Click here to see List of Swedenborg's Writings

Related Articles:

The surrendered wife and the surrendered husband  || Theistic Psychology || Spiritual Geography--Part 2: Jacob's Ladder and Other Psycho-Dynamic Applications|| Spiritual Geography--Part 1-- Graphic Maps of Consciousness for Regeneration || Dual Citizenship || Spiritual Psychology  || Spiritual Time and Space || De Hemelsche Leer Article || Theistic Science ||
Religious Psychology || Discrete Degrees: A Top Down Presentation (Ian Thompson)

I would be delighted to know your reactions. Please email Leon James

Doctrine of the Wife for Husbands:
A Spiritual Practice for Achieving Unity

by Leon James
Date: 1985-2004

Part 1 of 4

Go to the other parts:
Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 || Part 4

Note:  You may want to consult a more recent version of this essay:
www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/wife.html

1. Prologue

One of the truly remarkable revelations given in the Writings of Swedenborg is that the chief power and dynamic spiritual force that animates the universe is conjugial love, the love that internally binds and unites the minds of a husband and wife. Conjugial love is the chief love that rules all other loves in the universe. Its extending power and influence can be seen in all living species whose survival depends on male-female bonding for propagation. The supremacy of conjugial love expresses God's chief purpose in creating and maintaining the universe. This purpose is to create an ever growing heaven populated by angel couples who were born on some earth, developed a spiritual mind by living rightly, then went on living to eternity in one of the many heavenly societies Swedenborg has witnessed. The afterlife consists of a heavenly life for soul-mates bonded in marriage love between a husband and a wife. This life constitutes the highest human spiritual state and is called heaven. The inhabitants of heaven are all human beings born on one of the many earths in the universe and are called angels in the Writings. We can truly say that this revelation is indeed very good news.

The bad news is that conjugial life does not come to us automatically and that most people on this earth reject it and act against it, especially men. The reason is that we inherit our parents' traits, both physical and spiritual or mental. Scientists today are still unaware of these revelations in the Writings. It is believed that psychological traits are not inherited, and is is not known that psychological traits are spiritual organs constructed out of spiritual substances from the spiritual world. These spiritual substances are carriers of the mental or spiritual traits of the parents. We thus inherit tendencies that oppose conjugial love. One example is people's desire to know more than one partner sexually. Individuals who exhibit this interest out of religious or loyalty reasons, continue to experience the desire for or interest in other partners. But conjugial love does not allow this interest to remain in one's organic constitution, even when it is expressed merely hypothetically or in fantasy.

"This tendency and proneness to evils just mentioned, which is transmitted from parents to their children and descendants, can only be broken down by a person being born anew by the Lord's help, a process called regeneration. Without this not only does the tendency remain unbroken, but it is reinforced by a succession of parents, becoming more prone to evils, and eventually to every kind of evil." True Christian Religion Number 521

Another example of how conjugial love is opposed by inherited traits is our desire for independence based on the false idea that the individual is the unit of life and self-fulfillment. When people marry there is often a feeling of loss of freedom due to the marriage bond. But this idea is false because the bonds of marriage and union create a state of heavenly freedom while what is opposed to this bond is rooted in infernal freedom, which is actually slavery to inherited evil traits. Conjugial love establishes the married couple as the unit of human life giving the partners a wholeness and completeness they do not have outside the union. Independence is incompatible with wholeness, and this reality is resisted by many inherited and acquired traits.

For conjugial love to develop with a couple it is necessary for both husband and wife to overcome the inborn resistance they have for it. Marriage starts in the external mind of the partners through commitment and natural love for one another. This love is not yet conjugial love, which is a spiritual love, and the relationship is not yet a spiritual one, not yet an inner union of minds. In order for conjugial love to develop and grow the husband and wife must change their inner character by defeating all the inherited forces that are opposed to their conjugial union. The Writings teach that only couples who go beyond the external bond of marriage into an internal union of minds, can be together as an angel couple in heaven. It is therefore of the utmost importance to gain the knowledge of how to accomplish this since it doesn't happen automatically even with married individuals who sincerely love each other from a natural love and are devoted to each other from loyalty and friendship.

The Writings show how the natural love between partners joinjed together through an external bond is not spiritually deep enough and as soon as external conditions change and become a challenge, the love seems to evaporate and instead there is anger, rage, resentment, and disdain. Due to the spiritual constitution of men and women, there is more resistance to conjugial love on the part of husbands. Wives are born with the inclination towards marriage and a desire to move on to an internal or spiritual union, as long as the husband also desires it. Husbands on the other hand are born with an inclination for having multiple sexual partners and feel restricted and constricted by the marriage bond to one wife. As a result, husbands need special help in order to be able to overcome their inborn resistance to conjugial love, which is "the love for one of the sex," as the Writings put it, in contrast to the "love of the sex," which is natural, not spiritual, and roving. The Doctrine of the Wife is an expression we use to designate a philosophy of action for husbands based on the Writings of Swedenborg and intended to help them overcome their resistance to conjugial love.

In summary, this doctrine says that the husband's regeneration or self-change efforts, to be successful, must be focused on his wife and through his wife. She is to be accepted as the seeing eye in the marriage relationship and he needs to agree to voluntarily subjugate all of his resistances to her wisdom and inner perception in everything pertaining to their relationship. Swedenborg explains the mechanism whereby the Lord gives a special perception to each wife about her husband's affections and inclinations, knowledge which is not given to the husband so that he is only dimly aware of his own inner tendencies. The spiritual purpose for this difference in perceptual powers is to make the husband's regeneration dependent on his wife. This is called "cleaving to the wife" in the Old Testament and is a Divine commandment enjoined on every husband. Without following this commandment the husband cannot be regenerated, hence cannot have an eternal marriage in heaven with this or any other wife.

"People who are in a state of truly conjugial love look to eternity in their marriage because eternity is inherent in this love. Its eternity is owing to the fact that this love in the wife and wisdom in the husband grow to eternity, and as these grow or progress, the partners enter more and more deeply into the blessings of heaven - blessings which their wisdom and love of wisdom at the same time carry concealed within them. If one were to snatch away an idea of eternity, therefore, or if by some chance it should slip from their minds, it would be as though they were cast down from heaven. (Conjugial Love No. 216)

In people who did not have conjugial love there is no spiritual or inner bond, but only a natural or outer one; and if an inner bond does not hold the outer one in its order and course, it does not last." (Conjugial Love No. 320)

Conjugial union depends therefore on the willigness of the two partners to modify their inner character into a form that makes them fit together spiritually. Since husbands put up more resistance to this union than wives, it is necessary to give them spiritual tools that can overcome their own internal resistance.

  See also The surrendered wife and the surrendered husband

The Doctrine of the Wife is an expression I use to designate a philosophy of doing for husbands based on the Writings of Swedenborg. In essence, this doctrine says that the husband's regeneration efforts, to be successful, must be focused on his wife and through his wife. She is the seeing eye in the marriage relationship and he needs to voluntarily and willingly subjugate all his resistances to her wisdom and inner perception. Swedenborg explains the mechanism whereby God gives perception to each wife about her husband's affections which is not given to the husband. The purpose being, obviously, to make the husband's regeneration dependent on his reliance on the wife. This is called "cleaving to the wife" and is a commandment of God enjoined on every husband. Without this commandment the husband cannot be regenerated, hence cannot have an eternal marriage with this or any other wife.

The above passages clearly shows that the conjugial couple makes up a single angel in that the husband's understanding is no longer united to his own will but to his wife's will. This is the essential idea in the Doctrine of the Wife.

I have discovered that husbands resist the process of conjugial unification with such intensity and ferocity that it appears they are hell-bent and insisting on destroying their union, their marriage, their heavenly place with their wife. This is true whether the husband is a New Church person or not. Even those husbands who love the Writings and consider it the Word, experience this resistance and hatred for conjugial union. They are not aware of it and they deny it, yet it is true. For the wife this is a major problem since by denying their resistance and hatred, husbands neutralize the power of the wife to work towards the conjugial unity. This makes the wife suffer and feel desperate. The Doctrine of the Wife will help husbands become aware of their resistance and hatred of their wife, which at first they deny, but later can acknowledge or confess, then change. Husbands misread and sub-consciously distort the above passage, and many passages like it which are mentioned in this article.

This distortion effect is natural and inherited as well as fully supported and reinforced by a masculinized society and culture.  New Church husbands have a distinct opportunity to liberate themselves from this inheritance, but it takes a method to achieve liberation from it. This method is the Doctrine of the Wife, a collection of commandments given by the Lord to help New Church husbands to achieve conjugial union. Like all genuine Doctrine of the Church, the Doctrine of the Wife is spiritual out of a celestial origin, that is, from the Lord. All Doctrine is given by the Lord to anyone who is willing to receive it. Without genuine Doctrine the Writings cannot be understood.

Many passages discussing men's understanding and women's affections are interpreted as meaning that men should rule over women (or "have predominance") in relation to understanding or intellectual things, since men are born a form of understanding. Women on the other hand, should rule (or "have predominance") in relation to affectional things relating to feelings and love. We must draw a distinction between (a) What the Word says in the literal, and (b) The conclusion we draw from it (=doctrine). In this case the Word says that men are a form of understanding and women a form of love. But the erroneous conclusion based on it says: (c) Therefore in matters of Church governance or some other forensic or intellectual issue, men should predominate; but in matters of domestic order and works of charity or community, women should predominate.

Part (a) is far from Part (c), as is obvious. Part (c) is a political matter and whatever applications one makes to it from Doctrine or the Word is neither the Word nor Doctrine. No part of the genuine Doctrine of the Church or the Word says that men should predominate in Church administration or that women should be excluded from it. The same is true of any human or social area: the workplace, business, commerce, the military, education, science, engineering, parenthood, politics, etc. In short, it is not correct to say that the Word or the genuine doctrine of the Church gives men the Divine right to be have predominance over women in any area whatsoever.

The claim that men should predominate over women in decision making in any area of life is clearly a self-serving distortion of a masculinized society. The distortion guarantees that men will rule over women in everyday life--at home, Church, profession, or in managing things, making the final decisions, prevailing in one's opinion, in short, creating a man's world. Instead, the passage above means that the husband's understanding should unite with the wife's will. The will always rules the understanding, therefore this means that it is the wife's affections that are to unite to the husband's understanding on a voluntary basis by the husband. The affections in the will shape the cognitions in the understanding. Thus it is the feminization of marriage that makes its sanctification--see section below.

Whether you say "ruling over" or "having predominance over" is the same thing in terms of the factual consequences, which is that one rules over the other. But there is an essential difference between ruling over someone by dominance or dominion, and ruling over someone by voluntary submission. For instance, the police force in a democracy rules over the population in daily activities in public places. This is not an oppression as long as the population willingly and rationally submits to the authority of the law and its authorized or licensed agents acting in a lawful manner. But in an autocratic country the law rules by dominion and is hostile to the population. With the Doctrine of the Wife we are dealing with the husband's voluntary and rational submission of his will and judgment to that of his wife. If he refuses, there is nothing she can do since he has the greater power. In other words, the husband must listen and follow the wife's directives in all things in which they have interactions. This voluntary submission means that he has to re-adjust his cognitions to harmonize with her affections. Obviously this must be a voluntary submission on the part of the husband and not a dominion over him by his wife. The latter of course is destructive of the conjugial union.

Note again the passage quoted above: "Every man who is not spiritually rational and moral but only naturally so possesses a coldness towards his wife, such a coldness being inherent in him in his inmost elements.  (...) It comes from a lack of rationality on their part in matters of the spirit. Every man who is irrational in matters of the spirit is inmostly cold to his wife and inmostly warm toward harlots" (CL 294).

New Church people who acknowledge the Writings as the Word may have this temptation: that because they possess the Third Testament or the Latin Word, therefore they are spiritual. However the Writings clearly teach that it is not the Word that makes the Church but the understanding of the Word, and not even this, but the degree to which people live in accordance with their understanding of the Word (AE 356). And so study and expertise in the Writings of Swedenborg does not in itself make us spiritual. Therefore husbands who study the Writings and worship the Divine Human remain natural, hate the conjugial, love the scortatory, and remain unregenerate to the extent that they fail to live their daily life in accordance with their doctrine. The Doctrine of the Wife helps husbands live their life according to their understanding of Divine Truth. We must create adequate and effective doctrine for ourselves so that we may strive to live according to it. It is in this striving alone that the Lord is present by influx. Without this striving the Lord cannot be present in actuality.

See also The surrendered wife and the surrendered husband

2. Preface

In the Heavenly Doctrines known as Swedenborg's Writings, the Lord has given a number of new commandments to husbands who aspire to become one angel with a conjugial wife. The Doctrine of the Wife is a collection of these commandments and its purpose is to assist regenerating husbands in their difficult task. The Doctrine of the Wife is doctrine based on Scripture because it is a list of items collected and extracted from the Word. The Doctrine of the Wife is not an opinion statement or philosophy but Divine Wisdom as received in revelation through illustration from the Lord. The Doctrine of the Wife is an ever expanding body of knowledge, even to infinity and eternity. Countless generations of regenerating husbands will contribute to it through the expansion and deepening of our relationship to the Lord. Through it conjugial love will return to this earth and the societies of earth will return to a state of civilized paradise. This new state of culture and consciousness will be higher than all the preceding states of humanity. This is the Lord's deep desire--as He has revealed it to us in the Writings.

The future of humanity thus depends on the success of husbands each learning to conjoin to his wife on the internal plane of the mind. This internal conjunction is called conjugial love and is the basis of all other loves in the universe. All other loves are derivative of this one great love. But the husband cannot from his own self conjoin to his wife in an internal way. He appears to be able to do this in the external mind, but he cannot do anything at all in the internal mind for he cannot see the internal mind. It is closed to his conscious awareness while he is still in the early stages of regeneration. Only the angels inflow into this internal mind but not the husband's own consciousness or effort. By acknowledging the Doctrine of the Wife, and then striving to follow it, each husband is spiritually empowered by the Lord to overcome himself and, to enthrone the wife. To enthrone the wife means to conjoin his affections with his wife's affections. This can be done only by loving her affections, and that means following her will, for the will does what the affection loves. Hence the Lord gave husbands a long list of commandments to follow in order to allow them to achieve this internal union, each with their wife. The Doctrine of the Wife is not only a collection of these commandments but an exposition of them to the best of our current understanding.

Here are some examples of conjugial commandments for husbands:

(1) All human development is in relation to marriage (see CL 191), therefore unmarried men are to be considered "pre-husbands" in the sense we think of "preschool" as a state that prepares for the real school. The curriculum in biology and psychology, for instance, needs to introduce all concepts and goals as a hierarchy with the top of it always being the conjugial couple.

(2) Husbands are wiser and more spiritual than unmarried men (see CL 199). The Lord's commandment in the Old and New Testaments that a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, means that the man should dethrone his own affections ("father and mother") and enthrone his wife's affections in his own mind, thus to "cleave" unto her (see CL 194).

(3) Women's intelligence is like the Lord's intelligence, but men's intelligence is not (CL 218). Women's intelligence, like the Lord's, is "modest, gracious, peaceable, compliant, soft and gentle," while men's is "critical, rough, resistant, argumentative, and given to intemperance."

(4) Conjugial love is the state of internal union between husband and wife and it is achieved when they will that their two lives shall become one life (see CL 215). Conjugial love is a biological growth process that is achieved when the wife's affections are joined to the husband's cognitions, that is, the husband's cognitions are joined to the wife's affections. This is not  an automatic growth process that comes with living together. It must be willed by both partners. The husband must will to conjoin his own cognitions to his wife's affections. This is not easy to achieve and requires persistent effort into which the Lord's power can inflow and achieve the union. The husband can overcome his resistance entirely if he is willing to follow this one rule on a daily and regular basis: When his wife expresses her affections in the form of a direct request or an implied one, the husband has only these replies to give and follow:

• Yes.
• O.K.
• That's right.
• I will.

And never anything more than that, for it is always defensive and disagreeable to the wife's affections.

(5) If marriage remains external or fails altogether, it is always due to the husband's resistance and hatred of conjugial love (see CL 216-217). Women never cease their striving to conjoin internally to their husbands. There are women in hell of course, and we get to know the character of many through Swedenborg's discussions with them. They have revealed that they abandoned their striving for conjunction only after their husbands treated them cruelly and without love on a long term basis, even to their whole life together. The women then chose to protect themselves and fight back by learning the art of controlling and enslaving their men through seduction and other subtle means. But they would not have done this if their husbands had treated them decently.

(6) To the husband's sensual consciousness, which is that of the external mind, the wife appears as an object of sexual desire. He imagines that the desire is from himself and that she is its object. But when a husband's rational consciousness is awakened in his internal mind, he can see that the wife is not the object but the source of his desire (see CL 221-223). If you remove the wife's influx of sexual desire into her husband, the husband loses all feeling and interest for the female sex. This secret is kept by wives since they can notice that the man is made impotent and turns away when he experiences the woman's love entering him. But after they are conjoined in the internal mind, the wife shares all her feelings and expresses all her emotions without fear or ill effect on the husband.

(7) Conjugial love grows biologically through repeatedly going through these four conjoining steps on a daily and hourly basis:

• Step 1: The wife acts. She reveals her affections to her husband in the form of a direct or implied request.
• Step 2: the husband receives. He wills himself to love her affection, and by this, he receives it, that is, conjoins his cognitions to it. Her affection now is as-if his own.
• Step 3: the husband reacts. He says one or more of these four things:  Yes.  O.K.  That's right.  I will.
• Step 4: the wife reacts to the husband. She feels his reaction of conjunction as her bosom delight (see CL 293-294).

This commandment says that the husband must strive constantly to build up the network of conjoining between his cognitions and his wife's affections. Think about muscle building exercises,  how we repeat the same movement in series or sets during one workout session. Muscle tissue is built up, fiber by fiber, molecule by molecule, with each repetition of a movement. In a similar manner the husband builds up the fibers of conjunction with his wife with the series and sets of repetitions on a daily basis, even an hourly basis or more.  Here is a common example every man can relate to:

Many many times my poor wife tried to tell me that I talk to her defensively. A family trait, she added, to spurn me on to insight. For years, yea-- decades, my response was to deny that I was defensive. Each time we went through this routine, the conjugial separation she felt was  made more painful and desperate. What could she do to break down this wall of blindness and denial? She was getting so tired. She was getting no relief, year after year. At last the Doctrine of the Wife happened in my life. The Lord showed me in illustration while reading the Word that Hearken Unto Sarah was a commandment. Later I was able to see the biological perspective on the Doctrine of the Wife. That's when my regeneration really started showing results. For a long time I merely was able to compel my external behavior, putting on  a pleasant expression on my face and compelling my mouth to express the opposite of the defensive and offensive things I thought and felt whenever she was in my face and not budging an inch. She would never never compromise.

At first my wife was cowed into silent and passive acceptance of my affections. She loved my cognitions and instantly and constantly conjoined herself with them, making them as-if her own. She saw and understood what I saw and understood about anything and everything I had an interest in. She was my cognitive clone. But she was more than this for she had her own cognitive mind and she deftly used my cognitions in all situations, far surpassing me in many kinds of things. I admired her. I was not jealous of her. I felt superior and inferior to her. But she did not love my affections.

And I thank the Lord for that. She battled my affections fiercely for years. She tried to show me that my affections were not mine but instilled in me by my family and upbringing. All this happened before I met her. Now that I married her, she argued, I was supposed to abandon my family affections and espouse hers. then we can make a true couple. I went along with this idea philosophically, but not actually. At last the Lord sent the Doctrine of the Wife. Now I was able to see the many commandments the Lord gives in the Writings. Eventually I was able to accept, love, and promote the idea of the Doctrine of the Wife. I know that my wife is appreciative. I no longer make her cry on a regular basis! From the cold frozen tundra where I made a house for her, I brought her away from the North  and built a house in the East where we sojourn happily towards the real paradise of internal conjugial union. This is the house of the Doctrine of the Wife.

Here is another common example. Remember the four steps of forming a conjugial fiber:

• Step 1: The wife acts. She reveals her affections to her husband in the form of a direct or implied request.
• Step 2: the husband receives. He wills himself to love her affection, and by this, he receives it, that is, conjoins his cognitions to it. Her affection now is as-if his own.
• Step 3: the husband reacts. He says one or more of these four things:  Yes.  O.K.  That's right.  I will.
• Step 4: the wife reacts to the husband. She feels his reaction of conjunction as her bosom delight (see CL 293-294).

Here is a third example:

Women have a perception of truth that is more immediate than that of men, whose understanding in comparison is laborious, even pompous. So for women I want to state what is the Doctrine of the Wife in a nutshell (men will need the whole article to understand it, let alone accept it). It is this:

Even though men are born understandings and receive wisdom from the Lord, they cannot hold on to this wisdom or make it their own, unless and until they love their wife's judgment above their own judgment. The husband's wisdom, when genuine, is to know this. The husband's conjugial love is to love this.

The reason for this is that the wife's wisdom is inmost and celestial, from the Lord. The wife's conjugial love is to love the husband's wisdom to the extent it is genuine. Until the husband accepts the Doctrine of the Wife, he is in the delusion that he has genuine understanding of his own, from the Lord, independently of the wife.

This delusion is confirmed by doctrinal heresies they fabricate from the literal of the Writings. In this state of mind they discriminate against women, discount their judgment, and abuse them. This they refuse to recognize. Thus they are trapped. The Doctrine of the Wife for Husbands is my way of sharing with them what I have learned and what I was given to discover. In this way I invite all husbands to follow the practices enjoined by the Doctrine of the Wife so that they may have conjugial love, and thus eternal union with their wife.

Wives who read the Doctrine of the Wife for Husbands will experience a deep joy and renewed hope that their dearest longing is not a fiction but a Divine reality that awaits them.

3. Feminizing the Marriage is Sanctifying It

The expression "feminization of the Church" is usually taken in a pejorative sense. We need to reclaim this word in its good sense, and this is done through the Doctrine of the Wife. Through this perspective marriage becomes feminized in the mind of husbands. When this occurs, the feminization of marriage has taken place, and this is synonymous with the sanctification of marriage. Marriage is sanctified by the husband in his internal mind when he acknowledges, confirms, and lives in accordance with the Doctrine of the Wife. Marriage is the state of growth between a wife and a husband. There are two phases to this growth, external and internal, or, growth in the external mind and growth in the internal mind. In the external mind, marriage is masculinized and in society this is equivalent with the notion that this is a 'man's world.' But in the internal phase which comes next, marriage is feminized by the husband through living the Doctrine of the Wife.

The commandment for husbands to "leave mother and father" means to abandon loyalty and love for masculinized truth, and the commandment to "cleave unto the wife" means to conjoin himself in all things with the wife's affections. In this way they achieve the state of "one flesh" which means of one mind, which is the mind of an angel. This is composed of the wife's affections conjoined with the husband's cognitions, thus making one angelic mind out of a man and a woman. This conjoined mind is the highest state provided by the Lord for humans and in this state we are truly human, immortal and in perfect health, ecstatically happy, fully rational, loving and compassionate, creative and skillful to the extreme in all things. This is the angelic state, and it is created when the husband loves his wife's affections and adjusts his own cognitions to harmonize with the wife's affections. This is his striving in feminizing the marriage and which the Lord rewards by creating the perfect angelic mind out of the two imperfect individuals.

The idea that the feminization of marriage is its sanctification may appear surprising at first. Even more surprise is generated if we say that the feminization of the Church is its true and genuine sanctification. We can say in general that the feminization of society is its salvation, and universally we can say that the feminization of the universe is God's plan in creation. You can confirm this principle from many things written in the Writings. Let me mention just a few examples.

Divine Truth of the highest kind is represented by Sarah, Wives, Virgins, and so on. Divine Truth of the lower kind is represented by men, boys, kings, and so on. The Church and the Word  is also represented by women, maidens, brides, and so on. The Word describes women's intelligence as being like the Lord's intelligence--"modest, gracious, peaceable, compliant, soft and gentle," but the intelligence of men is described as "critical, rough, resistant, argumentative, and given to intemperance" (see(CL 218). A man is constructed biologically as the inverse of a woman since woman is interior truth covered over with love while man is love covered over with exterior truth. The Writings also teach that interior is always superior and more spiritual than exterior in all things. Clearly then, a woman's intelligence is more spiritual and celestial than a man's intelligence. But we know that the Lord's purpose in creating and maintaining the universe is to populate the heavens from individuals born on earths. The heavens vary in accordance with genius, that is, distance from the Lord's Mind or Proprium--which is His Character and Personality. Regeneration consists in loosing our own proprium and living as if from the Lord's Proprium. This means abandoning the external masculinized truth and entering existence into the internal feminized truth. The feminized truth is like the truth of the Lord's Own Proprium which we are to take on and in which we are to live. Our affections as husbands must be placed below the affections of our wife because her intelligence is higher than our intelligence and this higher intelligence can conjoin only with feminine affections, not masculine.

Passages such as the above are seized upon by our external masculinized mind which wants to hold on to the idea that intelligence is the arena of men while feelings is the arena of women. By this they mean that men are ahead of women in intelligence and wisdom while women are ahead of men in love and affection. In this way they mean to turn the Doctrine of the Wife upside down and make it into a non-genuine union made by man, not by the Lord. The union the man wants to make is the adjunction together of man's intelligence with woman's affectional predisposition. This is not a true marriage and adjunction does not constitute conjunction. The passage above, and all others like it, refer to EXTERNAL states of marriage. Internal states are the reverse, as you can see in this passage.

This passage has four sentences which I marked from (a) to (d) in order to consider them each in turn. Sentence (a) specifies the "essential" or inmost difference between man and woman. Note that this inmost difference constitutes a union. No union is possible between alike and alike for that yields only an external adjunction or co-location. Note that in order to create a structural union there must be a particular kind of difference or relation, one that functions as a unitary action like the heart and the lungs in the body. Sentence (a) specifies the structural relation in marriage: femininity consists in elevating masculine wisdom from external to internal, or, from natural-rational to spiritual-rational. A wife imbibes and appropriates her husband's wisdom and then elevates it, that is, makes it interior, and covers it over with feminine love. This is stated in sentence (b).

Note this very important observation: In sentence (b) it is said that the Lord gives the wife conjugial love "through the wisdom of her husband." There are two ways of interpreting the meaning. One is that the wisdom mentioned here is the wisdom of the husband such as it is in the husband. But this is not in accord with the Doctrine of the Wife and its rationale. The other possible meaning is that the wisdom of the husband mentioned here refers to the wisdom of the husband the wife has when she imbibes her husband's wisdom. This means that the wife has conjugial love from the Lord when she unites her current wisdom in her (originally from the husband) with harmonious affections also in her, within which is the love from the Lord.

In this second interpretation it is clear that the wife's intelligence and wisdom is more interior than his, even though her wisdom originates from his. But it is given to the wife to elevate that wisdom from the husband within herself by implanting it in her inner mind where it functions at a more interior level than with the husband where it originated from. This interior truth is represented by Sarah, Abraham's wife. It is celestial truth and is such as the highest angels have. Angelic unity of the married couple thus depends on the husband imbibing the wife's affections and the wife imbibing the husband's cognitions. This process changes the cognitions of the husband and the wife as a gradual and endless process of deeper and richer union. This is not a static process. When the husband imbibes the wife's affections, his cognitions must change accordingly. He gains a deeper wisdom than before. When a wife imbibes her husband's cognitions, her affections become more sublime as indicated by greater beauty and more glorious femininity. The more they love each other's reciprocity, the more they conjoin in deeper unity. And this to eternity. What an amazing and wonderful reality! This is indicated in sentence (d).

Sentence (b) also states that the Lord gives the husband wisdom according to his "reception" of wisdom. What is the measure of his reception? Not his knowledge and intelligence, but the life he conducts according to these. Which means the kind of affections he favors. The Lord is instructing us that if we husbands favor the affections of our wife, then it means that we are receptive of His wisdom. Then He can give us that wisdom, and more of it. We become more wise as a husband only by living what we know, and this means doing the work of charity, starting especially with the wife, who is the neighbor in the first place, before all other neighbors. By loving the affections of our wife, affections which she has from the Lord, we are living what we know and understand from the Word. We are then receptive to the Lord's wisdom. As we receive deeper wisdom from the Lord, our wife imbibes it, elevates it in her interior mind, and receives new deeper and more genuine conjugial love from the Lord. The husband now can imbibe her new affections--and the cycle of union continues to grow forever.

To imbibe the wife's affections and to favor them means that the husband must never disagree and always agree with his wife's requests in all things.

See also The surrendered wife and the surrendered husband

4. Heresies Regarding the Husband's Wisdom

The Writings of Swedenborg (1688-1771) contain the greatest scientific revelations ever made to humankind. The center of these revelations is that human emotions and feelings are arranged in a hierarchy from strongest to weakest, and the strongest at the very top is the intense desire to unite in marriage. This state of inner unition between a husband and a wife is the complete and pure human state of life. It is the angelic life of couplehood. This is the life Swedenborg witnessed with thousands of couples with whom he interacted in the spiritual world called the heavens. The married couple is organically united in their spirit body or mind exactly like newly born Siamese twins who are physically joined in the body. The mental state of unition is so real in the afterlife world that married partners appear as one angel from a distance, but then appear as husband and wife when approached by Swedenborg. Without knowing this reality, an inner union between husband and wife cannot be achieved on a conscious basis. Perhaps it can happen at the unconscious level, I don't know. But now look at this:

The above passages clearly show that a union is necessary for the husband to be whole, or for the wife to be whole. The two are singly incomplete, the man lacking the love his understanding needs to be whole, and the wife lacking the understanding her love needs. There is a temptation for husbands to read the above passage and conclude that men are superior to women in understanding the things of everyday life. This I call a doctrinal heresy and the husband must let go of this persuasion, or fail in his attempt to regenerate and become an angel. (See this article for heresies in the New Church)

A sermon by Rev. Geoffrey H. Howard titled "The Transformation of a Man into a Husband and a Woman into a Wife through Marriage" appeared in New Church Life, June 2001 issue, pages 243-248. I will use this sermon to illustrate some doctrinal issues in relation to the Doctrine of the Wife. The point I wish to make is that the literal of the Writings can lead to misconceptions unless contextualized in relation to the Doctrine of the Wife. In other words, articulating the Doctrine of the Wife and applying it to interpret the literal of the Writings avoids the heresy of believing that men are superior to women due to men's wisdom which women cannot have. I believe that this heresy cannot be avoided without the Doctrine of the Wife.

First I note that it is customary to make a statement of denial in relation to the heresy of the superiority of men over women in relation to wisdom. For instance, Rev. Howard states: "It is important to take teachings such as these in their proper context. Some have read into such teachings in Conjugial Love the erroneous notion that masculine virtues are extolled over those of the feminine. Nothing could be further from the truth" (p.244). Nevertheless, this denial appears perfunctory or a mere outward declaration when we examine how this apparent paradox is to be resolved. The apparent paradox is that portions of the literal of the Writings appear to suggest that men are superior to women with respect to wisdom. Rev. Howard refers to some of these, e.g.:

Rev. Howard concludes: "From this we can see that the reception of masculine wisdom depends upon a man's willingness to look to the Lord and shun as sins against the Lord the evils that may tempt him. Thus we can see that a man does not automatically receive wisdom because he is a male. He receives it only by honoring the Lord through living according to His commandments."

This is true. But we need to look at this closely for a serpent may lie hidden under it, like a rock in the desert. We must inquire into this and make it clear: How does a man live according to the Lord's commandments? One might think at first blush that the man has that power from the Lord independently of his wife. Can a husband live according to the Lord's commandments from his efforts apart from the wife or only through his wife? Could it be that the husband cannot follow the Lord's commandments unless he does so through his wife? This would appear to be so when considering Rev. Howard's description of the wife:  "A woman too is born with the potential for receiving wisdom, but in her case the wisdom she receives partakes more of love and of perception. She is gifted with the potential of elevating her will into the heat of heaven above what is possible with men" (p.245).

Rev. Howard: "Feminine wisdom, or perception, does not easily lend itself to description because it is of a more interior nature than is the wisdom given to a man" (...) They are entirely different in quality and nature, yet complementary to each other" (p.245).

This is true, and yet there is a temptation hidden in it. It seems to me that it is not enough to say (a) that masculine and feminine wisdom are different; and (b) that they are complementary. This is not enough. A conclusion must follow: (c) Therefore the husband should elevate the wife's judgment above his own. This is the Doctrine of the Wife.

Without this conclusion, the literal of the Writings is misperceived. The husband's wisdom may indeed be elevated even to the highest heaven, but he cannot appropriate it to himself. His wisdom falls back quickly to the level of his affections, which are in hell. The Writings make this comparison: "He is also like an adulterer who hides a harlot in a room below, and in turn ascends to the highest story of his house, and there in the presence of his wife talks wisely with visitors about chastity, and again steals away from the company and satiates his lust with the harlot below" (TCR 590). This comparison is said about every husband. Husbands can elevate their intellect into doctrinal things of the Word while they are studying and applying themselves piously. Then they descend from the lofty heights and interact with their wife, abusing them, discounting their intellect, holding the wife's judgment as nothing in comparison to their own. And this is done repeatedly, daily. Thus there is no regeneration possible for them.

Rev. Howard: "No wife can love a proud or conceited husband. (...) The attraction he feels [as he is drawn to her by love] has the effect of subduing his proprial pride. (...) Through the influence of her love his mind becomes elevated and aspires to a new idealism that no longer looks inward. He feels an incentive to live in a manner worthy of her love and respect. Through her influence he is withdrawn from his fallen proprium. By living a principled life of service to his wife, family and others, he begins to receive a degree of wisdom which will draw the affections of his wife" (p.247).

This is certainly true. And yet there is danger lurking in this truth that needs to be addressed by every husband. The above description is standard fair for what is called BROWN temptations (see part 2). Note what the paragraph says: the husband aspires to a new idealism as he strives to become worthy of her love and respect. Through this process he enlarges or deepens his wisdom, and this will draw his wife's affections to him. And then he can continue a new round, ever higher or deeper into conjugial love and unity. To me this seems to leave the main point unattended, which is that husbands CANNOT improve their wisdom through this process of self-motivated desire to be worthy of their wife's still greater love. This is not possible, no more than the proverbial lifting yourself through the boot straps.

The only way a husband can improve his wisdom is by elevating his wife's judgment above his own. This is the Doctrine of the Wife. Clearly the wife's wisdom is higher and superior to the husband's wisdom. This is not recognized by Rev. Howard, as can be seen from this:  "A husband is totally dependent upon the wife for love. Apart from feminine love, men feel little inspiration to seek things of wisdom." This is another standard version of BROWN temptations, described in Part 2. In this mental state wives are relegated to a ceremonious role, yes an essential role it is declared, but still not a central role, still not a PRIMARY role. This is refused by the husband. The husband will acknowledge that the wife has an essential role to play in the union. And this role is relegated to the "affectional side" of things. Here, Rev. Howard says "dependent on the wife for love" and "inspired by the wife to new heights of wisdom" etc. The central fact remains: It is believed that the husband improves and grows in his wisdom from the Lord in accordance with his "following the commandments."

It is believed that if the husband applies himself to following the commandments, his wisdom will grow from the Lord, and the wife will be able to love his wisdom even more, and thus the couple is conjoined. But this is the WRONG order! It is NOT the case that the husband gains wisdom implanted from the Lord BY HIMSELF, that is, apart from his wife, through his own independent effort and striving to follow the Lord's commandments. This is a FANTASY as I have discovered.

There is only one way the husband can grow in wisdom, and that is through receiving it from the Lord. True. But the Lord can only give as much as the husband can receive--this is recognized by everyone. Hence the question is: When can the husband receive more interior truths or deeper wisdom from the Lord? NOT as he strives independently to follow the Lord's commandments and receiving deeper wisdom which she can then love and conjoin with. There is no deeper wisdom for her to conjoin with just because the husband strives to improve by following the commandments. Striving to improve is not sufficient for the husband to receive more interior truths from the Lord. Why? Because this striving is from his proprium. His only salvation is to love the wife's judgment above his own, to love the wife's wisdom above his own. This is the Doctrine of the Wife.

Finally, Rev. Howard writes: "Rational wisdom, on the other hand, is gained through study and application to intellectual pursuits. These have the effect of elevating the mind of a husband into higher light" (p.248).

I have discovered that rational wisdom does not develop in this way because such study and scholarship only yields knowledges and scientifics about the literal of the Word. Instead, rational wisdom develops as the husband DRAWS OUT or EXTRACTS doctrine from the literal through enlightenment or illustration from the Lord (see this article on De Hemelsche Leer). It is shown in the article that this illustration is proportional to the husband's willingness to undergo spiritual and celestial temptations. These temptations cannot be undergone by the husband alone, but only through the wife, and only to the extent that one favors the wife's wisdom over one's own. This doesn't mean that the wife knows more than the husband about doctrinal things and so the husband takes lessons from the wife. It means that whatever doctrine the husband can extract from the literal, his understanding of it, and then his life according to it, is proportional to his seeing the doctrine in himself, in his life. This is the essence of illustration. For a husband, his wife is the all in all of his temptations, hence of his regeneration and salvation.

The Doctrine of the Wife explains many things about marriage taken from the Writings of Swedenborg.

5. The Role of the Wife in the Husband's Wisdom

One of the things explained is that the spiritual constitution of men and women is inside out and outside in. This organic difference results in reciprocal roles for unition. Unition would not be possible unless the spiritual organic parts of men and women were reciprocal. Wherever the word "spiritual" is used, you can also think "mental" because the mind is the spirit-body that continues its immortal life in the spiritual world when set free from its connection to the physical body in which it is born and formed through social and natural experiences on earth. The spirit-body, like all things in the spiritual world, is made of spiritual substances from the spiritual world. This spirit-body, called our mind, is connected to the physical body from birth, but is disconnected at death. Then the spirit-body, or mind, that has also grown up as your physical body grew up, is set free, and continues life in the spiritual world, forever. Swedenborg's marvelous revelations includes what he saw in the heavens: married couples, soul-mates to each other, living in eternal joy and bliss in magnificent palaces and peaceful cities.

So now the question is: How do we get there?

And the answer is: BY REGENERATION.

In order to be soul mates in heaven we must develop a character and personality other than what we were born with.

Women understand this rational truth and live it, but men do not.

All of this is explained as part of the Doctrine of the Wife for Husbands. We husbands need to be regenerated in an orderly way if we're going to catch up to our wife and be united to her. What is our alternative? The wife is given to us by God, chosen, prepared for us, just the right character, genius, inclination, that suits us husbands. She comes prepared to conjoin herself to our mind, fully, simply, sincerely. She loves us and is devoted to our future together in unity. For this she will fight and suffer and only give up when we make her desperate and abuse her and torture her. Such beasts we are, men, from our birth and inherited inclinations, but also from our spiritual constitution. We must understand this spiritual constitution, and I will spend quite a bit of effort trying to describe our spiritual genes and the course of their development. Wives do not need all this intellectual apparatus. They go straight to the truth and the good. But we men must go the circuitous route. Because we give our inward assent only to that which we understand and find logical. Anything else we reject and turn away from. So I've developed the Doctrine of the Wife that I may myself understand my job as a husband who wants to be a soul mate to my wife in heaven. But because this deals with truth, and truth with love, I cannot but desire strongly to bring this knowledge and understanding to other men. For this is what God intensely longs for, that He may have us as married couples in heaven, eternally united in receiving the endless Divine blessings God longs to bestow upon us. Such is His Great Love for each of us individually!! This is the purpose God had in creating the universe and maintaining it forever. These things we know from the revelations He has given to Swedenborg that we may rationally know who we are in a modern sense.

Women who want to know what is the Doctrine of the Wife only need to skim through this article, looking especially at the diagrams and charts. There is no need to study the details for themselves, though there may be some benefit in terms of learning how to argue with the husband when he is in a recalcitrant mode towards her wisdom and perception. As soon as the husband declares himself for the Doctrine of the Wife, which he will when moved by love and fear, he will make claims that he is following its precepts and guidelines. But he is not. He only wants to think that he is.

Then it might be useful for the wife to know some things about the Doctrine of the Wife from this article, and to throw it up at the husband's face. What about this, my husband? Did you not declare that you are for it? Then why are you behaving as if you're against it? And what about that? etc.

Husbands will then feel the urge to rebel, to resist, to protest, to complain, to withdraw. But the wife, strengthened by the knowledge of truth and reality, will remind him this:

My husband, you know you cannot save yourself by yourself. You know God has appointed me to lead you to heaven. For this God gives me perception to see your inmost inclinations, and God gives me wisdom to defeat the pack of delusions and lies that you've surrounded yourself with. You have no choice. I'm waiting. God is waiting. Get with it. Give up your pride and arrogance and listen to me. Do as I ask. etc. etc.

This is the Doctrine of the Wife--talking sense into men that they may enjoy eternal conjugial bliss.

Swedenborg coined a new word for marriage, which he also used as the title of one of his books:  CONJUGIAL LOVE. He explained that the extra "i" added to the normal word "conjugal" was to mark a new rational and spiritual idea that was unknown before to most people. This is the idea that marriage is social, legal, and religious on the outside but spiritual on the inside. The outside aspects of marriage are called by the usual word "conjugal" but the inside spiritual aspects are called "conjugial." God intends that we first form, build, develop the outside conjugal aspects of marriage, and then when this is solidly established, that we form, build, and develop the inside conjugial aspects.

Unity is to be achieved in both outside and inside aspects. Then the marriage is truly conjugial, blessed, and eternal. But the fact is that outside unity can be achieved and then never go on to inside unity. Spiritually this is a disaster. First, these two partners will not be in heaven together. Second, the woman will likely be a wife in heaven to another man, but the husband is likely to be a devil in hell. Of course both men and women populate the vast hells Swedenborg was allowed to visit. And yet it is the case that women are much more committed to achieving inner unity than men, and the women who honestly strive to achieve this, will obtain it, if not with this man, then with another in heaven. This is important to remember when a woman feels discouragement because her husband resists the work it takes to achieve inner unity. All is not lost, and though it's not possible to know this fully in advance, she can trust that God will provide her with her true soul mate in the afterlife. This is why a wife ceaselessly continues her efforts to unite herself to her husband, externally and internally, despite all his efforts to discourage her.

And yet, at some point, a husband will be inspired to give up his resistances and will make an honest effort to fulfill his side of the bargain, namely, to conjoin himself to her from his efforts and struggles against his inborn character and personality, all of which resists that union and tries to destroy it. to help the husband in his fight and struggle, I have made up these charts that are based on my understanding of what the Writings say about how husbands are regenerated. It describes the steps we must go through that are universal to all husbands. These charts are used for many topics, not just marriage. By studying these charts you gain a language of thinking that is rational. It can help you develop a philosophy of doing as a husband, but other things as well--in your projects, your science, your job, your parenting, your citizenship, your hobbies, your sports, everything, since all things obey the same spiritual laws. Knowing the system of progression called "correspondences" gives you a window to reality, how God operates on the world and on people, and especially, why--out of Love and Wisdom. This is a rational universe because it is created and upheld by truth, and this is rationality itself. To understand reality we must think rationally. And this is from God alone who is rationality itself. God has given us the Second Advent in the Writings of Swedenborg. The Doctrine of the Wife is a philosophy of life and a science of living extracted from those revelations.

6. The Basic Map for Understanding Regeneration of Marriage (Matrix 1)

Matrix 1 below is a chart similar in syntax to previous charts that describe the six degrees of consciousness as we are regenerated (see for example article 1 and article 2). The first column shows the six steps in progression and they are color coded as the others. The advantage to this harmony in all the charts is that the color segments are cumulative so that if you're analyzing say a YELLOW segment for one topic, you can apply to it all the YELLOW segments relating to the other topics. This enriches your perspective on any one topic and allows for the extraction of new knowledge not anticipated in any one chart alone. The second column lists the historical churches that correspond to each of the six steps of marriage unity. This is possible because history recapitulates biography, and vice versa, both following the same spiritual laws that govern all development in the universe. These spiritual laws are known as the laws of correspondence and degrees and they are revealed and explained in the Writings of Swedenborg. All regeneration must go through the six degrees of consciousness, each degree being an organic function in the human mind arranged from highest to lowest. These distinctions will be discussed later in the article with the help of visual diagrams.

For now you can inspect the chart below, after which you can read the explanations that follow. This will give you a basic understanding of the six steps every husband must go through in order to become conjugial and be able to live in heaven to eternity with his wife.

The chart above (matrix 1) lists the six main themes that correspond to each period of marriage unity. They are:

• Romance in the Infancy period of marriage (WHITE)
• Dominance in the Childhood period of marriage (YELLOW)
• Equity in the Adolescence period of marriage. (GREEN)

These first three phases are called the three "descending steps" because we start our journey being inspired by celestial angels who are the highest, then switch company to the spiritual angels who are in the middle heaven, and finally for our third descending steps, we are in company with the natural angels who dwell in the first or lowest heaven. Our regeneration is thus furthered by the succession of angels who are in higher consciousness than we are. In the afterlife we will dwell in the heaven corresponding to the highest degree of consciousness that has been activated in our regeneration until the moment of our death in the physical body. Upon immediate resuscitation into our spirit-body, we come prepared to dwell in one of the three heavens, and if not suitable for those, we sink into the lower places of consciousness called hells and dwell there. It is crucial therefore that we continue our regeneration while we still live in the physical body.

Following the third descending step we are faced with the inversion point. This represents the beginning of our spiritual life and occurs as soon as we acknowledge God's existence and His supernatural powers. It is not enough to acknowledge God from the religion we were born into. We must make this acknowledgment as an adult from our own thinking and philosophy within our private thoughts. this begins our adult relationship to the Divine and the operation of the Divine in our lives through our voluntary cooperation. God is omnipotent and rules the lives of all, the pious and the atheists alike. But in order to be regenerated and progress to a heavenly consciousness, that is, acquiring a consciousness that can dwell in heaven, we must reform our character seemingly from our own efforts and struggles. God cannot do this for us using His omnipotence for then it would not be our victory, our consciousness, our character, and we could not live as a human, only as a robot. And so this cooperation and struggle is necessary.

Marriage partners become united and heavenly to the extent they are regenerated. Without being regenerated, unity in marriage between two individuals is not possible. The process of regeneration is organic involving spiritual substances forming the mind as it is regenerated. This formation is permanent or eternal. The formation can only be done while we live in the physical body, and once we pass on and are resuscitated in our spirit-body, we can no longer regenerate in new areas but only in the areas we have begun regeneration in our physical body. We then continue with our regeneration to eternity, improving endlessly on the areas we brought with us and form our spirit-body. The chart above helps you understand how the regeneration of your character within the marriage, will form you and your wife into a single angel. Only in the state of an angel are we fully human beings and every angel is made of a husband and a wife. This is one of the most amazing and welcome revelations of the Second Advent (that is, the Writings of Swedenborg).

In order therefore to be an angel in heaven and live in eternal joy and blessedness as married partners, we must go through the steps of regeneration, of which there are six, each corresponding to a degree of consciousness in our mind that must be activated at the beginning of each period, then grown to fullness before we can move on to the next period of progression.

The last of the three steps are called the three ascending steps because we start with the natural angels in the young adulthood period (BLUE consciousness), move on to the spiritual angels in the adulthood period of marriage, and finally we are back with the highest or celestial angels in the old age period of marriage. Of course these periods do not necessarily correspond to specific ages. Some couples never reach the young adulthood period of their regeneration while others could reach the old age period of marriage while they are still young. These things depend on individual differences and variations. But the progression is the same for everyone, and the content of the activities that must take place at each period are also the same for everyone since these are dictated by spiritual laws. According to the chart, the main theme for the three ascending steps are Surrender, Specialization, and Unity. Let us now discuss the derivative themes for each period so that you can come to recognize them in your own life and the lives of others.

The first three steps called descending are Romance, Dominance, and Equity. The last three steps called ascending are Surrender, Specialization, and Unity.

The three descending steps are totally different from the three ascending steps in a crucial way. The three descending steps constitute the formation of our sensuous consciousness; the three ascending steps constitute the formation of our rational consciousness. These are described in previous articles (e.g., article 1 and article 2).   Here is the chart again, so you can have a second look at it:

Sensuous consciousness is something that we acquire automatically in the process of our growth as social individuals. We are mostly unaware of this process and it is governed and determined by God's Divine work within each individual, no different from the constant growth of a plant or the formation of a diamond mine in the ground. We become conscious of our actions and thoughts, but very selectively. We know very little about our feelings, especially deeper feelings and motives. So the formation of our sensuous consciousness is without a conscious "doctrine" or understanding. But this is then reversed for the three ascending steps.

The three ascending steps are the formation of our rational consciousness. We build upon our analytic judgement and reasoning so that we are conscious of living according to our chosen values and lifestyle. This is the true human way of living. Acting automatically out of sensuous consciousness is the animal way of living. As humans we have an external mind, like the animals, and an internal mind, which the animals don't have. this internal mind is rational and animals do not have a rational mind. animals get my with their natural mind only, and it is capable of learning and adapting, but it is not capable of rational consciousness. This requires a human organ called the internal mind. The internal mind grows within the external mind by means of rational truth from God. Animals, or people, when we are merely thinking in our natural mind, are incapable of receiving the implantation of rational truth. When such truth is presented to our natural mind, it laughs and mocks it as something not serious or real. And yet we are given the power from the Divine operating within us to acknowledge a rational truth as logical when we we are willing to make certain assumptions.

One of these essential assumptions is that God exists and this is His reality. When we are willing to make this acknowledgment, we are receiving the implantation of a rational truth. To the extent that we nurture this seed by loving it and setting our thinking and feeling according to it, we make it grow in us. Our rational consciousness grows more and more with new truths. These truths are provided to each of us by the Divine. The most common way is through reading and being taught, which always only represents the implantation or conception phase. In order for a successful birth to occur we must nurture and love the developing rational idea and make use of it in our thinking and planning and acting.

The three ascending steps develop our rational consciousness when rational truths are taken into our mind and there we reflect and ruminate upon them, and how they apply to us and the environment. The original source of rational truths is Divine revelation in Sacred Scripture which every religion receives from God through an appointed prophet or revelator. It is not possible to discover a single rational truth by ourselves, from our own intelligence. This is because our own intelligence is entirely formed by our sensuous consciousness and this is restricted to physical phenomena entering the senses and various abstract ideas based on these. We could perhaps imagine fantastic worlds that we can labeled spiritual or rational, but they would merely be fantasies based on sensuous consciousness. Rational ideas can enter only from the spiritual world where they exist from the Divine Wisdom or Rationality Itself. And when these rational truths are appropriated to us through a life according to them, we are angels, and yet not a single of those truths is our own. Swedenborg witnessed an amazing phenomenon: When some angels suddenly got the idea that a truth is their own, they sank down, out of heaven, and into the spiritual world below where they were tormented by evil spirits until ready to be readmitted into their heaven when they gave up the idea that any truth is their own. But this is the very reason why truths save us: Because they are not us but the Divine with us, and this conjunction with the Divine is what allows God to bestow immortality upon us. If these truths were ours, they would not conjoin us to the Divine and we would not be immortal human beings.

You can see the descriptions given in the chart for the three descending steps--Romance, Dominance, and Equity. These are developmental steps in marriage that build up our sensuous consciousness. Once this is built up, we reach the inversion, then we take the last three steps which are ascending steps of rational consciousness. 

Let's look at each of the six step separately.

The first descending step is called Romance and is described as a honeymoon period in the marriage during which the couple receives a celestial environment from the angels of the highest heaven who are then with our external mind. It is called an "unmerited advance" because it is innocent, heavenly, and inmost joy that only the highest angels can appropriate. But we are given to share in this unmerited advance just for so long as the honeymoon period lasts. This varies. With some it might last weeks and months, with others only days. It is marked by mutual involvement and passionate attraction. The two partners cling to each other and are disturbed when separated. They act and feel as if they want to conjoin and become one body, one mind. This is a recapitulation of or correspondence to the Infancy period of the human race called the Adamic Church, also the Golden Age of the human race. It is described in the Writings of Swedenborg who visited the heavenly inhabitations of these most ancient peoples who lived on this earth during the cradle of civilization. But this period is then consummated and we must take the second descending step in order to continue with our regeneration within the marriage.

There are bad things that also happen during this period: Rejection. This is the end of the romance. The dynamics will be discussed in a section below as the argument unfolds. For now, let's step through the remaining steps.

The second descending step is called by the theme of Dominance (YELLOW consciousness) and corresponds to the Childhood period of the marriage. The two partners are working out the details of their relationship as a couple, negotiating the power and status differences that will govern their behavior, rights, privileges, prerogatives, and expectations. This is a period during which they carefully monitor each other's closeness and loyalty to one another. There is an attempt on the part of the husband to dominate the wife through his shows of affections, physical and verbal, and through gifts and special treats. The wife is drawn to the husband and desires conjunction more and more, but the husband withdraws from her attempts and counteracts them, defeats them. He sees the relationship as a struggle for maintaining his independence within the rules of the marriage.

Thus the husband has a separatist motivation and inclination while the wife has a conjoint motivation and inclination. This brings them into conflict and competition. Yet they continually rededicate themselves to the partnership, drawn together by parenting and joint domestic management. At last this step is also resolved and consummated. The couple can go on the third and final descending step.

The third descending step is called Equity.

This GREEN consciousness develops through the furtherance or presence of the natural angels who inflow into our external mind where sensuous consciousness develops. The internal mind has not yet begun to develop, not until the first ascending step is taken after the inversion. Now in the adolescence period of Equity, the partners are striving to achieve a mutually convenient and enjoyable lifestyle that suits them both. They now more than before recognize the socio-legal status of marriages and govern their competitive issues through principles of equity and democracy. Each partner can appeal to their human rights and to the right to be treated fairly. They see their unity in their ability to constitute a functioning, mutually beneficial partnership in which the rights and conveniences of both are respected and cared for. Yet they continue to see themselves as separate individuals in their own right, insist on maintaining a modicum of independence in exclusive non-sexual friendships and recreational activities. However this unity remains an external achievement in the external mind. The time comes when they are ready to face the internal mind and the birth of their rational consciousness. This is possible only with surrendering our lives and our marriage to a higher, supernatural Being, and being willing to be obedient to the rules and commandments of God.

The refusal to cross into BLUE consciousness territory with the help of the natural angels is to run the course of vastation in sensuous consciousness. This consists of becoming abusive to the wife, as explained in the section on temptations below.

It is a rational truth that the same spiritual laws of progression shape evolution, history, and biography. Our individual steps of progression recapitulate at the micro-level and within our lifetime the centuries and millennia of history at the macro-level of evolution. Our progression in regeneration must go through the same six steps as the progression of civilizations. Both civilizations and individuals progress on a path of spiritual truths. These steps have been revealed in Sacred Scripture in every generation. For our modern world of science, democracy, and global communication the Sacred Scripture revelations were given in the Writings of Swedenborg (1688-1771) whose scientifically trained mind and great native genius allowed him to experience the rational world in his sensuous consciousness. This only happens normally when we are disconnected from the physical body by its death. But Swedenborg was given sensuous consciousness of the spiritual or rational world for 27 years and given the mission to record his experiences and make sense of them in a rational and scientific manner. This he did admirably in over 30 volumes of Writings in Neo-Latin that have now been translated in many languages.

So the belief in the existence of God is to believe a rational truth. The belief that God makes revelations is also rational since how else could we obtain these rational truths? It is rational to think that there is a physical world and a spiritual world. It is rational to think that marriage is sacred because instituted by God and commanded in Sacred Scripture. It is rational to believe that God supervises and manages every single detail of our life, otherwise what is the meaning of Omnipotence but an empty promise. And what is the meaning of Omnipresence but an empty word unless it means that God is present with each of us all the time, thus in all our thinking and in all our feeling. The fact is that God is our Divine Therapist and He ceaselessly strives to influence our thoughts and the course of our life so as to improve our lot and bring us into eternal happiness. This is the purpose of our regeneration. Since we are born animalistic and tied to devils in hell, we quickly develop a character that is hardly human, fit only to be an insane devil in hell. This is the testimony of Swedenborg and you need to read the Writings to really see it for yourself. So God must stick with us real close, to the stream of our thoughts and emotions, and bend them as much as we allow it, towards the true and the good. Then, it's up to us to love this truth and use it to change our character, our personality, what we think, how we love. We are responsible for this. This is our part of the bargain. And we accomplish this through the three descending steps followed by the three ascending steps.

The first ascending step is thus called Surrender (BLUE consciousness). Note in the chart that the three ascending steps are listed with a Doctrine that justifies the theme for each step. Doctrine refers to Divine Teaching from revelation or Sacred Scripture. Rational truths about reality and God must come to us through others who know of the revelations and teach them in each generation and in every society. The first step in rational consciousness of the Divine is made through the Doctrine of Fundamentalism. In this state we recognize and acknowledge God's authority over our marriage and we tend to support traditions and religion, of which there are many varieties to choose from. In this mental frame we rely on literalism which is doctrinal understanding that is at the same level as the literal words and sentences of Sacred Scripture or revelation. In this state we acquire persuasions and dogmas from other followers. We also support and identify with a patriarchal social order and symbolism that contains many male prerogatives. Husbands expects wives to obey the literal of Scripture that puts women in an obedient and secondary role to men. This attitude must be consummated and left behind as we make the second ascending step. Unless we move on, we get vastated at the earlier period which means that we falsify the rational truths we receive from the literal wording of Scripture. We then use them to justify our convenience and selfish desire for supremacy, and we lose sight of the truth contained in the revelations. Our regeneration is thus arrested.

The second ascending step is then called Specialization (BROWN consciousness) and involves a step up by switching to the spiritual angels. We now receive a more interior form rational truth called spiritual-rational. In those who recognize the Writings of Swedenborg as the basis of their religion this period can be called "Specialization" in marriage roles. This is based on what the Writings call the Doctrine of the Church and many passages are collected in this state of mind that show the specialization of the roles between women and men. This involvement in collecting and keeping track of passages that prove role specialization is justified as Scriptural and has affinity with the Doctrine of Fundamentalism in the earlier period. Men see the women they're married to as serving a "balancing role" in their lives and families and the Church. The men are opposed to anything that does not maintain strict role differentiation in church activities including worship, instruction and evangelization. Gender roles are worked out and specified in each new social activity or organization. Sprciptural passages from the Writings are always cited to justify these role specifications and statements. Attempts to blur the gender roles are seen as "feminization" threats to the Church and community. New Doctrines based on different passages regarding gender roles are ignored and resisted on various grounds of exegesis.

This period of marriage, though spiritual-rational, also must be consummated because it is opposed to true unity in marriage.

The third ascending step is called Unity (BLACK consciousness) because it is the final step as we reestablish communication with the celestial angels of the third heaven. We were connected to these angels during our WHITE period called ROMANCE, which is when we were truly happy and together as partners who love each other passionately. But very soon, probably too soon for most women, the husband takes his first descending step, and then his second descending step, and then his third, and not until the inversion during his first ascending step, does he begin to look to heaven and the wife's hope returns for the possibility of reestablishing connection with the celestial angels. Then the second ascending step, and the wife's hope grows deeper, but why is she still insecure? This is not yet unity. And so the third ascending step must be taken.

For those who know the Writings of Swedenborg and recognize its Divine authority the final step of regeneration within marriage is the inner UNITY (BLACK consciousness) that comes from practicing the Doctrine of the Wife. Yes, this same Doctrine of the Wife that this article is about. Many who recognize the Writings as Sacred Scripture still resist the idea that the Doctrine we make for ourselves to live the life of our religion, cannot be collected from the literal statements of the Writings. This is precisely what is done in the prior period called the Doctrine of the Church. But as the Writings explain, Doctrine based on the literal statements of Sacred Scripture can easily be heresies of various sorts because the literal of Sacred Scripture contains apparent truths for the sensuous consciousness of the reader. Several such heresies are explained and discussed in a related article.

In the present case, the Doctrine of the Wife is also based on the Writings but brings together different passages than the passages on gender roles in the prior period (BROWN consciousness). It is shown that gender roles are external rather than internal. The internal within the external reverses gender roles and gender symbolisms. This is also recognized in the prior period but the mind does not give assent to their use for role reversal. Partly this is out of fear that something sacred in the Church would be violated, and partly out of resistance to the temptations to be overcome during this period of BLACK consciousness, as will be explained below in the section on temptations in marriage.

But first, we need to go over again the basic components of the chart, this time with a diagram from a slightly different perspective. Diagrams of this type are useful to memorize because they give you a rational system for categorizing your thinking about marriage, regeneration, and the mind of men and women.

7. Comments

End of Part 1

Go to the other parts:
Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 || Part 4

Note:  You may want to consult a more recent version of this essay:

www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/wife.html

Please email Leon James

Related Articles:

The surrendered wife and the surrendered husband  || Theistic Psychology || Spiritual Geography--Part 2: Jacob's Ladder and Other Psycho-Dynamic Applications|| Spiritual Geography--Part 1-- Graphic Maps of Consciousness for Regeneration || Dual Citizenship || Spiritual Psychology  || Spiritual Time and Space || De Hemelsche Leer Article || Theistic Science ||
Religious Psychology || Discrete Degrees: A Top Down Presentation (Ian Thompson)

Back to the Index of Swedenborgian Marriage Handbook for Husbands

Back to Glossary of Swedenborg Related Concepts
Back to Leon James Home Page
Swedenborg Home Page Hawaii

e-mail button