64 HEAVEN and HELL §115
the heavenly goodness in which the earliest people lived. Silver, in con-
trast, means the spiritual goodness in which their successors, the early
people, lived; while bronze means the natural goodness characteristic of
their immediate followers. Iron, though, which gave its name to the last
era, means a harsh truth, devoid of good.The Sun in Heaven
116
O
UR world’s sun is not visible in heaven, and neither is anything
that is derived from it, since all that is natural. Nature, in fact,
begins with that sun, and whatever is produced by it is called natural.
The spiritual reality in which heaven exists, though, is above nature and
completely distinct from anything natural. They communicate with each
other only through correspondences.
The nature of the distinction can be gathered from what was said
above about levels in § 38 , and the nature of the communication from the
last two chapters about correspondences.117 However, even though neither this world’s sun nor anything derived
from it is visible in heaven, there is a sun there; there is light and warmth,
there are all the things we have in our world and many more—not from
the same origin, though, since things in heaven are spiritual while things
in our world are natural.
Heaven’s sun is the Lord; light there is the divine truth and warmth
the divine good that radiate from the Lord as the sun. Everything that
comes into being and manifests itself in the heavens is from this source.
We will discuss the light and warmth and the things that arise from them
in subsequent chapters; here we restrict ourselves to the sun.
The reason the Lord in heaven appears as the sun is that he is the
divine love from which all spiritual things come into being—and,
through the agency of our world’s sun, all natural things as well. That
love is what shines like a sun.118 As for the Lord’s actually appearing in heaven as the sun, this is
something I have not simply been told by angels but have also been