1. The Sacred Scripture, or Word, Is Divine Truth Itself

Everyone says that the Word comes from God, is Divinely inspired, and so is holy. But even so, no one has known before this wherein the Divinity in it lies. For in its letter the Word appears as though written in the ordinary way, in a foreign style, neither as sublime or nor as lucid as writings of the present age seem to be.

As a result, a person who worships nature as God, or in preference to God, and so thinks prompted by self and his own self-interest, and not prompted by heaven in response to the Lord, may easily fall into error regarding the Word, and into scorning it, and when reading it, saying to himself, “What is this? What is that? Is this Divine? Can God, whose wisdom is infinite, speak so? Where is the holiness in it, and what makes it holy, other than some teaching of religion and so conviction?”

5. 1. What the spiritual meaning is. The spiritual meaning is not the sense that shines from the literal one when one is studying the Word and interpreting it in order to confirm some dogma of the church. This sense is the Word’s literal sense. Rather its spiritual meaning is one not apparent in the literal one. The spiritual meaning lies within the literal one, like the soul within the body, like thought within the eyes, and affection within the face, which operate in concert, like cause and effect.

That spiritual meaning is what principally causes the Word to be spiritual, not only for people, but also for angels. Consequently that meaning is the means by which the Word communicates with the heavens.

115. However, because there are some people who assert and have confirmed in themselves that people could have known of the existence of God without the Word, and also of heaven and hell, as well as something of whatever else the Word teaches, and because they consequently weaken the authority and sanctity of the Word, if not by what they say, still at heart, therefore we cannot deal with them from the Word, but in accord with their rational sight. For they do not believe in the Word, but in themselves.

Inquire in accord with your rational sight and you will find that everyone has in him two faculties of life, called his intellect and his will. You will also find that the intellect is subject to the will, and not the will to the intellect. For the intellect only informs and shows the way.

Inquire further and you will find that a person’s will is his native self, that regarded in itself it is nothing but evil, and that it produces falsity in the intellect.

[2] When you discover this, you will see that of himself a person is unwilling to comprehend anything that does not accord with the native character of his will, and that it is impossible for him to do so unless he has some other impetus that causes him to see it.

Prompted by the native character of his will, a person is unwilling to comprehend anything that does not have to do with himself and the world. Anything higher than that is for him shrouded in darkness. So, for example, when he sees the sun, the moon and the stars, if by chance he were to think about their origin, he would be unable to think other than that they came into being by themselves. Could he possibly think more deeply than many of the learned in the world, who, even though they know from the Word of the creation of everything by God, still ascribe it to nature? What then would these same people have thought if they had known nothing from the Word?

[3] Do you suppose that ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and others who wrote about the immortality of the soul arrived at this in the first place on their own? They did not. Rather they learned it from others by its being handed down from people who first knew about it from the Ancient Word.

Writers of natural theology do not derive anything of the kind on their own, either, but only confirm with rational arguments what they know from the church where the Word is found. There may even be some among them who confirm these things and yet do not believe them.