Annotatio XL

”The Lord had planted a Paradise.” — Genesis 2:8

Augustine, in the 12th book On Genesis to the Letter, where he disputes about Paradise, chapter 22, says that the places in which souls, stripped of their bodies, are affected, whether well or ill, are not corporeal but spiritual;¹ which — together with various likenesses of corporeal things, both glad and sad — are represented to the souls of the deceased, not otherwise than [they are] to those to whom, either set in sleep or withdrawn from the senses, now grave terrors and torments, now glad and long-desired things, are exhibited. He seems to confirm this same thing in the 21st book The City of God, chapter 10, where he intimates that the fire of hell, by which that rich man was tormented, is spiritual, in these words: “I would indeed say that spirits will burn thus, without any body of their own, as that rich man was burning in the underworld when he said, ‘I am tormented in this flame’² — did I not see that it can be fittingly answered that that flame was of such a kind as [were] the eyes which he lifted up when he saw Lazarus; of such a kind the tongue, on which he desired a little moisture to be poured; of such a kind the finger of Lazarus, from whom he asked this to be done for him — where, however, the souls were without bodies. So then, both that incorporeal flame with which he burned, and that little drop which he begged, are such as are also the visions of sleepers, or of those beholding incorporeal things in ecstasy, which yet have likenesses of bodies. For man himself, too, when he is in such visions with the spirit, not the body, nevertheless then sees himself so like to his own body that he cannot at all distinguish [it].” Thus Augustine — to whom the consensus of all the recent Theologians seems repugnant: who, following the opinion of St. Gregory (explained in his fourth Dialogue), establish that the infernal places are corporeal, in which the souls suffer not imaginary and similitudinary punishments, but true ones — namely corporeal, and truly burning fires.

Accordingly, St. Thomas, in the fourth [book] of the Sentences, distinction 44, weighing that former opinion from book 12 on Genesis, writes thus: “Augustine’s saying can be taken in this way: that that place, to which souls are borne, is said to be non-corporeal to this extent — that the soul does not exist in it corporeally, namely in the manner in which bodies exist in a place, but in another, spiritual manner, as the angels are in a place; or it must be said that Augustine speaks by way of opinion, and not by way of determination, as he frequently does in those books.” Nicholas Trivet, in the scholia which he published on the books On the City of God, annotating the latter passage cited from the same books, says that Augustine did not bring forth those words to assert that the fire [Nicholas Trivet says that Augustine did not bring forth those words to assert] that the fire of hell is incorporeal — which through that whole chapter he had taught to be corporeal — but to show that his own assertion about a corporeal fire could not be confirmed by the example of the rich man burning in the flame, since it would easily be eluded by one who should answer that those flames were of such a kind as were the eyes and the tongue of the rich man suffering without his [own] body. See the observations pertaining to this below, in Annotations 42, 93, 141, and 227 of this book.