122 HEAVEN and HELL §236
what kind of person someone is—they know the quality of the affection
from the sound and the quality of the mind from the articulations of the
sound, or words. Wiser angels know from a single series of statements
what someone’s ruling affection is, since this is what they are primarily
attentive to.
[ 3 ] It is recognized that all people have various affections or moods—
one in times of happiness, another in times of sorrow, another in times
of tenderness and compassion, another in times of honesty and truth,
another in times of love and thoughtfulness, another in times of zeal or
anger, another in times of pretense and guile, another in times of ambi-
tion for respect and adulation, and so on; but there is a dominant affec-
tion or love within all of these, so since the wiser angels perceive this,
they know from conversation the whole state of another person.
[ 4 ] I have been granted knowledge of this through an abundance of
experience. I have heard angels discover a person’s life simply by listen-
ing. They have told me that they know everything about another per-
son’s life from a few individual ideas, because these enable them to know
the person’s ruling love, which contains everything in a pattern. This is
all that our “book of life” is.237 Angelic language has nothing in common with human language
except with a few of our words whose sound refl ects some feeling, and in
this case not with the words themselves but with their sound, which will
be further dealt with later.
The fact that angelic language has nothing in common with human
language is evidenced by angels’ inability to pronounce a single word of a
human language. It has been tried, and they could not. The only things
they can utter are the ones that are in complete accord with their own
affection. Anything that does not agree offends their very life, since their
life is a matter of affection and their language fl ows from it.
I have been told that the fi rst language of people on our earth shared
this nature because it was given them from heaven, and that Hebrew
resembles it in some respects.
238 Since angels’ language corresponds to the affections of their love, and
since heaven’s love is love for the Lord and love for our neighbor (see
above, §§ 13 – 19 ), we can see how elegant and delightful their conversa-
tion is. It affects not only the ears but also the deeper levels of the minds
of those who hear it. There was one particular hard-hearted spirit with
whom an angel talked, and eventually he was so moved by what the angel
was saying that he burst into tears, saying that he couldn’t help it, love
was talking, and he had never cried before.