The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
is the Wisdom of God, reaching everywhere by reason of His purity.186 Or He may have referred to the paradise to which St. Paul was caught up after the third heaven, whether it is in the third heaven or anywhere else—if the abode of souls of the blessed is not one and the same thing called by different names.
67. It seems that we are right, then, in understanding the first heaven in general as this whole corporeal heaven (to use a general term), namely, all that is above the waters and the earth, and the second heaven as the object of spiritual vision seen in bodily likenesses (as, for instance, the vision seen by Peter in ecstasy when he saw the dish let down from above full of living creatures),!87 and the third heaven as the objects seen by the mind after it has been so separated and removed and completely carried out of the senses and purified that it is able through the love of the Holy Spirit in a mysterious way to see and hear the objects in that heaven, even the essence of God and the Divine Word through whom all things have been made. If all this is true, then I believe that Paul was carried off to that third heaven and that there is a paradise which is more excellent than all others and is, if we may use the term, the paradise of paradises. For, if a good soul finds joy in the good that is in every creature, what is more excellent than that joy which is found in the Word of God through whom all things have been made?
CHAPTER 35
Reunion of the soul with the glorified body necessary for perfect beatitude.
68. But why must the spirits of the departed be reunited with their bodies in the resurrection, if they can be admitted to the supreme beatitude without their bodies? This is a problem that may trouble some, but it is too difficult to be answered with complete satisfaction in this essay. There should, however, be no doubt that a man's mind, when it is carried out of the senses of the flesh in ecstasy, or when after death it has departed from the flesh, is unable to see the immutable essence of God just as