What the Writings Testify
What the Writings Testify
NOTES:
The Internal Sense and the Sense of the Letter
"The internal sense is the Word itself" (AC 1540). Yet "the Divine truth is in its fullness in the sense of the letter of our Word". (AE 1087:2, compare SS 39) Hence it is also taught that "the Word ... is not the Word until it is in the sense of the letter. The Word not in that ultimate would be like a temple in the air and not on earth, or like a man having flesh but without bones". (AE 1087:2, compare 1088:2-5, TCR 214e, De Verbo 25) "It is from the spiritual sense that the Word is Divinely inspired and holy in every sentence (voce)." (TCR 200) But "in our natural Word are contained both the spiritual Word and the celestial Word", while "in the spiritual and celestial Word the natural Word is not contained; wherefore the Word in our world is most full of Divine wisdom, and thence is more holy than the Words in the heavens". (De Verbo 35, compare 54, heading)
When viewed spiritually, the doctrine of the New Church presented in the Writings cannot be separated in thought from the Word given in its literal sense in the Old and New Testaments; any more than the internal sense can be separated from the sense of the letter. "For the sense of the letter is the basis into which the spiritual ideas, which are with the angels, close, much the same as words (voces) are the basis into which the meaning of the thought falls and is communicated to another" (AE 356:5). The doctrine of the New Church "is solely from the sense of the letter of the Word", and "the Word in the sense of the letter contains all things of the doctrine of the New Church". (AR 898, 902)
The statement that the doctrine is drawn "from the sense of the letter" where it is also " contained", does not contradict the further teachings that it is "from the spiritual sense" (HD 7), that "the internal sense contains it", and that it is identical with the doctrine of genuine truth which is the spiritual sense appearing in the literal sense. (See WH 11:3, AC 9030e, 7233:3, 10400:2-4, 9424, SS 25, et al.)
A similar paradox is presented in the teachings, a) "that the Lord is present with man and enlightens him, and teaches him the truths of the church", in the sense of the letter of the Word "and nowhere else" (SS 53) ; b) that "elsewhere than in the Word the Lord does not reveal Himself, nor there otherwise than through the internal sense" (AE 36). These ideas make one in the light of the statements (in AC 7233:3) that doctrine should be formed from the "internal sense"; for "the internal sense is not only that sense which lies concealed in the external sense, ...but is also that which results from a number of passages of the sense of the letter rightly collated, and which is discerned by those who are enlightened by the Lord in respect to their intellectual".
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