39. It can be seen from this that the Word in its literal sense is the Word itself, inasmuch as that sense has within it spirit and life — the spiritual sense being its spirit, and the celestial sense its life.

It is as the Lord says: “The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63). The Lord spoke His words for the world’s comprehension, employing their natural meaning.

The spiritual and celestial senses are not the Word apart from the natural sense, the sense of the letter, as they would be like spirit and life without a body, and as said before in no. 33, like a palace lacking a foundation.

8. Since the Word is inwardly spiritual and celestial, it has therefore been written solely in terms of correspondences, and something written solely in terms of correspondences is written in its outmost sense in the kind of style found in the Prophets and Gospel writers. Even though this style seems to be an ordinary one, still it conceals in it Divine wisdom and all the wisdom of angels.