"your prophet" translates two words which could indeed mean that in the right context, but in
496 The Literal Meaning of Genesis signify the Church. That you see, is the place by the Lord, because the Church is his temple, and is itselfbuilt on the rock,47 and the other things said in the passage fit in with this understanding of it. All the same, unless Moses had earned the right to see the glory of God he so desired and longed for, God would not have said to Aaron and Miriam, his brother and sister, in the book of Numbers: Listen to my words; ifthere is yourprophet, in a vision as the Lord l will make myself known to him and in a dream l will speak to him. Not so in the way my servant Moses isfaithful in all my house; l will speak to him mouth to mouth in person and not through coded symbols, and he has seen the glory of the Lord** (Num
12:6-8). Nor is this, after all, to be understood in terms of a substantive body presented as their object to the senses of the flesh, because God certainly used to speak to Moses like this in person, "face to face," one to one; while when, on the other hand, Moses said to him, "Show yourselfto me," and now on this occasion when he was scolding these two and rating the merits of Moses higher than theirs, he was speaking by means of a bodily creature presented to the senses of the flesh as their object.
So then, in that other way, in the form by which he is God, he speaks in an ineffably more secret and intimate way, in inexpressible words, where nobody, living this life which is lived in these bodily senses, can see him. But this can only happen if a person somehow dies from this life, whether by completely departing from the body, or by being so turned away and alienated from the senses of the flesh that he quite rightly does not know, as the apostle says, whether it is in the body or out of the body when he is rapt and carried up to that vision.
Suggestion that the third kind of vision may be what was signified by the third heaven and paradise to which Paul was rapt
28, 56. Accordingly, if this third kind of vision, which is superior not only to every bodily vision by which bodies are perceived through the senses of the body, but also to every sort of that spiritual vision by which the likenesses of bodies are perceived with the spirit not the mind, if this is what the apostle called the third heaven, it is in this that the glory of God can be seen. It is for a sight of this that hearts are purified, as it says: Blessed the heart-pure, because they shall see God (Mt 5:8), not through any figure signified in either bodily or spiritual vision, as through a mirror in a code, butface toface (1 Cor 13: 12), or as was
47. See 1 Cor 3:16.17; 6:19; 2 Cor 6:16; Mt 16:18. 48. Augustine's text is a garbled, as well as a rather bad translation of the Greek Septuagint; thus, "your prophet" translates two words which could indeed mean that in the right context, but in this context mean "a prophet ofyours." But 1 am sticking to my principle of being very literal in my renderings of his biblical quotations, precisely because of their over-literal character.