The Literal Meaning of Genesis
BOOK TWELVE 197 cernment enables one in the very beginning (when the spirit appears as a good spirit to the majority) to judge immediately whether he is evil.
29. By means of corporeal vision as well as by means of the images of corporeal objects revealed in the spirit, good spirits instruct men and evil spirits deceive them.®* But there is no deception in intellectual vision; for either a person does not understand, and this is the case of one who judges something to be other than it is, or he does understand, and then his vision is necessarily true.®> The eyes are helpless when they see a body which resembles another body and which they cannot distinguish from the other; and the attention of the mind is helpless when in the spirit there is produced a likeness of a body which it cannot distinguish from the body itself. But the intellect is employed to seek out the meaning that these things have or the useful lessons that they teach; and either it finds its object and enjoys the fruit of its search, or it fails to find it and continues to reflect for fear of falling into some deadly error through a mischievous spirit of intellectual pride.
30. And with God's help the intellect prudently judges the nature and importance of those matters in which even erroneous thinking may take place without harm to the soul.®* When, for instance, a man who is secretly evil has a good name among good men, it cannot be said that this judgment involves more danger for those who think him so than harm for the man himself—provided no error is made in the true realities, that is to say, in Goodness itself by which a person becomes good.°®? Again, men in general do not suffer any harm from the fact that in their dreams they mistake the likenesses of bodies for real bodies. Moreover, Peter suffered no harm when, upon being released from his chains and led forth by an angel, he was induced by this sudden miracle to believe that he was seeing a vision;°® or when in his ecstasy he replied, Nay, Lord, for never did I eat anything common or unclean,®? thinking that the very objects shown him in the dish were real animals. When we discover that all these things are other than we thought they were at the time we saw them, we experience no regrets that they have appeared to us in this way, provided we do not have to reproach