The Preachers' Garden of the Triumphant City of Jerusalem

[-ty] He has prepared: some things are sensible, but some are only intelligible. Indeed, the sensible things are of such wondrous beauty, fairness, magnitude, form, splendor, and other sublime qualities, and in all these they so incomprehensibly excel all the sensible things which we see in these lower regions, that truly and rightly Holy Scripture exclaims that such things prepared for the elect the corporeal eye has never seen, nor the corporeal ear heard, nor can the human heart even imagine or understand them distinctly and perfectly, as they exist in themselves. However, it does not follow from this—from those things which we find in the sacred writings revealed by God, as well as from those sensible things which we know—that it is impossible to understand or to think that all those sensible things thus revealed to us are far greater, far more beautiful, far fairer, and far more excellent in many most excellent qualities unknown to us, in every magnitude, beauty, fairness, and every excellent corporeal quality, than those which we see, hear, and comprehend with the intellect in these lower regions. The same, it seems, must also be said concerning the individual goods of that city which are only intelligible. Since through those things which are divinely revealed to us, we perceive them to be far more excellent, far more sublime, more noble, and more wonderful than all and singular intelligible things which we apprehend in any manner whatever in these lower regions. If, by the testimony of Saint Paul (as was said before), man is led by the hand through the natural knowledge of creatures to a knowledge—albeit confused and far too obscure, and as if in a mirror—of the Divine perfections and of the supreme Divinity of the one God; since there are certain mirrors representing more or less the Divine perfections and His Divinity; why can we not have some knowledge, however obscure, from those things which are revealed by God concerning these invisible things of the heavenly fatherland, and especially under the figure of the city of Jerusalem? Indeed, we do not dare to assert anything clearly, distinctly, or indubitably concerning a heavenly Jerusalem of this kind, nor to express in these our writings the manner in which they are in themselves; but only to say something, to some extent, or as if nothing, and most obscurely, from all those things which we see, know, and perceive with our eyes in a material city, and especially that of Jerusalem; whatever