reated immediately, because the Divine is one and indivisible; but their
creation must be out of things created and finited, and so formed that
the Divine can be in them. Because men and angels are such, they are
recipients of life. Consequently, if any man suffers himself to be so
far misled as to think that he is not a recipient of life but is Life,
he cannot be withheld from the thought that he is God. A man's feeling
as if he were life, and therefore believing himself to be so, arises from
fallacy; for the principal cause is not perceived in the instrumental
cause otherwise than as one with it. That the Lord is Life in Himself,
He Himself teaches in John:

As the Father hath life in Himself, so also hath He given to the Son
to have life in Himself (5:26)
He declares also that He is Life itself (John 11:25; 14:6).

Now since life and love are one (as is apparent from what has been said
above, n. 1, 2), it follows that the Lord, because He is Life itself, is
Love itself.

5. But that this may reach the understanding, it must needs be known
positively that the Lord, because He is Love in its very essence, that
is, Divine Love, appears before the angels in heaven as a sun, and that
from that sun heat and light go forth; the heat which goes forth therefrom
being in its essence love, and the light which goes forth therefrom being
in its essence wisdom; and that so far as the angels are recipients of
that spiritual heat and of that spiritual light, they are loves and
wisdoms; not loves and wisdoms from themselves, but from the Lord. That
spiritual heat and that spiritual light not only flow into angels and
affect them, but they also flow into men and affect them just to the
extent that they become recipients; and they become recipients in the
measure of their love to the Lord and love towards the neighbor. That
sun itself, that is, the Divine Love, by its heat and its light, cannot
create any one immediately from itself; for one so created would be Love
in its essence, which Love is the Lord Himself; but it can create from
substances and matters so formed as to be capable of receiving the very
heat and the very light; comparatively as the sun of the world cannot by
its heat and light produce germinations on the earth immediately, but
only out of earthy matters in which it can be present by its heat and
light, and cause vegetation. In the spiritual world the Divine Love of
the Lord appears as a sun, and fro