The Fourth Seal: AR 320, 323 - A Pale Horse

AR 320

So I looked, and behold, a pale horse.
(Revelation 6:8)

This symbolizes
an understanding of the Word destroyed
as to both goodness and truth.

A horse symbolizes an understanding of the Word,
and paleness symbolizes a lack of vitality.

The Word lacks vitality for people
who are without goods of life
in accordance with doctrinal truths.
For the Word in the sense of the letter
is not understood apart from doctrine,
and doctrine is not seen
without a life in accordance with it.
That is because a life
in accordance with doctrine drawn from the Word
opens the spiritual mind,
and light from heaven flows into the mind,
enlightening it and giving it the ability to see.
The reality of this is not known
by one who is acquainted with truths of doctrine,
and yet does not live according to them.

AR 323

With sword, with famine, with death,
and by the beasts of the earth.
(Revelation 6:8)

This symbolically means,
by doctrinal falsities, by evil practices,
by self-love, and by lusts.

To be shown that a sword symbolizes truths
fighting against evils and falsities and destroying them,
and in an opposite sense, falsity
fighting against goods and truths and destroying them.
Accordingly, because the subject is
the destruction of all good in the church,
a sword here symbolizes doctrinal falsities.

. . . Death symbolizes a person's self-love
because death symbolizes the extinction of spiritual life,
and thus natural life divorced from any spiritual life,
and this life is the life of a person's self-love;
for this life causes a person to love
nothing but himself and the world,
and so to love also evils of every kind,
evils which, because of that life's love,
are delightful to him.

. . . A famine symbolizes the privation and rejection
of concepts of truth and goodness,
springing from evil practices.
It symbolizes as well
an ignorance of concepts of truth and goodness,
owing to an absence of these in the church.
And it symbolizes also
a desire to know and understand them.