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Doctrine of the Wife for Husbands:
A Spiritual Practice for Achieving Unity

by Leon James
Date: 1985-2004

Part 1 of 4

Go to the other parts:
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Note:  You may want to consult a more recent version of this essay:
www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/wife.html

1. Prologue

One of the truly remarkable revelations given in the Writings of Swedenborg is that the chief power and dynamic spiritual force that animates the universe is conjugial love, the love that internally binds and unites the minds of a husband and wife. Conjugial love is the chief love that rules all other loves in the universe. Its extending power and influence can be seen in all living species whose survival depends on male-female bonding for propagation. The supremacy of conjugial love expresses God's chief purpose in creating and maintaining the universe. This purpose is to create an ever growing heaven populated by angel couples who were born on some earth, developed a spiritual mind by living rightly, then went on living to eternity in one of the many heavenly societies Swedenborg has witnessed. The afterlife consists of a heavenly life for soul-mates bonded in marriage love between a husband and a wife. This life constitutes the highest human spiritual state and is called heaven. The inhabitants of heaven are all human beings born on one of the many earths in the universe and are called angels in the Writings. We can truly say that this revelation is indeed very good news.

The bad news is that conjugial life does not come to us automatically and that most people on this earth reject it and act against it, especially men. The reason is that we inherit our parents' traits, both physical and spiritual or mental. Scientists today are still unaware of these revelations in the Writings. It is believed that psychological traits are not inherited, and is is not known that psychological traits are spiritual organs constructed out of spiritual substances from the spiritual world. These spiritual substances are carriers of the mental or spiritual traits of the parents. We thus inherit tendencies that oppose conjugial love. One example is people's desire to know more than one partner sexually. Individuals who exhibit this interest out of religious or loyalty reasons, continue to experience the desire for or interest in other partners. But conjugial love does not allow this interest to remain in one's organic constitution, even when it is expressed merely hypothetically or in fantasy.

"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

Another example of how conjugial love is opposed by inherited traits is our desire for independence based on the false idea that the individual is the unit of life and self-fulfillment. When people marry there is often a feeling of loss of freedom due to the marriage bond. But this idea is false because the bonds of marriage and union create a state of heavenly freedom while what is opposed to this bond is rooted in infernal freedom, which is actually slavery to inherited evil traits. Conjugial love establishes the married couple as the unit of human life giving the partners a wholeness and completeness they do not have outside the union. Independence is incompatible with wholeness, and this reality is resisted by many inherited and acquired traits.

For conjugial love to develop with a couple it is necessary for both husband and wife to overcome the inborn resistance they have for it. Marriage starts in the external mind of the partners through commitment and natural love for one another. This love is not yet conjugial love, which is a spiritual love, and the relationship is not yet a spiritual one, not yet an inner union of minds. In order for conjugial love to develop and grow the husband and wife must change their inner character by defeating all the inherited forces that are opposed to their conjugial union. The Writings teach that only couples who go beyond the external bond of marriage into an internal union of minds, can be together as an angel couple in heaven. It is therefore of the utmost importance to gain the knowledge of how to accomplish this since it doesn't happen automatically even with married individuals who sincerely love each other from a natural love and are devoted to each other from loyalty and friendship.

The Writings show how the natural love between partners joinjed together through an external bond is not spiritually deep enough and as soon as external conditions change and become a challenge, the love seems to evaporate and instead there is anger, rage, resentment, and disdain. Due to the spiritual constitution of men and women, there is more resistance to conjugial love on the part of husbands. Wives are born with the inclination towards marriage and a desire to move on to an internal or spiritual union, as long as the husband also desires it. Husbands on the other hand are born with an inclination for having multiple sexual partners and feel restricted and constricted by the marriage bond to one wife. As a result, husbands need special help in order to be able to overcome their inborn resistance to conjugial love, which is "the love for one of the sex," as the Writings put it, in contrast to the "love of the sex," which is natural, not spiritual, and roving. The Doctrine of the Wife is an expression we use to designate a philosophy of action for husbands based on the Writings of Swedenborg and intended to help them overcome their resistance to conjugial love.

In summary, this doctrine says that the husband's regeneration or self-change efforts, to be successful, must be focused on his wife and through his wife. She is to be accepted as the seeing eye in the marriage relationship and he needs to agree to voluntarily subjugate all of his resistances to her wisdom and inner perception in everything pertaining to their relationship. Swedenborg explains the mechanism whereby the Lord gives a special perception to each wife about her husband's affections and inclinations, knowledge which is not given to the husband so that he is only dimly aware of his own inner tendencies. The spiritual purpose for this difference in perceptual powers is to make the husband's regeneration dependent on his wife. This is called "cleaving to the wife" in the Old Testament and is a Divine commandment enjoined on every husband. Without following this commandment the husband cannot be regenerated, hence cannot have an eternal marriage in heaven with this or any other wife.

"People who are in a state of truly conjugial love look to eternity in their marriage because eternity is inherent in this love. Its eternity is owing to the fact that this love in the wife and wisdom in the husband grow to eternity, and as these grow or progress, the partners enter more and more deeply into the blessings of heaven - blessings which their wisdom and love of wisdom at the same time carry concealed within them. If one were to snatch away an idea of eternity, therefore, or if by some chance it should slip from their minds, it would be as though they were cast down from heaven. (Conjugial Love No. 216)

In people who did not have conjugial love there is no spiritual or inner bond, but only a natural or outer one; and if an inner bond does not hold the outer one in its order and course, it does not last." (Conjugial Love No. 320)

Conjugial union depends therefore on the willigness of the two partners to modify their inner character into a form that makes them fit together spiritually. Since husbands put up more resistance to this union than wives, it is necessary to give them spiritual tools that can overcome their own internal resistance.

  See also The surrendered wife and the surrendered husband

The Doctrine of the Wife is an expression I use to designate a philosophy of doing for husbands based on the Writings of Swedenborg. In essence, this doctrine says that the husband's regeneration efforts, to be successful, must be focused on his wife and through his wife. She is the seeing eye in the marriage relationship and he needs to voluntarily and willingly subjugate all his resistances to her wisdom and inner perception. Swedenborg explains the mechanism whereby God gives perception to each wife about her husband's affections which is not given to the husband. The purpose being, obviously, to make the husband's regeneration dependent on his reliance on the wife. This is called "cleaving to the wife" and is a commandment of God enjoined on every husband. Without this commandment the husband cannot be regenerated, hence cannot have an eternal marriage with this or any other wife.

The above passages clearly shows that the conjugial couple makes up a single angel in that the husband's understanding is no longer united to his own will but to his wife's will. This is the essential idea in the Doctrine of the Wife.

I have discovered that husbands resist the process of conjugial unification with such intensity and ferocity that it appears they are hell-bent and insisting on destroying their union, their marriage, their heavenly place with their wife. This is true whether the husband is a New Church person or not. Even those husbands who love the Writings and consider it the Word, experience this resistance and hatred for conjugial union. They are not aware of it and they deny it, yet it is true. For the wife this is a major problem since by denying their resistance and hatred, husbands neutralize the power of the wife to work towards the conjugial unity. This makes the wife suffer and feel desperate. The Doctrine of the Wife will help husbands become aware of their resistance and hatred of their wife, which at first they deny, but later can acknowledge or confess, then change. Husbands misread and sub-consciously distort the above passage, and many passages like it which are mentioned in this article.

This distortion effect is natural and inherited as well as fully supported and reinforced by a masculinized society and culture.  New Church husbands have a distinct opportunity to liberate themselves from this inheritance, but it takes a method to achieve liberation from it. This method is the Doctrine of the Wife, a collection of commandments given by the Lord to help New Church husbands to achieve conjugial union. Like all genuine Doctrine of the Church, the Doctrine of the Wife is spiritual out of a celestial origin, that is, from the Lord. All Doctrine is given by the Lord to anyone who is willing to receive it. Without genuine Doctrine the Writings cannot be understood.

Many passages discussing men's understanding and women's affections are interpreted as meaning that men should rule over women (or "have predominance") in relation to understanding or intellectual things, since men are born a form of understanding. Women on the other hand, should rule (or "have predominance") in relation to affectional things relating to feelings and love. We must draw a distinction between (a) What the Word says in the literal, and (b) The conclusion we draw from it (=doctrine). In this case the Word says that men are a form of understanding and women a form of love. But the erroneous conclusion based on it says: (c) Therefore in matters of Church governance or some other forensic or intellectual issue, men should predominate; but in matters of domestic order and works of charity or community, women should predominate.

Part (a) is far from Part (c), as is obvious. Part (c) is a political matter and whatever applications one makes to it from Doctrine or the Word is neither the Word nor Doctrine. No part of the genuine Doctrine of the Church or the Word says that men should predominate in Church administration or that women should be excluded from it. The same is true of any human or social area: the workplace, business, commerce, the military, education, science, engineering, parenthood, politics, etc. In short, it is not correct to say that the Word or the genuine doctrine of the Church gives men the Divine right to be have predominance over women in any area whatsoever.

The claim that men should predominate over women in decision making in any area of life is clearly a self-serving distortion of a masculinized society. The distortion guarantees that men will rule over women in everyday life--at home, Church, profession, or in managing things, making the final decisions, prevailing in one's opinion, in short, creating a man's world. Instead, the passage above means that the husband's understanding should unite with the wife's will. The will always rules the understanding, therefore this means that it is the wife's affections that are to unite to the husband's understanding on a voluntary basis by the husband. The affections in the will shape the cognitions in the understanding. Thus it is the feminization of marriage that makes its sanctification--see section below.

Whether you say "ruling over" or "having predominance over" is the same thing in terms of the factual consequences, which is that one rules over the other. But there is an essential difference between ruling over someone by dominance or dominion, and ruling over someone by voluntary submission. For instance, the police force in a democracy rules over the population in daily activities in public places. This is not an oppression as long as the population willingly and rationally submits to the authority of the law and its authorized or licensed agents acting in a lawful manner. But in an autocratic country the law rules by dominion and is hostile to the population. With the Doctrine of the Wife we are dealing with the husband's voluntary and rational submission of his will and judgment to that of his wife. If he refuses, there is nothing she can do since he has the greater power. In other words, the husband must listen and follow the wife's directives in all things in which they have interactions. This voluntary submission means that he has to re-adjust his cognitions to harmonize with her affections. Obviously this must be a voluntary submission on the part of the husband and not a dominion over him by his wife. The latter of course is destructive of the conjugial union.

Note again the passage quoted above: "Every man who is not spiritually rational and moral but only naturally so possesses a coldness towards his wife, such a coldness being inherent in him in his inmost elements.  (...) It comes from a lack of rationality on their part in matters of the spirit. Every man who is irrational in matters of the spirit is inmostly cold to his wife and inmostly warm toward harlots" (CL 294).

New Church people who acknowledge the Writings as the Word may have this temptation: that because they possess the Third Testament or the Latin Word, therefore they are spiritual. However the Writings clearly teach that it is not the Word that makes the Church but the understanding of the Word, and not even this, but the degree to which people live in accordance with their understanding of the Word (AE 356). And so study and expertise in the Writings of Swedenborg does not in itself make us spiritual. Therefore husbands who study the Writings and worship the Divine Human remain natural, hate the conjugial, love the scortatory, and remain unregenerate to the extent that they fail to live their daily life in accordance with their doctrine. The Doctrine of the Wife helps husbands live their life according to their understanding of Divine Truth. We must create adequate and effective doctrine for ourselves so that we may strive to live according to it. It is in this striving alone that the Lord is present by influx. Without this striving the Lord cannot be present in actuality.

See also The surrendered wife and the surrendered husband

2. Preface

In the Heavenly Doctrines known as Swedenborg's Writings, the Lord has given a number of new commandments to husbands who aspire to become one angel with a conjugial wife. The Doctrine of the Wife is a collection of these commandments and its purpose is to assist regenerating husbands in their difficult task. The Doctrine of the Wife is doctrine based on Scripture because it is a list of items collected and extracted from the Word. The Doctrine of the Wife is not an opinion statement or philosophy but Divine Wisdom as received in revelation through illustration from the Lord. The Doctrine of the Wife is an ever expanding body of knowledge, even to infinity and eternity. Countless generations of regenerating husbands will contribute to it through the expansion and deepening of our relationship to the Lord. Through it conjugial love will return to this earth and the societies of earth will return to a state of civilized paradise. This new state of culture and consciousness will be higher than all the preceding states of humanity. This is the Lord's deep desire--as He has revealed it to us in the Writings.

The future of humanity thus depends on the success of husbands each learning to conjoin to his wife on the internal plane of the mind. This internal conjunction is called conjugial love and is the basis of all other loves in the universe. All other loves are derivative of this one great love. But the husband cannot from his own self conjoin to his wife in an internal way. He appears to be able to do this in the external mind, but he cannot do anything at all in the internal mind for he cannot see the internal mind. It is closed to his conscious awareness while he is still in the early stages of regeneration. Only the angels inflow into this internal mind but not the husband's own consciousness or effort. By acknowledging the Doctrine of the Wife, and then striving to follow it, each husband is spiritually empowered by the Lord to overcome himself and, to enthrone the wife. To enthrone the wife means to conjoin his affections with his wife's affections. This can be done only by loving her affections, and that means following her will, for the will does what the affection loves. Hence the Lord gave husbands a long list of commandments to follow in order to allow them to achieve this internal union, each with their wife. The Doctrine of the Wife is not only a collection of these commandments but an exposition of them to the best of our current understanding.

Here are some examples of conjugial commandments for husbands:

(1) All human development is in relation to marriage (see CL 191), therefore unmarried men are to be considered "pre-husbands" in the sense we think of "preschool" as a state that prepares for the real school. The curriculum in biology and psychology, for instance, needs to introduce all concepts and goals as a hierarchy with the top of it always being the conjugial couple.

(2) Husbands are wiser and more spiritual than unmarried men (see CL 199). The Lord's commandment in the Old and New Testaments that a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, means that the man should dethrone his own affections ("father and mother") and enthrone his wife's affections in his own mind, thus to "cleave" unto her (see CL 194).

(3) Women's intelligence is like the Lord's intelligence, but men's intelligence is not (CL 218). Women's intelligence, like the Lord's, is "modest, gracious, peaceable, compliant, soft and gentle," while men's is "critical, rough, resistant, argumentative, and given to intemperance."

(4) Conjugial love is the state of internal union between husband and wife and it is achieved when they will that their two lives shall become one life (see CL 215). Conjugial love is a biological growth process that is achieved when the wife's affections are joined to the husband's cognitions, that is, the husband's cognitions are joined to the wife's affections. This is not  an automatic growth process that comes with living together. It must be willed by both partners. The husband must will to conjoin his own cognitions to his wife's affections. This is not easy to achieve and requires persistent effort into which the Lord's power can inflow and achieve the union. The husband can overcome his resistance entirely if he is willing to follow this one rule on a daily and regular basis: When his wife expresses her affections in the form of a direct request or an implied one, the husband has only these replies to give and follow:

• Yes.
• O.K.
• That's right.
• I will.

And never anything more than that, for it is always defensive and disagreeable to the wife's affections.

(5) If marriage remains external or fails altogether, it is always due to the husband's resistance and hatred of conjugial love (see CL 216-217). Women never cease their striving to conjoin internally to their husbands. There are women in hell of course, and we get to know the character of many through Swedenborg's discussions with them. They have revealed that they abandoned their striving for conjunction only after their husbands treated them cruelly and without love on a long term basis, even to their whole life together. The women then chose to protect themselves and fight back by learning the art of controlling and enslaving their men through seduction and other subtle means. But they would not have done this if their husbands had treated them decently.

(6) To the husband's sensual consciousness, which is that of the external mind, the wife appears as an object of sexual desire. He imagines that the desire is from himself and that she is its object. But when a husband's rational consciousness is awakened in his internal mind, he can see that the wife is not the object but the source of his desire (see CL 221-223). If you remove the wife's influx of sexual desire into her husband, the husband loses all feeling and interest for the female sex. This secret is kept by wives since they can notice that the man is made impotent and turns away when he experiences the woman's love entering him. But after they are conjoined in the internal mind, the wife shares all her feelings and expresses all her emotions without fear or ill effect on the husband.

(7) Conjugial love grows biologically through repeatedly going through these four conjoining steps on a daily and hourly basis:

• Step 1: The wife acts. She reveals her affections to her husband in the form of a direct or implied request.
• Step 2: the husband receives. He wills himself to love her affection, and by this, he receives it, that is, conjoins his cognitions to it. Her affection now is as-if his own.
• Step 3: the husband reacts. He says one or more of these four things:  Yes.  O.K.  That's right.  I will.
• Step 4: the wife reacts to the husband. She feels his reaction of conjunction as her bosom delight (see CL 293-294).

This commandment says that the husband must strive constantly to build up the network of conjoining between his cognitions and his wife's affections. Think about muscle building exercises,  how we repeat the same movement in series or sets during one workout session. Muscle tissue is built up, fiber by fiber, molecule by molecule, with each repetition of a movement. In a similar manner the husband builds up the fibers of conjunction with his wife with the series and sets of repetitions on a daily basis, even an hourly basis or more.  Here is a common example every man can relate to:

Many many times my poor wife tried to tell me that I talk to her defensively. A family trait, she added, to spurn me on to insight. For years, yea-- decades, my response was to deny that I was defensive. Each time we went through this routine, the conjugial separation she felt was  made more painful and desperate. What could she do to break down this wall of blindness and denial? She was getting so tired. She was getting no relief, year after year. At last the Doctrine of the Wife happened in my life. The Lord showed me in illustration while reading the Word that Hearken Unto Sarah was a commandment. Later I was able to see the biological perspective on the Doctrine of the Wife. That's when my regeneration really started showing results. For a long time I merely was able to compel my external behavior, putting on  a pleasant expression on my face and compelling my mouth to express the opposite of the defensive and offensive things I thought and felt whenever she was in my face and not budging an inch. She would never never compromise.

At first my wife was cowed into silent and passive acceptance of my affections. She loved my cognitions and instantly and constantly conjoined herself with them, making them as-if her own. She saw and understood what I saw and understood about anything and everything I had an interest in. She was my cognitive clone. But she was more than this for she had her own cognitive mind and she deftly used my cognitions in all situations, far surpassing me in many kinds of things. I admired her. I was not jealous of her. I felt superior and inferior to her. But she did not love my affections.

And I thank the Lord for that. She battled my affections fiercely for years. She tried to show me that my affections were not mine but instilled in me by my family and upbringing. All this happened before I met her. Now that I married her, she argued, I was supposed to abandon my family affections and espouse hers. then we can make a true couple. I went along with this idea philosophically, but not actually. At last the Lord sent the Doctrine of the Wife. Now I was able to see the many commandments the Lord gives in the Writings. Eventually I was able to accept, love, and promote the idea of the Doctrine of the Wife. I know that my wife is appreciative. I no longer make her cry on a regular basis! From the cold frozen tundra where I made a house for her, I brought her away from the North  and built a house in the East where we sojourn happily towards the real paradise of internal conjugial union. This is the house of the Doctrine of the Wife.

Here is another common example. Remember the four steps of forming a conjugial fiber:

• Step 1: The wife acts. She reveals her affections to her husband in the form of a direct or implied request.
• Step 2: the husband receives. He wills himself to love her affection, and by this, he receives it, that is, conjoins his cognitions to it. Her affection now is as-if his own.
• Step 3: the husband reacts. He says one or more of these four things:  Yes.  O.K.  That's right.  I will.
• Step 4: the wife reacts to the husband. She feels his reaction of conjunction as her bosom delight (see CL 293-294).

Here is a third example:

Women have a perception of truth that is more immediate than that of men, whose understanding in comparison is laborious, even pompous. So for women I want to state what is the Doctrine of the Wife in a nutshell (men will need the whole article to understand it, let alone accept it). It is this:

Even though men are born understandings and receive wisdom from the Lord, they cannot hold on to this wisdom or make it their own, unless and until they love their wife's judgment above their own judgment. The husband's wisdom, when genuine, is to know this. The husband's conjugial love is to love this.

The reason for this is that the wife's wisdom is inmost and celestial, from the Lord. The wife's conjugial love is to love the husband's wisdom to the extent it is genuine. Until the husband accepts the Doctrine of the Wife, he is in the delusion that he has genuine understanding of his own, from the Lord, independently of the wife.

This delusion is confirmed by doctrinal heresies they fabricate from the literal of the Writings. In this state of mind they discriminate against women, discount their judgment, and abuse them. This they refuse to recognize. Thus they are trapped. The Doctrine of the Wife for Husbands is my way of sharing with them what I have learned and what I was given to discover. In this way I invite all husbands to follow the practices enjoined by the Doctrine of the Wife so that they may have conjugial love, and thus eternal union with their wife.

Wives who read the Doctrine of the Wife for Husbands will experience a deep joy and renewed hope that their dearest longing is not a fiction but a Divine reality that awaits them.

3. Feminizing the Marriage is Sanctifying It

The expression "feminization of the Church" is usually taken in a pejorative sense. We need to reclaim this word in its good sense, and this is done through the Doctrine of the Wife. Through this perspective marriage becomes feminized in the mind of husbands. When this occurs, the feminization of marriage has taken place, and this is synonymous with the sanctification of marriage. Marriage is sanctified by the husband in his internal mind when he acknowledges, confirms, and lives in accordance with the Doctrine of the Wife. Marriage is the state of growth between a wife and a husband. There are two phases to this growth, external and internal, or, growth in the external mind and growth in the internal mind. In the external mind, marriage is masculinized and in society this is equivalent with the notion that this is a 'man's world.' But in the internal phase which comes next, marriage is feminized by the husband through living the Doctrine of the Wife.

The commandment for husbands to "leave mother and father" means to abandon loyalty and love for masculinized truth, and the commandment to "cleave unto the wife" means to conjoin himself in all things with the wife's affections. In this way they achieve the state of "one flesh" which means of one mind, which is the mind of an angel. This is composed of the wife's affections conjoined with the husband's cognitions, thus making one angelic mind out of a man and a woman. This conjoined mind is the highest state provided by the Lord for humans and in this state we are truly human, immortal and in perfect health, ecstatically happy, fully rational, loving and compassionate, creative and skillful to the extreme in all things. This is the angelic state, and it is created when the husband loves his wife's affections and adjusts his own cognitions to harmonize with the wife's affections. This is his striving in feminizing the marriage and which the Lord rewards by creating the perfect angelic mind out of the two imperfect individuals.

The idea that the feminization of marriage is its sanctification may appear surprising at first. Even more surprise is generated if we say that the feminization of the Church is its true and genuine sanctification. We can say in general that the feminization of society is its salvation, and universally we can say that the feminization of the universe is God's plan in creation. You can confirm this principle from many things written in the Writings. Let me mention just a few examples.

Divine Truth of the highest kind is represented by Sarah, Wives, Virgins, and so on. Divine Truth of the lower kind is represented by men, boys, kings, and so on. The Church and the Word  is also represented by women, maidens, brides, and so on. The Word describes women's intelligence as being like the Lord's intelligence--"modest, gracious, peaceable, compliant, soft and gentle," but the intelligence of men is described as "critical, rough, resistant, argumentative, and given to intemperance" (see(CL 218). A man is constructed biologically as the inverse of a woman since woman is interior truth covered over with love while man is love covered over with exterior truth. The Writings also teach that interior is always superior and more spiritual than exterior in all things. Clearly then, a woman's intelligence is more spiritual and celestial than a man's intelligence. But we know that the Lord's purpose in creating and maintaining the universe is to populate the heavens from individuals born on earths. The heavens vary in accordance with genius, that is, distance from the Lord's Mind or Proprium--which is His Character and Personality. Regeneration consists in loosing our own proprium and living as if from the Lord's Proprium. This means abandoning the external masculinized truth and entering existence into the internal feminized truth. The feminized truth is like the truth of the Lord's Own Proprium which we are to take on and in which we are to live. Our affections as husbands must be placed below the affections of our wife because her intelligence is higher than our intelligence and this higher intelligence can conjoin only with feminine affections, not masculine.

Passages such as the above are seized upon by our external masculinized mind which wants to hold on to the idea that intelligence is the arena of men while feelings is the arena of women. By this they mean that men are ahead of women in intelligence and wisdom while women are ahead of men in love and affection. In this way they mean to turn the Doctrine of the Wife upside down and make it into a non-genuine union made by man, not by the Lord. The union the man wants to make is the adjunction together of man's intelligence with woman's affectional predisposition. This is not a true marriage and adjunction does not constitute conjunction. The passage above, and all others like it, refer to EXTERNAL states of marriage. Internal states are the reverse, as you can see in this passage.

This passage has four sentences which I marked from (a) to (d) in order to consider them each in turn. Sentence (a) specifies the "essential" or inmost difference between man and woman. Note that this inmost difference constitutes a union. No union is possible between alike and alike for that yields only an external adjunction or co-location. Note that in order to create a structural union there must be a particular kind of difference or relation, one that functions as a unitary action like the heart and the lungs in the body. Sentence (a) specifies the structural relation in marriage: femininity consists in elevating masculine wisdom from external to internal, or, from natural-rational to spiritual-rational. A wife imbibes and appropriates her husband's wisdom and then elevates it, that is, makes it interior, and covers it over with feminine love. This is stated in sentence (b).

Note this very important observation: In sentence (b) it is said that the Lord gives the wife conjugial love "through the wisdom of her husband." There are two ways of interpreting the meaning. One is that the wisdom mentioned here is the wisdom of the husband such as it is in the husband. But this is not in accord with the Doctrine of the Wife and its rationale. The other possible meaning is that the wisdom of the husband mentioned here refers to the wisdom of the husband the wife has when she imbibes her husband's wisdom. This means that the wife has conjugial love from the Lord when she unites her current wisdom in her (originally from the husband) with harmonious affections also in her, within which is the love from the Lord.

In this second interpretation it is clear that the wife's intelligence and wisdom is more interior than his, even though her wisdom originates from his. But it is given to the wife to elevate that wisdom from the husband within herself by implanting it in her inner mind where it functions at a more interior level than with the husband where it originated from. This interior truth is represented by Sarah, Abraham's wife. It is celestial truth and is such as the highest angels have. Angelic unity of the married couple thus depends on the husband imbibing the wife's affections and the wife imbibing the husband's cognitions. This process changes the cognitions of the husband and the wife as a gradual and endless process of deeper and richer union. This is not a static process. When the husband imbibes the wife's affections, his cognitions must change accordingly. He gains a deeper wisdom than before. When a wife imbibes her husband's cognitions, her affections become more sublime as indicated by greater beauty and more glorious femininity. The more they love each other's reciprocity, the more they conjoin in deeper unity. And this to eternity. What an amazing and wonderful reality! This is indicated in sentence (d).

Sentence (b) also states that the Lord gives the husband wisdom according to his "reception" of wisdom. What is the measure of his reception? Not his knowledge and intelligence, but the life he conducts according to these. Which means the kind of affections he favors. The Lord is instructing us that if we husbands favor the affections of our wife, then it means that we are receptive of His wisdom. Then He can give us that wisdom, and more of it. We become more wise as a husband only by living what we know, and this means doing the work of charity, starting especially with the wife, who is the neighbor in the first place, before all other neighbors. By loving the affections of our wife, affections which she has from the Lord, we are living what we know and understand from the Word. We are then receptive to the Lord's wisdom. As we receive deeper wisdom from the Lord, our wife imbibes it, elevates it in her interior mind, and receives new deeper and more genuine conjugial love from the Lord. The husband now can imbibe her new affections--and the cycle of union continues to grow forever.

To imbibe the wife's affections and to favor them means that the husband must never disagree and always agree with his wife's requests in all things.

See also The surrendered wife and the surrendered husband

4. Heresies Regarding the Husband's Wisdom

The Writings of Swedenborg (1688-1771) contain the greatest scientific revelations ever made to humankind. The center of these revelations is that human emotions and feelings are arranged in a hierarchy from strongest to weakest, and the strongest at the very top is the intense desire to unite in marriage. This state of inner unition between a husband and a wife is the complete and pure human state of life. It is the angelic life of couplehood. This is the life Swedenborg witnessed with thousands of couples with whom he interacted in the spiritual world called the heavens. The married couple is organically united in their spirit body or mind exactly like newly born Siamese twins who are physically joined in the body. The mental state of unition is so real in the afterlife world that married partners appear as one angel from a distance, but then appear as husband and wife when approached by Swedenborg. Without knowing this reality, an inner union between husband and wife cannot be achieved on a conscious basis. Perhaps it can happen at the unconscious level, I don't know. But now look at this:

The above passages clearly show that a union is necessary for the husband to be whole, or for the wife to be whole. The two are singly incomplete, the man lacking the love his understanding needs to be whole, and the wife lacking the understanding her love needs. There is a temptation for husbands to read the above passage and conclude that men are superior to women in understanding the things of everyday life. This I call a doctrinal heresy and the husband must let go of this persuasion, or fail in his attempt to regenerate and become an angel. (See this article for heresies in the New Church)

A sermon by Rev. Geoffrey H. Howard titled "The Transformation of a Man into a Husband and a Woman into a Wife through Marriage" appeared in New Church Life, June 2001 issue, pages 243-248. I will use this sermon to illustrate some doctrinal issues in relation to the Doctrine of the Wife. The point I wish to make is that the literal of the Writings can lead to misconceptions unless contextualized in relation to the Doctrine of the Wife. In other words, articulating the Doctrine of the Wife and applying it to interpret the literal of the Writings avoids the heresy of believing that men are superior to women due to men's wisdom which women cannot have. I believe that this heresy cannot be avoided without the Doctrine of the Wife.

First I note that it is customary to make a statement of denial in relation to the heresy of the superiority of men over women in relation to wisdom. For instance, Rev. Howard states: "It is important to take teachings such as these in their proper context. Some have read into such teachings in Conjugial Love the erroneous notion that masculine virtues are extolled over those of the feminine. Nothing could be further from the truth" (p.244). Nevertheless, this denial appears perfunctory or a mere outward declaration when we examine how this apparent paradox is to be resolved. The apparent paradox is that portions of the literal of the Writings appear to suggest that men are superior to women with respect to wisdom. Rev. Howard refers to some of these, e.g.:

Rev. Howard concludes: "From this we can see that the reception of masculine wisdom depends upon a man's willingness to look to the Lord and shun as sins against the Lord the evils that may tempt him. Thus we can see that a man does not automatically receive wisdom because he is a male. He receives it only by honoring the Lord through living according to His commandments."

This is true. But we need to look at this closely for a serpent may lie hidden under it, like a rock in the desert. We must inquire into this and make it clear: How does a man live according to the Lord's commandments? One might think at first blush that the man has that power from the Lord independently of his wife. Can a husband live according to the Lord's commandments from his efforts apart from the wife or only through his wife? Could it be that the husband cannot follow the Lord's commandments unless he does so through his wife? This would appear to be so when considering Rev. Howard's description of the wife:  "A woman too is born with the potential for receiving wisdom, but in her case the wisdom she receives partakes more of love and of perception. She is gifted with the potential of elevating her will into the heat of heaven above what is possible with men" (p.245).

Rev. Howard: "Feminine wisdom, or perception, does not easily lend itself to description because it is of a more interior nature than is the wisdom given to a man" (...) They are entirely different in quality and nature, yet complementary to each other" (p.245).

This is true, and yet there is a temptation hidden in it. It seems to me that it is not enough to say (a) that masculine and feminine wisdom are different; and (b) that they are complementary. This is not enough. A conclusion must follow: (c) Therefore the husband should elevate the wife's judgment above his own. This is the Doctrine of the Wife.

Without this conclusion, the literal of the Writings is misperceived. The husband's wisdom may indeed be elevated even to the highest heaven, but he cannot appropriate it to himself. His wisdom falls back quickly to the level of his affections, which are in hell. The Writings make this comparison: "He is also like an adulterer who hides a harlot in a room below, and in turn ascends to the highest story of his house, and there in the presence of his wife talks wisely with visitors about chastity, and again steals away from the company and satiates his lust with the harlot below" (TCR 590). This comparison is said about every husband. Husbands can elevate their intellect into doctrinal things of the Word while they are studying and applying themselves piously. Then they descend from the lofty heights and interact with their wife, abusing them, discounting their intellect, holding the wife's judgment as nothing in comparison to their own. And this is done repeatedly, daily. Thus there is no regeneration possible for them.

Rev. Howard: "No wife can love a proud or conceited husband. (...) The attraction he feels [as he is drawn to her by love] has the effect of subduing his proprial pride. (...) Through the influence of her love his mind becomes elevated and aspires to a new idealism that no longer looks inward. He feels an incentive to live in a manner worthy of her love and respect. Through her influence he is withdrawn from his fallen proprium. By living a principled life of service to his wife, family and others, he begins to receive a degree of wisdom which will draw the affections of his wife" (p.247).

This is certainly true. And yet there is danger lurking in this truth that needs to be addressed by every husband. The above description is standard fair for what is called BROWN temptations (see part 2). Note what the paragraph says: the husband aspires to a new idealism as he strives to become worthy of her love and respect. Through this process he enlarges or deepens his wisdom, and this will draw his wife's affections to him. And then he can continue a new round, ever higher or deeper into conjugial love and unity. To me this seems to leave the main point unattended, which is that husbands CANNOT improve their wisdom through this process of self-motivated desire to be worthy of their wife's still greater love. This is not possible, no more than the proverbial lifting yourself through the boot straps.

The only way a husband can improve his wisdom is by elevating his wife's judgment above his own. This is the Doctrine of the Wife. Clearly the wife's wisdom is higher and superior to the husband's wisdom. This is not recognized by Rev. Howard, as can be seen from this:  "A husband is totally dependent upon the wife for love. Apart from feminine love, men feel little inspiration to seek things of wisdom." This is another standard version of BROWN temptations, described in Part 2. In this mental state wives are relegated to a ceremonious role, yes an essential role it is declared, but still not a central role, still not a PRIMARY role. This is refused by the husband. The husband will acknowledge that the wife has an essential role to play in the union. And this role is relegated to the "affectional side" of things. Here, Rev. Howard says "dependent on the wife for love" and "inspired by the wife to new heights of wisdom" etc. The central fact remains: It is believed that the husband improves and grows in his wisdom from the Lord in accordance with his "following the commandments."

It is believed that if the husband applies himself to following the commandments, his wisdom will grow from the Lord, and the wife will be able to love his wisdom even more, and thus the couple is conjoined. But this is the WRONG order! It is NOT the case that the husband gains wisdom implanted from the Lord BY HIMSELF, that is, apart from his wife, through his own independent effort and striving to follow the Lord's commandments. This is a FANTASY as I have discovered.

There is only one way the husband can grow in wisdom, and that is through receiving it from the Lord. True. But the Lord can only give as much as the husband can receive--this is recognized by everyone. Hence the question is: When can the husband receive more interior truths or deeper wisdom from the Lord? NOT as he strives independently to follow the Lord's commandments and receiving deeper wisdom which she can then love and conjoin with. There is no deeper wisdom for her to conjoin with just because the husband strives to improve by following the commandments. Striving to improve is not sufficient for the husband to receive more interior truths from the Lord. Why? Because this striving is from his proprium. His only salvation is to love the wife's judgment above his own, to love the wife's wisdom above his own. This is the Doctrine of the Wife.

Finally, Rev. Howard writes: "Rational wisdom, on the other hand, is gained through study and application to intellectual pursuits. These have the effect of elevating the mind of a husband into higher light" (p.248).

I have discovered that rational wisdom does not develop in this way because such study and scholarship only yields knowledges and scientifics about the literal of the Word. Instead, rational wisdom develops as the husband DRAWS OUT or EXTRACTS doctrine from the literal through enlightenment or illustration from the Lord (see this article on De Hemelsche Leer). It is shown in the article that this illustration is proportional to the husband's willingness to undergo spiritual and celestial temptations. These temptations cannot be undergone by the husband alone, but only through the wife, and only to the extent that one favors the wife's wisdom over one's own. This doesn't mean that the wife knows more than the husband about doctrinal things and so the husband takes lessons from the wife. It means that whatever doctrine the husband can extract from the literal, his understanding of it, and then his life according to it, is proportional to his seeing the doctrine in himself, in his life. This is the essence of illustration. For a husband, his wife is the all in all of his temptations, hence of his regeneration and salvation.

The Doctrine of the Wife explains many things about marriage taken from the Writings of Swedenborg.

5. The Role of the Wife in the Husband's Wisdom