Annotatio XLI

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

Augustine, in the twelfth book On Genesis to the Letter, where he treats of Paradise, when he discourses (in chapters 27 and 28 of the same book) about those who saw God, wrote that Moses and Paul saw God not in any likeness or image of a corporeal creature, but in that essence and nature of the subject by which God is [as he is in himself], as far as a man is able to grasp it, withdrawn from all sense of the body;¹ and he confirms this same thing in the book (or epistle) On Seeing God, to Paulina, chapters 12 and 13. This opinion the same Augustine seemed to some to have disapproved, in book 2 On the Trinity, chapters 17 and 18, where he reckons those to be foolish who believe that God was seen by mortals in his [own] substance. James, Bishop of Christopolis, who in the preface of his explanation on the Psalms noted a contradiction of this kind, settled it by bringing a distinction of a twofold vision:² namely, [vision] a priori — that is, through the light of glory, by which the blessed see God in the fatherland — and [vision] a posteriori — that is, from an ascent from creatures up to the divine essence: as if someone, in a circle, should arrive at the vision of the center (invisible by its own nature) through the vision of the lines going out from the center to the circumference of the circle. In which way indeed he says that Augustine thought, in the epistle to Paulina and in the 12th book on Genesis, that the divine essence was beheld by Moses and Paul — but not a priori, or seen through the light of glory, as the same [Augustine] left written in the second book On the Trinity. But if anyone will more accurately inspect both passages of Augustine in their author, he will confess that no reconciliation is needed. For what he had taught to be attributed to Moses and Paul — that with the eye of the mind they for an hour beheld that which is God — this he denied could be done with corporeal eyes, concluding thus in book 2 On the Trinity, chapter 18: “For that very nature, or substance, or by whatever other name that very thing which God is must be called — whatever it is — cannot be seen corporeally.”