Water I Can Drink: Reception According to Degree and State

Water I Can Drink grew from a meditation journey in which questions about Swedenborg’s writings were brought into prayer. The Song Reflection tells the story of that experience and explores its meaning in accessible terms. This companion study examines the underlying Swedenborgian doctrine more closely: how infinite Divine love and wisdom are received by finite recipients, how degree differs from state, and how the biblical images of water, drinking, and a vessel illuminate the movement of truth into life.

The central principle is not that the Lord limits or withholds truth. Divine love and wisdom are infinite and unceasing. What varies is the organized recipient: the degrees that have been opened within a person, the person’s present state, and therefore what can actually be received, understood, appropriated, and lived.

Reception According to Degree and State

The doctrinal center of this study is Divine Love and Wisdom §§110-112. Swedenborg explains that angels receive Divine love and wisdom in the degree of spiritual heat and light adequate to their states. Because every angel is created and finite, no angel can receive the Lord as He is in Himself. The difference lies not in the Lord, who is equally present, but in the receiving subjects. Section 112 extends this principle to human beings: the interiors of the human mind are warmed and illuminated according to their reception of love and wisdom from the Lord.

Degree and state are related, but they are not identical. Degree concerns the levels of the mind that have been opened and formed over time. State concerns the person’s present condition within that structure: the love, understanding, readiness, and capacity actually present at a given moment. The experience behind the song can therefore be understood without assigning pride, fault, or spiritual wrongdoing. It pictures a finite recipient encountering something that, in that particular state, could not yet be fully received.

Discrete and Continuous Degrees

Swedenborg teaches that every person possesses three discrete degrees of height that can be progressively opened. Within each discrete degree are also continuous degrees through which growth occurs gradually (Divine Love and Wisdom §236). The distinction matters because a recipient is not simply an empty vessel of greater or smaller volume. A human mind is an organized form. What it can receive depends upon how that form has been opened, developed, and ordered.

Swedenborg further teaches that both discrete and continuous degrees exist in the greatest and least created things, including the least elements of affection and thought (Divine Love and Wisdom §§222-225). Seen in this light, the empty glass in the song represents more than a request for a smaller quantity. It represents a request for truth in a form that this particular recipient, at this particular time, can genuinely hold and make her own.

Successive and Simultaneous Order

The degrees of the mind can be described in two true and related ways. In successive order they appear as highest, middle, and lowest. In simultaneous order those same degrees are present as innermost, intermediate, and outermost within the formed recipient (Divine Love and Wisdom §§205-208). Consequently, ascent should not be reduced to a metaphor for turning inward. Successive elevation and simultaneous interiority describe different aspects of the same ordered structure.

Love Wisdom and Use

Swedenborg identifies the celestial degree with love, the spiritual degree with wisdom, and the natural degree with use. These three are related as end, cause, and effect, and the same threefold pattern recurs within love, wisdom, and use themselves (Divine Love and Wisdom §§230-235). Truth is therefore not received merely so that it may be known. It is meant to pass into understanding, become joined with love, and ultimately take form in use.

Leon James develops a more formal psychological model from this structural pattern. That development can be useful for theistic psychology, but it should be identified as a psychological elaboration rather than attributed to Swedenborg as his own explicit formulation.

Water Drinking and the Recipient

Throughout Swedenborg’s exposition of the Word, water signifies truth, while a well or spring from which water is drawn can signify the Word or doctrine (Arcana Coelestia §2702). Drinking signifies receiving instruction and accepting truth (Arcana Coelestia §3069), and more specifically the appropriation of truth into oneself (Arcana Coelestia §3333).

In the account of Abraham’s servant asking Rebekah for water from her pitcher, Swedenborg explains that the pitcher represents a recipient in which truth is held (Arcana Coelestia §3089). He further explains that “giving water” signifies a general influx of truth from the internal—the enlightenment that enables truth to be discerned and understood (Arcana Coelestia §5668). In another work, Swedenborg states that drinking signifies receiving, perceiving, and appropriating truth (Apocalypse Explained §617). What is appropriated is received according to the character and state of the recipient (Arcana Coelestia §7343).

From Influx to Life and Use

The image of water that can be drunk therefore describes a complete spiritual movement:

Divine love and wisdom flow unceasingly from the Lord.
They are received within an organized, finite human form.
Reception occurs according to the degrees that have been opened and the person’s present state.
Truth enters the understanding and is perceived.
What is genuinely received can be appropriated, becoming part of the person’s spiritual life.
Appropriated truth comes to rest in conduct, service, and the ordinary uses of daily life.

This last movement is essential. Spiritual life is not formed by withdrawing permanently from ordinary life, but by receiving what is spiritual within moral, civil, and useful living (Heaven and Hell §528). The prayer for water that can be drunk is ultimately a prayer for truth that can be received, understood, and brought into daily life.