Man knows that there is such a thing as love, but he does not know what
love is. He knows that there is such a thing as love from common speech,
as when it is said, he loves me, a king loves his subjects, and subjects
love their king, a husband loves his wife, a mother her children, and
conversely; also, this or that one loves his country, his fellow citizens,
his neighbor; and likewise of things abstracted from person, as when it
is said, one loves this or that thing. But although the word love is so
universally used, hardly anybody knows what love is. And because one is
unable, when he reflects upon it, to form to himself any idea of thought
about it, he says either that it is not anything, or that it is merely
something flowing in from sight, hearing, touch, or interaction with
others, and thus affecting him. He is wholly unaware that love is his
very life; not only the general life of his whole body, and the general
life of all his thoughts, but also the life of all their particulars.
This a man of discernment can perceive when it is said: If you remove
the affection which is from love, can you think anything, or do anything?
Do not thought, speech, and action, grow cold in the measure in which the
affection which is from love grows cold? And do they not grow warm in the
measure in which this affection grows warm? But this a man of discernment
perceives simply by observing that such is the case, and not from any
knowledge that love is the life of man.
2. What the life of man is, no one knows unless he knows that it is love.
If this is not known, one person may believe that man's life is nothing
but perceiving with the senses and acting, and another that it is merely
thinking; and yet thought is the first effect of life, and sensation and
action are the second effect of life. Thought is here said to be the first
effect of life, yet there is thought which is interior and more interior,
also exterior and more exterior. What is actually the first effect of life
is inmost thought, which is the perception of ends. But of all this
hereafter, when the degrees of life are considered.
3. Some idea of love, as being the life of man, may be had from the sun's
heat in the world. This heat is well known to be the common life, as it
were, of all the vegetations of the earth. For by virtue of heat, coming
forth in springtime, plants of every kind rise from the ground, deck
themselves with leaves, then with blossoms, and finally with fruits, and
thus, in a sense, live. But when, in the time of autumn and winter, heat
withdraws, the plants are stripped of these signs of their life, and they
wither. So it is with love in man; for heat and love mutually correspond.
Therefore love also is warm.
4. GOD ALONE, CONSEQUENTLY THE LORD, IS LOVE ITSELF, BECAUSE HE IS LIFE
ITSELF AND ANGELS AND MEN ARE RECIPIENTS OF LIFE.
This will be fully shown in treatises on Divine Providence and on Life;
it is sufficient here to say that the Lord, who is the God of the universe,
is uncreate and infinite, whereas man and angel are created and finite.
And because the Lord is uncreate and infinite, He is Being [Esse] itself,
which is called "Jehovah," and Life itself, or Life in itself. From the
uncreate, the infinite, Being itself and Life itself, no one can be
created immediately, because the Divine is one and indivisible; but their
creation must be out of things created and finited, and so formed that
the Divine can be in them. Because men and angels are such, they are
recipients of life. Consequently, if any man suffers himself to be so
far misled as to think that he is not a recipient of life but is Life,
he cannot be withheld from the thought that he is God. A man's feeling
as if he were life, and therefore believing himself to be so, arises from
fallacy; for the principal cause is not perceived in the instrumental
cause otherwise than as one with it. That the Lord is Life in Himself,
He Himself teaches in John:
As the Father hath life in Himself, so also hath He given to the Son
to have life in Himself (5:26)
He declares also that He is Life itself (John 11:25; 14:6).
Now since life and love are one (as is apparent from what has been said
above, n. 1, 2), it follows that the Lord, because He is Life itself, is
Love itself.
5. But that this may reach the understanding, it must needs be known
positively that the Lord, because He is Love in its very essence, that
is, Divine Love, appears before the angels in heaven as a sun, and that
from that sun heat and light go forth; the heat which goes forth therefrom
being in its essence love, and the light which goes forth therefrom being
in its essence wisdom; and that so far as the angels are recipients of
that spiritual heat and of that spiritual light, they are loves and
wisdoms; not loves and wisdoms from themselves, but from the Lord. That
spiritual heat and that spiritual light not only flow into angels and
affect them, but they also flow into men and affect them just to the
extent that they become recipients; and they become recipients in the
measure of their love to the Lord and love towards the neighbor. That
sun itself, that is, the Divine Love, by its heat and its light, cannot
create any one immediately from itself; for one so created would be Love
in its essence, which Love is the Lord Himself; but it can create from
substances and matters so formed as to be capable of receiving the very
heat and the very light; comparatively as the sun of the world cannot by
its heat and light produce germinations on the earth immediately, but
only out of earthy matters in which it can be present by its heat and
light, and cause vegetation. In the spiritual world the Divine Love of
the Lord appears as a sun, and from it proceed the spiritual heat and
the spiritual light from which the angels derive love and wisdom, as may
be seen in the work on Heaven and Hell (n. 116-140).
6. Since, then, man is not life, but is a recipient of life, it follows
that the conception of a man from his father is not a conception of life,
but only a conception of the first and purest form capable of receiving
life; and to this, as to a nucleus or starting-point in the womb, are
successively added substances and matters in forms adapted to the
reception of life, in their order and degree.