Pastoral Rule, Dialogues & Letters 106

GREGORY. A little above (Chapter V) you complained that you did not see the departing soul of a certain dying man; but this very thing was a fault, that you sought to see with bodily eyes an invisible thing. For many of our people, cleansing the eye of the mind with pure faith and abundant prayer, have often seen souls departing from the flesh. Whence it is now necessary for me to relate either in what manner departing souls have been seen, or how great things they themselves beheld while departing, so that to a wavering mind examples may persuade what reason cannot fully. For in the second book of this work (Chapter

35) I have already mentioned that the venerable man Benedict, as I learned from his faithful disciples, being situated far from the city of Capua, beheld by angels the soul of Germanus, bishop of that same city, borne to heaven in a fiery globe at midnight. And gazing upon that same ascending soul, with the fold of his mind enlarged, he saw the whole world gathered together, as it were, under a single ray of the sun, before his eyes.