5. The essence of love is loving others who are outside of oneself, want-
ing to be one with them, and blessing them from oneself.
6. These essential characteristics of divine love were the reason the uni-
verse was created, and they are the reason it is maintained.I will take up these points one by one.
- God is love itself and wisdom itself. These two constitute his essence.All 37
the infinite things in God and all the infinite things radiating from him
relate to two essentials: love and wisdom. Our earliest ancestors saw this
relationship. In the sequence of ages that then followed, however, people
removed their minds from heaven, so to speak, and plunged them into
worldly and bodily preoccupations, with the result that people became
unable to see this relationship. They began not to know what love is in its
essence, and therefore what wisdom is in its essence. They forgot that
without a form there is no love, because love operates in forms and
through them.
God is substance itself and form itself, and is therefore the first and
only substance and form, whose essence is love and wisdom. All things
that were made, were made by God [John 1 : 3 ]. It follows, therefore, that
it was from love by means of wisdom that God created the universe and
each and every thing in it. As a result, divine love together with divine
wisdom is present in every single entity that has been created. Further-
more, love is the essence that not only forms all things but also bonds
and unites them to each other; therefore love is the force that holds all
things in connection.
[ 2 ] Countless things in the world could be used to illustrate this. For
example, there are two essential and universal things through which each
and every thing on earth comes into existence and continues to exist: the
heat and the lightof the sun. They are present in the world because they
correspond to divine love and wisdom. The heat that radiates from the
sun in the spiritual world is in fact essentially love, and its light is essen-
tially wisdom.
As further illustration, take the two essential and universal things
through which human minds come into existence and continue to exist:
the will and the intellect.The mind of each of us consists of these two
things. They are present and operative in each and every detail of the
mind. This is because the will is a vessel and a dwelling place for love,
and the intellect is a vessel and a dwelling place for wisdom. Will and
intellect therefore correspond to the divine love and the divine wisdom
from which they originate.
§37 god the creator & creation 55