The Literal Meaning of Genesis
BOOK TWELVE eden
CHAPTER 32
The soul at death is transported with a likeness of the body to a "spiritual" place of punishment or of peace.
60. Now it may be asked!®? whether the soul on its departure from the body is brought to some corporeal region, or to an incorporeal one that is like the corporeal,!®3 or to neither, but rather to that which is more excellent than bodies and likenesses of bodies. To this question I should reply without hesitation that it is not brought to a corporeal region unless it is transported in union with a body or in a nonspatial way.
The further problem, whether the soul has some sort of body after it departs from this body, may be explained by anyone who can. I do not think it has.!¢+ But it is brought to a realm that is spiritual in accordance with its merits.!©5 This region, in one case, is a place of punishment, whose nature is similar to that of bodies; such a place as has often been shown to those who have been carried out of the senses of the body and, while lying as if in death, have seen the punishments of hell. Those who have undergone this experience were accompanied by some sort of likeness of the body, and through it they were able to be transported to those regions and to perceive them by the likenesses of their senses.!©° For the soul has a likeness of its body when the body lies senseless though not yet really dead and the soul is carried off to see those sights that many have told of after being restored to life. Why, then, should it not have a likeness of the body when death really overtakes it and it finally departs from the body? It follows, therefore, that the soul is transported either to a place of punishment of this kind or to another place of bodily likenesses, not, however, of punishment but of peace and joy.
61. Now it surely cannot be said that those punishments are false or that that peace and joy are false; for there is falsity only when, through an erroneous judgment, we mistake one thing for another. Peter was certainly in error when he saw the dish and fancied that bodies were in it rather than likenesses of bodies.167 No less was he in error when, on another occasion, he