& Short and other dictionaries for this extremely rare word is "a hauling ashore of a ship." with
500 The Literal Meaning of Genesis have borne in themselves some sort of likeness of their own bodies, by means of which it was possible for them to be carried away to those places and to experi ence such things with something like their senses.55 And l cannot see in any case why the soul should have a likeness of its body when, with its body lying there senseless but still not totally dead, it sees such things as many people have told of on being restored to the living after they had been hauled up onto the beach like that,56 and not have it when death overtakes it and it quits the body for good. So either it is carried away to those places of punishment, or to those others which likewise resemble bodily places, not however this time of punishments but of tranquil rest and enjoyments.
61 . Nor, you see, can it rightly be said that those are deceptive pains or that that is deceptive rest and joy, because visions are only deceptive when by a mistake of judgment one kind is taken for another. Thus Peter was deceived when he saw that dish and thought that there were real bodies in it, not just like nesses of bodies; and again on the other hand, the time when he was released by an angel from his bonds and went along walking in the body and in the presence of real bodily shapes, and thought he was seeing a vision, he was still nonethe less being deceived. Those things in the dish, you see, were spiritual shapes like real bodies, and this real physical release from bonds by a miracle was like some thing spiritual. The soul was being deceived both times, but only because it mistook one kind of vision for another.
So then, although it is not bodily sights but sights resembling bodily ones that souls divested of their bodies are affected with, for better or worse, since they appear to themselves as being like their own bodies, what they see is both real joy and real affliction, made from spiritual substance. After all, even in dreams it makes a great difference whether we find ourselves in joyful or sorrowful circumstances. Thus sometimes we have regretted waking up from dreams in which we were set among things we had always longed to have, while at other times, on waking up after being terrified out of our wits and subjected to frightful
55. Reading similitudinibus sensuum with the Maurists. who adopt this reading from earlier editors to bring order and sense into a whole variety of defective manuscript readings. The CSEL text reads just similibus without mentioning its manuscript support; this would give the meaning (?) "to experience such things with similars." 56. An admittedly elaborate rendering ofex illa subductione; but the only meaning given by Lewis & Short and other dictionaries for this extremely rare word is "a hauling ashore of a ship." with references to Caesar's Gallic War 5,1 and to Vitruvius, 10.2.10, both authors with whom Augustine would have been familiar. No doubt he had had to plod his weary way through Caesar as a schoolboy. Now the hauling ashore of a vessel which would, 1 am sure, have occurred to him here in this context, is the one of which we are told in John 2 1 , when the risen Christ appears on the shore of the sea of Galilee to the disciples who are fishing in the sea; and in his sermons on the passage Augustine invariably explains the shore, the dry land, as representing heaven, the sea this life. Admittedly here in our passage the travelers had been restored to the living after being taken on a tour of hell ; but they could be thought of as viewing hell from the other side of the abyss, like Lazarus in Abraham's bosom.