1112. About the pleasure of the heavenly angels

Just as the heavenly are set apart from the spiritual in other respects, so they are also in their feeling of joy. Heavenly joy is a pleasantness that cannot be described, still less understood except by those who are given by the Lord to experience it. It fills the whole body with its pleasantness, which I have been given to feel for some time. It is a clear sensation of the whole body, as if coming from the heart and spreading itself gently throughout all the tissues, not unlike that supreme pleasantness of married partners in their joy, but spreading from the smallest simple tissues to the more complex. But one must carefully distinguish between pleasure coming from the innermost regions, and pleasure existing merely on the outside. On this subject, see earlier [379, 903-4]. 1748, 1 March.