Divine Love and Wisdom (Rogers) n. 130

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130. Angels turn their faces continually to the Lord as the sun for the reason that angels are in the Lord and have the Lord in them, and the Lord inwardly guides their affections and thoughts and turns them continually to Him. Therefore they cannot but look to the east where the Lord as the sun appears. From this it is apparent that it is not the angels who turn themselves to the Lord, but that it is the Lord who turns them to Him. Actually, when angels think more interiorly of the Lord, they do not think of Him then as being other than in them. Interior thought does not itself produce an appearance of distance, but exterior thought does, thought which is bound up with the vision of the eyes. That is because exterior thought is caught up in space, unlike interior thought; and even when it is not caught up in space, as in the spiritual world, still it is caught up in the appearance of space. [2] But this can be little understood by anyone who thinks of God in terms of space. For God is present everywhere, and yet does not exist in space. Thus He is both within and around an angel, and therefore an angel can see God, that is to say, the Lord, both within and around him-within him when he thinks in accord with love and wisdom, and around him when he thinks about love and wisdom. On this subject, however, we will say something more particularly in treatises on The Lord's Omnipresence, Omniscience, and Omnipotence.* Let everyone take care not to fall into the detestable heresy of supposing that God infused Himself into people so as to have existence in them and no longer in Himself. The fact is that God is present everywhere, both within a person and around him. For He is present through all space independently of space, as shown above in nos. 7-10 and 69-72. Indeed, if He were to have His existence in people, He would be not only divisible but also bounded by space. In fact a person might even then suppose himself to be God. This heresy is so abhorrent that in the spiritual world it stinks like a rotting corpse. * These treatises have not been found and perhaps were never written.


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