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Love Quote by Emanuel Swedenborg

"In the spiritual body moreover, man appears such as he is with respect to love and faith, for everyone in the spiritual world is the effigy of his own love, not only as to the face and the body, but also as to the speech and the actions"

About this Quote

Swedenborg is smuggling a moral X-ray into the language of anatomy. In his spiritual universe, you dont just have beliefs; you wear them. Love and faith are not private convictions tucked safely behind the skull. They are the architects of your visible form, scripting everything from facial features to voice to reflex. The move is clever because it collapses the usual gap between inner life and social performance: the self is not hidden, its rendered.

The intent is pastoral but unsentimental. Swedenborg wants accountability without the courtroom. If everyone becomes the effigy of his own love, hypocrisy stops being a strategy. You can no longer talk your way out of what you desire. Speech and action, the places where people typically stage-manage their virtue, become biometric readouts. The subtext is blunt: your character is already advertising itself; the afterlife just removes the flattering lighting.

Context matters. Swedenborg was a respected scientist who pivoted into visionary theology, and you can feel the empirical itch in this metaphysics. He treats the spiritual world like a lab where variables (love, faith) produce observable effects (form, behavior). Its an Enlightenment-era proposition with mystical voltage: the cosmos is orderly, legible, and relentlessly diagnostic.

The line also rebukes a Protestant culture that could overvalue correct doctrine. Faith alone isnt the star here; love is the sculptor. The punch is ethical: salvation is not winning an argument about God, its becoming someone whose desires are worth looking at.

Quote Details

TopicFaith
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Swedenborg on the Spiritual Body and the Power of Love
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About the Author

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Emanuel Swedenborg (January 29, 1688 - March 29, 1772) was a Scientist from Sweden.

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