The Literal Meaning of Genesis
BOOK TWELVE 229 the holy angels see it, even though it has passed beyond the likenesses of corporeal things.!88 This may be because of some mysterious reason or simply because of the fact that it possesses a kind of natural appetite for managing the body. By reason of this appetite it is somehow hindered from going on with all its force to the highest heaven, so long as it is not joined with the body, for it is in managing the body that this appetite is satisfied.
Moreover, if the body is such that the management of it is difficult and burdensome, as is the case with this corruptible flesh, which is a load upon the soul!89 (coming as it does from a fallen race), the mind is much more readily turned away from the vision of the highest heaven. Hence it must necessarily be carried out of the senses of the flesh in order to be granted this vision as far as it is able. Accordingly, when the soul is made equal to the angels and receives again this body, no longer a natural body but a spiritual one!?° because of the transformation that is to be, it will have the perfect measure of its being, obeying and commanding, vivified and vivifying with such a wonderful ease that what was once its burden will be its glory.
CHAPTER 36
The three kinds of vision will be made perfect in the blessed after the resurrection.
69. Then, indeed, there will be the three kinds of vision of which we have been speaking, but no error will induce us to mistake one thing for another, either in regard to corporeal objects or in regard to spiritual objects, or especially in regard to intellectual objects.!9! There will be joy in the things of the intellect, and they will be far more luminously present to the soul than the corporeal forms that now surround us, which we perceive through the senses of our body. Yet many are now so absorbed in these material forms that they judge them to be the only ones, and they think that anything of a different order is simply nonexistent. But, although the corporeal world is more