350 HEAVEN and HELL §574
b. On the correspondence of teeth: 5565 – 5568. People who are merely sensory correspond to teeth
and have hardly any spiritual light: 5565. In the Word, a tooth refers to the sensory level that is
the outmost level of human life: 9052 , 9062. Gnashing of teeth in the other life comes from peo-
ple who give nature credit for everything and credit the Divine with nothing: 5568.The people who were enslaved are released and offer their support to
some new devil for the subjugation of others. Then the ones who do not
surrender and yield their obedience are tortured in various ways, and so
on and so on.
Torments like this are the torments of hell that are referred to as
hellfi re.575 The gnashing of teeth, though, is the constant clash and strife of false
convictions with each other (and therefore the warfare of the individuals
who hold the false convictions) united to contempt for others, hostil-
ity, derision, mockery, and blasphemy. These even break out into vari-
ous kinds of butchery. Everyone there is defending his or her own false
convictions and calling them true. From outside the hells, these clashes
and battles sound like gnashing teeth, and they turn into the gnashing of
teeth when truths from heaven fl ow into hell.
In these hells dwell all the people who acknowledged nature and
denied the Divine. The people who deliberately convinced themselves
are in the deeper hells. Since they cannot accept any ray of light from
heaven and can therefore not see anything within themselves, most of
them focus on their senses and their bodies. These are people who do
not believe anything they cannot see with their eyes and touch with their
hands. So for them, all sensory illusions are the truths on which they base
their arguments. This is why their arguments sound like the gnashing of
teeth. It is because in the spiritual world all false statements grate, and
teeth correspond to the outmost aspects of nature and to our own out-
most natures, which have to do with our senses and our bodies.b
On the gnashing of teeth in the hells, see Matthew 8 : 12 ; 13 : 42 , 50 ;
22 : 13 ; 24 : 51 ; 25 : 30 ; and Luke 13 : 28.