affection for understanding, and affection for seeing what it knows and understands, it follows, that for these affections love forms the understanding and actually enters into them when it begins to feel and to act and to think. To this the understanding contributes nothing, as is evident from the analogy of the heart and lungs (of which above). From all this it can be seen, that love or the will conjoins itself to wisdom or the understanding, and not wisdom or the understanding to love or the will; also from this it is evident that knowledge, which love acquires to itself by the affection for knowing, and perception of truth, which it acquires by the affection for understanding, and thought which it acquires by the affection for seeing what it knows and understands, are not of the understanding but of love. Thoughts, perceptions, and knowledges therefrom, flow in, it is true, out of the spiritual world, yet they are received not by the understanding but by love, according to its affections in the understanding. It appears as if the understanding received them, and not love or the will, but this is an illusion. It appears also as if the understanding conjoined itself to love or the will, but this too, is an illusion; love or the will conjoins itself to the understanding, and causes the understanding to be reciprocally conjoined to it. This reciprocal conjunction is from love's marriage with wisdom, wherefrom a conjunction seemingly reciprocal, from the life and consequent power of love, is effected. It is the same with the marriage of good and truth; for good is of love and truth is of the understanding. Good does everything and it receives truth into its house and conjoins itself with it so far as the truth is accordant. Good can also admit truths which are not accordant; but this it does from an affection for knowing, for understanding, and for thinking its own things, whilst it has not as yet determined itself to uses, which are its ends and are called its goods. Of reciprocal conjunction, that is, the conjunction of truth with good, there is none whatever. That truth is reciprocally conjoined is from the life belonging to good. From this it is that every man and every spirit and angel is regarded by the Lord according to his love or good, and no one according to his intellect, or his truth separate from love or good. For man's life is his love (as was shown above), and his life is qualified according as he has exalted his affections by means of truth, that is, according as he has perfected his affections by wisdom. For the affections of love are exalted and perfected by means of truths, thus by means of wisdom. Then love acts conjointly with its wisdom, as though from it; but it acts from itself through wisdom, as through its own form, and this derives nothing whatever from the understanding, but everything from a kind of determination of love called affection.


This page is part of the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg

© 2000-2001 The Academy of the New Church