Page:DivineLoveAndWisdom.djvu/76

 ality, is his, they are the Lord's in him. But since the two are intimately conjoined to his life, so intimately that they may be said to be joined into it, they appear to be his own. It is from them that he is able to think and will, and to speak and act; and what he thinks, wills, speaks, and does from them, appears as if it were from himself. This gives him the ability to reciprocate, and by means of this conjunction is possible. Yet so far as an angel believes that love and wisdom are really in him, and thus lays claim to them for himself as if they were his, so far the angelic is not in him, and therefore he has no conjunction with the Lord; for he is not in truth, and as truth makes one with the light of heaven, so far he cannot be in heaven; for he thereby denies that he lives from the Lord, and believes that he lives from himself, and that he therefore possesses Divine essence. In these two, freedom and rationality, the life which is called angelic and human consists. From all this it can be seen that for the sake of conjunction with the Lord, the angel has the ability to reciprocate, but that this ability, in itself considered, is not his but the Lord's. From this it is, that if he abuses his ability to reciprocate, by which he perceives and feels as his what is the Lord's, which is done by appropriating it to himself he falls from the angelic state. That conjunction is reciprocal, the Lord Himself teaches (John xiv. 20-24; xv. 4-6); also that the conjunction of the Lord with man and of man with the Lord, is in those things of the Lord that are called His words (John xv. 7).

. Some are of the opinion that Adam was in such liberty or freedom of choice as to be able to love God and be wise from himself, and that this freedom of choice was lost in his posterity. But this is an error; for man is not life, but is a recipient of life (see above, n. 4-6, 54-60); and he who is a recipient of life cannot love and be wise from anything of his own; consequently, when Adam willed to be wise and to love from what was his own he fell from wisdom and love, and was cast out of Paradise.