XXIV.
CONFUGIAL LOVE—ITS NATURE.
BUT marriages in heaven, Swedenborg tells us, are quite different from marriages on earth. They are, like everything else there, more interior and perfect, and consequently more blissful. The love that binds in marriage union two parties in the realms above, is the true conjugial love. And this is not mere sexual love, which in itself is impure, and is felt by natural men and even by the lower animals. It is a pure spiritual affection. Souls in heaven are drawn together and held together by a love of what is really good and true—of what there is of the Lord in souls. A female angel looks and longs for wisdom in the male, for this is what delights her most. And in proportion as any male angel embodies, the particular kind of wisdom with which she is most delighted, she loves him. And she loves him because of the Lord's wisdom which she perceives in him, and with which her soul yearns for conjunction. And the male angel looks and longs for love in the female, pure, innocent, tender, gentle, like the Lord's own love, for this is what delights him most. And he loves her in the degree that she embodies in herself the special kind of love that agrees with his special kind and degree of wisdom. And so it is the Lord's love which he perceives in her, and which is the life and soul of his wisdom, that is to him the peculiar attraction.
Thus consorts in heaven love only what there is of
