Love

“Love" is one of those tricky things: We all know what it is,

but can any of us define it?

Merriam-Webster’s first definition is “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.” Well, yeah, but “strong affection” seems kind of weak, and the motivations can be nobler than “kinship or personal ties.” The dictionary also offers “affection based on admiration, benevolence or common interests,” “warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion,” and “unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another.” None of them exactly measure up to the feeling, do they?

So what’s Swedenborg’s take? Love, it says, is all about becoming one with others.

“The hallmark of love is not loving ourselves but loving others and being united to them through love,” Swedenborg says in Divine Love and Wisdom. “Truly, the essence of all love is to be found in union...”

That, however, is in a way just the tip of the iceberg: Swedenborg says that love – the desire for union – is the actual source of all existence. Love is God, love is life, love is the goal of every person, love is what takes us to heaven or hell, love is the actual source of all matter and energy in the universe, love is the creator of reality itself.

How is that? Swedenborg says the essence of God – the actual substance of God – is pure, perfect, infinite love, a desire for union beyond anything we could ever hope to imagine. That desire flowed forth to create the universe and reality as we know it, with the sole purpose of having something to be unified with. And we humans are that something: Beings capable of accepting love and returning it out of free choice.

This means we are created from love, and created with the goal of loving. So it follows that what we love, what we desire, is at the inmost of our own selves, and is actually our life, our essence – is actually who we are.

That leads to two obvious questions: 1. If we’re created from God’s love, why are we so nasty and selfish? 2. What about our thoughts and ideas? Don’t they count for anything?

The answers to those are related.

First, God had to create us with the capacity for evil so that we could be in freedom, because if we weren’t free, then the choice to accept and return his love wouldn’t be a choice at all, and would be meaningless. On a deeper level, God is perfection, and if he created something perfect it would have simply been more of himself and he would be loving himself. So we have to be imperfect, but with the ability to choose love.

That ability to choose is really the answer to the second question. Our power to think and know can be separated from our loves, which means we can know something is right even if it conflicts with our desires. Swedenborg says we can use that ability to compel ourselves to choose what is right, and to ask God to actually change what we love to make it good. If we’re diligent and sincere, God will indeed change our loves through the course of our lives. By the time we’re ready for heaven, we live in a sincere love for other people and for the Lord, and from that a love for doing good things for others. At that point we are actually in true freedom, because what we want is perfectly aligned with what we know is right, and we can actually do what we want.

On the flip side: If we refuse to engage in that process, refuse to see what is right, refuse to make the effort to do what is right and refuse God’s wish to change what we love, we will end up in hell, together with others who love only themselves.

This creates an interesting and important question we can all ask ourselves: Deep down, in the depths of ourselves, what do we love? Is it good? Are we willing to open it to God and ask Him to change it?

Passages from Swedenborg

Divine Love and Wisdom (Rogers) n. 426

(21) Spiritual and celestial love is love for the neighbor and love toward the Lord, while natural and sensual love is love of the world and love of self. By love for the neighbor we mean a loveof useful services, and by love toward the Lord we mean a love of performing useful services, as we have previously shown.
These loves are spiritual and celestial for the reason that to loveuseful services and to perform them from a love of them is divorced from a person's love of his own self-interest. For one who loves useful services spiritually regards not himself but others apart from himself, being affected by a concern for their welfare.
Opposed to these loves are loves of self and the world, for loves of self and the world have regard for useful services not for the sake of others but for the sake of self; and people who do this invert Divine order, putting themselves in place of the Lord, and the world in place of heaven. Consequently they look away from the Lord and heaven, and to look away from them is to look in the direction of hell. But for more on the subject of these loves, see no. 424 above.

Heaven and Hell (Ager) n. 23

The love in which those are, who are in the celestial kingdom is called celestial love, and the love in which those are who are in the spiritual kingdom is called spiritual love. Celestial love is love to the Lord, and spiritual love is love towards the neighbor. And as all good pertains to love (for good to any one is what he loves) the good also of the other kingdom is called celestial, and the good of the other spiritual. Evidently, then, the two kingdoms are distinguished from each other in the same way as good of love to the Lord is distinguished from good of love towards the neighbor.# And as the good of love to the Lord is an interior good, and that love is interiorlove, so the celestial angels are interior angels, and are called higher angels.

Divine Love and Wisdom (Ager) n. 427

(22) It is the same with charity and faith and their conjunction as with the will and understanding and their conjunction. There are two loves, according to which the heavens are distinct, celestial loveand spiritual love. Celestial love is love to the Lord, and spirituallove is love towards the neighbor. These loves are distinguished by this, that celestial love is the love of good, and spiritual love the loveof truth; for those who are in celestial love perform uses from love of good, and those in spiritual love from love of truth. The marriage of celestial love is with wisdom, and the marriage of spiritual love with intelligence; for it is of wisdom to do good from good, and it is of intelligence to do good from truth, consequently celestial love does what is good, and spiritual love does what is true. The difference between these two loves can be defined only in this way, that those who are in celestial love have wisdom inscribed on their life, and not on the memory, for which reason they do not talk about Divine truths, but do them; while those who are in spiritual love have wisdom inscribed on their memory, therefore they talk about Divine truths, and do them from principles in the memory. Because those who are in celestial love have wisdom inscribed on their life, they perceive instantly whether whatever they hear is true or not; and when asked whether it is true, they answer only, It is, or It is not. These are they who are meant by the words of the Lord:
Let your speech be Yea, yea, Nay, nay (Matt. 5:37).

Divine Love and Wisdom (Dole) n. 47

Divine love and wisdom cannot fail to be and to be manifested in others that it has created. The hallmark of love is not loving ourselves but loving others and being united to them through love. The hallmark of love is also being loved by others because this is how we are united. Truly, the essence of all love is to be found in union, in the life of love that we call joy, delight, pleasure, sweetness, blessedness, contentment, and happiness.
The essence of love is that what is ours should belong to someone else. Feeling the joy of someone else as joy within ourselves--that is loving. Feeling our joy in others, though, and not theirs in ourselves is not loving. That is loving ourselves, while the former is loving our neighbor. These two kinds of love are exact opposites. True, they both unite us; and it does not seem as though loving what belongs to us, or loving ourselves in the other, is divisive. Yet it is so divisive that to the extent that we love others in this way we later harbor hatred for them. Step by step our union with them dissolves, and the love becomes hatred of corresponding intensity.

Divine Love (Whitehead) n. 20

XX.

LOVE PRODUCES HEAT.

Love produces heat for the reason that love is the very life, and living force of all things in the whole, world. All endeavors, forces, activities, and movements therein have no other origin than the Divine love which is the Lord, who appears in the heavens before the angels as a sun. That love is one thing and heat another is clearly evident from the difference between them in angel and in man. It is from love that an angel wills and thinks, and has perception and wisdom, and inmostly in himself is sensible of what is blissful and satisfactory, and also loves it. The same is true of man. All this is in their minds; while in their bodies they both feel what is hot apart from any sense of happiness or satisfaction. This makes clear that heat is an effect of the activity of life or of love.

Divine Love and Wisdom (Dole) n. 1

Divine Love and Wisdom

Angelic Wisdom about Divine Love

Part 1

Love is our life. For most people, the existence of love is a given, but the nature of love is a mystery. As for the existence of love, this we know from everyday language. We say that someone loves us, that monarchs love their subjects, and that subjects love their monarch. We say that a husband loves his wife and that a mother loves her children, and vice versa. We say that people love their country, their fellow citizens, their neighbor. We use the same language about impersonal objects, saying that someone loves this or that thing.
Even though the word "love" is so commonly on our tongues, still hardly anyone knows what love is. When we stop to think about it, we find that we cannot form any image of it in our thoughts, so we say either that it is not really anything or that it is simply something that flows into us from our sight, hearing, touch, and conversation and therefore influences us. We are wholly unaware that it is our very life--not just the general life of our whole body and of all our thoughts, but the life of their every least detail. Wise people can grasp this when you ask, "If you take away the effects of love, can you think anything? Can you do anything? As the effects of love lose their warmth, do not thought and speech and action lose theirs as well? Do they not warm up as love warms up?" Still, the grasp of these wise people is not based on the thought that love is our life, but on their experience that this is how things happen.

True Christian Religion (Rose) n. 400

400
4. Love for ourselves and love for the world in specific.
(a) Love for ourselves is wanting good things for ourselves alone and not wanting good things for others unless we benefit - not even if the others are the church, our country, any human community, or other people who live in the area. Love for ourselves also entails doing something good for others only if it benefits our own reputation, honor, and glory. If we do not see these benefits in the good things we are doing for others, we say at heart, "What's the point? Why should I do this? What's in it for me?" and we no longer bother to do them. Clearly then, if we are wrapped up in loving ourselves we do not love the church, our country, our community, other people in our area, or anything else that is truly good. We love only ourselves and our own things.
[2] (b) When we are not focusing on our neighbor or the public in the things that we think about and do, let alone the Lord, we are wrapped up in loving ourselves. We are thinking only about ourselves and our own people. To put it another way, this is our nature when everything we do is for ourselves and our own people; if we do anything for the public, we do it only to look good; if we do anything for our neighbors, we do it only so they will like us.
[3] (c) I say "for ourselves and our own people" because if we loveourselves we also love our own people - specifically our own children and grandchildren, and generally all the people around us whom we call our own. Loving them is the same as loving ourselves, because we look at them as if we were looking at ourselves and we see them in relation to ourselves. "Our own people" also includes all the people who praise us, respect us, and look up to us. The rest may look human to our physical eyes, but with the eyes of our spirit we more or less see them as phantoms.
[4] (d) Love for ourselves is what we have if we despise our neighbors in comparison with ourselves. It is what we have if we think of people as our enemies because they do not favor, revere, or adore us. We are deeper in this love if we hate and persecute our neighbors for feeling that way. And we are deeper still in this love if we have a burning desire for revenge against our neighbors and long for their destruction. If we have this nature, we eventually love to be savage.
[5] (e) We can see the nature of love for ourselves by comparing it with heavenly love. Heavenly love is a love for usefulness because it is useful; it is a love for the good things that we do for our church, our country, human society, and people in our area because they are good things to do. If, however, it is for our own sake that we loveusefulness and good actions, we love them only as our drudges, because they serve us. Therefore if we love ourselves, we want our church, our country, human communities, and the people around us to serve us; we do not want to serve them. We place ourselves above them; we put them beneath ourselves.
[6] (f) Furthermore, the more we have a heavenly kind of love (welove actions that are useful and good and are moved with heartfelt pleasure when we do them), the more we are led by the Lord. This heavenly kind of love is the kind of love the Lord has; it is the kind of love that comes from him.
The more we love ourselves, the more we are led by ourselves and by our own self-centeredness. Our self-centeredness is nothing but evil. It is our hereditary evil. It is loving ourselves more than God and loving the world more than heaven.
[7] (g) The nature of love for ourselves is that the more the reins are let out - that is, the more its external constraints are removed, which are a fear of the law and its penalties and a fear of losing our reputation, respect, advantage, position, and life - the more our lovefor ourselves rushes on, until it wants to control not only the entire planet but also heaven and even God himself. It never has a limit or an end.
This limitless desire for control lies hidden within all people who are in love with themselves, although it is not visible to the world as long as the reins and constraints just mentioned hold them back. The nature of all people like this is that whenever further progress upward becomes impossible for them, they stay where they are until moving up becomes possible again. This explains why people wholove themselves like this are unaware that there is an insane and limitless obsession hiding inside them.
No one can avoid seeing the truth of this, however, when looking at powerful people and monarchs - people who lack reins, constraints, and impossibilities. They rush on and overpower whole provinces and countries as long as they keep succeeding. They aspire to power and glory beyond all limits. This is particularly the case with people who extend their domain into heaven and transfer all the Lord's divine power to themselves. They always crave more.
[8] (h) There are two kinds of ruling power: one comes from love for our neighbor; the other comes from love for ourselves. They are opposite to each other. If we have ruling power because we love our neighbors, we want what is good for all. We love nothing more than being useful and serving others. Serving others is doing good and useful things for them because we wish them well. This is what welove to do and what gives pleasure to our heart. In this case, the more we are promoted to high positions, the happier we are, not because of the high positions but because of the useful things we can then do with a wider scope and greater magnitude. This is the nature of ruling power in the heavens.
On the other hand, if we have ruling power because we loveourselves, we want what is good for no one except ourselves and our own. The useful things we do are for our own honor and glory. As far as we are concerned, honor and glory are the only really useful things. If we serve others, it is for the purpose of being served and honored and having power. We pursue high positions not for the good things we could do but to have importance and glory and the heartfelt pleasure they bring us.
[9] (i) The particular love for ruling power that people have had stays with them after their life in the world. People who had power because they loved their neighbor are entrusted with power in the heavens. In that situation, they do not have the power: the good and useful causes they love have the power. And when good and useful causes have the power, the Lord has the power.
People who had ruling power in the world because they loved themselves are thrown out of office after their life in the world comes to an end. They are then forced into slavery.
The points above make it now possible to recognize which people have love for themselves. It does not matter how they seem in outer form, whether haughty or obsequious. The attributes discussed above are in their inner selves, and the inner self is hidden from most other people. Their outer selves are taught to pretend to love the public and their neighbors - the opposite of what they feel. This too they do for their own sake. They are aware that loving the public and their neighbors deeply affects people and increases people's respect for them. This strategy works because heaven flows into a love for the public and for one's neighbor.
[10] (j) The evil qualities generally found in people who lovethemselves are contempt for others, jealousy, unfriendliness toward people who do not favor them; a resulting hostility; and various kinds of hatred, vengefulness, guile, deceit, ruthlessness, and cruelty. Where you find evils like this, you also find contempt for God and for the divine things that are the true insights and good actions taught by the church. If such people honor these things, their respect is only verbal, not heartfelt. Because evils like these are present, related falsities are also present, since falsities come from evils.
[11] (k) Love for the world, on the other hand, is wanting to redirect other people's wealth to ourselves with whatever skill we have. It is putting our heart in riches and letting the world distract us and steer us away from spiritual love (love for our neighbor) and heaven. We have a love for the world if we long to redirect other people's possessions to ourselves by various methods, especially if we use trickery and deception, and have no concern for how our neighbor is doing. If we have this type of love, we have a strong and growing craving for good things other people have. Provided we do not fear the law or losing our reputation, we take people's things away, and in fact rob people blind.
[12] (l) Yet love for the world is not as opposite to heavenly love aslove for ourselves is - the evils hidden in it are not as enormous.
[13] (m) Love for the world takes many forms. It can be a love we have for wealth in order to be promoted to higher positions. It can be a love for honor and high position for the sake of increasing our wealth. It can be a love for wealth for the sake of various benefits that gratify us in the world. It can be a love for wealth for the sake of wealth itself: this kind is miserly. And so on. Our purpose in gaining the wealth is the use we hope to get out of it. This purpose or use determines the quality of the love. The nature of any love is the nature of the purpose it has; everything else about it serves as a means.
[14] (n) To summarize, love for ourselves and love for the world are completely opposite to love for the Lord and love for our neighbor. Therefore love for ourselves and love for the world, as I have just described them, are hellish loves. In fact, they rule in hell. They also create a hell in us.
Love for the Lord, however, and love for our neighbor are heavenly loves. In fact, they rule in heaven. They also create a heaven in us.

True Christian Religion (Rose) n. 399

399
3. Love in general.
(a) Our love is our very life itself. The nature of our love determines the nature of our life and in fact our entire nature as a human being. Our dominant or leading love, however, is the love that constitutes us.
Our dominant or leading love has many other loves; they are derived from it in a hierarchy beneath it. No matter how these other loves may look or seem, each one of them is part of our leading love. With it they make one government, so to speak. Our dominant love is like the monarch and leader of the rest: it guides our other loves and uses them as intermediate purposes through which it focuses on and aims for its goal. Both directly and indirectly, this goal is the primary and ultimate objective for them all.
[2] (b) The focus of our dominant love is what we love above all else. What we love above all else is constantly present in our thinking, because it is in our will and ultimately constitutes our life.
For example, if we love wealth above everything else, whether that means money or property, we are constantly contemplating how to get more. When we do get more we are profoundly overjoyed. When we lose wealth we are profoundly grief-stricken. Our heart is in it.
If we love ourselves above all else, we keep ourselves in mind at all times. We think about ourselves, talk about ourselves, and act for our own benefit, because our life is a life of self.
[3] (c) Our purpose is what we love above all else. We focus on it in each and every thing we do. It exists in our will like a hidden current in a river that moves and carries things along, even when we are doing something else, because it is what motivates us. It is the factor that people look for and identify in others; then they use it either to influence the others or to cooperate with them.
[4] (d) Our nature is completely shaped by the dominant force in our lives. That force is what differentiates us from other people. If we are good, our heaven is created to accord with it. If we are evil, our hell is created to accord with it. It is our will, our self, and our nature. It is the underlying reality of our life. It cannot be changed after we die, because it is our true self.
[5] (e) For each of us, all our pleasure, joy, and happiness comes from our dominant love and depends on it. This is because whatever we love we say is enjoyable, since we feel it that way. What we think about but we do not love we are also capable of calling enjoyable, but it is not the central enjoyment of our life. What ourlove enjoys we experience as good, and what our love does not enjoy we experience as evil.
[6] (f) There are two types of love that act as a source for all forms of goodness and truth. There are two types of love that act as a source for all forms of evil and falsity. The two loves that originate all forms of goodness and truth are love for the Lord and love for our neighbor. The two loves that originate all forms of evil and falsity are love for ourselves and love for the world. When the latter two loves are dominant, they are completely opposite to the former two loves.
[7] (g) Love for the Lord and love for our neighbor are the two loves that constitute heaven in us, as I said. They are the dominant types oflove in heaven. Since they constitute heaven in us, they also constitute the church in us.
The two loves that originate all forms of evil and falsity, which as I said are love for ourselves and love for the world, constitute hell in us, since they are the dominant types of love in hell. Therefore they also destroy the church in us.
[8] (h) The two types of love that originate all forms of goodness and truth, which are the types of love in heaven, open and form our inner spiritual self, because that is where these loves reside. The two types of love that originate all forms of evil and falsity, which as I have said are the types of love in hell, close and destroy our inner spiritual self when they are dominant. They make us earthly and sense-oriented, depending on how extensively and powerfully dominant they are.

Divine Love and Wisdom (Dole) n. 4

God alone--the Lord--is love itself, because he is life itself. Both we on earth and angels are life-receivers. I will be offering many illustrations of this in works on divine providence and life. Here I would say only that the Lord, who is the God of the universe, is uncreated and infinite, while we and angels are created and finite. Since the Lord is uncreated and infinite, he is that essential reality that is called Jehovah and is life itself or life in itself. No one can be created directly from the Uncreated, the Infinite, from Reality itself and Life itself, because what is divine is one and undivided. We must be created out of things created and finite, things so formed that something divine can dwell within. Since we and angels are of this nature, we are life-receivers. So if we let ourselves be misled in thought so badly that we think we are not life-receivers but are actually life, there is no way to keep us from thinking that we are God.
Our sense that we are life and our consequent belief that we are life rests on an illusion: in an instrumental cause, the presence of its principal cause is only felt as something identical to itself. The Lord himself teaches that he is life in itself in John: "As the Father has life in himself, so too he has granted the Son to have life in himself" (John 5:26); and again in John (11:25 and 14:6) he teaches that he is life itself. Since life and love are one and the same, as we can see from the first two sections above, it follows that the Lord, being life itself, is love itself.

Who (or What) is Swedenborg?

The ideas on this site are based on the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18^th-century Swedish scientist and theologian. Swedenborg claimed that his religious writings, the sole focus of the last three decades of his life, were done at the behest of the Lord himself, and constituted a revelation for a successor to the Christian Church.

In keeping with Swedenborg’s own statements, modern believers downplay his role as author, attributing the ideas to the Lord instead. For this reason they generally refer to Swedenborg’s theological works as “the Writings,” and some resist the label “Swedenborgian” as placing emphasis on the man rather than the message.

Since “the Writings” would be an unfamiliar term to new readers, we have elected to use the name “Swedenborg” as a label for those theological works, much as we might use “Isaiah” or “Matthew” to refer to books of the Bible. The intent, however, is not to attribute the ideas to Swedenborg, any more than we would attribute the divinity of the Bible to Isaiah the man or Matthew the man.

So when you read “according to Swedenborg” on this site, it’s really shorthand for “according to the theological works from the Lord through Swedenborg.” When you read “Swedenborg says,” it’s really shorthand for “the theological works of Swedenborg say.”

WHY AM I HERE?

“Love" is one of those tricky things: We all know what it is,

Who (or What) is Swedenborg?