The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
newed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, which bas been created according to God;33 and elsewhere he speaks of the interior man, ... which is being renewed unto the knowledge of God according to the image of its Creator.** So, too, after he had said, Therefore I myself with my mind serve the law of God, but with my flesh the law of sin,>> he returned to the same thought in another place and added, The desires of the flesh are against the spirit and those of the spirit against the flesh, so that you do not do what you would;3® and thus he indifferently gave to the same thing the name "mind" or "spirit." God also is called a spirit, as our Lord declares in the Gospel, God is spirit, and they who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.*?
CHAPTER 8
The basis for calling the second kind of vision spiritual.
19. It is not from any of these meanings we have mentioned, in which "spirit" is used, that we take the word "spiritual" to designate the kind of vision we are now treating. It is rather from that singular use of the word, found in the Epistle to the Corinthians, in which spirit is obviously distinguished from mind. For, says St. Paul, if J pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my understanding is unfruitful.38 By the word "tongue" in this passage he is to be understood to refer to obscure and mystical signs, which profit no man if the understanding of his mind is removed from them, for he hears what he does not understand.
Hence he also says, For he who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God; for no one understands, though the spirit is speaking mysteries.°° Thus he makes it clear enough that in this passage he is speaking of the sort of tongue in which there are signs, such as the images and likenesses of things,*° which demand an intuition of the mind to be understood; and when they are not understood he says they are in the spirit, not in the mind. And so he declares more plainly, /f you give praise with the spirit, how shall he who fills the place of the uninstructed say "Amen" to your thanksgiving? For he does not know what you are saying.*!