Divine Love and Wisdom (Harleys) n. 116

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116. It will now be explained how it comes about that an angel perceives and feels as his own, and thus receives and retains that which yet is not his (for, as was said above, an angel is not an angel from what is his own, but from those things which are with him from the Lord). The essence of the matter is thus. Every angel has liberty and rationality. He has these two so that he may be capable of receiving love and wisdom from the Lord. Yet each of these, liberty as much as rationality, is the Lord's with him, and not his. But because these two are intimately conjoined to his life, so intimately that they may be said to be joined into his life, therefore they appear as if they were his own. From these he is able to think and will, also to speak and act. And what he thinks, wills, speaks and does from them, appears as if it were from himself. This causes reciprocity by which there is conjunction. In so far, however, as an angel believes that love and wisdom are in him, and thus claims them to himself as his own, so far the angelic is not in Him and therefore to that extent he has no conjunction with the Lord. For he is not in the truth; and because truth makes one with the light of heaven, to that extent he cannot be in heaven. For he thereby denies that he lives from the Lord, and believes that he lives from himself, consequently that the Divine essence is his. In these two, liberty and rationality, consists the life which is called angelic and human. From these things it can be established that an angel has reciprocity for the sake of conjunction with the Lord, but that this reciprocity viewed in its own aspect, is not his, but the Lord's. Hence it is that if he abuses this reciprocity by which he perceives and feels as his own what is the Lord's, which is done by appropriating it to himself, he falls away from the angelic state. The Lord Himself teaches in John (XIV 20-24; XV 4-6) that conjunction is reciprocal; also that conjunction of the Lord with man, and of man with the Lord, is in those things of the Lord which are called His words, John XV 7.


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