§577 malice & skill 351
The Malice and Unspeakable Skills
of Hellish Spirits
576
A
NYONE who thinks deeply and knows anything about the workings
of the human mind can see and understand how signifi cantly supe-rior spirits are to other people. In a minute, we can consider and turn over
and decide in our minds more than we can express in speech or writing in
half an hour. This shows how much better we are when we are in the spirit
and therefore when we become spirits, since it is the spirit that thinks and
the body is what the spirit uses to express its thoughts in speech or writing.
This is why people who become angels after death have access to
indescribable intelligence and wisdom relative to the intelligence and wis-
dom they had while they were living in the world. While they were living
in the world, their spirits were confi ned in a body and by that means
were in the natural world. So when the spirit did think spiritually, the
thoughts fl owed into natural concepts that are relatively general, crude,
and hazy. This means they are not open to the countless elements char-
acteristic of spiritual thought. They also immerse them in the thickets of
the cares of the world. It is different once the spirit has been freed from
the body and has arrived at its own spiritual state, which happens when
it crosses from the natural world to the spiritual world that is appropriate
to it. We can see from what has already been said that its state in regard
to thoughts and affections is far better than its former state. This is why
angels think thoughts that are unutterable and indescribable, things that
cannot come through to our natural thoughts. Yet in fact, every angel
was born a person on earth and lived as such, and then seemed to herself
or himself to be no wiser than anyone else.
The level of wisdom and intelligence for angels is also the level 577
of malice and craft among hellish spirits. The issue is much the same
because once the human spirit is freed from its body it devotes itself
wholly to its virtue or to its vice. An angelic spirit devotes itself to its
virtue and a hellish spirit to its vice. This is because every spirit actually
is its own good or its own evil because it is its own love, as has often been
stated and explained above. This means that just as angelic spirits think
and intend and speak and act from their good, so hellish spirits do the
same from their evil. Thinking and intending and speaking and acting