Male and Female

Selection from Conjugial Love ~ Emanuel Swedenborg
MALE IS MALE AND FEMALE FEMALE

Inasmuch as the human being lives as such after death, and is male and female, and the masculine and the feminine are different, and so different that one cannot be changed into the other, it follows that after death, the male is male, and the female female, each a spiritual being.

We say that the masculine cannot be changed into the feminine or the feminine into the masculine, and that therefore male is male after death, and female female.

As it is not understood, however, in what masculine and feminine essentially consist, this shall be told briefly: —

The difference consists essentially in the fact that inmost in the male is love, with wisdom for its envelopment, or, what is the same, the masculine is love cloaked in wisdom; while inmost in the female is that male wisdom, with love of it for its envelopment. The latter love is woman's love, given a wife by the Lord through her husband's wisdom, while the former and prior love is masculine and is a love of being wise, given the husband by the Lord in the measure of the reception of wisdom. Accordingly, the male is wisdom from love, and the female a love for that wisdom.

There has therefore been implanted in each from creation a love for union into one. The following words in Genesis make it evident that the feminine is from the masculine, or that woman was taken from man.

Jehovah God . . . took one of the man's ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and He built . . . the rib, which he had taken from the man, into a woman; and He brought her to the man; and the man said, This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, having been taken from man (2: 21-23).

It follows from this original formation that the male is by nature intellectual and the female volitional, or what is the same, he is born into an affection for knowing, understanding and being wise, and she into a love for uniting herself with that affection in the man.

As interiors fashion exteriors to their likeness, and the masculine is a form of understanding and the feminine a form of the love of understanding, the male is different from the female in appearance, utterance and body, having a rougher appearance, a harsher utterance, and a stronger body, a bearded chin, too, in general a less beautiful form than woman. They also differ in bearing and ways. In a word, nothing is the same in them, though throughout there is what unites them.  Indeed, the man is masculine throughout, in every least part of the body, in every idea of thought, in every particle of affection; similarly the woman is feminine. As one cannot be made into the other, it follows that after death male is male, and female female.

(Conjugial Love 32-33)