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| The Opinion of Those Who Have Thought that the Mind Was Signified by the Man, the Bodily Sense by the Woman.
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Chapter 13.—The Opinion of Those Who Have Thought that
the Mind Was Signified by the Man, the Bodily Sense by the
Woman.
20. Nor does it escape me, that
some who before us were eminent defenders of the Catholic faith and
expounders of the word of God, while they looked for these two
things in one human being, whose entire soul they perceived to be a
sort of excellent paradise, asserted that the man was the mind, but
that the woman was the bodily sense. And according to this
distribution, by which the man is assumed to be the mind, but the
woman the bodily sense, all things seem aptly to agree together if
they are handled with due attention: unless that it is written,
that in all the beasts and flying things there was not found for
man an helpmate like to himself; and then the woman was made out of
his side.780
And on this
account I, for my part, have not thought that the bodily sense
should be taken for the woman, which we see to be common to
ourselves and to the beasts; but I have desired to find
something which the beasts had not; and I have rather thought the
bodily sense should be understood to be the serpent, whom we read
to have been more subtle than all beasts of the field.781
For in those
natural good things which we see are common to ourselves and to the
irrational animals, the sense excels by a kind of living power; not
the sense of which it is written in the epistle addressed to the
Hebrews, where we read, that “strong meat belongeth to them that
are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses
exercised to discern both good and evil;”782
for these “senses” belong to
the rational nature and pertain to the understanding; but that
sense which is divided into five parts in the body, through which
corporeal species and motion is perceived not only by ourselves,
but also by the beasts.
21. But whether that the apostle
calls the man the image and glory of God, but the woman the glory
of the man,783
is to be
received in this, or that, or in any other way; yet it is clear,
that when we live according to God, our mind which is intent on the
invisible things of Him ought to be fashioned with proficiency from
His eternity, truth, charity; but that something of our own
rational purpose, that is, of the same mind, must be directed to
the using of changeable and corporeal things, without which this
life does not go on; not that we may be conformed to this world,784
by placing
our end in such good things, and by forcing the desire of
blessedness towards them, but that whatever we do rationally in the
using of temporal things, we may do it with the contemplation of
attaining eternal things, passing through the former, but cleaving
to the latter.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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