marvelous light, and the various and atrocious pains of the ungodly in outer
484 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis
38. One day he saw the joy and happiness of the godly playing their harps in a marvelous light, and the various and atrocious pains of the ungodly in outer darkness, with these two persons leading him round and showing it all to him and suggesting how each sort earned their respective good and bad lot. Now he saw this on Easter Sunday, when he had suffered no pain through the whole of Lent, having been spared it scarcely three days before.
But at the actual start of Lent he had seen these two promising him that for forty days he would feel no pain; later on they gave him what you could call medical advice, to have the length of his foreskin cut off, and when that was done he had no pain for a long time. When however he once more felt the same sort of pain and began to see the same sort of things, he again received advice from them, this time that he should walk into the sea up to his groin, and come out again after a certain length of time; and they promised him definitely that from then on he was not going to suffer that extreme pain, but only the inconvenience of that sticky fluid; and so it turned out. Nor after that did he ever experience such a withdrawal of his mind from his senses, or see any such things as he had done previously when in the middle of his pain and horrifying screams he had been suddenly snatched away and fallen silent. Afterwards, though, when the doctors had cured the rest of his ills and restored him to health, he did not keep to his resolution of holiness.
A tentative assessment ofthese phenomena
18, 39. Should anyone be able to trace the causes of these visions and divina tions and of the forms they took, and definitely establish them, I would much rather listen to him than have people expect me to analyze them myself. None theless I shall not hide what I think, stating it though in such a way that the learned do not laugh at me as positively asserting it, and the unlearned do not lap it up as if l were teaching it; instead l would have them both take me as inquiring and debating possible answers rather than knowing the right ones.
I compare all these visions with the things people see in dreams. These too, after all, are sometimes false sometimes true, sometimes troubled sometimes tranquil; while the true ones are sometimes entirely like events to come, clearly described, sometimes foretelling them under obscurely significant signs and in a kind of figurative language. Well, it is exactly the same with these extraordinary cases. But people love to marvel at things outside their experience and to look for the causes of unaccustomed events, while for the most part they are not inter ested in knowing about similar things of daily occurrence which often spring from even more hidden origins.
Take words: that is to say the signs we employ in speaking; on hearing an unusual word they first ask what it is, that is what it means, and on learning that, they then go on to ask what it comes from, while about so many words they use