Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

“The angels are forever in the perfection of beauty. Their marriages take places with miraculous ceremonies. To such a union, from which no children are born, man brings Understanding, woman brings Will; they become one being—one flesh on earth; then, after putting on the heavenly body, they go to heaven. On earth, in the natural state, the mutual affection of the two sexs leads to lust, which is an effect, producing fatigue and disgust; but in their heavenly form, the pair, having become one spirit, finds in itself a cause of perpetual joys. Swedenborg had seen such a union of spirits, who, as Saint Luke has written, ‘neither marry nor are given in marriage,’ and this union leads to none but spiritual pleasures. An angel offered to take him to witness such a marriage, and bore him away on his wings; the wings are only symbolical, and not an earthly reality. He clothed him in his festal garment; and Swedenborg, seeing himself arrayed in light, asked the reason.

‘“*On such occasions,’ replied the angel, ‘our robes light up and shine and are nuptial garments’ (‘The Delight of Wisdom in Conjugal Love’).

‘‘He then saw two angels who came—one from the South, and the other from the East. The angel from

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the South rode in a chariot drawn by two white horses, whose reins were of the color and the radiance of the morning; but when they came close to him in heaven, he saw no more of the chariot or horses. The angel from the Hast, clothed in purple, and the angel from the South, in hyacinth color, rushed together like two breaths of wind, and were onc; one was an angel of Love and the other an angel of Wisdom. Swedenborg’s guide told him that on earth these two angels had been bound by an inward sympathy, and constantly united, though divided by space. Consent, which is the essence of happy marriage on earth, is the habitual condition of angels in heaven. Love is the light of their world.

‘The perpetual ecstasy of the angels is produced by the faculty, bestowed on them by God, of giving back to Him the joy they have in Him. This reciprocity of the infinite constitutes their life. In heaven they too become infinite by partaking of the essential nature of God, who is selfsubsistent. Such is the vastness of the heavens where the angels dwell, that if man were endowed with vision as constantly rapid as the transmission of light from the sun to the earth, and if he gazed through all eternity, his eyes would find no horizon to rest on. Light alone can be an emblem of the joys of heaven. ‘It is,’ says he (‘Angelic Wisdom’), ‘an effluence of the virtue of God, a pure emanation from His glory, compared to which our most brilliant day is dark. It is omnipotent, it renews. everything, and cannot be absorbed; it surrounds the angel, putting him into contact with God by infinite joys which are felt to multiply and reproduce themselves to infinity. This light kills the man who is not prepared to receive it. No one on earth, or indeed in the heavens, can look on God and live. This is

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