Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 330 pages of information about Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom.

Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 330 pages of information about Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom.
he calls rational, abides, not knowing that so far as he denies these things, he is irrational.  That this is so, may be confirmed by the idea entertained of this truth, that god is a man.  Read with attention, I pray you, what has been said above (n. 11-13) and what follows after, and your understanding will accept it.  But when you let your thought down into the natural lumen which derives from space, will not these things be seen as paradoxes? and if you let it down far, will you not reject them?  This is why it is said that the Divine fills all spaces of the universe, and why it is not said that God-Man fills them.  For if this were said, the merely natural lumen would not assent.  But to the proposition that the Divine fills all space, it does assent, because this agrees with the mode of speech of the theologians, that God is omnipresent, and hears and knows all things.  (On this subject, more may be seen above, n. 7-10.).

73.  The Divine is in all time, apart from time.

As the Divine, apart from space, is in all space, so also, apart from time, is it in all time.  For nothing which is proper to nature can be predicated of the Divine, and space and time are proper to nature.  Space in nature is measurable, and so is time.  This is measured by days, weeks, months, years, and centuries; days are measured by hours; weeks and months by days; years by the four seasons; and centuries by years.  Nature derives this measurement from the apparent revolution and annual motion of the sun of the world.  But in the spiritual world it is different.  The progressions of life in that world appear in like manner to be in time, for those there live with one another as men in the world live with one another; and this is not possible without the appearance of time.  But time there is not divided into periods as in the world, for their sun is constantly in the east and is never moved away; for it is the Lord’s Divine Love that appears to them as a sun.  Wherefore they have no days, weeks, months, years, centuries, but in place of these there are states of life, by which a distinction is made which cannot be called, however, a distinction into periods, but into states.  Consequently, the angels do not know what time is, and when it is mentioned they perceive in place of it state; and when state determines time, time is only an appearance.  For joyfulness of state makes time seem short, and joylessness of state makes time seem long; from which it is evident that time in the spiritual world is nothing but quality of state.  It is from this that in the Word, “hours,” “days,” “weeks,” “months,” and “years,” signify states and progressions of state in series and in the aggregate; and when times are predicated of the church, by its “morning” is meant its first state, by “mid-day” its fullness by “evening” its decline, and by “night” its end.  The four seasons of the year “spring,” “summer,” “autumn,” and “winter,” have a like meaning.

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Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.