69. See Book X1, 18,24 above and note 19 there.
Book XII 505 disposal, it is somehow or other held back by this unsatisfied appetite from pressing on with undivided attention to that highest heaven.
Now clearly, if the body is such that the administration of it is difficult and burdensome, like this flesh of ours which mars and weighs down the soul (Wis 9: 15), deriving as it does from the handing on of the first transgression, the mind will be even more completely distracted from that vision of the highest heaven. So that is why it had necessarily to be snatched away from the senses of this flesh, for that vision to be shown it in whatevermeasure it could grasp it. Accord ingly, when it receives back this body, now no longerjust "ensouled" but thanks to the transfiguration to come "enspirited,"69 it will have the measure of its proper nature complete, it will be both obeying and commanding, both quick ened and quickening with such inexpressible ease, that what was once its burden is now its glory.
36, 69. Undoubtedly even then there will be these three kinds of vision, but there will be no false impressions with one thing being taken for another either in bodily or spiritual visions, let alone in intellectual ones. These will be enjoyed in such vivid and immediate clarity that it will make our sight ofthese bodily things we have all round us seem positively blurred. Our contact with these of course is through the senses of the flesh, and many people are so attached to them that they reckon they are the only things that really are, and assume that anything not of that nature simply does not exist. The wise, however, while agreeing that bodily sights seem more immediately and certainly present to us, are themselves much more certain all the same about those things they have some kind of advance intellectual sight of, independently of bodily sights, independently too of bodily likenesses—this, even though they are not able to observe them with the mind as clearly as they can look at these other things with the senses of the body.
The holy angels however also preside over the judging and administering of these bodily things, without of course being more inclined to them as things with which they are more immediately familiar; and they are so good at discerning their significant likenesses in the spirit, and somehow manage them with such authority, that they can mix them into the spirits ofhuman beings by way ofreve lation. And they gaze so raptly upon that unchangeable substance of the creator, that they not only put the sight and love of it before everything else, but also makejudgments about everything in accordance with it, and align themselves on it in order to make themselves useful, and from it draw the lines on which to make use of other things.
Finally, though the apostle was snatched away from the senses of the flesh to the third heaven and to Paradise, he certainly lacked that full and perfect knowl edge of things which the angels have, in that he did not know whether he was in the body or out of the body. This certainly will not be lacking when bodies have
69. See Book X1, 18,24 above and note 19 there.