potentially and not with regard to act, that is to say,
when the soul is united to the mortal body as its form, yet so as to
make use neither of the bodily senses, nor even of the imagination,
as happens in rapture; and in this way the contemplation of the
present life can attain to the vision of the Divine essence.
Consequently the highest degree of contemplation in the present life
is that which Paul had in rapture, whereby he was in a middle state
between the present life and the life to come.

Reply Obj. 1: As Dionysius says (Ep. i ad Caium. Monach.), "if anyone
seeing God, understood what he saw, he saw not God Himself, but
something belonging to God." And Gregory says (Hom. xiv in Ezech.):
"By no means is God seen now in His glory; but the soul sees
something of lower degree, and is thereby refreshed so that
afterwards it may attain to the glory of vision." Accordingly the
words of Jacob, "I saw God face to face" do not imply that he saw
God's essence, but that he saw some shape [*Cf. I, Q. 12, A. 11, ad
1], imaginary of course, wherein God spoke to him. Or, "since we know
a man by his face, by the face of God he signified his knowledge of
Him," according to a gloss of Gregory on the same passage.

Reply Obj. 2: In the present state of life human contemplation is
impossible without phantasms, because it is connatural to man to see
the intelligible species in the phantasms, as the Philosopher states
(De Anima iii, 7). Yet intellectual knowledge does not consist in the
phantasms themselves, but in our contemplating in them the purity of
the intelligible truth: and this not only in natural knowledge, but
also in that which we obtain by revelation. For Dionysius says (Coel.
Hier. i) that "the Divine glory shows us the angelic hierarchies
under certain symbolic figures, and by its power we are brought back
to the single ray of light," i.e. to the simple knowledge of the
intelligible truth. It is in this sense that we must understand the
statement of Gregory that "contemplatives do not carry along with
them the shadows of things corporeal," since their contemplation is
not fixed on them, but on the consideration of the intelligible truth.

Reply Obj. 3: By these words Gregory does not imply that the blessed
Benedict, in that vision, saw God in His essence, but he wishes to
show that because "all creatures are small to him that sees God," it
follows that all things can easily be seen through the enlightenment
of the