Suzanne Howard *
email: howardsu@hawaii.edu
*
Reference #11
Doctrine of the Wife for Husbands: A Spiritual Practice for Achieving
Unity
By Leon James
http:www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/wife.html
I. Conjugial love and the Doctrine of the Wife
A. The concept of conjugial love comes from the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.
1. A person’s strongest desire is to be united in conjugial love in a marriage relationship.
2. Conjugial love is the chief love that all other loves come from.
B. Conjugial love does not come to us automatically.
1. Most people, and especially men, are very resistant to this type of love due to the evil tendencies that we have inherited from our parents.
2. “This tendency and proneness to evils just mentioned, which is transmitted from parents to their children and descendants, can only be broken down by a person being born anew by the Lord’s help, a process called regeneration. Without this not only does the tendency remain unbroken, but it is reinforced by a succession of parents, becoming more prone to evils, and eventually to every kind of evil” (True Christian Religion Number 521).
C. Natural love is different from spiritual love (conjugial love).
1. Natural love is external and spiritual love is internal.
2. Husbands are more resistant to conjugial love because they are different from their wives in their spiritual makeup.
D. The Doctrine of the Wife is a doctrine based on the Writings of Swedenborg and it is intended to help husbands overcome their resistance to conjugial love.
1. The husband must undergo regeneration to be one with his wife.
2. The wife has been given by God the special abilities to know and understand her husband’s perceptions and inclinations.
3. The husband “cleaves to his wife” by conjoining himself in all ways with her affections.
4. The Lord rewards the couple by creating one angelic mind out of two imperfect people.
II. Wisdom vs. Love
A. Men are born of wisdom and understanding that they receive from the Lord.
B. The wife’s wisdom is inmost and celestial and comes from the Lord.
C. Men’s and women’s intelligence is different.
1. Women’s intelligences are “modest, gracious, peaceable, compliant, soft and gentle.”
2. Men’s intelligences are “critical, rough, resistant, argumentative, and given to intemperance.”
3. This is because men and women are biologically different.
D. From Swedenborg’s Conjugial Love: “Changes of state are of one kind with men and of another with women, because, by creation, men are forms of science, intelligence, and wisdom, and women, forms of the love of these with men.”
1. This passage refers to the external state of marriage, not internal.
2. Internal marriage refers to the union of one male and one female, where the male is a form of wisdom and the female is the love of that wisdom.
III. Are men superior to women?
A. Many of the Writings talk about dominance.
1. We need to understand the difference between: a) the literal Writings and b) the conclusions we draw from them (aka doctrine).
2. It is not correct to base the conclusion on the Writings that men have the right to dominate women in any area.
B. Dominance vs. Voluntary submission
1. When the husband is striving for unity with his wife he submits voluntarily to her.
2. If he does not submit to her, she can do nothing about it.
C. The Doctrine of the Wife is an important tool that can be used to understand the literal of the Writings.
1. “Some people also suppose that women can raise the sight of their understanding into the same realm of light that men can and see things on the same level. They have been persuaded of this opinion by what some educated female poets have written. But when the works of these female poets were examined in their presence in the spiritual world, they were found to be works, not of judgment and wisdom, but of cleverness and a facility in the use of language. And works which result from these two gifts, because of the elegance and skill in the way the words are put together, appear as though they were lofty and intelligent – but only to people who take any kind of cleverness and call it wisdom” (Conjugial Love).
IV. Feminizing the marriage
A. From the Doctrine of the Wife, feminizing the marriage takes place in the minds of the husbands.
B. Internal vs. External
1. External marriage is masculinized.
2. Internal marriage is feminized by living the Doctrine of the Wife.
C. Equity vs. Unity
1. Equity is necessary for the outside (external) world.
2. The unity process must go on in the internal mind to achieve conjugial love.
3. There is no place for equity in the internal mind.
D. Feminizing the church does not mean men will leave or that superior rights are to be given to women.
1. For conjugial love to happen, a husband must voluntarily put his wife’s judgment above his own.
V. Email about conjugial love
A. “In all things?”
1. Is the husband to yield to his wife in all things or only in some?
a. He must yield to his wife in all things including his area of expertise and in his choice of what sports to watch and what music to listen to.
b. If the husband does not elevate his wife’s judgment about his own then he is discounting her intelligence, wisdom, and judgment.
2. The husband cannot disagree nor have differing opinions with his wife because this cannot exist in a conjugial couple in heaven.
a. What happens when there is a difference in opinion?
B. “What movie should we see?”
1. A husband who desires unity loves the idea of choosing his wife’s movie instead of his own first choice.
2. Method
a. At first you must pretend to want to pick her movie. (“conjugial simulation”)
b. Eventually, you love the idea of putting your wife’s wants before your own because you feel closer to God.
C. “Does the wife really know what’s best for her husband?”
1. The answer is yes. By loving his wife’s wisdom above his own the husband is practicing conjugial love and getting closer to the Lord. He could not do this on his own.
“It is instinctive in a wife’s love to unite her husband’s will to her own, for in this way a wife becomes one who belongs to her husband, and the husband one who belongs to his wife. Thus the two become one person.” (Conjugial Love 196)