4. See Acts 10:10-16; Rv 1:10-20; Ez 37:1-10; 1s 6:1-13.
466 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis was not. Thus the soul of a sleeper, though somehow marvelously awake, could not but be led a pretty dance by the images of bodies, as if they really were the bodies themselves.2
4. As for ecstasy, l have been able to listen to one man, and him a rustic scarcely able to express what he perceived;3 he knew both that he was awake and that he was seeing something, and not with the eyes in his head. So, to use his own words as far as l can recall them: "My soul," he said, "was seeing him, not my eyes; still l did not know whether he was a body or the image of a body." The man was not, you see, the sort of person naturally to make such a distinction; nonetheless he was a believer ofsuch simplicity that as I listened to him it was as if l myself had seen what he was telling me that he had.
5. The question then is: how did Paul see Paradise? Was it in the same way as that dish let down from heaven appeared to Peter, or as everything that John recorded he had seen in the Apocalypse did to him, or as that field with the bones of the dead in it and their resurrection did to Ezekiel, or as God seated on his throne and the Seraphim in his presence and the altar from which a coal was taken to purify the prophet's lips did to Isaiah?4 lf so, then he obviously could have been left in ignorance about whether he was seeing it in the body or out of the body.
A closer look at the apostle 's words, to learn what he may have seen, if it was when he was "out of the body"
3. 6. But ifthey were seen out of the body and were not bodies, we can still ask whether they were images of bodies, or the kind of substance which carries no bodily likeness, like God, like the human mind or intelligence or reason, like the virtues, prudence, justice, chastity, charity, loyalty and any others there are. These we count, distinguish, define by understanding them and thinking about them, not of course by observing their features or colors or what they sound like or smell like or taste like in the mouth, or what they inform those who feel and handle them about how hot or cold they are, how soft or hard, how smooth or rough. No, we observe them by a quite different kind ofvision, a different light, a different manifestation ofreality, and one that altogether outclasses the rest in its reliability.
7. Let us again, therefore, go back to the apostle's very words and investigate them more carefully, and make this our indisputable starting point, that the
2. 1 cannot help feeling that only someone of Augustine's uniquely tortuous—and nimble—mind could have had such an involuted, "Chinese boxes," "self-cataloguing library catalogue" kind of dream as this! 3. 1n all probability because his mother tongue was not Latin but Punic, the Phoenician language of the old Carthaginians. 4. See Acts 10:10-16; Rv 1:10-20; Ez 37:1-10; 1s 6:1-13.