new church life: september / october 2013
higher warmth without a higher light, as warmth and light are forever bound
together. Indeed, the higher warmth is said to be a love for wisdom (Ibid. 211),
and no one loves what he or she cannot see.
If women could not elevate their intellects, they could not reform
themselves and so could not be regenerated. Yet it remains true that they
cannot elevate their intellects into the same light as men, not as a matter of
degree, but as a matter of affection. For whatever they see, whatever wisdom
they attain, they continue to be women and not men. Theirs is not a manly
sight, but a womanly one; not a manly wisdom, but a womanly one.
So we are told that a husband is not capable of his wife’s wisdom, and
that a wife is not capable of her husband’s wisdom. (Ibid. 167, 168) And the
reason is that men are men, and women are women, and whatever they see or
do, they see or do as either men or women. Masculinity cannot be converted
into femininity, nor can femininity be converted into masculinity. (Ibid.
32, 33) Men may affect feminine behavior, and women may adopt mannish
comportment; but at their core, even as in their DNA, men remain men, and
women remain women.
Relation to Marriage
Regarding the differences between men and women, it is worth observing at
the outset that descriptions of these differences are, in the Doctrines, often
made in the context of some relation between the sexes. For example, we
are told that in women the will predominates, whereas in men the intellect
predominates. (Heaven and Hell 369, Married Love 33, 91, 187)
The statement in Heaven and Hell 369 occurs in a section titled “Marriages
in Heaven,” and it applies to marriages in this natural world. In Married Love
91 the statement is made about women in their response to men, and not apart
from them. Married Love 187 is also concerned with the relation between the
sexes and how they change in response to each other, this in a chapter titled
“The Change in the State of Life Made by Marriage.”
Some objection has been raised against the statement in Secrets of
Heaven that “it is in keeping with Divine order for men to be concerned with
knowledge and for women to be concerned solely with affections.” (Secrets of
Heaven 8994) But this has to be read in the context of the number. For it goes
on to say that women ought not to love themselves for their knowledge, but
should love men, because “from this springs the desire for marriage.” Again,
the underlying consideration is of the relation between the sexes. Moreover,
women who are to be “concerned solely with affections” are contrasted, not
with women concerned with knowledge, but with women concerned only with
knowledge, without any real affection for truth. But if they have a genuine
affection for truth, it is not only acceptable for women to be concerned with
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