Philosophy of Religion

Divine Love and Wisdom

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Emanuel Swedenborg

1763

Swedenborg's most philosophically concentrated work — a systematic account of the nature of God as the unity of divine love and divine wisdom, and of creation as the perpetual outflowing of that unity into finite forms. God does not create the world from outside it but sustains it moment by moment as the sun sustains light and warmth; remove the divine influx and creation ceases instantly. The work introduces Swedenborg's distinctive doctrine of degrees — discrete levels of reality (celestial, spiritual, natural) through which the divine descends and through which the soul ascends — and his analysis of the human form as the form of God made finite.