in fact knowable.
494 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis senses and supremely of the mind and reason is to be applied, so that what is really true in this area ofreality may be ascertained, as far as this is possible.44
With spiritual vision on the other hand, that is, with the likenesses of bodies which are seen by the spirit, the soul is deceived when itjudges the things it sees in this way to be the bodies themselves, or assumes that what it has itselfmade up on suspicion or false guesswork is also there in bodies, which it has not seen but which it guesses are real. In its intellectual visions, by contrast, it is not deceived; for either it understands the matter, and then it is true; or if it is not true, the soul does not understand. From this we conclude that it is one thing for the soul to go wrong over things which it sees, another to go wrong precisely because it does not see.
Two stages or degrees of rapture
26, 53. For this reason, when the soul is rapt away to sights perceived by the spirit as being like bodies, so that it is altogether cut off from the senses of the body much more completely than is the case in sleep, but less than in death, this is a helpful warning to it from God that it should realize it is not perceiving bodies, but visions of things like bodies—not unlike the case of those who know even before they wake up that they are seeing things in a dream. It may be that future events are also seen then, in such a way that they are definitely known to be in the future, while their images are seen as being in the present, and this can be by the person's mind being aided by God, or by someone among the things seen explaining what they signify, as John had things explained to him in the Apocalypse. If so, it is a great revelation, even if the person these things are being shown to does not know whether he has gone out of the body, or is still in the body, but seeing it all with the spirit alienated from the senses of the body. Someone thus rapt away, you see, may be left in ignorance on the point ifthis too has not been shown him.
54. Next, however, just as he has been rapt away from the senses of the body to find himself among these bodily likenesses which are seen in spirit, so too he may be rapt away from these to be carried up to that region, so to say, of things intellectual or intelligible. There, without any bodily likeness the pure trans parent truth is perceived, overcast by no clouds of false opinions. There the virtues of the soul are not a matter of hard labor or toil; no lust, after all, has there to be braked by the work of self-restraint, no hardships to be borne with the work of fortitude, no iniquities to be punished by the work of justice, no evils to be avoided by the work of prudence.
44. A Platonic reserve about how far the material world, the world of appearances, of"seeming," is in fact knowable.