Conjugial Love (Rogers) n. 211

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211. (2) In the case of people who are in a state of truly conjugial love, their capacity for growing wise increases, but with those who are not in a state of conjugial love, it decreases. A capacity for growing wise increases with those who are in a state of truly conjugial love, because it is as a result of wisdom and in accordance with it that this love exists in married couples, as we have shown and fully demonstrated in preceding chapters. It also increases because the special sense of this love is the sense of touch, and since this sense has something in common with all the senses, and is moreover full of delights, it therefore opens the inner perceptions of their minds as it opens the inner perceptions of their senses and together with these the organic substances of the whole body. It follows from this that people who are possessed of this love love nothing better than to become wise. For a person becomes wise as the inner perceptions of his mind are opened, because by their opening the thoughts of his understanding are raised into a higher light and the affections of his will into a higher warmth - the higher light being wisdom, and the higher warmth a love for wisdom. Spiritual delights joined to natural delights - as is the case in people in a state of truly conjugial love - bring about an amenability to and therefore a capacity for becoming wise. Because of this, angels possess conjugial love in accordance with their wisdom, and increases in that love and its accompanying delights come about as a result of increases in their wisdom. Because of this, too, the spiritual offspring which are born of their marriages are, from the father, such things as have to with wisdom, and, from the mother, such things as have to do with love; and they love these offspring with a spiritual storg-* (the natural affection of parents for their offspring). This latter love attaches itself to their conjugial love and continually elevates it, and at the same time unites the partners. * From the Greek storg, pronounced stor'gee (like psyche), in use in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries to mean natural or instinctive affection, usually that of parents for their offspring, but no longer current.


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