The philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg : God, Man and the cosmos

Being and therefore it is finite Being. God alone is the First and is therefore the Infinite. Created beings, including man, are finite. So far as it is possible to define the Infinite and the finite, it may be done by saying that the Infinite is that which alone is (‘is’ being the very predicate of existence). The finite is created Being whose existence is derived from the Infinite, that is, from God.

In his supreme philosophical work—‘Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom’, Swedenborg commences the thesis which is therein expounded by the amazing and seemingly irrelevant statement that ‘love is the life of Man’, and he illustrates this astonishing definition of life in these words—

“Man knows that love is something, but he does not know what love is . . . . Man is altogether unconscious that love is his very life; not only the common life of all his thoughts, but also the life of all the singular things thereof... .

‘If you remove the affection belonging to love, can you think anything and can you do anything? Do not thought, speech and action grow cold in proportion as the affection belonging to the love grows cold, and do they not grow warm in proportion as the affection warms? ... .

“Some idea of love as being the life of man may be had from the sun of this world. Heat is a kind of common life to all vegetation. For when it goes forth in the time of spring, plants of every kind rise out of the ground... . But when the heat retires, as it does in autumn and winter, the plants are stripped of all the signs of their life and fall away. So itis in love with man: for love and heat mutually correspond to each other: wherefore also love is warm.’

By way of further illustration of this definition of life as being love, we may usefully consider some of the various forms of life on the earth. First take animals of every genera and species. In what does their life consist but in their animal loves—the affections of eating, drinking, sleeping, mating, procreating and love of their offspring? These their loves, so closely allied to their bodily

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