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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 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. For in those
natural good things which we see are common to our selves 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;" 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, 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, 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.
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