Love Produces by Wisdom

Selection from True Christian Religion ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

Love as a bridegroom and husband produces or begets all forms, yet only by wisdom as a bride and wife, can be proved by things innumerable in both the spiritual world and in the natural world, provided only it is kept in mind that the entire angelic heaven is arranged in its form, and kept in it, from the Divine love through the Divine wisdom.

Those who deduce the creation of the world from any other source than the Divine love through the Divine wisdom, not knowing that these two constitute the Divine Essence, descend from reason's sight to eyesight, and bestow kisses on nature as the creator of the universe; and thereby conceive chimeras* and bring forth specters*. They devise fallacies, and reason from them; and their conclusions are eggs that contain birds of night.

Such should not be called minds, but eyes and ears without understanding, or thoughts without soul. They talk of colors as if these existed without light; of trees as if they existed without seed; and of all things in the world as existing without the sun; for they make derivatives to be first principles and things caused to be causes; thus they turn all things upside down, lull their reason to sleep, and the things they see are dreams.

(True Christian Religion 37:3)

* chimera
(1.) (in Greek mythology) a fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.
(2.) a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve.

* specters
a ghost. Something widely feared as a possible unpleasant or dangerous occurrence.

Knowing Love in Its Essence

Selection from True Christian Religion ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

God is Love itself and Wisdom itself, and these two constitute His Essence. 

In the earliest ages it was seen that love and wisdom are the two essentials to which all the infinite things that are in God and proceed from God have reference. 

But succeeding ages, as they withdrew their minds from heaven and immersed them in things worldly and corporeal, gradually became unable to see this - for they gradually ceased to know what love is in its essence, and thus what wisdom is in its essence, not knowing that love abstracted from a form is impossible, and that love operates in a form and through a form. 

. . . God is the Itself and the Only, and thus the first substance and form, the essence of which is love and wisdom.

. . . From Him were made all things that were made, it follows that He created the universe with each thing and all things of it from love by means of wisdom; consequently the Divine love, together with the Divine wisdom, is in each and all created subjects. 

Love, moreover, is not merely the essence that forms all things, it is also that which unites and conjoins them, and thus, when they are formed, holds them in connection. 

(True Christian Religion 37:1)

Three Things That Are The Lord

Selection from Divine Love and Wisdom ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

There are in the Lord three things that are the Lord - the Divine of love, the Divine of wisdom, and the Divine of use

These three are presented in appearance outside of the sun of the spiritual world - the Divine of love by heat, the Divine of wisdom by light and the Divine of use by the atmosphere which is their containant.

(Divine Love and Wisdom 296)