"In 'Divine Love and Wisdom,' Swedenborg reaches out to the secular mind with a vision of order and beauty pregnant with meaning and direction and appeals to human experience and reflection (rather than scriptural interpretation) in making the case for the presence of God’s love and God’s wisdom. It is not just that there is a purpose underlying creation; it is that we share in that purpose and are essential to its fulfilment. From God’s infinite love and wisdom to our own individual desires and perceptions, there is an underlying unity on which we can rely".
Swedenborg opens this book of spiritual philosophy with words on love:
LOVE is our life. For most people, the existence of love is a given, but the nature of love is a mystery. As for the existence of love, this we know from everyday language. We say that someone loves us, that monarchs love their subjects, and that subjects love their monarch. We say that a husband loves his wife and that a mother loves her children, and vice versa. We say that people love their country, their fellow citizens, their neighbour. We use the same language about impersonal objects, saying that someone loves this or that thing.
Even though the word “love” is so commonly on our tongues, still hardly anyone knows what love is. When we stop to think about it, we find that we cannot form any image of it in our thoughts, so we say either that it is not really anything or that it is simply something that flows into us from our sight, hearing, touch, and conversation and therefore influences us. We are wholly unaware that it is our very life—not just the general life of our whole body and of all our thoughts, but the life of their every least detail. Wise people can grasp this when you ask, “If you take away the effects of love, can you think anything? Can you do anything? As the effects of love lose their warmth, do not thought and speech and action lose theirs as well? Do they not warm up as love warms up?” Still, the grasp of these wise people is not based on the thought that love is our life, but on their experience that this is how things happen.
An online version of Divine Love and Wisdom can be viewed by following this link: