angels in
churches, whether sculptured or painted, are always depicted as men.
In respect to this insight from heaven they said that it is the
Divine flowing into such as are in the good of faith and life.

{Footnote 1} Unless man is raised above the sense-conceptions
of the external man he has very little wisdom (n. 5089). The
wise man thinks above these sense-conceptions (n. 5089, 5094).
When man is raised above these, he comes into clearer light,
and finally into heavenly light (n. 6183, 6313, 6315, 9407,
9730, 9922). Elevation and withdrawal from these was known to
the ancients (n. 6313).

75. From all my experience, which is now of many years, I am able to
say and affirm that angels are wholly men in form, having faces,
eyes, ears, bodies, arms, hands, and feet; that they see and hear one
another, and talk together, and in a word lack nothing whatever that
belongs to men except that they are not clothed in material bodies. I
have seen them in their own light, which exceeds by many degrees the
noonday light of the world, and in that light all their features
could be seen more distinctly and clearly than the faces of men are
seen on the earth. It has also been granted me to see an angel of the
inmost heaven. He had a more radiant and resplendent face than the
angels of the lower heavens. I observed him attentively, and he had a
human form in all completeness.

76. But it must be remembered that a man cannot see angels with his
bodily eyes, but only with the eyes of the spirit within him,{1}
because his spirit is in the spiritual world, and all things of the
body are in the natural world. Like sees like from being like.
Moreover, as the bodily organ of sight, which is the eye, is too
gross, as everyone knows, to see even the smaller things of nature
except through magnifying glasses, still less can it see what is
above the sphere of nature, as all things in the spiritual world are.
Nevertheless these things can be seen by man when he has been
withdrawn from the sight of the body, and the sight of his spirit has
been opened; and this can be effected instantly whenever it is the
pleasure of the Lord that man should see these things; and in that
case man does not know but what he is seeing them with his bodily
eyes. Thus were angels seen by Abraham, Lot, Manoah, and the
prophets; and thus, too, the Lord was seen by the disciples after the
resurrection; and in the same way angels have been seen by me