2. In the treatment of these words it is customary to ask first (continued)
BOOK TWELVE 179 what St. Paul means by the third heaven, and then whether he wishes us to understand that Paradise is there, or whether he means that after he was caught up to the third heaven he was caught up also to Paradise, wherever it may be. Thus he would indicate that to be caught up to the third heaven is not the same thing as to be caught up to Paradise, but that first there is the third heaven and then Paradise.
This matter is so obscure that a solution seems to me impossible, unless one can have recourse not to the words of St. Paul cited above but perhaps to some other passages of Scripture or some sound reasoning to find a proof that Paradise is or is not in the third heaven; for it is not even clear what the third heaven is: namely, whether it is to be numbered among corporeal or spiritual things: It might indeed be said that a man could not have been taken with his body except to some corporeal place. But since even St. Paul expressed himself as not knowing whether he was caught up in the body or out of the body, who would be so rash as to say that he knows what Paul himself says he does not know? However, if it is impossible for the spirit to be carried without the body to corporeal places or for the body to be carried to spiritual places, this very doubt of his virtually forces us to the conclusion that the region to which he was carried (for he is obviously speaking about himself)? was such that it was impossible to discern clearly whether it was corporeal or spiritual.?
CHAPTER 2
St. Paul could have been ignorant about how he saw Paradise if he saw it in ecstasy.
3. When images of bodies are formed in sleep or in ecstasy, a person does not distinguish them from bodies until he returns to the life of the bodily senses and recognizes that he was in a world of images which he did not derive from the senses of the body. What man on waking from sleep is not immediately aware that the objects he saw were mere images, although when he