Conjugial Love (Acton) n. 102

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102. That married partners become that form as the interiors of their mind are opened, is because the mind is opened successively, from infancy to extreme old age. Man is born corporeal, and, as the mind next above the body is opened, he becomes rational. As this rational is purified and, as it were, decanted from the fallacies flowing in from the bodily senses and the concupiscences flowing in from the allurements of the flesh, it is opened, this being done solely by means of wisdom; and when the interiors of the rational mind are opened, then the man becomes a form of wisdom--a form which is the receptacle of love truly conjugial.* The wisdom which makes this form and receives this love is rational and at the same time moral. Rational wisdom regards the truths and goods which appear interiorly in man, not as his own but as flowing in from the Lord; and moral wisdom shuns evils and falses as leprosies, shunning especially things lascivious which contaminate its conjugial love. * In the original, the paragraph that follows is enclosed in inverted commas.


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