vided for it from the creation of the world, and which are the delights and satisfactions of the inmost heaven, arising from the love of the Lord towards heaven and the church, and therefore from the love of good and truth for each other; from which loves every joy in the heavens is derived. The reason why man thus grows young in heaven is because he then enters into the marriage of good and truth, and in good there is an inclination continually to love truth, and in truth there is a continual inclination to love good; and then the wife is good in form, and the man is truth in form. From this inclination man puts off all the austerity, dejection, and dryness of age, and puts on the liveliness, gladness, and freshness of youth,—whence the inclination lives and becomes joy. It has been told me from heaven that they have then a life of love which can only be described as a life of joy itself. (A. E. n. 1000.)
They who are in Love truly conjugial feel and see themselves to be a united Man.
I talked with the angels respecting conjugial love, or the love between two consorts who love each other. [They said] that it is the inmost of all loves, and is such that consort sees consort in his or her inner and outer mind (animo et mente[1]), so that each consort has the other within him or her. That is, that the image, yea, the similitude of the husband is in the mind of the wife, and the image and similitude of the wife is in the mind of the husband; so that the one sees the other in himself or herself, and in their inmosts they thus dwell together. This was represented by angelic conceptions, which cannot be expressed in words. (S. D. n. 4408.)
I have heard it testified by those who have lived for ages with their consorts in heaven, that they feel themselves to be thus united,—the husband that he is united with the wife, and the wife that she is united with the husband; and feel themselves to be each within the other, mutually and reciprocally, as also in
- ↑ There are in general four distinct terms which the author applies to the spiritual part of man, each with a different and very definite signification; viz. spiritus, anima, mens, and animus. Spiritus (the spirit) is the whole immortal part of man,—all that which lives as a man after death,—and includes the anima, mens, and animus. Anima (the soul), strictly, is the very inmost of man's spirit, the first receptacle of life from the Lord (C. L. n. 101, 315, end); and by derivation it inmostly pervades and is the life of the whole mind and body below it. Metis (the mind) is intermediate between the anima and the animus, and in itself comprises three discrete degrees, viz. the highest, middle, and lowest (C. L. n. 270). The animus is a still lower and outer mind, composed of "affections, and hence outward inclinations insinuated principally after birth, by education, association, and consequent habits of life." (ib. n. 246.) See Chapter on the Human Soul.
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