Infancy, Old Age, And How To Unite Goodness and Truth | NCE Spotlight

Featured quotations from Emanuel Swedenborg's Secrets of Heaven:


3304:2


Goodness but not truth is born into humans, with the
result that babies lack any knowledge of truth. Truth has to be
learned and then united with goodness.


3321:3


As a consequence of these facts and others, our earthly self
accepts truth much later and with much more difficulty than our
rational self does. The result is combat, which lasts quite a
long time and does not end until the vessels in our earthly self
for receiving goodness have been softened by inward trial, as
shown above in §3318. Truth is just a vessel for receiving
goodness (§§1496, 1832, 1900, 2063, 2261, 2269), and the
vessel becomes harder the more rigid we are about truth. . .
. The more rigid we are, the heavier the battle, if we are to
be reborn. Accordingly, since this is what happens in the
earthly self to unite truth with goodness there, and it is
accomplished through the struggles of inward trial, the biblical
text repeats I’m worn out.


3254


The reason it is newness or a new stage that old age symbolizes
on an inner level is that angels (the intended audience of the
Word’s inner meaning) have no idea of time. So they know
nothing of time-related concepts such as the different eras of a
person’s life—childhood, youth, young adulthood, full adulthood,
and old age. Instead they replace them all with the idea of
states. For the period of childhood they picture an innocent
state; for the period of youth and young adulthood, a state of
desire for goodness and truth; for full adulthood, a state of
understanding; and for old age, a state of wisdom (§3183). In
old age we pass from temporal concerns to the concerns of
timeless life  and therefore put on a new state. As a
result, old age symbolizes newness.