Introduction to the Philosophy of Saint Augustine
the same thought in another place and added: "The flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, so that you do not do what you would"; thus he indifferently gave to the same thing the name mind or spirit. God also is called a spirit, as our Lord declares in the Gospel: "God is spirit, and they who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth."
8. It is not from any of these meanings we have mentioned, in which spirit is used, that we take the word spiritual to designate the kind of vision we are now treating. It is rather from that singular use of the word, found in the Epistle to the Corinthians, in which spirit is obviously distinguished from mind. "For," says the Apostle, "if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my understanding is unfruitful." By the word tongue in this passage he is to be understood to refer to obscure and mystical signs, which profit no man if the understanding of his mind is removed from them, for he hears what he does not understand. Hence he also says: "For he who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God; for no one understands, though the spirit is speaking mysteries." Thus he makes it clear enough that in this passage he is speaking of the sort of tongue in which there are signs, such as the images and likenesses of things, which demand an intuition of the mind to be understood; and when they are not understood he says they are in the spirit, not in the mind. And so he declares more plainly: "If thou givest praise with the spirit, how shall he who fills the place of the uninstructed say 'Amen' to thy thanksgiving? For he does not know what thou sayest." Hence in view of the fact that signs of things, and not the things themselves, are given forth by the tongue, the member of the body which is moved in the mouth in speech, the Apostle, using a metaphor, designated as tongue any production of signs before they are understood. But once the understanding has grasped the sign (and this activity is proper to the mind), then there is revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching. Accordingly he says: "If I come to you speaking in tongues what shall I profit you, unless I speak to you either in revelation, or in knowledge, or in prophecy, or in teaching?" And he means to say that this happens when the intellect grasps the signs, or, in other words, the tongue; so that what is done is done not by the spirit alone but also by the mind.
9. Hence those to whom signs were manifested in the spirit by means of certain likenesses of corporeal objects had not yet the gift of prophecy, unless the mind had performed its function, in order that the signs might be understood; and the man who interpreted what another had seen was more a prophet than the