correct form.
498 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis
29, 57. If however we suppose that beyond the third heaven to which the apostle was carried there was also a fourth and a few more heavens higher up, beneath which is this third heaven, as in fact some people maintain that there are seven of them, others eight, others nine or even ten, and they affirm that in this one which is called the firmament there are many grades, and thus they reckon that they are bodily heavens—but it would take too long now to discuss their calculations and opinions." Now it could well be that someone will wish to argue, or even demonstrate if he can, that in the spiritual or intellectual spheres too there are many grades, and that they are distinguished in accordance with the more or the less illuminating revelations they convey.
But however that may be, and however these opinions may be accepted, one by this person, one by that as they please, l for my part have not so far been able to discern or teach that there are any other kinds of visions or things seen besides these three, in body or spirit or mind. But how many differences in each kind, or how important, so that in each kind there is a hierarchy of these differences—of that I happily confess my ignorance.
Gradations in bodily and spiritual vision
30, 58. However, just as in this bodily light there is the sky which we look up at above the earth, from which shine the great lights and the constellations, bodies far and away better than terrestrial ones, so too in that spiritual kind, in which the likenesses of bodies are seen by its own kind of incorporeal light, there are some superlative, not to say divine, images which angels show us in marvelous ways. Whether they do this by a sort of easy and potent conjunction or mingling with our spirit so that their visions also become ours, or whether they have the knowl edge, I know not how, to shape and inform our vision in our spirit, is a matter difficult to sort out and even more difficult to state.
There are, though, other ordinary, merely human visions, some ofwhich arise in many ways from the spiritual element in us itself, others with which the spirit is somehow or other furnished from the body, depending on whether we have been affected by flesh or by spirit. It is not only when awake, you see, that people mull over their preoccupations by thinking about them in bodily likenesses, but also when asleep that they often dream about what they are badly in need of; this is because they carry their daily business with them as a result of their souls' desires, and so if they have happened to go to bed hungry and thirsty, in their dreams they greedily apply themselves to guzzling and carousing. I think we can compare all these visions to angelic showings in the same way as in the realm of bodily vision we compare the terrestrial and the celestial.
53. A long, unfinished sentence in the Latin, which the translator cannot presume to finish in correct form.