CSEL editors, however, without quoting their manuscript support (presumably one
Book XII 469
The apostle questioned a little more closely
13. So then, what do you know in fact, which you distinguish from what you do not know, so that believers may not be misled? The same man, he says, was snatched up to the third heaven. But that heaven was either material body or spirit. lf it was body, and seen by bodily eyes, why is it known that that heaven exists and not known that it was also seen in the body? lf however it was spirit, then it either presented the image of a body, and so it is as uncertain whether it was a body as it is uncertain whether it was seen in the body; or else it was seen in the way that wisdom is seen by the mind without any bodily images, and so it is no less certain that it could not have been seen through the body. So either then each thing is certain or each is uncertain; or else how is it certain that it was seen, and uncertain by what means it was seen?
After all, it is obvious that a thing of a non-bodily nature could not have been seen by him through the body. As for bodies though, even if they can be seen8 without the body, they are certainly not thus seen by means of the body but in a manner that is very very dissimilar—if indeed there is such a manner. So it would be surprising indeed if this manner of seeing could mislead the apostle or force him to have doubts, as if it were completely similar; force him to say, if he did see a material heaven with eyes that were not material, that it was uncertain to him whether he saw it in the body or out of the body.
14. So then, one other possibility remains, since the apostle, who took such pains to distinguish between what he knew and what he did not, could not possibly be lying. This is that which we should understand him to be ignorant of, whether he was in the body when he was snatched up to the third heaven in the way that the soul is in the living body, either ofsomeone who is awake or asleep or alienated from the senses of the body in ecstasy; or whether he departed totally from the body so that it lay there dead, a corpse, until on the completion of that revelation the soul returned to the dead limbs, and he did not just wake up like a sleeper or return to ordinary consciousness like someone alienated in ecstasy, but quite simply being dead came back to life.
ln that case what he saw when snatched right up to the third heaven (which he also assures us that he knew), he saw in its own proper reality, and not by means of images. But because he was uncertain about the nature of this alienation from the body, whether it left his body totally and simply dead, or whether while the
8. This is the reading of the Maurists and most of the manuscripts: etiam si possunt videri. The CSEL editors, however, without quoting their manuscript support (presumably one manuscript at least), read: etiam si non possent videri, "even if they could not be seen without the body." This entirely fails to make the contrast, or to make sense of what he goes on to say. 1t looks like the correction of an earnest but singularly dim copyist, or else like a marginal scribble, "but they couldn't be," non possent, which an equally dim copyist then put in place of the text's possunt.