Building a Spiritual Marriage

An introduction

One of the most important and far-reaching set of new teachings provided by the Writings given through Swedenborg is the explanation of the spiritual basis of the relationship between men and women. Many aspects of these teachings have been lost, the Writings say, since the Golden Age at the dawn of the history of the human race. It is noteworthy that the Bible in general and Christ in particular had relatively little to say about this relationship, a surprising lack in view of its fundamental importance in creation. Furthermore, it appears that some of the things that Christ said have not been properly understood.

The resulting lack of accurate knowledge about the underlying spiritual difference between men and women, and hence the spiritual basis of their relationship with each other, has had enormous and tragic results, ranging from the abuse of women in a variety of forms through history to a near-total loss of understanding by even the best-intentioned people of how to build a good marriage. Indeed, both cultural trends and social science findings of our time have confused even the basic understanding of just what it means to be masculine or feminine in the first place. How can a successful relationship between the sexes be achieved if neither one understands their own role to being with?

The disastrous state of the marriage relationship today makes it very clear that a deeper answer is needed than that which human experimentation or scientific study of the external appearances of behavior are able to provide. In short, a spiritual answer is needed. The Writings provide such an answer, a new and more "grown up" answer than could be given earlier, in keeping with the level of revelation now being made available to a more intellectually sophisticated day and age.

To understand this area, the Writings teach, it is necessary to go back to nothing less than the nature of God Himself and just what was involved in His creation of people in the first place. To begin with, it is important to understand, the Writings teach, that God is not a ball of impersonal energy but a Divine Man. Not male, but man, as in "mankind." (see Who is God?) The thing that makes Him man is that in His mind, His "personality," there is a perfect balance between the two aspects that are the basis of His mind and of the minds He has created in human beings as well. These two aspects are the feeling, loving, motivation half of the mind and the thinking, understanding, rational half of the mind. Every mind needs both halves to function. You can see how this is so when you reflect on how, in order to do anything, you have to both want to do it (from the feeling, willing half of your mind) and know how to do it (from the thinking, understanding half of your mind). In God's mind, these two halves, the Divine Love, and the Divine Wisdom, or understanding, are in perfect balance, making Him a complete Divine man. When He created human beings, He made all of our minds a mirror of His, with a love half and an understanding half.

But at creation God, in His usual profoundly insightful way, made a decision that, to maximize human happiness, He would not make individual human beings fully in his "image" or "likeness" (Gen. 5:1). Instead, "He created them male and female...and called them mankind" (Gen. 5:2), differentiating man and woman in such a way that only in the complementing, the fusion of the two into a married pair would the "image" or "likeness" be achieved. Thus, it is the married pair rather than the individual human who fully mirrors God and relates to Him most completely (see Marriage in Heaven).

It is difficult in a short explanation to give a full sense of the Writings' teachings of just how God designed the differences between men and women to achieve the goal of a spiritual marriage between them. (See the articles listed below for a full overview).  But even to briefly try to summarize,  it is important to try to free the mind as much as possible from all the unhappy history of the relationship between the sexes and think in terms of the ideal, the spiritual principles that God intended from the beginning. Again, His goal is as it has always been, to show His love by making possible the greatest human happiness that people will allow Him to provide. But that can be achieved, as any angel will attest, only if we listen clearly to what He has to say.

 What God did, then, was both subtle and profound. While He placed "images" of His love and wisdom, or will and understanding, in both men and women, he offset the balance between those two parts of the personality in opposite - and hence complementary - ways between the two sexes. The spiritual nature of men was inclined more toward the wisdom/understanding dimension and the woman more toward the love/will dimension. This spiritual difference is the origin, by means of correspondences, of all the differences between the sexes, down to the tiniest detail, of even their physical bodies.

It is very important here, again if the truth is be clearly understood, not to jump to superficial or simplistic conclusions about the in-fact profound and very non-obvious implications of this spiritual design of the sexes. God is a great deal more sophisticated than the 21st century often seems to give Him credit for! So there's a lot more involved here than may meet the eye at first introduction of this concept.

The basic principle, then, is summarized in the following passage from Heaven and Hell (#369):

"Everyone, whether man or woman, rejoices in understanding and will; but with the man the understanding predominates, and with the woman the will predominates, and the character is determined by that which predominates. Yet in marriages in the heavens there is no predominance; for the will of the wife is also the husband's will, and the understanding of the husband is also the wife's understanding, since each loves to will and to think as the other, that is, mutually and reciprocally. Thus are they conjoined into one. This conjunction is actual conjunction, for the will of the wife enters into the understanding of the husband, and the understanding of the husband into the will of the wife, and this especially when they look into one another's faces; for, as has been repeatedly said above, there is in the heavens a sharing of thoughts and affections, more especially with husband and wife, because they reciprocally love each other. From all this it can be established what the conjunction of minds is that makes marriage and produces conjugial love in the heavens, namely, that one wishes what is his own to be the other's, and this reciprocally."

Further insight can be gained from the comments of two angel couples that Swedenborg spoke with in heaven. (To understand the context of the comments of the first couple, it is necessary to appreciate that the duality of love and wisdom is reflected in every aspect of creation, not simply in the difference between the sexes. A specific example, used by one of the angels, is the heart and lungs, which are related to each other like - and correspondences of - love and wisdom, or will and understanding.)

The first couple was from the time of the Golden Age:

"The man was dressed in a blue-colored robe and a tunic of very white wool. And his wife was dressed in a purple dress, with a blouse underneath of embroidered fine linen. Then because I had in my thought the desire to learn about the marriages of the most ancient peoples, I looked by turns at the husband and wife, and I observed a seeming unity of their souls in their faces. So I said, 'You two are one.' The man replied, 'We are. Her life is in me, and my life is in her. We have two bodies, but one soul. The union between us is like the union of the two tabernacles in the breast which are called the heart and the lungs. She is my heart and I am her lungs. But since when we say heart here we mean love, and when we say lungs we mean wisdom, therefore she is the love of my wisdom, and I am the wisdom of her love. Therefore her love outwardly clothes my wisdom, and my wisdom is inwardly within her love. Consequently, as you have said, the unity of our souls appears in our faces.'" (Conjugial Love 75)

The second couple was from the time of the following Silver Age:

"We come from peoples in Asia, and the focus of our age was the pursuit of truths, by which we acquired intelligence. This pursuit was the focus of our soul and mind. But the focus of our physical senses was on representations of truths in forms, and a study of correspondences combined the sensory interests of our bodies with the perceptions of our minds, gaining for us intelligence.

"Hearing this, [Swedenborg's angel guide] asked them to tell us something about marriages among them. So the husband said, 'There is a correspondence between the spiritual marriage, which is a marriage of truth with good, and natural marriage, which is the marriage of a man with one wife. And because we have studied correspondences, we see that the church with its truths and goods can by no means exist except in people who live with one wife in a state of truly conjugial love. For a marriage of good and truth in a person is the church in him. Consequently, we who are here all say that a husband is a form of truth, and his wife a form of good, and that good cannot love any other truth than its own truth, nor can truth love any other good in return than its own good. If it were to love another, the inner marriage that forms the church would die, and the marriage would become merely external the kind of marriage that idolatry corresponds to, not the church.'...

"While we were looking, we saw on the wall a kind of rainbow, consisting of three colors, purple, blue, and bright white. And we saw how the purple color passed through the blue and tinted the white with a purplish blue hue, and that the latter color flowed back through the blue into the purple and raised it into a kind of flaming radiance. Then the husband said to me, 'Do you understand it?'

"And I said, 'Instruct me.'

"So he said, 'The purple by its correspondence symbolizes the conjugial love of the wife; the bright white, the intelligence of the husband; the blue, the beginning of conjugial love in the husband's perception from the wife; and the purplish blue, which tinted the white, conjugial love then in the husband. This latter color's flowing back through the blue into the purple and raising it into a kind of flaming radiance symbolizes the conjugial love of the husband flowing back to the wife. Things like these are represented on these walls whenever we reflect on conjugial love, its mutual, progressive and simultaneous union, and then look closely at the rainbows exhibited there.'" (Conjugial Love #76)

One result of this interweaving process between husband and wife is that the central aspect of their relationship moves in a direction that may come as something of surprise to contemporary culture, though not to a happily married older couple of any generation. For, far from our culture's goal of a relationship based on continual (sensual) "excitement," the Writings teach that a successful marriage - on earth and into eternity in heaven - is primarily based on friendship, a very advanced form, an "inmost" friendship. Again, this will come as no surprise to any happily married older couple, who have long since learned that marriage is about all the things being a friend is about, sharing the good times and helping each other through the bad times. It has the special intimate times that can occur only in the marriage friendship, but there is also the working and relating together on a daily basis aimed toward goals held in common that is the stuff of daily experience found in any good friendship. Indeed, it is the long haul of building a relationship here on earth that will stand the test of eternity, the daily back and forth, discussing challenges, attending to the everyday questions of life, that build the shared outlook described in the passages from the Writings just quoted and represented by the angels' light painting. Again, the couple's object is to become so close and harmonious that they have but a single outlook, like those angels, and like the saying inscribed in many a wedding ring: "One heart, one mind, one way."

So, while men and women are both images of God, they are both incomplete images, and they feel that incompleteness in their strong attraction for each other. For at the heart of that attraction is the longing of two incomplete halves to make a whole, from male and female to make "mankind."  The strong and beautiful feelings associated with sexual intercourse are both an expression of and aid to this conjunction. How much spiritual marriage should be the origin of this intercourse is illustrated by the teaching of the Writings that there is intercourse between the married partners in heaven, and that it is inexpressibly more beautiful than here, for there at last their spirits may fully touch on one another. (And, just as intercourse outside of marriage here decays and destroys its beauty, taking the "spirit" of marriage out of the bodily conjunction and so in effect killing that beauty, so in hell there is only a loathsome and degraded imitation of the heavenly delights of intercourse. For evil's basic orientation to self always ends up bringing alienation and ugliness to its participants, in dramatic contrast to the quiet but powerful beauty arising from the angelic orientation towards harmony with others.)

A note on vocabulary: The Writings use the term "conjugial love," sometimes translated as "married love," to refer to the special spiritual love between man and wife.  ("Conjugial" should not be confused with the term "conjugal.") 

Readings

1. Background

• A Heaven from the Human Race - why God created the universe in the first place, and its connection to marriage

• The Purpose in  Marriage - why God created it, and review of some important misundestandings of just what it is

• The Eternity of Marriage - death does not end true marriage

• The History of the Conjugial with Mankind - the spiritual history of marriage, beginning with the Golden Age

• Re-establishment of the Conjugial - focusing specifically on recent spiritual history and marriage 

• "Above Every Love" : The Relation of Conjugial Love to Other Heavenly Loves - just how fundamentally important spiritual married love really is to the world, and how spiritually deadly its opposite.

• Conjugial Love: Table of Contents - from that volume of the Writings

2. Building a Marriage

• Principles Relating to the Selection of a Marriage Partner - spiritual guidelines to help in making this most important of decisions, including the concept of "similitudes"

• Before Marriage and After Marriage - a book combining discussion of  the ideals and their  practical application in both courtship and preparation for marriage and working out problems that arise after marriage.

• Marriage Love: The Vision and Its Realization - starting at square one

• Friendship in Marriage - it turns out that, spiritually speaking, true marriage is in fact based on friendship, a very special kind, but friendship

• Tenderness in Marriage - not what you'd expect, viewed from our culture's distorted concept of what "tenderness" means, but a powerful tool for achieving marital happiness

• The Journey of Life - a reflection, based on the correspondences of the story of Exodus, on dealing with the challenges of life and marriage.

• Playfulness in Marriage - a maybe surprisingly important key to a happy marriage

• Some Thoughts on Masculinity - its spiritual basis

• A Name of Glory and Honor - the name "wife"

• Beauty, Innocence and Love - where real beauty originates

• Genuine Love in Marriage - achieving "true love," the real, spiritual kind

• Correspondences in Marriage - a clarification as to what the symbolic, "correspondential" relationship between God and church and man and wife really is, according to the Writings.

• Idealism and the Real World - thoughts on hanging on to the dreams you started out with

• Blessings in Marriage - sometimes they don't come easy

• Marriage and Regeneration and Safeguards of Marriage - the central role marriage can and should play in helping both partners improve their spiritual state

3. Issues in Marriage

• The Seed of Man and The Primitive of Man  - the spiritual basis of sperm cells and what occurs spiritually during intercourse

• Human Prudence and the Love of Offspring: A Compilation of Passages from the Writings - an extensive collection of teachings from the Writings pertinent to decisions about birth control

• Spiritual Offspring - the spiritual results of conjunction of man and wife, both here and in heaven

4. Dealing with Problems in Marriage

• The Marriage Covenant and Marital Separation - the seriousness of the marriage bond, and what the Writings teach as solutions to particularly serious marriage difficulties

• The Falsity of Adultery - just how bad it really is, and how spiritually deadly

• Apparent Love in a Covenant for Life

• Divorce - only an option for a limited, and God-specified, set of grave situations

5. Permissions in Disorder

• The Second Part of Conjugial Love - tools provided by a merciful God to help control lust, particularly fornication, when it cannot be avoided