quo absentia corpora corporalia cogitantur, "by which absent bodily bodies are thought
470 The Literal Meaning of Genesis soul was in some way still there animating his living body, his mind was torn away to see or rather hear the inexpressible words (2 Cor 12:4) of that vision; that, perhaps, is why he said, whether in the body or out of the body, l do not know, God knows.
A scale ofdifferent kinds ofvision
6, 1 5. Now anything that is seen not in images but as it properly is in itself, and is not seen through the body, is seen with a kind of vision that surpasses all the other kinds. I will carefully explain the differences between them, so far as the Lord may assist me. Here is an example in a single commandment. When you read, You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Mk 12:31), three kinds of vision take place; one with the eyes, when you see the actual letters; another with the human spirit,9 by which you think of your neighbor even though he is not there; a third with the attention of the mind, by which you understand and look at love itself. Ofthese three the first is evident to everyone; it is the vision, after all, with which we see heaven and earth and everything in them that is visible to our eyes. Nor is it difficult to indicate the second one, by which absent bodies are thought about in a bodily fashion.10 After all, even when we are standing in the dark, we can think about the sky and the earth and all the things we can see in them; we are not seeing anything with the eyes in our heads, but we are looking all the same at bodily images with the spirit," whether they be true ones like the bodies we have seen and retained the memory of, or fictitious ones the imagination may have constructed. After all, we think about Carthage, which we know well, in one way, in another about Alexandria, which we do not know.12
But the third kind, by which love is understood and looked at, touches on things which do not have any images that are like them without actually being
9. Per spiritum hominis: here "spirit" is being used in its least spiritual meaning, for what are also called the inner senses, memory and imagination. No, not quite its least spiritual meaning; it is sometimes used for the vapor or fluid or whatever it was that the ancients thought filled the nervous system. But he will go on shortly himself to list the different applications of the word. 10. A slight textual problem here; the CSEL text reads, without offering any manuscript support: quo absentia corpora corporalia cogitantur, "by which absent bodily bodies are thought about." Such a pointless tautology surely cannot be what Augustine dictated. The Maurists. supported in CSEL's own apparatus by three manuscripts, omit corpora, and so give us, "by which absent bodily things are thought about." 1 break all the rules of textual criticism and combine both readings, only emending corporalia to corporaliter, which could have been misheard by stenographer or copyist as corporalia.
1 1 . This time, animo.
1 2. See The Trinity V111,6,9, where the same comparison is made between these two cities; there however it is used to illustrate the difference between knowing something and believing something on someone else's authority. But in the latter case one's picture of what one accepts on authority, one's picture of what Alexandria looks like, will still be the work of imagination, and not memory.