Literal Commentary on Genesis 12.24–12.35

This spiritual nature, then, in which not bodies but likenesses of bodies are formed, has visions of a lower kind than that light of the mind and intelligence by which both these lower things are judged and those things are discerned which neither are bodies nor bear any forms resembling bodies: such as the mind itself and every good disposition of the soul, to which are opposed its vices, which are rightly blamed and condemned in human beings. For in what other way is the intellect itself beheld except by understanding? So too love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, self-control, and the rest of this kind, by which one draws near to God; and God himself, from whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things. Although, then, the visions happen in the same soul—whether those perceived through the body, like this bodily heaven and earth and whatever in them can be known, so far as they can; or those seen by the spirit, likenesses of bodies, about which we have already said much; or those understood by the mind, which are neither bodies nor likenesses of bodies—they certainly have their order, and one is more excellent than another. For spiritual vision is more excellent than bodily, and again intellectual more excellent than spiritual. For bodily vision cannot exist without spiritual, since at the same moment at which a body is touched by a sense of the body, something of the same kind happens in the soul, not that it is this but that it is like it; and if this did not happen, there would be no sense by which things lying outside are perceived. For it is not the body that perceives, but the soul through the body, which it uses as a messenger to form in itself what is reported from outside. So bodily vision cannot happen unless spiritual vision happens at the same time; but it is not distinguished until the sense has been withdrawn from the body, so that what was seen through the body is found in the spirit. But spiritual vision can happen even without bodily vision, when likenesses of absent bodies appear in the spirit, and many are invented at will or shown beyond the will. Again, spiritual vision needs intellectual vision in order to be judged, but intellectual vision does not need this lower, spiritual vision. And therefore bodily vision is subject to spiritual, and both to intellectual. When, then, we read, “The spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is judged by no one,” we must take it not according to the spirit from which the mind is distinguished, as in the saying, “I will pray with the spirit, I will pray also with the mind,” but in that sense in which it is said, “But be renewed in the spirit of your mind.” For we have already shown above that in another way the mind itself is called spirit, and it is according to this that the spiritual man judges all things. Therefore I think it neither absurd nor unfitting to say that spiritual vision holds a kind of middle place between intellectual and bodily. For I think it not unfitting to call that middle which is not a body but is like a body, between that which is truly a body and that which is neither a body nor like a body.

The soul is mocked by likenesses of things not through their fault but through its own opinion, when, failing in understanding, it approves things that are like as if they were the things they are like. It is deceived, then, in bodily vision, when it thinks that what happens in the senses of the body happens in the bodies themselves—as to those sailing, things on land that stand still seem to move, and to those looking at the sky the stars, which move, seem to stand still; and when the rays of the eyes are spread apart, two images of a lamp appear; and an oar seems broken in water; and many things of this kind—or when it thinks a thing to be what is similarly coloured, or sounds or smells or tastes or feels similar. Hence a waxy medicine cooked in a pot is thought to be a vegetable; the sound of a passing cart is thought to come from thunder; if it is explored by no other senses but left to smell alone, the citron is thought to be the herb called balm; food flavoured with some sweetish juice is thought to be preserved in honey; and an unknown ring handled in the dark is thought to be gold when it is bronze or silver. Or when the soul, disturbed by sudden and unexpected bodily sights, thinks it is seeing in dreams or affected by some spiritual sight of that kind. Hence in all bodily sights the testimony of the other senses too is applied, and above all that of the mind itself and of reason, so that what is true in this kind of things may be found as far as it can be found. But in spiritual vision, that is, in likenesses of bodies seen by the spirit, the soul is deceived when it supposes that what it sees in this way are bodies themselves, or when it thinks that what it has invented for itself by suspicion and false conjecture exists also in the bodies it conjectures without seeing them. But in those intellectual sights it is not deceived. For either it understands, and it is true; or, if it is not true, it does not understand; hence it is one thing to err about what one sees, another to err because one does not see.

Therefore, when the soul is snatched into those sights which are discerned by the spirit as like bodily things, so that it is turned away from the senses of the body more fully than usually happens in sleep, but less than in death, it is now a matter of divine admonition and help that it should know that it is discerning spiritually not bodies but sights like bodies; just as those who know they are seeing in dreams, even before they wake. There, if future things are also seen, so that the future things whose images are seen as present are fully known, whether the man's mind itself is divinely helped or someone among the sights themselves explains what they signify, as was explained to John in the Apocalypse, it is a great revelation, even if perhaps the one to whom these things are shown does not know whether he has gone out of the body or is still in the body but sees them with the spirit estranged from the senses of the body; for one so snatched away can be ignorant of this, if this too is not shown to him. Further, if, just as he was snatched from the senses of the body so as to be among these likenesses of bodies seen by the spirit, he is also snatched from these so as to be carried up into that region, as it were, of intellectual or intelligible things, where the clear truth is discerned without any likeness of a body and is darkened by no mists of false opinions, there the virtues of the soul are not toilsome and laborious. For there lust is not reined in by the work of temperance, nor adversities borne by the work of fortitude, nor wrongs punished by the work of justice, nor evils avoided by the work of prudence. There the one and whole virtue is to love what you see, and the highest happiness is to have what you love. For there the happy life is drunk at its source, from which something is sprinkled on this human life, so that amid the temptations of this world one may live temperately, bravely, justly, and prudently. For it is in order to attain that—where there will be secure rest and the ineffable vision of truth—that the labour is undertaken of refraining from pleasure, of enduring adversities, of helping the needy, and of resisting deceivers. There the glory of the Lord is seen, not through a signifying vision, whether bodily, as it was seen on Mount Sinai, or spiritual, as Isaiah or John in the Apocalypse saw it, but by sight, not through enigmas, so far as the human mind can grasp it, according to the grace of God who takes it up, so that God speaks mouth to mouth with him whom he has made worthy of such converse—not the mouth of the body but of the mind, as I think is to be understood what is written of Moses.

For he had desired, as we read in Exodus, to see God, not as he had seen him on the mountain nor as he saw him in the tabernacle, but in that substance by which God is God, with no bodily creature taken up to be presented to the senses of mortal flesh, nor in likenesses of bodies figured in the spirit, but in his own form, so far as a rational and intellectual creature can grasp it, called away from every sense of the body and from every signifying enigma of the spirit. For so it is written: “If, then, I have found favour in your sight, show me yourself, that I may see you plainly”; whereas a little earlier we read, “And the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as one speaks to his friend.” So he perceived what he was seeing, and desired what he was not seeing. For a little later, when God had said to him, “For you have found favour in my sight, and I know you above all,” he answered him, “Show me your glory.” And then indeed he received a figurative answer from the Lord, which it would take long to discuss now, when he said to him, “You cannot see my face and live; for man shall not see my face and live.” Then he added and said to him, “Behold, there is a place by me, and you shall stand upon the rock; as soon as my majesty passes, I will put you in a cleft of the rock and cover you with my hand until I pass; and I will take away my hand, and then you will see my back; for my face will not appear to you.” Yet the Scripture that follows did not narrate that this also happened bodily, and by this it is shown clearly enough that it was said figuratively, signifying the church. For the church is the place by the Lord, since it is his temple and is itself built upon the rock; and the other things said there fit the same understanding. Yet unless Moses had been found worthy to see the glory of God which he had longed and desired for, God would not have said in the book of Numbers to Aaron and Miriam, his brother and sister, “Hear my words: if there is a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known to him in a vision and will speak to him in sleep. Not so with my servant Moses: he is faithful in all my house; I will speak to him mouth to mouth, by sight and not through enigmas, and he has seen the glory of the Lord.” For this is not to be understood according to the substance of a body, which is presented to the senses of the flesh; for in that way, certainly, he was speaking to Moses face to face, opposite to opposite, at the very time when Moses said to him, “Show me yourself”; and now too, to those very people whom he was rebuking and to whom he was so preferring the merit of Moses, he was speaking in that way, through a bodily creature presented to the senses of the flesh. In that other way, then, in that form by which God is God, he speaks far more ineffably, more secretly and more presently, by an ineffable speech, where no one living sees him with this life that is lived mortally in these senses of the body, unless he in some way dies to this life, whether going out of the body altogether or so turned away and estranged from the fleshly senses that he rightly does not know, as the apostle says, whether he is in the body or out of the body, when he is snatched and carried up into that vision.

Therefore, if the apostle called the third heaven this third kind of vision, which is higher not only than all bodily vision, by which bodies are perceived through the senses of the body, but also than all that spiritual vision by which likenesses of bodies are discerned by the spirit, not the mind, then in this the glory of God is seen, for the seeing of which hearts are cleansed. Hence it is said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”; not through some signification figured bodily or spiritually, as through a mirror in an enigma, but face to face—what was said of Moses, “mouth to mouth”—that is, by that form by which God is whatever he is, however little of him the mind, which is not what he is, can grasp, even when cleansed from every earthly stain, estranged and snatched away from every body and likeness of a body. From him we are absent on pilgrimage, weighed down by a mortal and corruptible burden, as long as we walk by faith, not by sight, even when we live righteously here. But why should we not believe that God willed to show to so great an apostle, the teacher of the Gentiles, snatched up to that most excellent vision, the life in which, after this life, we are to live for ever? And why should this not be called paradise, apart from that one in which Adam lived bodily among shady and fruitful trees? Since the church too, which gathers us into the bosom of love, has been called a paradise with the fruit of apples. But this was said figuratively, as if by that paradise, where Adam properly was, the church was signified in the manner of a type of what was to come. Although to those who consider more carefully it may perhaps occur that by that bodily paradise, in which Adam was bodily, there was signified both this life of the saints which is now led in the church and that which will be after this for ever: just as Jerusalem, which is interpreted “vision of peace,” and yet is shown to be an earthly city, signifies Jerusalem our eternal mother in the heavens, whether in those who have been saved in hope and, hoping for what they do not see, wait for it with patience—according to whom “many are the children of the desolate, more than of her who has a husband”—or in the holy angels themselves, to whom the manifold wisdom of God is made known through the church, with whom, after this pilgrimage, we are to live without toil and without end.

But if we take the third heaven, to which the apostle was caught up, in such a way as to believe that there are also a fourth and several more heavens above, below which this third heaven is—as some maintain there are seven, others eight, others nine or even ten, and assert that within that one called the firmament there are many in degrees, and therefore reason or opine that they are bodily; it would take long to discuss their reasoning and opinion now; and it may be that someone contends, or if he can shows, that even among spiritual or intellectual things there are many degrees, distinguished according to some advance of more or less illuminated revelations—however these things stand, and let them be taken as one pleases, by one this way and by another that way, I for my part cannot, up to now, either know or teach any kinds of things seen or of visions besides these three: by body, by spirit, or by mind. But how many and how great are the differences within each kind, so that in each one thing is raised above another by degrees, I confess I do not know.

Just as, in this bodily light, there is the heaven that we look up to above the earth, from which the luminaries and stars shine, bodies far better than earthly ones, so in that spiritual kind, in which likenesses of bodies are seen by a certain incorporeal light of its own, there are certain excellent things, rightly called divine. These the angels show in wonderful ways: whether by making their own sights ours too through some easy and very powerful union or intermingling, or by knowing, in some way I know not, how to form our vision in our spirit, is a thing hard to perceive and harder to say. But there are other, ordinary and human sights, which either arise in many ways from our spirit itself or are in some way suggested to the spirit from the body, according as we have been affected in flesh or in mind. For not only do people who are awake turn over their cares in thought in likenesses of bodies, but even when asleep they often dream of what they need; for they carry on their business out of the soul's desire, and greedily press upon feasts and cups if they happen to have gone to sleep hungry and thirsty. All these, I think, compared with those angelic showings, are to be regarded as earthly things are compared with heavenly ones in the nature of bodies.

So too in that kind of intellectual things seen, some are seen in the soul itself, such as the virtues, to which the vices are opposed: whether those that will remain, like godliness, or those useful for this life and not to exist afterwards, like faith, by which we believe what we do not yet see; and hope, by which we wait with patience for what is to come; and patience itself, by which we bear all adversities until we come where we wish. These and similar virtues, which are now very necessary for completing this pilgrimage, will not exist in that life for the attaining of which they are necessary; and yet they too are seen intellectually; for they neither are bodies nor have forms resembling bodies. But the light itself by which the soul is illuminated, so that it beholds all things truly understood either in itself or in that light, is something else. For that light is God himself, whereas the soul is a creature, though rational and intellectual, made in his image; when it tries to gaze on that light, it trembles with weakness and is less able. Yet from there comes whatever it understands, as it is able. When, then, it is snatched there and, withdrawn from the fleshly senses, is presented more vividly to that vision—not by spaces of place but in a certain way of its own—it sees even above itself that by whose help it sees whatever it also sees in itself by understanding.

But if it is asked, when the soul has gone out of the body, whether it is carried to some bodily places, or to incorporeal places like bodily ones, or indeed to neither, but to that which is more excellent than both bodies and likenesses of bodies, I would readily answer that it is not carried to bodily places except with some body, or else is not carried locally. Whether it has some body when it has gone out of this body, let him show who can; I do not think so. But it is carried, according to its deserts, to spiritual places: either to places of punishment resembling bodies, such as have often been shown to those who have been snatched from the senses of the body and lain like the dead and seen the punishments of the underworld, since they too bore in themselves a certain likeness of their own body, through which they could be carried to those places and experience such things in likenesses; for I do not see why the soul should have a likeness of its body when, the body itself lying without sense but not yet entirely dead, it sees such things as many have related who were restored to the living from that withdrawal, and should not have it when, death being complete, it has gone out of the body entirely. So it is carried either to those places of punishment or to places likewise resembling bodily ones, yet not of punishment but of rest and joys. For it cannot rightly be said either that those punishments are false or that that rest and gladness are false; for things are false when, through error of opinion, some are thought to be others. For Peter was certainly deceived not only when he saw that sheet and thought there were in it not likenesses of bodies but bodies; but also at another time, when, freed from his chains by an angel, he was going along walking in the body and presented to bodily forms and thought he was seeing a vision, he was nonetheless deceived. For those forms in the sheet were spiritual forms resembling bodily ones, and this bodily appearance of one freed from his chains was, because of the miracle, like a spiritual one. The soul was deceived in both cases only because it approved some things for others. So, although the things by which souls stripped of their bodies are affected, well or ill, are not bodily but resemble bodily things, while the souls themselves appear to themselves like their own bodies, yet they exist; and the gladness is true and the distress is true, made of spiritual substance. For even in dreams it makes a great difference whether we are in joyful or sad circumstances. Hence some, placed among things they had desired, have grieved that they woke up; and others, agitated and vexed by grievous terrors and torments, when they woke up feared to sleep lest they be called back into the same evils. And certainly there is no doubt that those things called infernal are more vivid, and therefore felt more vehemently. For those too who have been withdrawn from the senses of the body—less, indeed, than if they had died altogether, but more than if they were asleep—have related that they saw things more vivid than if they had been relating dreams. So the underworld is real; but I think its substance is spiritual, not bodily.

Nor should we listen to those who assert that the underworld is worked out in this life and does not exist after death; let them see how they interpret the fictions of the poets. We must not depart from the authority of the divine Scriptures, which alone are to be believed on this matter. Yet we could show that the wise men among them too did not at all doubt the reality of the underworld, which receives the souls of the dead after this life. But why the underworld is said to be under the earth, if it is not a bodily place, or why it is called the underworld if it is not under the earth, is rightly asked. That the soul is not bodily I dare to profess, not as my opinion but as plain knowledge; yet whoever denies that it can have a likeness of a body and of bodily members altogether can deny that it is the soul that in dreams sees itself walking or sitting or carried here and there, going and returning on foot or even in flight, which does not happen without some likeness of a body. Accordingly, if it bears this likeness also in the underworld, not bodily but like a body, so too it seems to be in places that are not bodily but like bodily ones, whether in rest or in pains. I confess, however, that I have not yet found the place where the souls of the righteous rest called the underworld. And it is not without reason believed that the soul of Christ came even to those places where sinners are tormented, in order to free from torments those whom, by his justice hidden from us, he judged should be freed. For how else is to be understood what is said, “whom God raised from the dead, having loosed the pains of the underworld, because he could not be held by them,” I do not see, unless we take it that he loosed the pains of certain people in the underworld, by that power by which he is Lord, to whom every knee bows of those in heaven, on earth, and under the earth; by which power he also could not be held by those pains which he loosed. For neither Abraham, nor that poor man in his bosom, that is, in the secret place of his rest, was in pains; between their rest and those infernal torments we read that a great chasm is fixed; nor are they said to be in the underworld. For it says, “It happened that the poor man died and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom; and the rich man also died and was buried. And when he was in torments in the underworld,” and so on. So we see that the underworld is not mentioned in connection with the poor man's rest, but in connection with the rich man's punishment. As for what Jacob says to his sons, “You will bring down my old age with sorrow to the underworld,” he seems rather to have feared this: that he would be so disturbed by excessive sorrow that he would go not to the rest of the blessed but to the underworld of sinners. For sorrow is no small evil for the soul, since the apostle too feared so anxiously for someone, lest he be swallowed up by excessive sorrow. Accordingly, as I said, I have not yet found, and I am still seeking, nor does it occur to me, that Scripture—the canonical Scripture, at least—has anywhere used “the underworld” in a good sense. But I do not know whether anyone could bear to hear that Abraham's bosom and that rest to which the godly poor man was carried by angels is not to be taken in a good sense. And therefore I do not see how we can believe it to be in the underworld.

But while we are seeking this, and either finding or not finding, the length of this book urges us at last to conclude it. Therefore, since we began our discussion of paradise because of what the apostle says—that he knows that a man was caught up to the third heaven, but does not know whether in the body or out of the body, and that he was caught up into paradise and heard ineffable words which it is not lawful for a man to speak—we do not rashly affirm whether paradise is in the third heaven, or whether he was caught up both into the third heaven and from there again into paradise. For if paradise properly means a wooded place, but by a transferred use of the word any spiritual region, as it were, where it is well with souls can rightly be called paradise, then not only the third heaven, whatever it is—and surely it is something great and sublimely glorious—but even within man himself a certain gladness of a good conscience is a paradise. Hence the church too is rightly called a paradise for the saints who live temperately, justly, and godly, rich in the abundance of graces and chaste delights; since even in tribulations it glories, rejoicing greatly in patience itself, because according to the multitude of sorrows in its heart God's consolations gladden its soul. How much more, then, after this life can that bosom of Abraham also be called paradise, where there is no longer any temptation, where there is such great rest after all the sorrows of this life! For there is a light there too, of its own and of its own kind, and surely a great one, which that rich man, from the torments and darkness of the underworld, so far away, with a great chasm in between, yet saw in such a way that he recognized there that once despised poor man. If these things are so, the underworld is said or believed to be under the earth because it is fittingly shown in the spirit through those likenesses of bodily things in such a way that, since the souls of the dead who deserve the underworld sinned through love of the flesh, there is shown to them through those likenesses of bodies what usually happens to the dead flesh itself, that it is buried under the earth. Finally, inferi is the Latin name because they are below (infra); and just as with respect to body, if they keep the order of their weight, all heavier things are lower, so with respect to spirit all sadder things are lower. Hence in the Greek language too the origin of the name by which the underworld is called is said to echo the fact that it has nothing sweet. Yet our Saviour, having died for us, did not disdain to visit even that part of things, in order to free from there those whom, according to divine and secret justice, he could not fail to know were to be freed. Therefore to the soul of that thief to whom he said, “Today you will be with me in paradise,” he did not grant the underworld, where the punishments of sinners are, but either that rest of Abraham's bosom—for there is nowhere that Christ is not, since he is the Wisdom of God reaching everywhere because of his purity—or that paradise, whether in the third heaven or wherever else it is, to which the apostle was caught up after the third heaven, if indeed it is not one thing called by different names, where the souls of the blessed are. If, then, we rightly understand the first heaven to be, by a general name, all this bodily world, whatever is above the waters and the earth; the second, what is discerned by the spirit in bodily likeness, like that from which the sheet full of animals was let down to Peter in ecstasy; and the third, what is beheld by the mind so secluded and removed and wholly snatched from the senses of the flesh and cleansed that it can, ineffably, see and hear the things that are in that heaven, and the very substance of God, and God the Word through whom all things were made, through the love of the Holy Spirit; then we think, not unfittingly, both that the apostle was caught up there and that perhaps there is the paradise better than all others and, if it may be said, the paradise of paradises. For if the gladness of a good soul in good things is found in every creature, what is more excellent than that gladness which is in the Word of God, through whom all things were made?

But if anyone is troubled about what need there is for the spirits of the dead to receive their bodies in the resurrection, if that highest happiness can be given them even without bodies, the question is indeed too difficult to be settled perfectly in this discussion. Yet there should be no doubt at all that the mind of a man, whether snatched from the senses of the flesh, or after death, when the flesh itself has been laid aside and even the likenesses of bodily things have been transcended, cannot see the unchangeable substance as the holy angels see it; whether for some other more hidden reason, or because there is in it a certain natural appetite for governing a body. By this appetite it is in a way held back, so that it does not go with its whole attention into that highest heaven, so long as the body is not there, in whose governance that appetite may rest. Further, if the body is such that its governance is difficult and heavy, like this flesh, which is corrupted and weighs down the soul, coming from the stock of the transgression, the mind is much more turned away from that vision of the highest heaven; hence it had necessarily to be snatched from the senses of that flesh so that that vision might be shown to it as it could grasp it. Accordingly, when it has received this body, no longer animal but, through the change to come, spiritual, it will be made equal to the angels and will have the perfect measure of its nature, obeying and commanding, given life and giving life, with such ineffable ease that what was its burden will be its glory.