Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence | Page 5

also
showed in that treatise that love can do nothing without wisdom, and
wisdom nothing without love. For love apart from wisdom, or the will
apart from understanding, cannot think anything, indeed cannot see,
feel or say anything, so cannot do anything. Likewise, wisdom apart
from love, or understanding apart from will, cannot think, see, feel, or
speak, therefore cannot do, anything. For if love is removed from
wisdom or understanding, there is no willing and thus no doing. If this
is true of man, for him to do anything, it was much more true of
God--who is love itself and wisdom itself--when He created and made
the world and all that it contains.
[2] That the universe, with each and all things in it, was created from
divine love by divine wisdom may also be established from objects to
be seen in the world. Take a particular object, examine it with some
wisdom, and you will be convinced. Take the seed, fruit, flower or leaf
of a tree, muster your wisdom, examine the object with a strong
microscope, and you will see marvels. Even more wonderful are the
more interior things which you do not see. Note the unfolding order in
the growth of a tree from seed to new seed; reflect on the continuous
effort in all stages after self-propagation--the end to which it moves is
seed in which its reproductive power arises anew. If then you will think
spiritually, as you can if you will, will you not see wisdom in all this?
Furthermore, if you can think spiritually enough, you will see that this
energy does not come from the seed, nor from the sun of the world,
which is only fire, but is in the seed from God the Creator whose
wisdom is infinite, and is from Him not only at the moment of creation

but ever after, too. For maintenance is perpetual creation, as
continuance is perpetual coming to be. Else it is quite as work ceases
when you withdraw will from action, or as utterance fails when you
remove thought from speech, or as motion ceases when you remove
impetus; in a word, as an effect perishes when you remove the cause.
[3] Every created thing is endowed with energy, indeed, but this does
nothing of itself but from Him who implanted it. Examine any other
earthly object, like a silkworm, bee or other small creature. View it first
naturally, then rationally, and at length spiritually, and if you can think
deeply, you will be astounded at all you see. Let wisdom speak in you,
and you will exclaim in astonishment, "Who does not see the divine in
such things? They are all of divine wisdom." Still more will you
exclaim, if you note the uses of all created things, how they mount in
regular order even to the human being, and from man to the Creator
whence they are, and that the connection, and if you will acknowledge
it, the preservation also of them all, depend on the conjunction of the
Creator with man. That divine love created all things, but nothing apart
from the divine wisdom, will be seen in what follows.
4. (ii) Divine love and wisdom proceed as one from the Lord. This, too,
is plain from what was shown in the work Divine Love and Wisdom,
especially in the propositions: "Esse and existere are distinguishably
one in the Lord" (nn. 14-17); "Infinite things are distinguishably one in
Him" (nn. 17-22); "Divine love is of divine wisdom, and divine
wisdom of divine love" (nn. 34-39); "Love not married to wisdom
cannot effect anything" (nn. 401-403); "Love does nothing except in
union with wisdom" (nn. 409, 410); "Spiritual heat and light,
proceeding from the Lord as a sun, make one as divine love and
wisdom make one in Him" (nn. 99-102). The truth of the present
proposition is plain from these propositions, demonstrated in that
treatise. But as it is not known how two distinct things can act as one, I
wish now to show that there is no "one" apart from form, and that the
form itself makes it a unit; then, that a form makes a "one" the more
perfectly as the elements entering into it are distinctly different and yet
united.

[2] There is no "one" apart from form, and the form itself makes it a
unit. Everyone who brings his mind to bear on the matter can see
clearly that there is no "one" apart from form, and if a thing exists at all,
it is a form. For what exists at all derives from form what is known as
its character and its predicates, its changes of state, also its relevance,
and so on. A thing without form has no way of affecting us, and what
has