The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
BOOK TWELVE 193 turn to his bodily senses, he beheld the images within the same spiritual power that had seen the vision and he pondered over them in thought. These objects were not bodily things but images of bodily things, both at the time when he first was carried away and beheld them, and later when he recalled them and thought of them. When, however, he deliberated and sought for an understanding of these signs, it was his mind that was making the effort—but all in vain until he received word of the arrival of the men from Cornelius. Now with this supplementary vision of the bodily eyes, and with the Holy Spirit saying to him, Depart with them (speaking to him within that same spirit in which He had shown the sign and impressed the words), Peter's mind with God's help understood what was meant by all these signs. A careful consideration of these and other similar facts makes it abundantly clear that corporeal vision is ordered to the spiritual, and the spiritual to the intellectual.
CHAPTER 12
Corporeal and spiritual vision.
25. But when, during our waking hours, in full possession of our bodily senses, we experience a corporeal vision, we distinguish between this vision®' and the spiritual vision by which we think of absent bodies in imagination—whether recalling in memory objects that we know, or somehow forming unknown objects which are in the power of thought possessed by the spirit, or arbitrarily and fancifully fashioning objects which have no real existence. From all such objects we distinguish the bodies which we see and which are present to our senses, so that we have no doubt that these are bodies and that the others are images of bodies. But it may sometimes be that by an excessive application of thought, or by the influence of some disorder (as happens to those who are delirious with fever), or by the agency of some other spirit, whether good or evil, the images of bodies are produced in the spirit just as if bodies were present to the senses of the body, though the attention®* of the soul may mean-