How did God create the universe?
What does the universe say about God . . . and about the human psyche?
This highly philosophical work will expand the boundaries of your mind, revealing many deep mysteries of the cosmos, the human spirit, and the mind of God:
Divine Love and Wisdom
By Emanuel Swedenborg
Divine Love and Wisdom was originally published in Latin in 1763. I recommend the New Century Edition linked here for the most readable and accurate modern translation. It is also available in a deluxe hardcover edition combined with its sequel, Divine Providence.
To purchase direct from the publisher in various formats, or to download a free PDF or epub version (without the scholarly introduction and notes), click this link.
From the back cover:
This spiritual classic, now in a new and eminently readable translation, offers unique and often surprising answers to age-old questions about the nature of God, the universe, and the inner self.
Divine Love and Wisdom has been called the most profound work of the Enlightenment scientist and seer Emanuel Swedenborg. It demonstrates how God’s love, wisdom, and humanity are reflected in creation and in ourselves, and suggests that the act of Creation is not a mystery of the past, but a miracle ongoing in every instant of the present. Like a blueprint of things unseen, Divine Love and Wisdom makes visible the hidden design of the universe, as well as the qualities of its Architect. Its vivid depiction of the spiritual mechanism of the world has impressed thinkers such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry James, Sr.
Like George F. Dole’s other masterful translations, his rendering of Divine Love and Wisdom captures the striking qualities of Swedenborg’s prose—its dignity, simplicity, clarity, and emotional warmth.
An introduction by Gregory R. Johnson sets Divine Love and Wisdom in the context of history and philosophy, and annotations by Dole, Johnson, and other scholars of Swedenborg help to clarify the work’s eighteenth-century context for today’s readers. Four indexes and three bibliographies provide further paths of access to this remarkable text.
“Divine Love and Wisdom contains many rare treasures, not only for seekers of spiritual truth, but also for scientists exploring the reach and nature of human consciousness. There are few books I would praise so highly.”
—Jeffrey Mishlove, Ph.D
Host of the television series “Thinking Allowed”; author, The Roots of Consciousness; President, Intuition Network“This highly readable edition in George Dole’s sensitive translation admirably reflects the coherence and consistency of Swedenborg’s language, while Gregory Johnson’s introductory essay on Swedenborg’s metaphysics of creation offers a comprehensive guide to this important theological work.”
—Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Ph.D
Research Fellow in the Western Esoteric Tradition, University of Wales Lampeter“In this book brimming over with insight and power, his most philosophical work, the Magus of Stocholm maps out a compelling account of fundamental mysteries.”
—Gary Lachman
Author, Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius and A Secret History of Consciousness
Translated by George F. Dole and published in 2003
by the Swedenborg Foundation, West Chester, Pennsylvania
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
Is there a link to purchase this translation?
Hi hoboduke,
Just click on the cover image or any of the Divine Love and Wisdom title links, and it will take you to the listing for this translation on Amazon. If you buy from a third party, be sure it is the same ISBN / edition.
I loved it. Everything I have read of his is very inspiring.
Yes, great book! They’re all good, as you say, but Divine Love and Wisdom is one of my personal favorites due to its philosophical nature and its universal, cosmological perspective.
Hello Lee – there is another digital edition of The Divine Love and Wisdom, and Divine Providence, combined into one volume called “Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine.” Its based on the 1907 edition but it has been updated to modern English, moreover, all the paragraph references are hyperlinked. It also includes “Intercourse between the Soul and Body.” Here is the link to the Amazon version: http://amzn.com/B008L7P9V4
Swedenborg’s definition is that God is a Divine Man, or the “Universal Human” that influences all humanity. However, this is more of an assumption he makes based on his direct experiences, I wish he had provided more arguments to demonstrate this. It is something I was going to explore further in light of the theory of The Reflexive Universe by Arthur N. Young, but never had the time to get to that in my blog.
Hi Doug,
Thanks for your comments. I love the idea of a hyperlinked edition of Swedenborg. His works have extensive internal cross-references. Only with the dawn of computers and the Internet can we publish editions that bring those cross-references into their own so that readers can easily follow them. I hope that one day the New Century Edition will be published in a digital, cross-referenced format. Meanwhile, kudos to you on all the work of producing a hyperlinked edition! Did you do all the work yourself?
Yes, I did all the work myself. I was tired of just leaving my Swedenborg books in storage while I travelled. It took time but I did it while taking the train to and from work. If you want all the published works altogether in one volume, it was published under the name “The Divine Revelation of the New Jerusalem” – go here: http://amzn.com/B008GHMPSO The hardest part was hyperlinking the index to Heavenly Arcana (other editions do not have an index). However, that left out the Apocalypse Explained, and I was not sure what to do about that..so I published an expanded edition which included that as well: see http://amzn.com/B00AMLPBHO It also hyperlinks the paragraphs between Apocalypse Revealed and Apocalypse Explained (for just the Apocalypse, see http://amzn.com/B00AM7VZ5U ). When I hyperlinked those two, I could see why he left AE unpublished, unfortunately AR is much abbreviated. Have not checked out the New Century Edition, the dean of the House of Swedenborgian Studies was working on that as well.
Well Doug what an amazing accomplishment-thank you. I will purchase it in the near future.
About the Divine Human, I do suspect that for Swedenborg, Jesus Christ–aka the Lord–was such a living, real, daily presence in his life that he did not feel the need to demonstrate it, but simply assumed that anyone who was deeply drawn to his writings would also have this experience of the human presence of the Divine. It would be like a fish demonstrating the existence of water to another fish.
For my own part, the reality of the Divine Human has only grown over the years. I believe that the Bible itself is an example of the Divine Human. In one of my future posts I will write about the Bible as a book that is both divine and human, and thus forms a link and a relationship between the infinite God and ordinary, finite human beings on earth.