Divine Love and Wisdom [3]

~Emanuel Swedenborg

Spiritual warmth and spiritual light flow into and affect not only angels but also us, precisely to the extent that we become receptive. Our receptivity develops in proportion to our love for the Lord and our love for our neighbor. 

That sun itself, or divine love, cannot use its warmth and light to create anyone directly from itself. If it did, the creature would be love in its essence, which is the Lord himself. It can, however, create people out of material substances so formed as to be receptive of its actual warmth and light. In the same way, the sun of our world cannot use its warmth and light to bring forth sprouts in the earth directly. 

Rather, the sun uses substances in the soil in which it can be present through its warmth and light to make plants grow. (On the Lord’s divine love being seen as the sun in the spiritual world, with spiritual warmth and light flowing from it, giving angels their love and wisdom, see Heaven and Hell 116–142.)

Since we are life-receivers, not life, it follows that our conception from our parents is not the conception of life but simply the conception of the first and purest forms that can accept life. These forms serve as a nucleus or beginning in the womb, to which are added, step by step, material substances in forms suited, in their various patterns and levels, to the reception of life.

Divinity is not in space. Given the divine omnipresence—presence with everyone in the world, with every angel in heaven, and with every spirit under heaven—there is no way a merely physical image can compass the thought that Divinity, or God, is not in space. Only a spiritual image will suffice. Physical images are inadequate because they involve space. They are put together out of earthly things, and there is something spatial about absolutely every earthly thing we see with our eyes. 

Everything that is large or small here involves space, everything that is long or wide or high here involves space—in a word, every measurement, every shape, every form here involves space. This is why I said that a merely physical image cannot compass the fact that Divinity is not in space when the claim is made that it is everywhere.