visions are first and foremost Joseph in the first instance and Saint Peter in the second.
426 The Literal Meaning of Genesis it cannot have surprised him much, if it coincided with some memory.46 As being of an airy and luminous color, on the other hand—well, l do not know if he would ever have seen himself like that if he had never read or heard of such a thing.
43. And what if people let themselves be led by the nose by such dreams and visions, and wish to prescribe to us from the scriptures that, not the soul, but God himself is actually something of the kind in which he shows himself figuratively to the spirits of the saints, in which he is also presented in allegorical passages? Those dream visions are assuredly very similar to such forms ofexpression. And that in fact is how they go astray, setting up the idols of their deluded ideas in their hearts, and not understanding that the saints made the same sort of judg ment about their own visions of this kind as they made on reading or hearing about such things said by God in figures; as for example that the seven ears of corn and the seven cows are seven years, that the sheet tied up by four lines like a dish full of various animals is the whole wide world with all its peoples.47 And so with all the rest, and much more so when incorporeal realities are signified not by actual bodily things but by bodily figments of the imagination.
26, 44. For all that, however, Tertullian would not have the soul grow in substance like the body, and he also states why he shrinks from allowing this: "in case its substance should also be said to decrease," he says, "and thus should be thought liable to fade away altogether as well." And yet. because he stretches the soul locally throughout the body, he cannot find a way out of admitting its growth, as he would have it remain commensurate from a tiny seed with the size of the body, and he says: "But its energy, in which its natural properties are embedded and retained, is gradually extended with the flesh, while its substance keeps to the modest measurements in which it was breathed into the body from the start." We would perhaps be unable to understand this unless he made it plain with a comparison, which he went on to state.
"Take," he says, "a certain weight of gold or silver, still an unworked mass; it is heaped up together in a pile, and while the mass is occupying less space for the moment than it will do, it is still within the outlines of the model all pure gold or silver. From then on, when the mass is laminated into gold or silver leaf, it is made bigger than it was to begin with by the spreading out of that certain weight, not by addition to it, while it is being stretched out, not while it is being
46. Here 1 have altered the punctuation ofboth Maurists and CSEL editors, who make this passage about the Ethiopian all one sentence, and put the question mark here. That gives the sense: ". . . or if he did ever see himself in another color, did it not surprise him all the more if it coincided with some memory?" But that is a sense that seems to me to be lacking in sense, because if he could link this dream with some memory, it would not surprise him very much at all, while if he couldn't, it certainly would. 47. See Gn 41:26 and Acts 10:11-12. The "saints" who made the right judgment about these visions are first and foremost Joseph in the first instance and Saint Peter in the second.